FOR SOME time the house had been sending out signals, as if moved by a premonition of its abandonment. Two of these signals, the creaking rafters at night and the worsening leaks in the roof, were very obvious. But there was no question of any repairs.
My sister was the first to leave for the capital city, with a scholarship. Then my grandmother left for Vasiliko – ‘the basil bed’, as the city cemetery was called, perhaps the only one in the entire Balkans named after a flowering herb. Meanwhile my two uncles had finished their studies abroad, one coming back with an ear missing and the other with a Russian bride. After the appearance of my book and a fruitless wait for an answer from the Gorky Institute in Moscow, I went to Tirana (by bus this time) to enrol, with a slight sense of injury, in the Faculty of Literature.
Bardhyl B. left shortly after me, because, as he wrote in his first and last letter to me, life in Gjirokastra had lost all meaning after my departure. We never met again, although I asked after him several times. They told me that he’d become a taxi driver in Vlora, and my guilty feeling that I may have inadvertently been the cause of this was assuaged by the soothing thought that between the two incidents of my early life, the mini prison sentence of two days and the taxi, he had chosen the latter as his model.
I did go to Moscow, and after my return, my parents moved to the capital city.
At first they were both disoriented, especially the Doll. Her expression, ‘the house eats you up’, which she had used of the large house, now acquired an opposite meaning, because the small apartment ate her up worse than ever.
This was merely the beginning. After three weeks, we two sons of the family, that is myself and my brother, who had meanwhile entered the Faculty of Medicine, set off in a truck ‘to fetch the things from the house’.
As if the exhausting journey were not bad enough, what awaited us at our house, the selection of the furniture and belongings we had to take, was a nightmare. Helped by two removal men, we started work but in a totally haphazard and illogical fashion. We were irritable, and remembered almost nothing of the many instructions not to forget this or that. We had a feeling that we were taking unnecessary things and leaving things we shouldn’t, but there was nothing we could do. We broke the chandelier in the ‘great drawing room’ while trying to prise it loose, and our search of the Doll’s hope chest was perhaps even more careless than when the German took the perfume in World War Two. The only things that were easy and indeed a pleasure to select were the carpets and rugs. The most awkward, not to say frankly resistant, were the copper utensils.
Surfeited with books in Tirana, I had decided to ignore any ‘cultural heritage’, but at the last moment I gave in and took from the chest containing my notebooks a handful of ‘novels with advertisements’, three or four plays, the manuscript of Macbeth and the only novella without advertisements, finally entitled In an Unknown Land.
The return journey was a particular nightmare. The further we left the city behind us, the more convinced we were of the mistakes we had surely made. The truck shook more and more. At the Këlcyra Gorge, the copper baklava tray fell out. As I dozed, I heard it clang as it fell into the ravine. The driver stopped the vehicle and we got out to look for it, but there was nothing we could do.
In fact, my brother, when he saw I had selected it, had asked me, ‘What do we want this for?’ I made no reply, but was thinking that perhaps we might need it at some future wedding. I had just got to know Helena, and my mind obscurely linked the tray for baklava, the symbolic wedding pastry, to the possibility of marrying her, and there and then, without giving any explanation, I had said to the baggage carrier, ‘Take this!’
Its fall from the truck left me with an unpleasant presentiment. Shortly after, as I dozed again, I found myself talking to it: ‘You didn’t want to serve us …’
In my groggy state, it seems as if I thought that old tray, so loyal to the house, did not want to enter service outside it, and had decided it was better to hurl itself into an abyss than be used in this way.
How crazy, I thought drowsily. Such fancies were perhaps my last bond with the old house, from which I was now freeing myself.
When we arrived in Tirana towards midnight, instead of resting we were faced with the further chore of unloading the truck and carrying the furniture into the apartment. A more hellish experience could not be imagined. Some of the items would not fit through the door at all, and others got stuck and were cruelly crushed. Apart from the soft rugs, which huddled where they were thrown like frightened cats, everything else acquired a look of indignation. Alarming iron utensils, clothes props, oil lamps, copper or porcelain vases, all kinds of jugs and forks, seemed to howl as soon as you touched them. The apartment, as if violated by some monster, was full to bursting.
