The Doll Read online

  Most were students who had returned from abroad after the big break-up had interrupted their studies. They were attractive characters in every way, with their energy, humour, and even their anxieties over foreign fiancées who had either remained behind in Albania and could not return to their own countries, or wanted to come to Albania and were not allowed to.

  Artists tried out their colours on the kitchen shelves, using particular shades which, although never explicitly banned, were semi-forbidden. Others sorted out the library and the bedroom, teasing Helena by the by.

  We were so absorbed in all this that we rarely gave a thought to what was happening outside. An extraordinary tension could be felt everywhere. If you turned on the radio, you quickly turned it off. The yellow bulletin, the family’s secret watchdog, was turning increasingly fierce.

  My father was conspicuously absent from the upheaval. It was a real mystery how he managed to go out, come home and shut himself up in his own room without anyone noticing. Meanwhile I had never seen the Doll so animated. She drank coffee incessantly, darted from one apartment to the other, and was obviously happy to be at the centre of attention. (‘Hey, Ism’s mother, do you like this colour? Does the washing machine go here? Am I being a nuisance? Sorry, what did you say, Mrs Kadare?’)

  One day I saw her in the distance, her hand held by someone whose face was familiar. Soon I heard the girl’s voice: ‘Smajl, I’m so pleased to meet Mrs Kadare again.’

  She drew her by the hand towards me, while the Doll kept her eyes lowered, as always when she felt guilty.

  ‘Mrs Kadare is so delightful. We do enjoy chatting.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. The Doll lifted her eyes, perhaps to see if I was still angry.

  I was no longer angry in the least, but I felt a sudden, familiar qualm at having spoken ill of the girl. Apparently she had come with one of the artists in the role of his assistant, either as a model or a lover, as happened with these girls who were cruelly called ‘handy’ (probably because they were passed from hand to hand), but who might be thought of as more fortunate than others, because after all they were in the hands of artists and poets, who put them on canvas or into poems before touching their bodies.

  I had neither the time nor the opportunity to express my feelings, except by doing something that I did not do often: I stretched out my hand to touch the Doll’s hair with the tenderness that a woman and her hair arouse at such sweet moments.

  The Doll became even more enterprising. One day I found her listening with great attention to Pirro Mani. I was very curious to know what the Doll could find to talk about with the most fashionable theatre director in Tirana. He was showing her a sheet of paper, while intoning in his booming voice: ‘Ism’s mother, this show will shake the whole of Tirana! Look, here are the two levels of the stage, one inside the belly of the monster, that is the wooden horse, and the other, at its feet, where Laocoön is arguing with the crowd.’

  I realised that he was explaining his plans to stage my novel The Monster, whose still-unpublished manuscript I had given to him.

  ‘Do you see now, Ism’s mother. It will be a superb confrontation … Ah, here is Ism … I was explaining our next production to your mother. She has a special feeling for the theatre, have you noticed?’

  ‘Yes, you might say so,’ I said, and then turned to the Doll, to ask if she had understood.

  At first she avoided replying, but when I pressed her, she muttered, ‘Yes, that argument … that’s what people are like these days, always quarrelling …’

  I described this incident a little later to a small circle of friends. The Doll pretended not to hear, as if we weren’t talking about her. Somebody said that the conversation would have gone better in the hands of Dritëro Agolli, who was well known for being able to talk to old people. My brother objected. According to him, the harder the conversation was to understand, the more it appealed to her. The Doll still pretended not to hear.

  Some time later, another director, this time of films, told me one day, ‘I know your mother,’ and my brother who happened to be there burst out: ‘What did you make of each other!’

  Kujtim Çashku was famous for overusing foreign words. He had met the Doll on the benches of the Park of Youth, alongside the main boulevard, where she used to sit, sometimes with her sisters, sometimes by herself, ‘to watch the world go by’.

  As Çashku told me, the Doll was attracted not just by the theatre but by the view of the Hotel Dajti opposite, especially on the days when there were official receptions, stylish cars, foreign ladies getting out of them … what you might call all that glamour …

  The Doll’s taste for elegance and for drawing attention, such as I dimly remembered from the time when our little cortège, escorted by Vito the Roma, passed through Gjirokastra on the way to my grandfather’s house, was apparently returning.

  Her theatrical side probably responded to the appeal of the chic, a taste so long suppressed in her, probably since the German’s theft of the perfume. She no doubt liked the dimension of secrecy (Mrs Kadare’s mysterious Thursdays) that her plaster-like carapace encouraged.

  On fine days, telling nobody, she would put on her best clothes and set off with her light-footed gait towards the main boulevard.

  On rainy days, she had another destination, which we would perhaps never have discovered if a woman friend had not told us that she had come across the Doll quite by chance sitting in an armchair in the great lobby of the Dajti, watching people go up and down the stairs to the library and the big café on the first floor.

  Asked if she were expecting anyone, she had said no, she was just ‘giving her eyes a treat’, an expression that our friend had never heard and couldn’t understand.

  I didn’t find out anything else. In particular, I never discovered whether or not she went secretly to the theatre, although I suspected it.

