MY MOTHER, otherwise so hard to fathom, made no secret of her absolute dislike for our house.
This was perhaps an understandable reaction for a seventeen-year-old bride entering this vast building. Her first thought, if only in passing, would have been that a house like ours would take such a lot of work – especially for a girl who, as I later learned from her sisters’ stories, had often been scolded for a lack of housewifely zeal. Besides, she was the sole young wife, with no prospects of a second bride in the household, because my father was an only son, and fatherless.
The house was not merely huge, but ancient and oppressive. Moreover, her mother-in-law, my future grandmother, had a reputation both for tight-lipped severity and for wisdom. It would be a long time before I understood the profound reasons why reputations for great wisdom so irritated my mother.
The first chilliness between the young bride and her mother-in-law was probably caused by the bride’s lack of interest in the house, or rather her failure to be awed by it. But the true cause lay deeper, making their coldness unavoidable.
It was well known that when the families of Gjirokastra formed marriage alliances, they immediately redefined their relationships to each other. Besides the usual forging of a bond between two clans, there was an extraordinary kind of deafening din in the period before the wedding. This was an opportunity for the old houses to behave with their well-known swank, pride, swagger and vanity, so that the two families being joined in marriage could be set on the scales and compared. During the long winter nights, the future brides, and indeed the grooms, would hear all kinds of insinuations about the other party: ‘They think they’re a cut above us,’ and the like. It was a kind of cold war that burdened both sides, especially the young brides and their mothers-in-law, with feelings of contempt for one another.
So, whether or not my future mother expressed her disdain for the Kadare house, or my grandmother pursed her lips at her, an inescapable frostiness set in between the two.
As the years passed, and with great difficulty, I would come to understand – or more accurately, think I understood – the senseless history of the supposed animosity between the Kadares and the Dobis.
This ill will that initially seemed quite inevitable became complicated and later beyond comprehension. Then the opposite happened: the fog lifted of a sudden, and everyone said, ‘So that’s what this business was all about! We were too blind to see it.’
The hostility arose from the impossibility of comparing the two families, starting with their houses, which were so different that it was hard to believe they belonged to the same city.
Our house was old and grim, but that of my grandfather on my mother’s side was the opposite. It was large, but it had neither deep cellars nor a cistern, nor fancy wooden stairs, not to mention uninhabited rooms, a prison, secret subterranean passages and useless corridors and vestibules. The Dobi house had its particular character because it stood on its own, not on a street or in a neighbourhood that would require it to fit in with other houses. It occupied an empty space beside the castle and a swift-flowing stream. In the absence of secrets, it possessed a patch of land that might be considered a garden, which also contained a small house known as the outbuilding, in which there lived a Roma family, former servants of the Dobis.
But instead of restoring the equilibrium between the houses, everybody made matters worse. The Kadares and the Dobis, as I learned later, differed from one another even more than their houses did. The most striking contrast was that most of the Dobi family were alive, while most Kadares were dead. Now and then I would find an old photograph tucked away in the house and run to my grandmother to ask who this person was and where I could find them. Her answer always saddened me. ‘What about this one?’ I would ask a few days later when I found another photograph. But the answer was the same: they were no longer of this world.
There were plenty of other differences. The Dobi house had trees and birds, violins and Roma. There were the Greek peasants on my grandfather’s former properties, and my maternal aunts and uncles – tezet and ungjët – but the problem was that these things were not in any way comparable to what we Kadares had. Could you compare, for instance, skill with the violin to the two rooms that we were not allowed to enter – or the dungeon, as the prison was called? And I knew that we couldn’t have tezet and ungjët, because, according to my grandmother, in our house they wouldn’t be sisters and brothers of our mother, but of our father, and the offspring of our grandmother herself, and we would use different words for them.
Later, when both Dobi uncles went abroad to study, one to Budapest and the other to Moscow, the difference between them and us was more evident in the letters that they sent from far away than in their actual absence. In our house, letters never arrived from anybody, and to me this seemed normal, because everybody knew that the dead didn’t send them.
The Doll (for this sobriquet was now, if not replacing the word ‘mother’, at least relegating it to second place) would have found it hard to put into words, but she had known that she would have to face up to the Kadare house, with its high windows, cupboards, porches, secret chambers, carved wooden ceilings and famous dungeon, and all those forebears with sonorous names, Seit Kadare, Avdo Kadare, Shahin Kadare, and the most renowned among them, Ismail Kadare, my great-great-grandfather, who, as I liked to recall, had become famous in a song, not for killing Turks, as one would expect, but because of his clothes, or rather his pursuit of fashion.
Against this menacing pile of stone, the Doll had her own army of trees, birds, violins, sisters and former servants. At first sight she appeared fragile and naive, but she too had her secrets. The Doll did not know many things, but she was clearly aware of the truth behind the mundane but slippery phrase ‘financial situation’. The Dobis were well-to-do – that is, rich – and the Kadares were not.
This fact was never mentioned in either of the two houses, as if it were agreed upon that each side should wear a mask. Under their mask of modest tastes in everything, the Dobis concealed their wealth. And in turn the Kadares wore a mask of grandeur to cover their poverty.
The alliance between the two was a mistake from the start, and nobody ever understood the reason for the marriage.