The Doll endured it as long as she could, and then put her hands to her head and broke into a wail. It was the first time I had seen her distressed over the old house.
The upheaval lasted for days on end, especially for the Doll and my father. For the rest of us, it made the events taking place outside the household seem much less dramatic. The quarrel with Moscow was getting worse every day. A break of diplomatic relations was expected, and after this, something that until recently would have astonished us more than the end of the world: war with the Soviet Union!
For a while, as if some pact of silence had been sealed, nobody mentioned the house. My father dealt with it. One day, after he came back from the café, he announced that the house had been rented out, as if this were a short news report. He said something about the number of tenants and, after a deep sigh of the kind he usually concluded with an ‘eh!’, added: ‘Eh, tenants … all with Greek names.’
I had learned in my student life in Moscow that a silence did not mean that the unmentioned had been forgotten.
There, enchanted by the big city, I’d been sure that I had not only forgotten my old house but that the city of Gjirokastra, and even Tirana and the whole of Albania, had been erased from my memory for ever.
Something that in the writers’ school was quite normal, but at the same time seemed to come from heaven, brought an unavoidable change into my life. The novel. The desire to write one was something between an order and a temptation. I knew that communism had founded this institute, at the very heart of its empire, not to cultivate literature but to destroy it. So I was a soldier of a death squad, summoned to do my pitiless duty of assault and slaughter.
However, even before recovering from the Pasternak scandal, in which some writers had badly disgraced themselves, more than half of the students had embarked on their novels. In the mornings, during the classes of what might be called the ‘black mass’, the lectures against the Joyce-Kafka-Proust trio, we learned that we must not write like them; while at nights, tortured by doubt, we could hardly resist the temptation of writing precisely in their manner.
This torture was their revenge. However, it seemed a blessed kind of payback.
In a last attempt to avoid these writers’ accursed influence, I had decided to use a recently invented technique of not writing, but rather tape-recording. At least, Joyce and Proust had not known it, and certainly not Kafka. I felt somehow close to the latter, perhaps because our names began with K.
Most of the student writers of novels, as if fulfilling a promise, described the places where they had been born: the cities, villages, mountains, steppes, fjords, tundra or canyons. Nostalgia for these places was for some accompanied by a kind of superciliousness towards Moscow, the treacherous beauty who tried to employ her charms to estrange them from their birthplaces.
I was not a part of this clan, especially because I was sure that the girls of Moscow, though not those of the cloddish Soviet Union, were the sweetest in the world, an opinion I thought would never change.
So I was not a Moscow-sceptic but, without knowing why, I unexpectedly obeyed a call in the blood, remembered something that I was sure I’d forgotten forever: the city of my birth.
So you forgot me? But you remember me now I’m useful?
I was sure that I had no need of this city, and neither our professors nor dogma forced us to write about our home towns. This urge had no connection with the merits of these places, but with the recesses of our souls.
If I dared try to explain the inexplicable, I would say that if this city appeared to me grim and reproachful, like the ghost of a murdered king, this wasn’t its fault but mine. Just as it wasn’t to blame for its reputation for producing two kinds of people: the famous and the crazy.
This was a good opening phrase for a novel, but I sensed that, like so many promising beginnings, it might be badly misinterpreted. The big boss came from the same city, and this was enough.
The harder I tried to forget this phrase, the firmer it stuck in my mind. It was a city that produced … strange … people. A city that … how to put it …
The beginning of an old song partly allayed my doubts:
Renowned Gjirokastra
Home of Shemo the thief.
It wasn’t clear to me who Shemo the thief was, and still less whether he was mentioned for good or ill. However, I thought of myself and imagined the text should read, ‘Home of Shemo the thief and … me.’
This created an obscure parallel between myself and the bandit of the song. It couldn’t be said out loud, but I was like him, if not worse than him, an art murderer, a bandit of literature, who was even going to a college where elite troops were trained to learn how to kill better.