  Her panoramic view would include the arcade of Luigj Gurakuqi Street, the Palace of Culture, the Clock Tower Café where my father drank his morning coffee and from where the Doll surely wouldn’t want to be seen, and then the National Theatre and Writers’ Club, from where she would also not want me to see her, and then the Art Gallery and finally the Hotel Dajti itself. This was the map of her beau monde through which she moved, as if escorted by an unidentified companion, whether my father, me, all of us, or perhaps her alter ego.

  11

  WE KNEW that my father’s end was close. He was still slim and straight, but one could sense death in the way he walked. It is significant that funeral marches move at a slow pace, as if to show that death is, among other things, a matter of rhythm.

  Only at this pace could he descend beneath the earth, where the Kadares seem to be stronger.

  When I reflected on this later, I thought of Pythagoras and the power of what is not yet incarnate. I seemed to have grasped something of it, but the wings that I imagined were giving flight to my thoughts suddenly failed me.

  I had pitilessly mocked my non-existent novels, the ones with advertisements, and in Moscow I had even owned up to them in seminars on the psychology of creativity, reducing my friends on the course to helpless laughter. It did not occur to me that these books, just as they were, disembodied and shapeless, had an advantage: they were untouchable. They were in no danger from anything.

  As we talked about the superiority of unwritten literature, with the usual hilarity, our professor interrupted to say that there had been child composers, but nobody could write literature at the age of twelve, or even fourteen.

  This caused me a little pang to the heart. I had wanted to believe a while longer in the qualities of unwritten literature. After all, it was thanks to these non-existent books that I achieved that dream-like freedom not to be found anywhere else. They had made me believe that my enchantment with Macbeth, written by some Englishman called Shakespeare, gave me a special affinity to him, as to no one else.

  My awe of Shakespeare did not lessen but grew to the point where I began to copy out
the text. When I began to lose my temper with him, as I had done with Bardhyl B., I persuaded myself that I was not just close to Shakespeare, but almost a cousin.

  I told B. B. this and had seldom seen him moved so deeply.

  This ability to lose my temper with the Englishman struck both of us as the most convincing proof that I had become fused with him.

  ‘Fused,’ Bardhyl B. echoed, in a voice that I had never heard before.

  I even thought that when I was a little more grown up – in other words, when I became clever – I would correct Shakespeare’s mistakes, as far as I could.

  I would start with the scene in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears. I was convinced that if Hamlet had been the son of my own father, he would not have behaved so carelessly during the conversation. It wasn’t a question of respect, more a matter of not spoiling the beauty of the fear … For example, if my own father’s ghost appeared to tell me, say, that the Doll’s brothers, my two uncles, had murdered him in his sleep, both I and my friend Horatio – in other words you, Bardhyl B. – would speak rather differently …

  At this point Bardhyl B. broke down entirely from emotion. We fixed our eyes on one another, and I awaited the fatal words: ‘So why don’t you start now?’

  A short time before, something had happened that we didn’t want to remember. In my feverish desire to write works of a kind never seen before, I had started my novel This Is Victory, which, in order to show that I was original and not to be compared to anybody else, I had started back to front, from the end.

  Bardhyl B. and I were in my house, he in the room between two storeys that we considered belonged to the two of us, and myself in the drawing room where I usually wrote. It was afternoon, hot, and in the adjacent room my father was taking his nap. I finished and was about to descend the stairs, holding in my hand the page I’d written, that is, the end of the novel: ‘The sun shone on the glowing fields of the cooperative and the villagers listened with happy faces to the partisan commissar who pointed to the meadow and said, “This is victory.”’

  The stairs creaked under my feet. My head was numb from exhaustion. Bardhyl B.’s stare was still more glazed.

  ‘Did you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That mur …’ (der.)

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ve gone pale.’

  How could I not be, I thought.

  I held the page of writing out to him.

  Thou canst not say I did it.

  I heard a knocking at the gate.

  We both shivered.

  ‘My father might wake up,’ I said softly.

  Wake Duncan … wake my father …

  Bardhyl B. started reading the manuscript. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of one thing and something else came out.’

  The page shook as he returned it to me. So did my hand as I took it from him.

  The knock came again.

  ‘I’ve got no words …’ I said, almost sobbing.

  I felt that I was rambling. No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me …

  This was perhaps the moment when I discovered the power of the unspoken.

  For days on end, as if to convince myself how incomparably better it was not to communicate, we both, obscurely and irrationally, repeated the same thing, that we had no words.

  A few days later he came to me and announced in one breath, as he usually did when bringing news, that he had read a novella in which there was another world or planet, that, although containing the same human species as ourselves, honoured as its greatest poet not Homer, as we do, but a tailor who had never written a single line.

  I was about to say that this was crazy, but he forestalled me by saying that this might seem nonsense, but if you looked carefully at this story, it had to do with us …

  It took a while for it to sink in that in this other world where everything was different, the important thing was not what you wrote, but what you could write … In other words …

  In other words, it was the same in our case … with the novels that nobody knew about …

  The terrifying novels that do not exist, I thought with a certain pride.

