The Doll Page 5

  This was a good opening phrase for a novel, but I sensed that, like so many promising beginnings, it might be badly misinterpreted. The big boss came from the same city, and this was enough.

  The harder I tried to forget this phrase, the firmer it stuck in my mind. It was a city that produced … strange … people. A city that … how to put it …

  The beginning of an old song partly allayed my doubts:

  Renowned Gjirokastra

  Home of Shemo the thief.

  It wasn’t clear to me who Shemo the thief was, and still less whether he was mentioned for good or ill. However, I thought of myself and imagined the text should read, ‘Home of Shemo the thief and … me.’

  This created an obscure parallel between myself and the bandit of the song. It couldn’t be said out loud, but I was like him, if not worse than him, an art murderer, a bandit of literature, who was even going to a college where elite troops were trained to learn how to kill better.

  In the end, without delving deeper into my conscience, one cold Moscow evening I wrote on a sheet of white paper my name and then the word ‘novel’.

  Of course, I remembered the many openings of novels that I had written, or rather the advertisements for them, and with them Bardhyl B., who had been the author of some of them. After a little wave of nostalgia, as if to stress the stubborn fact that those times would never return, I felt the wish, after the word ‘novel’, to add ‘without advertisements’. In other words, this novel, unlike the previous ones, would be without bragging and swank.

  At the same time, my mind was subconsciously working on the title. I knew that the novel would be about a distant city that resembled neither Dublin nor Prague, nor Proust’s Combray, and the idea of the ‘city’ wandered through my mind, a city with a few characteristics that made the place dull and lacking, mixed up with the word ‘advertisement’. So it was a city that lacked something, like flowers or straight roads.

  In this muddle, the word ‘advertisement’ suddenly shifted from describing the novel (a short novel, one without flowers or advertisements) to the city.

  City Without Advertisements. I looked in astonishment at my title and I thought it was the stupidest title in the world, about illuminated advertisements, which did not exist in gloomy Gjirokastra, nor in Tirana or anywhere else in Albania.

  I struck a line through the title, and with unnecessary haste looked for a new one. City Without … City Without … It had to be a city without something.

  Finally, I thought I had found it. City Without Taxis. That’s it, I said to myself. Even though not perfect, at least the title meant something. It was impossible to use taxis in Gjirokastra because of the city’s steepness. Except …

  I sensed that I could not play tricks on myself. I had pretended to have forgotten it, but the symbol of the taxi, like the advertisements, rose up straight from the grotesque mock-epic of my adolescence. The famous taxi journey over the book (which I no longer wanted to remember), Bardhyl B. and all the rest had caught up with me there in Moscow, just when I thought I had left them behind for ever.

  I crossed out this new title with the taxis and wrote again the old one, City Without Advertisements.

  My mind worked feverishly, and I thought I had found my answer on the very first page. Late in the evening, the Tirana–Gjirokastra bus was approaching the city … without advertisements. Among the drowsy passengers, a young boy called Gjon looked out at the view with a feeling of total boredom.

  That’s how I would start the novel City Without Advertisements. A novel without … I stared at the title for a while, as if trying to get used to it.

  Meaning a city that lacked something … or someone who did.

  My temples were beating again.

  But this city is missing me, I almost cried aloud. So it’s a city without … me.

  Finally you’ve come to your senses, Bardhyl B. would have said to me reproachfully. The most important thing is always yourself.

  The city without me, I thought. But soon there came a doubt. Was it or was it not without me?

  With me … or without …

  The two possibilities chased each other round my mind. With me, of course. Who else was that boy with the bored gaze? Or, as the great English master had taught us, my ghost?

  I was returning to the city like a shadow of the kind I would certainly have become if I had not gone to Moscow. In short, I would experience a life which, although it was not my own, nevertheless might have been, and so I had an obligation to live through it, if only as a ghost.

  After moving to Tirana, the Doll settled in, for good or ill, and it was my father who lost his bearings.

  Leaving his home seemed to upset his equilibrium. The house had given him all his authority and now took it away, along with his title of ‘the Great Repairer’.

  He would emerge gloomily from his bedroom and return gloomily from the café after reading the newspapers.

  His new friends in the café probably asked about me, as his old ones had done. Since that distant day when he had given me a thick ear because of using his name (an imitation of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy), he had never laid a hand on me, or even spoken harshly to me.

  Old magazines dating back to the time of the monarchy insisted on the unavoidable enmity between father and son. The story of King Oedipus, which they told differently to the way we had heard it at school, attracted me more and more.

  Under their influence, I began to think of my relations with my father as a strange kind of pact, a ceasefire in a war that had never been declared.

  Besides the non-existence of this war, there was something else that did not fit in: my father’s severe presence. As I mentioned several times in notes I made, not only did he not annoy me, but I rather liked him. Bardhyl B. had of course influenced my perspective. According to him, my father’s grimness was altogether more attractive than the milk-and-honey sweetness of his own.

