AFTER ANY exciting incident, the house seemed even duller. That winter the wind whistled more loudly through the rafters, out of spite. For some time my grandmother had refused to come downstairs, supposedly because of the pain in her knees, although it was hard to tell when this was in fact out of spite and when it was not.
Nor did any real news come from my grandfather’s house, except for the letter that my eldest uncle Qemal Dobi had sent from Budapest. He wrote that everyone was asking him if he was related to the president of Hungary, István Dobi.
I started two novels, one after another, driven more by impatience to use my ordinary name, Smajl, on the advice of my younger uncle, rather than any desire to write. So I left both unfinished, not even getting halfway through the advertisements.
In 1953 my grandmother died. Her departure ended what might be called ‘the judicial era’ in our house.
The sudden emptiness bewildered everyone, especially the Doll. I thought more than ever about her long-running irritation with my grandmother, and still I could not work out who had been in the right. Even today, after so many years, I cannot find the truth, and I even think that perhaps I have no right to look for it, as happens when the bitterness of a quarrel is so deep that any mere explanation pales beside it.
It was at about the time of my first book of poetry, or rather my taxi ride, when the Doll first asked me if I had really become famous, as they said, and then braced herself to ask something else. Boys like that, when they became so … that is, celebrated … did they take their mothers with them to where they went? It was a while before I worked out that she was talking about boys like me. Still, I couldn’t understand her. ‘Where should they take them?’ I asked her. ‘In the taxi? To the publisher?’
Finding it hard to explain, she got angry.
She came back to this conversation a few days later.
‘Will you listen to me a bit?’ she said. ‘I want to have talks.’
For a while, she had been speaking in unusual phrases, like those of newspaper headlines or ‘Microphone Theatre’.
‘Talks,’ I repeated to myself. Bilateral government talks.
‘Don’t laugh,’ she said, ‘I’m serious.’
Even though she had apparently long prepared for these ‘talks’, she made a mess of everything. Finally, I grasped the gist of what she wanted to say. She had heard that boys, when they became famous, swapped their mothers.
Try as I might, I couldn’t help laughing.
‘What? What?’ I repeated, interrupting her. ‘They swap their mothers if they’re unsuitable?’
‘Don’t laugh, Smajl.’
‘You mean they choose a different mother, an opera singer for example? Or a member of the academy? Who told you such nonsense? Izmini Kokobobo?’
The Doll lowered her eyes.
I went on roaring with laughter, because I sensed that it was making her feel better. Slightly relieved, she too started to smile.
‘But, Mother, how can you believe such nonsense? Are you really so silly?’
She went on smiling in her confusion, but didn’t admit that it was her cousin from the capital who had given her this idea.
Izmini Kokobobo’s next visit made it obvious. The Doll could not conceal her apprehension. As on previous occasions, Izmini didn’t avoid argument, and indeed provoked it further. ‘What have you got against me?’ she asked.
My father didn’t usually care for loud laughter, but was untroubled by our cousin’s. This seemed to upset the Doll. ‘What have I got against you?’ she blurted out bitterly. ‘You think you’re the bee’s knees because you went to school in Italy. That’s what I’ve got against you.’
This time, Izmini’s mirth was so explosive it drowned out her own words and the Doll’s replies. Then, in the middle of this exchange, something shifted. ‘What?’ said Izmini, and the Doll made no reply, which led the other woman to repeat in the ensuing silence, ‘What?’
The Doll, as stubborn as ever, did not answer.
Izmini Kokobobo’s expression froze. ‘You mentioned Enver,’ she said. ‘Could you explain more clearly?’
Astonishingly, my father, who generally did not interfere in such matters, interrupted. Later it struck me that perhaps the sudden creation of a courtroom atmosphere made him pipe up. ‘You mentioned Enver Hoxha,’ he said to the Doll. ‘I thought you did too.’
The Doll must have said something sour, because Izmini Kokobobo’s expression remained icy. The Doll was still silent and my father repeated: ‘So what were you trying to say? Speak up, explain yourself.’
