The Doll Page 4

  As he talked, Bardhyl B. could not hide being slightly annoyed with me. At first I could not understand why, but then he came out with it. It was about removing the boastful advertisements, some of which we had assembled together. According to him, I could do what I wanted with literature – that was my business and he wasn’t interfering – but where my fame was concerned … I had obligations … at least … towards … my friends.

  His words became confused, but from the movement of his head and his reddened cheeks I understood what he was driving at.

  In fact, even though I tried not to show it, I felt guilty.

  We came back often to this subject of big-headedness. Everyone spoke badly of it, especially in proverbs such as ‘conceit is the vice of the clever’, but this made no impression on us. Bardhyl B. and I made no secret that we thought the opposite. What was wrong with being big-headed? Why should it bother anyone? Bardhyl B. especially liked to enlarge on this latter point. Take your case for instance, he would say to me. Being big-headed makes you happy. Other people envy you, but you don’t envy anybody. What business is it of other people if you think you’re like Shakespeare? In the end, that’s a matter between the two of you, Shakespeare and yourself. Particularly as he’s long gone. So why should other people butt their noses in? Right?

  I stared at him fixedly, and wondered how it was possible for this person to have exactly the same thoughts in his head as I did.

  The question of big-headedness became more complicated when it was entangled with other issues such as poetry, money or prison. It was a knot that seemed impossible to untangle. You could make money from poetry, but if you made money yourself, you went to prison. Besides, it was said that poetry could send you to prison anyway. And as for conceit, the prevailing view was that it played a part in all of this. This idea was so widespread that the Doll asked me if they sent me money because I was big-headed!

  I had recently noticed that everything was open to serious misunderstanding. Shortly before, my sister, whispering into my ear as if confiding a secret, told me that she was probably the daughter of our grandmother.

  I put my finger to my temple to tell her she was crazy, but she replied that I didn’t understand these things and then ran away in a rage.

  I was sure that everyone was taking offence and ready to argue over the slightest thing. And when everyone was quarrelling, one could imagine the effect of all these quarrels on the Doll.

  After her unexpected triumph over Izmini Kokobobo, she had become withdrawn again. One day, when she said with that uncertain expression that was now familiar to me that she wanted to have talks (talks between Vyacheslav Molotov and John Foster Dulles were being extended), I could again barely keep back my laughter.

  As soon as she opened her mouth, I realised that it was once more the story of changing mothers, but this time in an even more dramatic light.

  ‘Now that you’re famous you’re not thinking of renouncing me, are you?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘This nonsense again? And for God’s sake where did you find that word?’

  She kept her eyes lowered and did not reply.

  I insisted that she should at least tell me what she meant by that word, ‘renounce’.

  Finally she managed an answer.

  ‘I wanted to say, to see the back of me.’

  ‘Ah, you meant disown you. Now I understand.’

  Again I wanted to laugh, but something restrained me.

  She seemed to interpret my silence as hesitation, and so blurted out everything. ‘I brought you into this world,’ she sobbed. ‘Let them say what they want. I am your mother, you don’t have any other.’

  Finally, I shouted, ‘That’s enough, Mother.’ I asked her how she could be so silly, such a sillyhead, and because I couldn’t think of any other phrases beginning with ‘silly’, I ended, under my breath, with the word ‘idiot’.

  I was no doubt trying to say that Izmini Kokobobo had been making fun of her again, but I remembered that she did not visit anymore and a wave of real anger swept over me.

  She should at least tell me where she had heard such rubbish, or stop tormenting me with these things.

  When I was about to say, once more, ‘How can you be so silly … such an …’ she uncharacteristically interrupted me:

  ‘I am not an idiot.’

  She had caught that word which I had always been careful never to say until now, and which I’d regretted as soon as I uttered it.

  ‘I’m not an idiot …’ If only she had said it in a stern and harsh tone, but her voice was low and gentle, almost ashamed. As if this were not already painful enough, she burst into tears. They were those familiar tears, as soft as in cartoon films, real doll’s tears, and for this very reason harder to bear.

  A pang of tenderness, sharper than ever before, stabbed me like a knife, and with it the thought that from then on I would be the source of her greatest and yet most absurd fear, that I would turn my back on her. Its absurdity did not render it any easier to allay.

  How could I explain to her that there was not a shred of truth in all this? And that, even if there were boys who thought to exchange their own mothers for a more exquisite kind with fur coats who, like in the movies, played the piano at moments of sorrow, kept secret letters and other confidences (Mrs Kadare’s mysterious Saturdays, for example), these were ephemeral fantasies, which in the realm of literature meant nothing. Our standards were different.

  I knew that it was impossible to explain this, and still more impossible to tell her that not only did her limitations not hem me in, but as the years passed I had grown to appreciate these frailties as a sign of her superiority. I came to think that it was precisely from her skewed analysis of the appearances of the world, from this blurred and perverse reasoning, in short from this determination not to let go of the nature of a child, that what was called the ‘writer’s gift’ was born.

