The Doll Read online

  People also began again to tease me about the Doll. Would I take her with me to Paris when my book was published there? Another version was more wounding: would I take Helena’s aunt instead?

  The girls in the house laughed, and the Doll tried to laugh too. Laughter seemed to relieve her more and more.

  That was the last time the Doll laughed on this earth.

  Anybody hearing those words will think first of death.

  But the truth was even more galling.

  Just before dusk on 24th October 1990, the phone rang and an unknown voice said: ‘Listen to the radio!’

  The news of my flight with Helena from Albania was being broadcast. A letter sent to the country’s president. A call for free elections. The state’s response was to declare me a traitor.

  The Doll and Kaku were alone. They were staying in our apartment on Dibra Street, as usual when we were away from Albania.

  They were stupefied. They trembled in the darkness, which gradually became more intense. They did not dare open the windows. The telephone rang again, but there was no voice on the other end. A little later, they lifted the receiver once more and discovered the line had been cut. As if finding only one thing to do, they started to weep, sometimes together, sometimes in turn.

  After a while there was knocking at the door.

  Two men entered first, followed by two more carrying metal chests.

  The Doll did not remember the word ‘search’ being mentioned. Nor did my sister.

  One of the men, a diminutive, gloomy character, stood at the entrance to the study. The other went up to our two bookcases.

  From a distance, the Doll could hear them talking to Kaku.

  ‘What did they say?’ she asked when Kaku came past her, but my sister did not reply.

  The raiders opened the glass doors of the first bookcase. The Doll couldn’t believe her eyes. They were taking out the files of my manuscripts! She had imagined anything except what was happening before her. She told me later that she thought they might take her away in handcuffs, but not that they would touch these manuscripts. When I asked her why she thought this, she couldn’t say. It seemed she believed these manuscripts possessed a secret power from having absorbed my thoughts over many years. Now, their magic spell broken, they were being passed roughly from hand to hand and thrust into metal chests.

  ‘But didn’t you think that when they left the apartment, the danger would disappear with them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps …’

  Her eyes assumed the expression they wore whenever she felt ashamed at not understanding something, a habit that some people called a failing and others a gift.

  The chests were now being closed. The diminutive man, who was apparently in charge, supervised everything.

  It was hard to figure out what was happening. It seemed to be the manuscripts that were causing confusion. The men circled round them in an ungainly dance.

  The Doll was unable to make sense of the chaos. As if in a dream, she went up to the glum-faced supervisor, and asked him, ‘Are you the person who will put me in prison?’

  The man gave her a strange look.

  ‘I am a prosecutor,’ he said in a low voice, ‘But don’t be scared, granny.’

  The uncertainty continued, and the foul taste of a nightmare spread everywhere. From our bedroom, Kaku emerged holding a revolver, like in the movies. The Doll thought that she would shoot, and cried out, ‘What are you doing, you wretched woman?’

  One of the prosecutor’s men calmly took the revolver from her hand and looked at it carefully.

  ‘This isn’t the gun we knew about,’ he said. ‘This is unauthorised. Find the other one, that has a permit.’

  Kaku opened her eyes wide, at a loss.

  ‘Don’t you put me in prison. I’m ill,’ the Doll said to the prosecutor. ‘My eyes aren’t too good either.’

  The prosecutor replied with the same words as before, in the same sad voice. Kaku returned with another revolver in her hand and the Doll would have said again, ‘What are you doing, you wretched woman?’, if one of the men hadn’t calmly taken the gun from her. ‘It was in the white bookcase,’ Kaku explained. ‘Behind De Rada’s Complete Works. I saw it when I was dusting.’

  The prosecutor’s man examined it for a moment, and said, ‘This is the one.’

  The metal crates were full at last, and they carried them downstairs in silence. The melancholy prosecutor followed them out. By the door, he put his arm round the Doll’s shoulders, and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t cry, granny.’

  I could not get this picture out of my mind. For years, my thoughts kept returning to that grief-stricken apartment on Dibra Street, where the two women, now left alone, burst into loud sobs as if in mourning.

  12

  WHEN I returned to Tirana for the first time in March 1992, of all the memories that came to me on the plane, that one had been the hardest to bear. Now the Doll sat silent on the settee, while a correspondent of French television filmed her. ‘Cheer up,’ everybody said to her. ‘Let bygones be bygones.’

  She did her best to smile, but evidently couldn’t. Her eyes were haunted by that same guilty expression she wore when she did not comprehend things. The only difference was that cheering up called for even greater effort.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said after a pause. ‘I’m delighted … only my eyes aren’t too good.’

