I HAD NOTICED that each member of our family had a unique relationship to the house. My grandmother’s was the most natural and obvious. One had the impression that long ago she had established a rapport with its archways, rafters and buttresses. The decision not to leave the house was evidently part of a process of becoming absorbed into it.
My father’s own alliance with the house was strong but entirely different, founded on what had become the sole passion of his life: repairing it. For him everything else took second place. This was so generally known that when in our history class the teacher spoke to us about the great rebuilding undertaken by Marcus Aurelius, Ela Laboviti whispered to me from the next bench, ‘Just like your father!’
I became increasingly sure that all this was more than a matter of repairs. It was probably connected to his authority, and, looking at it this way, one might say that my father, in attempting to fix the house, was merely trying to restore his own dominance.
As one can imagine, the Doll’s connection to the house could only be superficial. She continued to be distressed by the size of the rooms, and indifferent if not hostile to repairs. Her expression ‘the house eats you up’ had earlier made me curious, because I could not tell which torture would be worse, being gnawed at slowly day by day, or gobbled up all at once. Now the phrase had acquired a third meaning, the truest and most dramatic of them all: poverty.
My father’s weakness for repairs was also the main reason for our financial straits. My uncles openly teased him and would ask me, ‘What’s the Great Repairer up to? Planning an interior triumphal arch?’
I didn’t know how to reply. My grandmother had explained to me that my father worried about repairs more than he should, but there was no getting away from them.
If each person had their own special bond with the house, my relationship was the least clear of all. It was hard to explain because there were no words for it. Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.
It was easy for instance to talk about the house of the big doctor Laboviti, where our entire class had gone to wish Ela a happy birthday. Everyone said how beautiful it was inside. Or how warm. And if some thoughts were left unspoken, we all knew that they had to do with the notorious dinner for the Germans. Whereas it was hard to say things like this about our house, where the class also came to congratulate me on my birthday. It was even hard to guess what my schoolmates’ private thoughts were. I remember that when Kiço Rexha begged me in a whisper to tell him the whereabouts of the dungeon, as he called the prison, I nodded in its direction, but when he asked if my father had ever put me into it, I answered no, and at the same time felt insulted.
If anyone had asked me what my house looked like, I wouldn’t have known how to reply. This stemmed from a feeling that I dared not confess to anyone. A part of the house appeared to me … unreal. This was not a matter of imagination and fantasy, but of totally tangible spaces. On the second floor for instance, behind the room with the fireplace, or the winter room, as we called it, there were two unfinished partitions left after the most recent repair of 1936. I had long understood that every repair project spawned one or two more rooms – or the reverse, swallowed a couple. Shut up with temporary doors, nailed with two crossed planks, these chambers always attracted me. Beyond the planks, you could see rafters and half-finished windows in a beautiful, soft, falling light, especially in the afternoon.
These were not yet rooms but ‘sort of’ and ‘not yet’ spaces, and nameless embryos of this kind filled our house. The summer room. The winter corner. The balcony room. The big gallery, or the little gallery.
I was impatient for these rooms to be born, after such a long gestation, even as I realised that my father’s sole desire in life, the next repair, would never be totally fulfilled.
My grandmother was to die in 1953, my father in 1975, and the Doll in 1994. The house itself would unexpectedly cease to exist in 1999. During the war, when German-occupied Gjirokastra was bombed by the English, I heard a lot about its possible destruction from the air. People said that two bombs from a heavy English bomber could raze to the ground this three-hundred-year-old house, which seemed so indestructible.
Ever since then, I seem always to glimpse in the sky an English aircraft, blindly but insistently looking for …
To get back to the story of the Doll, I remember a phrase written on the wall by the not-yet-annexes, a favourite place of mine to leave notes, in the shape of half a line of verse, or rather the name of a girl from Form B, whom I was sure I would never forget.
The phrase ‘If Izmini Kokobobo did not exist …’ was incomplete, but I knew what was missing. If Izmini Kokobobo did not exist, the Doll would feel better.
This seemed cynical. Perhaps this was why the phrase was left unfinished. But its meaning was less cynical than it was grotesque.
Izmini Kokobobo was a cousin of ours who had returned from Italy. She was one of the girls of the city who had interrupted her studies in 1939 in protest against the Italian invasion. Later, for the same reason, she had joined the partisans, ending up with an official position under the new regime. She was the only person who, when she came on business to Gjirokastra, stayed with us instead of in chilly hotels. She brought news from the capital city, and also her roaring laughter, accompanied by flourishes of her reddish hair.