A long time later, I would remember the Doll’s face in connection with what I had come to think of as the secret terror of white plaster, which the Doll would one day inspire.
The Doll’s explanation was astonishing. ‘I wanted to say that if she was as much a lady as she seems, Enver Hoxha would not have thrown her out because …’
‘Because of what?’ my father said. ‘Speak up.’
After a short hesitation, the Doll replied, ‘Because she didn’t know how to make conversation.’
Izmini Kokobobo’s face went pale.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ my father said to the Doll. ‘Where did you hear such tittle-tattle?’
I waited for Izmini Kokobobo to say the same, but she remained silent.
My grandmother was no longer there to change the topic of conversation (mentioning somebody’s rheumatism had been her favourite way of doing this), but although it took another direction of its own accord, everyone kept thinking of what had just been said.
The more I thought about it, the more illogical it all appeared to me, starting from the very idea of being thrown out for being a poor conversationalist. But Izmini Kokobobo’s state of shock baffled me more than anything.
Although the Doll never told where she’d heard about it, this incident involving Enver Hoxha in Tirana was true. Izmini Kokobobo had been acquainted with the future chief a long time ago in Gjirokastra, and in clandestine circles in the capital city. Later, after the establishment of communism, she sometimes went for lunch to the Hoxhas, until one day a careless remark put an end not only to her visits but to her entire career. It was a casual conversation, in which the party was mentioned, or more accurately the party’s view of such-and-such an issue, when an expression had escaped her lips in the joking manner of former times: ‘Oh, come on, what the party thinks – you mean what you yourself think …’
Enver Hoxha had frowned and said, in a serious voice, that Izmini Kokobobo had a mistaken idea of the role of the party. This was enough for the door of the first house in the country to be closed to her forever.
The year 1953 seemed extraordinary, or sometimes quite the opposite. Various events took place between the deaths of Stalin and my grandmother, but it was hard to predict whether they would be remembered or not. The most sensational of these was the arrival of condoms in the city pharmacy. There were contradictory instructions permitting and prohibiting them. It was suspected they might be a test to identify any weakening of the class struggle after the death of Stalin. But then it was realised that the measure was at the insistence of the Soviets and was linked to women’s rights (Rosa Luxemburg, etc.), and after some hesitation by the party committee over whether communists should be advised to avoid the pharmacy and leave these bits of rubber to the increasingly depraved bourgeoisie, everything calmed down.
Our house remained desolate. Waiting for the publication of my book of poetry, I wrote some prose, and for the first time I did not fill most of the notebook with advertisements and self-praise. I stared in amazement at the first page on which I had written ‘On Foreign Soil, October 1953’. There was nothing about a demonic or Dante-esque work, no encouragement to run to the bookshop, and especially no price in gold franga from the time of the monarchy.
Meanwhile, this business of publishing poetry seemed to me unreal. When somebody referred to it, I would remember the taxi journey, and not the book.
Surprisingly, this did not make me more modest. On the contrary. It was Ela Laboviti who first pointed it out: ‘You’ve got very big-headed recently.’ Then, a time-waster who never opened his mouth about anything said the same thing, and I dimly grasped what had happened. The advertisements and boasts that I had eliminated from my new prose-writing were determined to find a way out, and had found one. My conceit had been displaced.
The Doll had her own ways of knowing things, although more of taking no notice of things, and became aware of my swollen head. In her mind, fame and conceit appeared to be the same thing, and she mixed up these words in her own way.
When one day my cousin and loyal friend Bardhyl B. came to me with a black eye, I realised the Doll was not the only one who’d got confused. Bardhyl B. had been fighting with the boys of 3C over the very issue of my big-headedness.
The quarrel wasn’t about whether I was conceited, because both sides agreed on this, but something else: did I or did I not have the right to be conceited? According to Bardhyl B., I had every reason: I published poems in the literary press, and received fees. I had travelled by taxi to take my book to Tirana, I had spent two nights in prison, and finally I had written two love letters to a girl in 2B.