  I felt less the son of a mother than of a seventeen-year-old girl whose growth had been arrested.

  It was not easy to get used to this idea, especially when I was growing up myself, approaching this age of seventeen at which she had remained. Incredibly, when I entered my twenties, she stubbornly remained seventeen. Eventually I became double her age.

  This distortion of the course of time brought further turmoil in its wake. Sometimes I thought that all those things we say we learn at our mother’s breast had come to me from another kind of milk, quite different from the Doll’s. Lapses that seemed to me delightful, examples of back-to-front reasoning whose trail, once lost, can never be recovered, lodged themselves in my memory.

  Schools, each more dangerous than the last the more complicated they became, insisted on trying to remedy these errors, to eliminate them, and free me from them, supposedly for my own good. But in fact they merely crushed me.

  Meanwhile, together with the Doll’s failings, and as a way of preserving them, I had sucked from her doll-like breast the very sense that I mentioned earlier, a cold terror like a carapace of white plaster, whose inhumanity would, it seemed, protect me from the fear of people.

  Sometimes it seemed to me that everything that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art. Indeed I almost started to believe that she had accepted her own self-impairment in order to be useful to me.

  She surrendered the freedom and authority of a mother – in short, turned herself into a doll – to give me all possible liberty as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find, like crusts of rationed bread in the time of the Germans, which she broke off from her own small portion and secretly gave to me.

  It was impossible to untangle this knot.

  Attempting to understand it more clearly, it has seemed to me, in those transcendent moments when you know one’s insights will last no longer than an instant, that one must look for an explanation only above, in the highest spheres.

  She would not have understood this in a thousand years, and would depart this world none th
e wiser.

  Unknowingly, she had set herself up in a vain and tragic confrontation, with herself on one side and her son’s so-called art on the other. One of the two would give way.

  No doubt she knew that she had lost.

  Her appeal – do not disown me – in fact meant: Disown me, if this helps you …

  Had she invented that childish delusion herself, and blamed Izmini Kokobobo? Or perhaps it was something normal in her world … among dolls … this art–mother jealousy.

  It seemed these two worlds would never come to an understanding.

  At that faraway dinner in Paris, speaking Russian so that others would not understand, Voznesensky had tried to explain to me the inexplicable: his quarrel with his own mother, Russia.

  Matma, Mamterr, Mater …

  7

  FOR SOME time the house had been sending out signals, as if moved by a premonition of its abandonment. Two of these signals, the creaking rafters at night and the worsening leaks in the roof, were very obvious. But there was no question of any repairs.

  My sister was the first to leave for the capital city, with a scholarship. Then my grandmother left for Vasiliko – ‘the basil bed’, as the city cemetery was called, perhaps the only one in the entire Balkans named after a flowering herb. Meanwhile my two uncles had finished their studies abroad, one coming back with an ear missing and the other with a Russian bride. After the appearance of my book and a fruitless wait for an answer from the Gorky Institute in Moscow, I went to Tirana (by bus this time) to enrol, with a slight sense of injury, in the Faculty of Literature.

  Bardhyl B. left shortly after me, because, as he wrote in his first and last letter to me, life in Gjirokastra had lost all meaning after my departure. We never met again, although I asked after him several times. They told me that he’d become a taxi driver in Vlora, and my guilty feeling that I may have inadvertently been the cause of this was assuaged by the soothing thought that between the two incidents of my early life, the mini prison sentence of two days and the taxi, he had chosen the latter as his model.

  I did go to Moscow, and after my return, my parents moved to the capital city.

  At first they were both disoriented, especially the Doll. Her expression, ‘the house eats you up’, which she had used of the large house, now acquired an opposite meaning, because the small apartment ate her up worse than ever.

  This was merely the beginning. After three weeks, we two sons of the family, that is myself and my brother, who had meanwhile entered the Faculty of Medicine, set off in a truck ‘to fetch the things from the house’.

  As if the exhausting journey were not bad enough, what awaited us at our house, the selection of the furniture and belongings we had to take, was a nightmare. Helped by two removal men, we started work but in a totally haphazard and illogical fashion. We were irritable, and remembered almost nothing of the many instructions not to forget this or that. We had a feeling that we were taking unnecessary things and leaving things we shouldn’t, but there was nothing we could do. We broke the chandelier in the ‘great drawing room’ while trying to prise it loose, and our search of the Doll’s hope chest was perhaps even more careless than when the German took the perfume in World War Two. The only things that were easy and indeed a pleasure to select were the carpets and rugs. The most awkward, not to say frankly resistant, were the copper utensils.

  Surfeited with books in Tirana, I had decided to ignore any ‘cultural heritage’, but at the last moment I gave in and took from the chest containing my notebooks a handful of ‘novels with advertisements’, three or four plays, the manuscript of Macbeth and the only novella without advertisements, finally entitled In an Unknown Land.

