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 darkness 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.