The fight was over the last point: the love letters. My imprisonment was not considered to my credit, but a disgrace, especially because I had been defended by a bourgeois lawyer. But it was unclear whether I was a winner or a loser in the question of love. In fact, this was not very clear to either Bardhyl B., who took my side in all possible circumstances, or to myself. Bardhyl B. had passed the letters to Ylberja, our faithful friend, and because the girl in question had neither burst into tears nor threatened to hit me on the head with her shoe, but had on the contrary said ‘thank you’, we counted it a victory. But to our opponents the opposite seemed true, and moreover they said the two letters were wretched ones. They then recalled the case of a boy from the next neighbourhood, who came from the capital city and wrote one hundred and seven letters to a girl in his class, and was consequently excluded from every school in Albania.
As he talked, Bardhyl B. could not hide being slightly annoyed with me. At first I could not understand why, but then he came out with it. It was about removing the boastful advertisements, some of which we had assembled together. According to him, I could do what I wanted with literature – that was my business and he wasn’t interfering – but where my fame was concerned … I had obligations … at least … towards … my friends.
His words became confused, but from the movement of his head and his reddened cheeks I understood what he was driving at.
In fact, even though I tried not to show it, I felt guilty.
We came back often to this subject of big-headedness. Everyone spoke badly of it, especially in proverbs such as ‘conceit is the vice of the clever’, but this made no impression on us. Bardhyl B. and I made no secret that we thought the opposite. What was wrong with being big-headed? Why should it bother anyone? Bardhyl B. especially liked to enlarge on this latter point. Take your case for instance, he would say to me. Being big-headed makes you happy. Other people envy you, but you don’t envy anybody. What business is it of other people if you think you’re like Shakespeare? In the end, that’s a matter between the two of you, Shakespeare and yourself. Particularly as he’s long gone. So why should other people butt their noses in? Right?
I stared at him fixedly, and wondered how it was possible for this person to have exactly the same thoughts in his head as I did.
The question of big-headedness became more complicated when it was entangled with other issues such as poetry, money or prison. It was a knot that seemed impossible to untangle. You could make money from poetry, but if you made money yourself, you went to prison. Besides, it was said that poetry could send you to prison anyway. And as for conceit, the prevailing view was that it played a part in all of this. This idea was so widespread that the Doll asked me if they sent me money because I was big-headed!
I had recently noticed that everything was open to serious misunderstanding. Shortly before, my sister, whispering into my ear as if confiding a secret, told me that she was probably the daughter of our grandmother.
I put my finger to my temple to tell her she was crazy, but she replied that I didn’t understand these things and then ran away in a rage.
I was sure that everyone was taking offence and ready to argue over the slightest thing. And when everyone was quarrelling, one could imagine the effect of all these quarrels on the Doll.
After her unexpected triumph over Izmini Kokobobo, she had become withdrawn again. One day, when she said with that uncertain expression that was now familiar to me that she wanted to have talks (talks between Vyacheslav Molotov and John Foster Dulles were being extended), I could again barely keep back my laughter.
As soon as she opened her mouth, I realised that it was once more the story of changing mothers, but this time in an even more dramatic light.
‘Now that you’re famous you’re not thinking of renouncing me, are you?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘This nonsense again? And for God’s sake where did you find that word?’
She kept her eyes lowered and did not reply.
I insisted that she should at least tell me what she meant by that word, ‘renounce’.
Finally she managed an answer.
‘I wanted to say, to see the back of me.’
‘Ah, you meant disown you. Now I understand.’
Again I wanted to laugh, but something restrained me.
She seemed to interpret my silence as hesitation, and so blurted out everything. ‘I brought you into this world,’ she sobbed. ‘Let them say what they want. I am your mother, you don’t have any other.’
Finally, I shouted, ‘That’s enough, Mother.’ I asked her how she could be so silly, such a sillyhead, and because I couldn’t think of any other phrases beginning with ‘silly’, I ended, under my breath, with the word ‘idiot’.