  We had discussed this several times and more or less reached the conclusion that there was something in our reading that we had failed to understand. Either that the severity of my father’s presence was not real, but imagined by ourselves, or that another factor came into the story: the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  The magazines predicted that father-son hostility would sooner or later lead to a dramatic conflict. In the lectures against decadent writing in Moscow, it was claimed that this was something said by ‘the other side’, the bourgeoisie. If they said it, it became twice as attractive to us, and four times as attractive if it was attacked by ‘our side’, the socialists.

  Rightly or not, the notion of a ceasefire, that is of waiting for a future battle, had taken root in my subconscious, as we had recently begun to call it. Especially now that my father had arrived in the capital city, stripped of his titles, in a cramped prison-like apartment. I was no longer a schoolboy in short trousers but in possession of two diplomas, an author of books, who knew many things, including that file on Oedipus with its dark secret.

  This feeling of hostility, whether real or imagined, naturally led me to think that my father would either alter or break the pact.

  I calmly awaited developments. Indeed, one day I sensed that I was heading for a possible confrontation (superiority of forces, attack, final counter-attack, etc.), and that involuntarily I was acting out the Oedipus story, that is the father-son conflict.

  When my chief at the editorial board of the magazine Drita showed me in secret a confidential bulletin of Western news dealing with Albania, adding that I could take it home but should be careful to burn it after reading, I immediately thought of my father. He would be better than anyone at not telling secrets and burning forbidden writings.

  This publication was called the ‘yellow bulletin’, a reference to yellow literature, as all forbidden books were called, and it was distributed to senior editors to keep them informed about ‘foreign anti-Albanian poison’.

  One day, when my father seemed exceptionally troubled, I trusted in his co
nfidence, showed him the bulletin and told him about the instruction to destroy it after reading.

  I knew his appetite for newspapers and current events, but I had never before seen his moroseness change so totally into a mixture of gratitude and childish joy, as if I had presented him with a most precious gift.

  In her memoirs, Helena has described the full ritual of forbidden reading, of locking yourself in your own room, burning the pages afterwards in the stove, the inspection of the ashes, and all the rest.

  My father’s entire life changed. He would wait impatiently at home for my arrival like a poor man expecting his monthly cheque, a patient longing for his medicine or an addict yearning for his drug.

  I fully understood him, because it was no small thing for a long-standing follower of the press to read news that was so different. At the same time, according to the logic of my imagined conflict with him, I imagined the yellow bulletin as a secret weapon that had totally reversed the fortunes of the war between us.

  By the same reasoning, I came to realise that with great effort, and with the aid of this secret weapon, the ‘perverted’ bulletin, I had defeated my opposite number and taken him prisoner.

  Years later, I related this story to a close friend who had problems with his father’s authoritarianism, and he told me half seriously that it was odds on that Freud, if he were alive today, would revise his theory.

  In what I knew of Oedipus and Freud, it was the Sphinx that impressed me more than anything else, and I set less store by the prospect of parricide and still less by any attraction to my mother. The Doll’s austere silhouette made her particularly unapproachable.

  As the years passed I’d got used to Freud, as if learning the secret impotence of a tyrant (who may scare others, but is more scared of something himself.) In Moscow, Freud suddenly regained his lost authority in my eyes. So much mud was slung at him that I felt guilty of failing to appreciate him. Rarely did I not love someone I was given instructions to avoid. I tried to correct this tendency, but it was hard.

  A rumour unexpectedly rescued me from this suffering.

  Usually, the Muscovite slanders were exactly the same as Tirana’s: these decadents were paranoid, immoral, syphilitic. But in Moscow a rumour circulated about Freud that was so different that my Latvian friend Jeronims Stulpans called it ‘dissident gossip’. According to him, despite the official attitude to Freud, a secret memorandum of Stalin advised the use of his theories to break writers under interrogation. Anna Akhmatova also referred venomously to ‘the malignant psychiatrist’. This caused a wave of hatred against Freud to spread throughout the Institute, which was very confusing for the spies.

  At the very moment when I had lost hope, my father was fully acquitted of all Freud’s charges against him.

  8

  DESPITE HER bewilderment in the first weeks, my impression was that the capital city suited the Doll. Her spirits perked up, she learned the streets and went looking for relatives.

  I was sure that the naivety in her character, perhaps a result of her constricted life in the city of her girlhood, would lessen in Tirana.

  After a time, I noticed that the very opposite was happening. Her naivety only increased.

  For a while I wanted to believe that it was perhaps the big city itself that fostered illusions in someone like the Doll. In the end, I discovered that this was not the case, when she tried to conduct with me the most serious conversation in her life, about a proposed engagement.

  Although considered slightly old-fashioned, it was still not entirely anachronistic for a mother to advise her son about his future bride.

  When one day she said to me, in the old-time manner, that she wanted to have ‘some talks’, I at first laughed it off, as usual. But when I realised what it was about, my laughter hurt my ribs. It took a while before it sank in that my mother was thinking of a bride … for myself.

  I could hardly believe my ears. Yet out of curiosity I cut my laughter short and waited for her candidate. The Doll’s proposal was not merely disappointing, but beneath anything I might have expected. It would be impossible to find a more mistaken choice among a million mothers’ suggestions. In short, I heard my dear, good mother, as described in hundreds of poems, suggest that I should become engaged to … a semi-prostitute.