In the end, without delving deeper into my conscience, one cold Moscow evening I wrote on a sheet of white paper my name and then the word ‘novel’.
Of course, I remembered the many openings of novels that I had written, or rather the advertisements for them, and with them Bardhyl B., who had been the author of some of them. After a little wave of nostalgia, as if to stress the stubborn fact that those times would never return, I felt the wish, after the word ‘novel’, to add ‘without advertisements’. In other words, this novel, unlike the previous ones, would be without bragging and swank.
At the same time, my mind was subconsciously working on the title. I knew that the novel would be about a distant city that resembled neither Dublin nor Prague, nor Proust’s Combray, and the idea of the ‘city’ wandered through my mind, a city with a few characteristics that made the place dull and lacking, mixed up with the word ‘advertisement’. So it was a city that lacked something, like flowers or straight roads.
In this muddle, the word ‘advertisement’ suddenly shifted from describing the novel (a short novel, one without flowers or advertisements) to the city.
City Without Advertisements. I looked in astonishment at my title and I thought it was the stupidest title in the world, about illuminated advertisements, which did not exist in gloomy Gjirokastra, nor in Tirana or anywhere else in Albania.
I struck a line through the title, and with unnecessary haste looked for a new one. City Without … City Without … It had to be a city without something.
Finally, I thought I had found it. City Without Taxis. That’s it, I said to myself. Even though not perfect, at least the title meant something. It was impossible to use taxis in Gjirokastra because of the city’s steepness. Except …
I sensed that I could not play tricks on myself. I had pretended to have forgotten it, but the symbol of the taxi, like the advertisements, rose up straight from the grotesque mock-epic of my adolescence. The famous taxi journey over the book (which I no longer wanted to remember), Bardhyl B. and all the rest had caught up with me there in Moscow, just when I thought I had left them behind for ever.
I crossed out this new title with the taxis and wrote again the old one, City Without Advertisements.
My mind worked feverishly, and I thought I had found my answer on the very first page. Late in the evening, the Tirana–Gjirokastra bus was approaching the city … without advertisements. Among the drowsy passengers, a young boy called Gjon looked out at the view with a feeling of total boredom.
That’s how I would start the novel City Without Advertisements. A novel without … I stared at the title for a while, as if trying to get used to it.
Meaning a city that lacked something … or someone who did.
My temples were beating again.
But this city is missing me, I almost cried aloud. So it’s a city without … me.
Finally you’ve come to your senses, Bardhyl B. would have said to me reproachfully. The most important thing is always yourself.
The city without me, I thought. But soon there came a doubt. Was it or was it not without me?
With me … or without …
The two possibilities chased each other round my mind. With me, of course. Who else was that boy with the bored gaze? Or, as the great English master had taught us, my ghost?
I was returning to the city like a shadow of the kind I would certainly have become if I had not gone to Moscow. In short, I would experience a life which, although it was not my own, nevertheless might have been, and so I had an obligation to live through it, if only as a ghost.
After moving to Tirana, the Doll settled in, for good or ill, and it was my father who lost his bearings.
Leaving his home seemed to upset his equilibrium. The house had given him all his authority and now took it away, along with his title of ‘the Great Repairer’.
He would emerge gloomily from his bedroom and return gloomily from the café after reading the newspapers.
His new friends in the café probably asked about me, as his old ones had done. Since that distant day when he had given me a thick ear because of using his name (an imitation of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy), he had never laid a hand on me, or even spoken harshly to me.
Old magazines dating back to the time of the monarchy insisted on the unavoidable enmity between father and son. The story of King Oedipus, which they told differently to the way we had heard it at school, attracted me more and more.
Under their influence, I began to think of my relations with my father as a strange kind of pact, a ceasefire in a war that had never been declared.
Besides the non-existence of this war, there was something else that did not fit in: my father’s severe presence. As I mentioned several times in notes I made, not only did he not annoy me, but I rather liked him. Bardhyl B. had of course influenced my perspective. According to him, my father’s grimness was altogether more attractive than the milk-and-honey sweetness of his own.