I was no doubt trying to say that Izmini Kokobobo had been making fun of her again, but I remembered that she did not visit anymore and a wave of real anger swept over me.
She should at least tell me where she had heard such rubbish, or stop tormenting me with these things.
When I was about to say, once more, ‘How can you be so silly … such an …’ she uncharacteristically interrupted me:
‘I am not an idiot.’
She had caught that word which I had always been careful never to say until now, and which I’d regretted as soon as I uttered it.
‘I’m not an idiot …’ If only she had said it in a stern and harsh tone, but her voice was low and gentle, almost ashamed. As if this were not already painful enough, she burst into tears. They were those familiar tears, as soft as in cartoon films, real doll’s tears, and for this very reason harder to bear.
A pang of tenderness, sharper than ever before, stabbed me like a knife, and with it the thought that from then on I would be the source of her greatest and yet most absurd fear, that I would turn my back on her. Its absurdity did not render it any easier to allay.
How could I explain to her that there was not a shred of truth in all this? And that, even if there were boys who thought to exchange their own mothers for a more exquisite kind with fur coats who, like in the movies, played the piano at moments of sorrow, kept secret letters and other confidences (Mrs Kadare’s mysterious Saturdays, for example), these were ephemeral fantasies, which in the realm of literature meant nothing. Our standards were different.
I knew that it was impossible to explain this, and still more impossible to tell her that not only did her limitations not hem me in, but as the years passed I had grown to appreciate these frailties as a sign of her superiority. I came to think that it was precisely from her skewed analysis of the appearances of the world, from this blurred and perverse reasoning, in short from this determination not to let go of the nature of a child, that what was called the ‘writer’s gift’ was born.
I felt less the son of a mother than of a seventeen-year-old girl whose growth had been arrested.
It was not easy to get used to this idea, especially when I was growing up myself, approaching this age of seventeen at which she had remained. Incredibly, when I entered my twenties, she stubbornly remained seventeen. Eventually I became double her age.
This distortion of the course of time brought further turmoil in its wake. Sometimes I thought that all those things we say we learn at our mother’s breast had come to me from another kind of milk, quite different from the Doll’s. Lapses that seemed to me delightful, examples of back-to-front reasoning whose trail, once lost, can never be recovered, lodged themselves in my memory.
Schools, each more dangerous than the last the more complicated they became, insisted on trying to remedy these errors, to eliminate them, and free me from them, supposedly for my own good. But in fact they merely crushed me.
Meanwhile, together with the Doll’s failings, and as a way of preserving them, I had sucked from her doll-like breast the very sense that I mentioned earlier, a cold terror like a carapace of white plaster, whose inhumanity would, it seemed, protect me from the fear of people.
Sometimes it seemed to me that everything that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art. Indeed I almost started to believe that she had accepted her own self-impairment in order to be useful to me.
She surrendered the freedom and authority of a mother – in short, turned herself into a doll – to give me all possible liberty as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find, like crusts of rationed bread in the time of the Germans, which she broke off from her own small portion and secretly gave to me.
It was impossible to untangle this knot.
Attempting to understand it more clearly, it has seemed to me, in those transcendent moments when you know one’s insights will last no longer than an instant, that one must look for an explanation only above, in the highest spheres.
She would not have understood this in a thousand years, and would depart this world none the wiser.
Unknowingly, she had set herself up in a vain and tragic confrontation, with herself on one side and her son’s so-called art on the other. One of the two would give way.
No doubt she knew that she had lost.
Her appeal – do not disown me – in fact meant: Disown me, if this helps you …
Had she invented that childish delusion herself, and blamed Izmini Kokobobo? Or perhaps it was something normal in her world … among dolls … this art–mother jealousy.
It seemed these two worlds would never come to an understanding.
At that faraway dinner in Paris, speaking Russian so that others would not understand, Voznesensky had tried to explain to me the inexplicable: his quarrel with his own mother, Russia.
Matma, Mamterr, Mater …