  ‘And Homer?’ I asked after a moment. ‘The real one, ours, did he exist there, or had they done away with him?’

  ‘He existed. In eleventh place, if I remember right.’

  ‘The real Homer?’

  ‘None other. With the Iliad and all the rest, the Cyclops, Helen of Troy.’

  Fearing bad news, I didn’t dare ask about Shakespeare.

  When Bardhyl B., as if realising what was on my mind, uttered the words ‘Whereas our William, he …’ my heart skipped a beat.

  ‘What?’ I asked in a faint voice.

  ‘The place of the world’s finest dramatist had been usurped by an idiot who not only hadn’t written a single play, but couldn’t even read or write … So William barely hung on to seventh place.’

  I consoled myself that maybe that wasn’t too bad. However, Bardhyl B. uttered a ‘but’ that stopped my heart again.

  ‘But William was up against another problem. They accepted his plays, but there was some doubt about whether he himself existed.’

  For a while we strove amidst our bewilderment to work out which would be worse, losing the plays or the man himself.

  I was totally confused.

  ‘And who wrote this wretched story?’ I asked with assumed indifference.

  ‘Someone called Mark,’ said Bardhyl B. ‘Mark … Twain or something.’

  We felt that we should be tearing this man to shreds, but we didn’t have the heart. The fantasy of this Mark from America was somehow close to the miracle that we had long been looking for, a masterpiece that acquired its power from being unwritten.

  Bardhyl B. thought that it was rather like the case of my own novels, of which only the advertisements were visible, while they themselves still lay underground. It was not for nothing that we liked to call them ‘demonic’ – that is, invisible, unseen. Isn’t this the most common phrase for something that inspires awe?

  Our intoxicated minds raced back to Shakespeare. His situation, apparently so different, resembled ours.

  We tried to take the question calmly: Here was Shakespeare, and there were his plays. The world seemed not to have room for both. We had to choose between the man and his work.

  My head swam again. We felt we hadn’t quite hit the mark, although we’d come close. Famous yourself, but without your plays … or fame for your plays, but not for you … As you might say, life without fame or fame without life.

  At last we seemed to be solving the riddle. In any event, we shouldn’t break our ties with the netherworld, because it was only there that certain things not allowed in this world were permissible.

  My novels had been a mistake, because they had been born at a time when literature was forbidden. Like alcohol prohibited to adolescents. So they would remain deep down below, lying in rows, frozen between thinking and writing, and invisible to the human eye. I was sure that if any one of them stirred itself to be written, it would be annihilated at once, as if struck by lightning.

  In the days after my father went to that next world which he may have considered his more natural home, my memories of Bardhyl B. crowded in as never before.

  What’s he doing? I wondered whenever he came to mind. Why don’t I see him?

  On my wedding day of 23rd October I’d had several premonitions that he would come in his taxi (his taxi playing the role of an old nag). Come so I can send you to abduct Helen, or whatever you like, as in the past, when everything was permitted to us.

  At my father’s burial, I reflected that, as the saying goes, a friend may fail to come for joy but not for sorrow. He should have been present with his taxi down there on the road, ready to take my father to the proper place.

  It would be
no wonder if he came one day to take me …

  Why wasn’t he here? I had sent word again to Vlora, but in vain. Was he ill, I wondered … or worse, no longer in this world?

  It was not for the first time this suspicion had occurred to me. I would have heard something unless … unless he had never belonged to this world.

  I was stunned for a moment and shook my head as if to banish this terrible thought. But it would not go away. On my last visit to Gjirokastra, as I was climbing Lunatics’ Lane together with an architect friend, my feet had instinctively stopped at the third gate on the left that must have been Bardhyl B.’s, but strangely it did not resemble his gate at all. The architect who was with me wanted to open it, but in a voice that seemed not my own, I cried, ‘No.’

  After my father was buried, the Doll retreated totally into herself. It took time for the apartment to regain its equilibrium. One evening, during an after-dinner conversation, a friend remarked that old houses preserved the memory of the dead for a long time, but modern apartments with their simple, smooth lines were designed to note a departure as casually as possible.

  I remembered everything connected with him. People said contradictory things: some had found him formidable, while others insisted on his unusual sense of humour. Then both sides would turn their heads to me, to hear the truth.

  Any explanation seemed impossible, especially when the conversation touched on father-son relationships, however obliquely. Perhaps the only secret I learned from him was how difficult it is to understand whether tyranny is a real thing or something one projects oneself. The same goes for enslavement. In the end, one can be the slave of a tyrant, but he is just as much your slave.

  I calmly learned to search my conscience. My sister Kaku’s engagement and then my younger brother’s marriage both took place quietly. On the latter occasion, as expected, when it came to the cake I recalled the big baklava tray, and my suspicion of a crime committed long ago, that night at the Këlcyra Gorge. Did my brother really not see anything, as he dozed wrapped in rugs on the flatbed of the truck, or did he notice that the old tray was about to fall off, and do nothing to prevent it?