  The return journey was a particular nightmare. The further we left the city behind us, the more convinced we were of the mistakes we had surely made. The truck shook more and more. At the Këlcyra Gorge, the copper baklava tray fell out. As I dozed, I heard it clang as it fell into the ravine. The driver stopped the vehicle and we got out to look for it, but there was nothing we could do.

  In fact, my brother, when he saw I had selected it, had asked me, ‘What do we want this for?’ I made no reply, but was thinking that perhaps we might need it at some future wedding. I had just got to know Helena, and my mind obscurely linked the tray for baklava, the symbolic wedding pastry, to the possibility of marrying her, and there and then, without giving any explanation, I had said to the baggage carrier, ‘Take this!’

  Its fall from the truck left me with an unpleasant presentiment. Shortly after, as I dozed again, I found myself talking to it: ‘You didn’t want to serve us …’

  In my groggy state, it seems as if I thought that old tray, so loyal to the house, did not want to enter service outside it, and had decided it was better to hurl itself into an abyss than be used in this way.

  How crazy, I thought drowsily. Such fancies were perhaps my last bond with the old house, from which I was now freeing myself.

  When we arrived in Tirana towards midnight, instead of resting we were faced with the further chore of unloading the truck and carrying the furniture into the apartment. A more hellish experience could not be imagined. Some of the items would not fit through the door at all, and others got stuck and were cruelly crushed. Apart from the soft rugs, which huddled where they were thrown like frightened cats, everything else acquired a look of indignation. Alarming iron utensils, clothes props, oil lamps, copper or porcelain vases, all kinds of jugs and forks, seemed to howl as soon as you touched them. The apartment, as if violated by some monster, was full to bursting.

  The Doll endured it as long as she could, and then put her hands to her head and broke into a wail. It was the first time I had seen her distressed over the old house.

  The upheaval lasted for days on end, especially for the Doll and my father. For the rest of us, it made the events taking place outside the household seem much less dramatic. The quarrel with Moscow was getting worse every day. A break of diplomatic relations was expected, and after this, something that until recently would have astonished us more than the end of the world: war with the Soviet Union!

  For a while, as if some pact of silence had been sealed, nobody mentioned the house. My father dealt with it. One day, after he came back from the café, he announced that the house had been rented out, as if this were a short news report. He said something about the number of tenants and, after a deep sigh of the kind he usually concluded with an ‘eh!’, added: ‘Eh, tenants … all with Greek names.’

  I had learned in my student life in Moscow that a silence did not mean that the unmentioned had been forgotten.

  There, enchanted by the big city, I’d been sure that I had not only forgotten my old house but that the city of Gjirokastra, and even Tirana and the whole of Albania, had been erased from my memory for ever.

  Something that in the writers’ school was quite normal, but at the same time seemed to come from heaven, brought an unavoidable change into my life. The novel. The desire to write one was something between an order and a temptation. I knew that communism had founded this institute, at the very heart of its empire, not to cultivate literature but to destroy it. So I was a soldier of a death squad, summoned to do my pitiless duty of assault and slaughter.

  However, even before recovering from the Pasternak scandal, in which some writers had badly disgraced themselves, more than half of the students had embarked on their novels. In the mornings, during the classes of what might be called the ‘black mass’, the lectures against the Joyce-Kafka-Proust trio, we learned that we must not write like them; while at nights, tortured by doubt, we could hardly resist the temptation of writing precisely in their manner.

  This torture was their revenge. However, it seemed a blessed kind of payback.

  In a last attempt to avoid these writers’ accursed influence, I had decided to use a recently invented technique of not writing, but rather tape-recording. At least, Joyce and Proust had not known it, and certainly not Kafka. I felt somehow close
to the latter, perhaps because our names began with K.

  Most of the student writers of novels, as if fulfilling a promise, described the places where they had been born: the cities, villages, mountains, steppes, fjords, tundra or canyons. Nostalgia for these places was for some accompanied by a kind of superciliousness towards Moscow, the treacherous beauty who tried to employ her charms to estrange them from their birthplaces.

  I was not a part of this clan, especially because I was sure that the girls of Moscow, though not those of the cloddish Soviet Union, were the sweetest in the world, an opinion I thought would never change.

  So I was not a Moscow-sceptic but, without knowing why, I unexpectedly obeyed a call in the blood, remembered something that I was sure I’d forgotten forever: the city of my birth.

  So you forgot me? But you remember me now I’m useful?

  I was sure that I had no need of this city, and neither our professors nor dogma forced us to write about our home towns. This urge had no connection with the merits of these places, but with the recesses of our souls.

  If I dared try to explain the inexplicable, I would say that if this city appeared to me grim and reproachful, like the ghost of a murdered king, this wasn’t its fault but mine. Just as it wasn’t to blame for its reputation for producing two kinds of people: the famous and the crazy.