  My last conversation with her had been on the day of our departure on one of our regular visits to Paris. In her look it was easy to discern the question that most mothers ask on these occasions: When you come back, will you find me alive?

  But after a prolonged stare, she finally put to me the most surprising question of all.

  ‘What?’ I said, hoping that I had not heard correctly.

  But my hope was in vain.

  The Doll repeated what I thought she had said.

  ‘Are you a Frenchman now?’

  Later, whenever I remembered this question, instead of becoming familiar it seemed more and more strange, from whatever side I considered it. So clear yet so obscure, childish and timeless at the same time, her words caught me wholly unprepared. In short, they were utterly in her style – comprehension and non-comprehension at the same time, joined in life and in death.

  And so I answered her question only now, as she lay in a coffin, white, with a little red on her cheeks, entirely the Doll in a toy box.

  As I looked at her, it seemed that she had been preparing for years to make this leap. She had put on a little make-up as if for a final performance, but her manner was still the same, and the essence of her question was still the same, about the replacement of a mother, though now articulated in the pretentious phrases ‘Mother France’ or ‘Mother Albania’.

  Of course, my reply would be to her, to myself, and to some other dimension that might sit in judgement over us, as my father did long ago in his famous trials.

  I wanted to tell her that she could no longer complain of a lack of consideration. She was the centre of attention in the role of the deceased, the main protagonist of antique tragedy, as students throughout the world learn.

  People now encircled her, just like in the theatre of Tirana that she had perhaps visited in secret without imagining that one day she would take the stage herself to assume her role in a three-thousand-year-old drama.

  Here they were, intimates and strangers, each more important than the other, all wearing expressions of grief, half of them in silence, some in black Borsalinos. Some speaking foreign languages.

  For your sake, the actors of the National Theatre lowered their resounding voices, which you so adored. For they all knew that you were about to set off to meet your husband in Tirana’s western cemetery, just as you had once come to him as a bride in the distant year of 1933. And he, like then, might say to you, ‘Have you come to me, Doll?’

  In these last moments I will try to avoid things that are difficult for you, like that matter of the dark
ness from which we all emerge. Or the other one, the darkness to which we are all going.

  At least for these minutes I would like to reassure you once more that the misunderstandings between us did not hinder me in any way, but were perhaps more necessary than any kind of rapport. Because, as I’ve tried to explain to you so many times, a gift may manifest itself in its very opposite – that is as an absence of something rather than an abundance.

  And I recalled the Russian poet on that cold night in Paris as he told me how on his last trip to Moscow a woman had spat at him in the street, just like that, for no reason … ponyimayesh … for no reason, in the street one evening … a woman wrapped in a shawl, as Mother Russia, Matushka Rus, is usually depicted … ponyimayesh … on the posters in November. And he asked her … ‘Why …? What have I done to you …? Why did you spit at me …?’ While she, not taking her eyes off him … threatening … mysterious … gave no answer.

  13

  MY SENSE that something was missing from my portrait of the Doll became clearer when the architect dealing with the reconstruction of the house phoned from Gjirokastra with the news that he had discovered its secret entrance.

  I felt unprepared for this news and found myself lost for encouraging words that wouldn’t disappoint him.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he continued cheerfully, ‘we were working on the east wing, and suddenly … you see … we were astonished … quite amazed … you see …?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I replied, after a time, but feeling my sluggish response was justified. After all, nobody could be thrilled to discover that the house where they spent the first seventeen years of their life has a secret entrance, and still less when the news is relayed with cries of delighted astonishment and endless you sees from the architect in charge of renovation.

  He talked on while I hunted for banal phrases in reply, and came up with the most useless question imaginable: ‘Was it a secret entrance or an exit …?’

  ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Entrance or exit? … Hmm, what a strange question … really strange.’

  I rather regretted my interruption and conceded that it might be considered both at once, and I felt the anxiety pass from him to me.

  It was a strange kind of unease, for few people will ever have to worry whether a secret entrance or exit is a good sign for a house or not.

  This consternation, a kind of obscure misgiving, clung to me even after I hung up.

  A secret way in … or way out … what’s there to worry about? I thought.

  And yet my apprehension would not go away.

  I had known the architect before the house was destroyed.

  ‘I come from Lunatics’ Lane,’ he had said to me with a cheerful face, as if telling me he had a degree from Oxford.

  We laughed, as we later did whenever we recalled that first meeting. The fact that we both came from this famous little street would surely help us to understand one another.

  We were in complete harmony until the day when the house, as if playing some great trick on us, caught fire during the repairs and burned to the ground.