We had discussed this several times and more or less reached the conclusion that there was something in our reading that we had failed to understand. Either that the severity of my father’s presence was not real, but imagined by ourselves, or that another factor came into the story: the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
The magazines predicted that father-son hostility would sooner or later lead to a dramatic conflict. In the lectures against decadent writing in Moscow, it was claimed that this was something said by ‘the other side’, the bourgeoisie. If they said it, it became twice as attractive to us, and four times as attractive if it was attacked by ‘our side’, the socialists.
Rightly or not, the notion of a ceasefire, that is of waiting for a future battle, had taken root in my subconscious, as we had recently begun to call it. Especially now that my father had arrived in the capital city, stripped of his titles, in a cramped prison-like apartment. I was no longer a schoolboy in short trousers but in possession of two diplomas, an author of books, who knew many things, including that file on Oedipus with its dark secret.
This feeling of hostility, whether real or imagined, naturally led me to think that my father would either alter or break the pact.
I calmly awaited developments. Indeed, one day I sensed that I was heading for a possible confrontation (superiority of forces, attack, final counter-attack, etc.), and that involuntarily I was acting out the Oedipus story, that is the father-son conflict.
When my chief at the editorial board of the magazine Drita showed me in secret a confidential bulletin of Western news dealing with Albania, adding that I could take it home but should be careful to burn it after reading, I immediately thought of my father. He would be better than anyone at not telling secrets and burning forbidden writings.
This publication was called the ‘yellow bulletin’, a reference to yellow literature, as all forbidden books were called, and it was distributed to senior editors to keep them informed about ‘foreign anti-Albanian poison’.
One day, when my father seemed exceptionally troubled, I trusted in his confidence, showed him the bulletin and told him about the instruction to destroy it after reading.
I knew his appetite for newspapers and current events, but I had never before seen his moroseness change so totally into a mixture of gratitude and childish joy, as if I had presented him with a most precious gift.
In her memoirs, Helena has described the full ritual of forbidden reading, of locking yourself in your own room, burning the pages afterwards in the stove, the inspection of the ashes, and all the rest.
My father’s entire life changed. He would wait impatiently at home for my arrival like a poor man expecting his monthly cheque, a patient longing for his medicine or an addict yearning for his drug.
I fully understood him, because it was no small thing for a long-standing follower of the press to read news that was so different. At the same time, according to the logic of my imagined conflict with him, I imagined the yellow bulletin as a secret weapon that had totally reversed the fortunes of the war between us.
By the same reasoning, I came to realise that with great effort, and with the aid of this secret weapon, the ‘perverted’ bulletin, I had defeated my opposite number and taken him prisoner.
Years later, I related this story to a close friend who had problems with his father’s authoritarianism, and he told me half seriously that it was odds on that Freud, if he were alive today, would revise his theory.
In what I knew of Oedipus and Freud, it was the Sphinx that impressed me more than anything else, and I set less store by the prospect of parricide and still less by any attraction to my mother. The Doll’s austere silhouette made her particularly unapproachable.
As the years passed I’d got used to Freud, as if learning the secret impotence of a tyrant (who may scare others, but is more scared of something himself.) In Moscow, Freud suddenly regained his lost authority in my eyes. So much mud was slung at him that I felt guilty of failing to appreciate him. Rarely did I not love someone I was given instructions to avoid. I tried to correct this tendency, but it was hard.
A rumour unexpectedly rescued me from this suffering.
Usually, the Muscovite slanders were exactly the same as Tirana’s: these decadents were paranoid, immoral, syphilitic. But in Moscow a rumour circulated about Freud that was so different that my Latvian friend Jeronims Stulpans called it ‘dissident gossip’. According to him, despite the official attitude to Freud, a secret memorandum of Stalin advised the use of his theories to break writers under interrogation. Anna Akhmatova also referred venomously to ‘the malignant psychiatrist’. This caused a wave of hatred against Freud to spread throughout the Institute, which was very confusing for the spies.
At the very moment when I had lost hope, my father was fully acquitted of all Freud’s charges against him.