Everybody was always thrilled at her arrival, except for the Doll. Moreover, my mother’s coldness, the cause of which she stubbornly tried to hide, only increased as the days passed. Clearly Izmini irritated her. And when she saw the Doll becoming annoyed, she persisted. We were all sure that she meant no harm.
It all started over a perfume. This was so like the Doll: a matter of lavender water, as they called perfume in Gjirokastra.
I remember very well the day when what would later be called ‘the incident of the German’s perfume’ took place. Three Germans had come to search for weapons. They turned everything upside down, including my grandmother’s trunk and the Doll’s hope chest.
Soon after they left, the Doll could be heard sobbing. They had taken her perfume. Her best and most expensive, which her father had ordered from Salonica on the day of her engagement.
The incident would be remembered for a long time. Izmini Kokobobo was the first to say, laughing, that for the Doll the whole of World War Two was summed up in that lost perfume.
The Doll was not noted for her argumentative skills, but nevertheless replied that of course she, Izmini Kokobobo, would say that, because she thought that her own lavender water … like everything else of hers … was the best.
My sister and I both thought that the senseless rivalry between these two women had started with this exchange at dinner.
In fact, there were even earlier signs of the Doll’s vanity and self-regard, so unlike her usual shadowy self-effacement. This was especially striking when we set off together to visit her father. According to a custom that the post-war new order had still not succeeded in abolishing, the city’s women, when they ‘went to their father’s’, were escorted by a Roma woman. This woman carried a bundle with a change of clothes, and the baby if there was a child, while the escorted lady carried only her parasol.
There were two such women living near us, Zëra and Vito, mother and daughter, who regularly accepted requests to act as escorts.
On the way to my grandfather’s, the Doll maintained a theatrically stiff appearance. My uncles, chancing to meet her at the gate, responded to her in similar stage voices: ‘Welcome, Mrs Kadare!’
When I reached the age of twelve, they thought that I too was infected by a touch of vanity.
It was 1947. The newspaper The Young Penman had made fun of me in its ‘Replies from the Editor’ on the fourth page, and to emphasise the mockery, had printed my name as I had written it myself: Ismail H. Kadare.
Worse luck, my two uncles had seen that reply, and almost in one voice said to me that if I had decided to follow in the tradition of swollen-headed Kadares, and call myself Ismail Hello Kadare, on the model of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, I should henceforth insert the prefix de, as the French writer Balzac had done. According to them, having grown up plain Smajl Kadare I would end up as Ismail de Kadare, which meant nothing. They did not fail to point out that the name ‘Ismail’ did not at all suit a famous writer, although ‘Kadare’ had real class.
Two years later I was involved in an incident, which showed the disadvantages of fame. Together with a schoolmate, I ended up in prison. Not in the house prison, as some people thought at first, but in the real one, the state’s. It was a tale of some counterfeit five-lekë coins, made of lead, which I had shown to all and sundry. They arrested us during our gym lesson and we slept for two nights among handcuffed prisoners. Although we had not broken the law, a trial was held according to the proper procedure. Our lawyer, Hilmi Dakli, took his place at our side. The presiding judge intoned the words ‘In the name of the people’. My father stood there in the courtroom, just as he had done hundreds of times during his life as a court summoner. For him, it must have been like a bad dream. This was the second occasion that I had entered his own sphere: a short while before, as if to measure up to him, I had earned a fee, in actual money. And now I was in court. Soon I would be imitating him by asking, ‘When will this house be repaired?’
When my uncles later found the notebook in which I had started my first novel, they told me that they were finally sure I suffered from megalomania. Three-quarters of the notebook was filled with advertisements along the lines of: ‘The century’s most demonic novel, hurry to the Gutenberg bookshop, buy I. H. de Kadare’s magnificent posthumous novel,’ with the price in gold franga and so on, whereas the text of the novel took up no more than five or six pages, and was incomplete, because, apparently worn out after the advertisements, I had abandoned the project.
When my first book of poetry was published and a telegram arrived from the publisher summoning me to Tirana, my father unexpectedly decided that I should go the whole way by taxi. It was this last bit, the taxi, that drew the most attention. Many people asked me in astonishment, ‘Did you really go all the way to Tirana in a taxi?’ Some people did not believe it, and others thought that going by taxi was part of publishing a book and becoming a famous writer.