  I appointed the same architect for the house’s reconstruction, and everything was as previously: degree, Oxford, our harmony. As before, we understood each other totally, down to the word ‘air raid’, which we used quite nonchalantly, simultaneously.

  When we met for the first time beside the ruins, he noticed my incredulity at what I saw and used the very words that were in my mind … ‘It looks like there’s been an air raid, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Precisely,’ I replied. And he told me that the houses of Gjirokastra burned in this way, as if bombed from the air, unlike all other houses in the world. The collapse of the fortress-like walls had caused general amazement.

  The architect explained that the cruel blow our house had suffered was the equivalent of two large bombs dropped from a heavy British bomber. The house was roofed with stone slabs which, when the supporting rafters burned away, collapsed into the house with all their appalling weight.

  One might say that the Kadare house was bombed by its own roof – that is, by itself.

  And then in that unforgettable year, 1999, something happened that never occurred in World War Two. Waves of NATO aircraft flew across the Adriatic to bomb Serbia. The fire in our house was at about this time. In my mind, the idea of destruction had been associated with air raids for so long that I could easily imagine a British bomber peeling off from its squadron and, flying over Gjirokastra like a character in some fairy tale from my childhood, seeking out our house, on which to drop those two long-awaited bombs.

  But as so often happens, a misfortune brings its own consolation, and thanks to this mishap we found the secret entrance to our house, which might otherwise have remained undetected.

  It was something much more than an entrance, something deeper than any secret. It seemed to me to offer a vital code to interpret everything, including the riddle of the Doll.

  This is what ran through my mind as Helen and I travelled to Gjirokastra. The architect had insisted that she should come too, because my friends there had prepared some kind of surprise for her …

  I did not stop to consider what this surprise might be, because the whole event could only be a surprise, starting with the house, which was both itself and no longer itself.

  The house was to have a second life now, something never granted to people. The rooms, corridors, staircases and carved ceilings would experience a resurrection, while the non-rooms, which had never been rooms before, would embark on a second life without ever having had a first.

  I tried to put this jumble out of my mind, for it seemed to me more esoteric than the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato put together.

  And so, pestered by a little group of friends, we arrived at the western gate. The architect pushed open the door and we passed through into the entrance hall, which led to another door that led into another hall where the internal staircase was. A third door opened into the eastern yard with its external stairs.

  All together we climbed this stone staircase, which still had no protecting rail, to the upper floor. I saw my guides glance at one another with the special look of people who share a secret understanding, and noticed they were careful to keep Helena at the front of our procession. I remembered the surprise that the architect had mentioned, but in my unfocused state of mind I forgot it once again.

  The cortège led by Helena reached the top of the stairs, and suddenly, in the midst of a silence of the sort created by whispers of ‘Watch out! Be careful!’, an old song burst forth from a large number of male chests.

  People hurried up the staircase to see what was happening. The sight was breathtaking. In the big first-floor corridor stood a row of men in fustanellas, assembled in a formal semicircle, singing an old wedding song in resonant voices.

  Helena stood immobile in front of them, captivated.

  The song was for her. It was a famous Gjirokastra song, perhaps the oldest of all wedding songs, and she was the bride.

  Bride, here where you set foot, may you also lose your teeth.

  In other words: Bride, here where you enter, may you remain for the rest of your life.

  The singers did not take their dark and minatory eyes away from her.

  She had been many years in coming, but had finally arrived. It was too late to rescue her, or to change anything. She was being told bluntly: You will never leave here.

  This must be a misunderstanding, a kind of mirage of a wedding from another era. It was the wrong bride, and I instinctively wanted to cry out: Stop this dangerous play-acting, curtain down!

  Meanwhile, Helena had acquired an extraordinary kind of beauty, as if she wanted to do well by the house.

  Everything around was grim, threatening.

  I wanted to say that it was no longer the house that it had been, and it had no rights over a bride who had married elsewhere.

  I wanted to say something more, about the regrets the old house still somehow held, i
ts long wait, and its pointless spite, but at that moment the song abruptly stopped, as is usual with this kind of music, as if the performers’ breath had been taken away.

  The company now descended the stairs with the same haste as when they had come up, as if fleeing a danger zone. I managed to pass through them to take the still-dazed Helena by the hand and say to her ‘Be careful!’ as, almost in a panic, she came down the stairs without a rail.

  At the foot of the staircase, as we walked towards the gate, I thought it might be better for us to leave by the secret door, but I remembered that I still had no idea where this door might be, nor could I glimpse the architect anywhere, and the feeling that overcame me was nothing other than a continuation of the perplexity of long ago.

  Paris, April 2013

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