  This is what had happened: One afternoon there knocked on the door of our apartment one of my acquaintances of what my friends and I called the ‘pre-Hellenic’ period, the time before my relationship with Helena. This acquaintance was one of those girls with very forward behaviour who mixed in intellectual circles and acted as models in artists’ studios. I had got to know her one evening after dinner with an artist friend of mine, and indeed it was one of the rare cases in which, before I imagined a girl naked, I saw her thus on the wall of my friend’s studio.

  Our first words while dancing were about this picture. With a sugary and supposedly bashful smile, the girl, nodding towards one of the nudes, asked me, ‘Do you like it?’ She went on to ask whether I could imagine who it was, and I said unhesitatingly, despite the bad light, ‘Isn’t it you?’ Smiling, she said that she had asked the artist to change the face a little, so she wouldn’t be recognised …

  She was very sweet, and it seemed her honeyed tones had instantly attracted the Doll: ‘Good morning, ma’am, is this Smajl’s apartment?’

  The Doll was taken aback, but invited her in and was totally enchanted by the stranger.

  I had never before heard her praise anyone so fervently. She had been dazzled not only by her appearance and manners, but by her Shkodra accent, which reminded the Doll of the time when she had lived there. Especially the word ‘ma’am’, which the girl repeated so frequently.

  In the first silence that fell between us, the Doll gave me a guilty but appealing look, saying that I wasn’t listening to her at all, but this girl, she thought, was perhaps … such a polite girl …

  ‘Mother,’ I interrupted. ‘I understand what you’re talking about.’

  ‘But you aren’t listening properly.’

  ‘How can I listen,’ I said. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘That’s what you tell me about everything I say.’

  My laughter suddenly evaporated. The only thing was not to make her cry.

  I thought of saying: Listen, Mother, that girl is not what she seems to you. But the explanation would have been difficult. I had to find a simple, comprehensible way.

  ‘Listen, Mother, that girl seems polite, but she’s … how can I say it … a bit loose. Do you see what I mean?’

  She seemed to understand this, but it made no particular impression on her.

  With a feeling of injustice towards the ‘girl’, I used some qualifications that she perhaps didn’t deserve. Impatiently, so that the Doll would understand, I listed the labels one after another, and the thought struck me that in Albanian we have an excess of epithets for this kind of woman, who is slightly ‘loose’. It was as if those words had been the first Latin, Celtic, Byzantine and Ottoman influences on our language. For some reason Ottoman words seemed the most appropriate in this case.

  ‘Do you understand or not,’ I bellowed. ‘Do you want me to marry a whore? Say something. Would you like me to have a bride like that? Just because she called you “ma’am” forty times in two minutes?’

  I wanted to add that she had been seduced by that wretched word ‘ma’am’, but I was satisfied that I had succeeded in stopping her tears and I didn’t distress her further.

  In her memoirs, Helena has described her first lunch at our house, which was also the first time she met my parents.

  I have never understood, not even now after so many years, what made me say to Helena, after we had spent the entire morning in my room, ‘Why don’t you stay for lunch?’

  ‘Lunch?’ she said in surprise, ‘Why? What for?’

  We had been meeting for several weeks, but had never talked about such things as getting to know my parents. Helena knew my sister, I don’t k
now how, and she had once bumped into my younger brother on the stairs.

  ‘Why?’ I echoed. I wanted to give her a pretext, but not finding one, I said, ‘Just … for no reason …’

  Without further ado I stood up and left the room to tell the Doll that my friend was staying for lunch.

  ‘Who?’ asked the Doll. ‘That blonde girl?’ She didn’t say ‘fair-haired’, which was the usual expression in Gjirokastra, especially in the old houses, where fair hair was particularly valued, but used a word that had just come into fashion.

  I took this as a sign that the Doll was taken with this girl, which proved that I was right in thinking that, if it came to achieving an understanding between Helena and my stubborn family, my main hope lay in her hair.

  But it did not turn out this way. A kind of frostiness in the Doll’s face hinted that she still nursed a kind of pique that her own untimely suggestion had not been considered, and it had no doubt occurred to her that Helena was the reason.

  She said nothing, but merely asked if she should tell ‘him’, meaning my father.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We’ll all have lunch together.’

  It was only noon, and there was still time for preparations before our usual lunchtime of two o’clock.

  Helena did not conceal her nervousness. To raise her spirits, I told her some curious stories about the Kadares, some of them involving the Doll’s simplicity. I mentioned the incident with the ‘model’, and half in jest added that, because the Doll had been so entranced by the word ‘ma’am’, she should try to use it herself.

  Shortly before lunch, I went to assess the situation. From my father’s suit and the expression on his face I realised that he ‘knew’. My brother whispered to me, ‘Helena’s coming?’ and I nodded.

  At two o’clock, I led the way into lunch, with Helena following. A lunch that Bardhyl B. would probably have called the biggest event in recent Albanian literary history, or something that recalled Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence or the German Sturm und Drang movement that we had recently covered in Literature.