The Doll

by Ismail Kadare

  My father, with his severe expression at the head of the table, was as always on a ‘war footing’. The Doll’s manner was, as usual on such occasions, a mixture of reserve and disdain. My sister, for some reason I couldn’t understand, seemed to behave in a slightly guilty manner. Only my brother was relaxed.

  ‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ Helena said in a tentative voice.

  I could hardly keep from laughing. The Doll did not hear, or pretended not to. I thought it was better if she hadn’t heard, because Helena’s voice would probably have sounded totally lifeless, compared to the tinkling, kittenish tones of that other girl.

  As the Doll set down the final course, I thought I detected something familiar in her face. Thin-lipped. I almost said it out loud. A grandmother. Perhaps a mother-in-law …

  At the table, it was nearly impossible to keep the conversation going. Apart from some ordinary exchanges between Helena and my brother, the usual student talk about changes to the faculty rules, the conversation was like some text pasted together with great effort.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ I whispered to Helena, next to me.

  She nodded, and this reassured me.

  It was the Kadares’ usual incomprehension, about which I had spoken to her. But this time there was justification for the coldness. Questions could be read in everyone’s eyes: Who is this girl, why is she here, and what does this lunch mean?

  Now and then I glanced at the Doll, imagining how she felt.

  Your heart bleeds for that other girl, I thought. I know it.

  For a while I continued this imaginary conversation with the Doll. This girl here, Helena, is beautiful too, isn’t she? The Doll couldn’t say anything about her looks. Indeed, Helena was more beautiful than the other girl who had appealed to the Doll, and fair-haired, like the girls on stage that she liked.

  I felt slightly puzzled. I wanted to say, there’s no reason to look so blank. This is only a lunch, and above all this is only a girl. But she’s the one I love, and this is our own business, not yours or anyone else’s. Do you understand now?

  The sudden irritation I had felt without any visible cause left me as quickly as it had come.

  I was still confused, but now differently. Some time had passed since the lunches and dinners at the big house ‘back there’. The Doll was now in the role of her own mother-in-law. There was nothing left for me but to assume the role of my father, who had to redress justice when war broke out between the two women. Especially as he had now surrendered and lost the post of Grand Inquisitor … The cycle was coming full circle …

  ‘What an exhausting lunch,’ I said to Helena when we went back to my room. ‘Perhaps it was a mistake to invite you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, in the same unsteady voice in which she had uttered the words ‘Good afternoon, ma’am?’

  If anyone had told me that this lunch, apparently so senseless, held a secret meaning, I would have laughed.

  Questions were indeed asked. Who is this girl? Why is she here? What does this play-acting mean? Yet in fact nobody, especially not Helena or I, was hiding anything. This was true first of all because we were totally ingenuous. We had come to this lunch guilelessly, without any ulterior motive or covert plan.

  Later, as if in an aberration, or as a result of a psychoanalytic reading, it occurred to us that, unconsciously, we may have been tempting first ourselves and then other people with the faint prospect of an engagement.

  I increasingly thought that the absurd theatre of this lunch concealed an implicit future wedding, like those still-nameless rooms in the house in Gjirokastra, a ‘maybe-wedding’, to use a word modelled on those not-yet-rooms.

  Unspoken congratulations that had no right to be uttered hovered in the air, like the glint of a pin in Helena’s hair that sometimes caught the light and then vanished with a movement of her head – signs and portents of an engagement waiting to materialise.

  9

  WHENEVER WE mentioned this subject, we agreed that we would never follow any tradition, especially as Helena had already been through a farcical engagement. Increasingly we went out in public together, to cafés, the Writers’ Club and other places, as well as restaurants, until only hotels were left, and all the signs were that they were also in store for us in the not-too-distant future.

  I’d told Helena how on the ‘decadence course’ in Moscow I’d heard about the atmosphere of the belle époque and its famous courtesans who kept company with distinguished writers. She took pleasure in hearing about these things, to the point that when her family, during a row that Helena herself has described in her memoirs, tried to pin her down with the piercing question of whether she ‘wanted to become his mistress’, she had obstinately replied, ‘Yes, that’s what I want to be, his mistress!’

  The febrile atmosphere that clung to us went back, we were sure, to that Sunday lunch.

  Underlying this fever was a question that I had thought had gone out of fashion: engagement. I had been among those who scorned such a thing, and my lines of verse, ‘I don’t promise you engagement … with all its plans, and still less marriage, with its days of boredom like pyjamas’, had put Helena off too, as she candidly admitted.

  Now, as if in revenge, these lines were coming back to haunt us.

  To me, people said, ‘We saw you in the Café Flora with that student of literature, are you getting engaged?’ To Helena, ‘We saw you at the theatre with that character back from Moscow. Congratulations.’ Or worse: ‘We heard you made up with your ex-fiancé. What a good thing. Congratulations.’ We soon realised that a single engagement could not provoke so many rumours. In Helena’s case, there were two engagements, one broken and one potential, that dogged her feet. As if this were not enough, a violinist at the Volga Restaurant said that he would smash his instrument because of H. G., not to mention two men of letters who were expected to do the same to their pens.

  Our resentment of the idea of engagement grew, and our desire to trample on tradition led us to the idea of vaulting it entirely and going straight to the next stage … marr … iage …

  But I had also spared no criticism of marriage. People were right to ask me, what about all that defiance of pyjamas with boring stripes, and so on?

  However, there was no going back for us. We could try to continue as we were (‘Will you be his mistress?’) or we could bow our heads and go straight to … to … what the hell could we call it … a union of matrimony … The phrase was reminiscent of Tirana City Hall, which it was said would soon break with the Soviet Union, itself on the brink of collapse. So to a kind of union … not the sort of marriage other people imagined, no way, but another kind, the sort that we wanted …

  In truth, it wasn’t clear to us what we wanted. An ‘as-if’ marriage sui generis, something that was and wasn’t … In other words, a ‘sort-of’ …

  As if to convince ourselves of our own determination, and so that nobody could think we were building castles in the air, we heedlessly set a date for the sort-of: 23rd October.

  So it was no longer a matter of poetical flights or broken violins, but of a precise date for our union, at the proper time and place stated on the invitation.

  Our announcement of 23rd October made both our families furious. Why this date and this sudden hurry? Why hadn’t we threshed the matter out between the two parties? And where did this 23rd October come from?

  We had selected the date at random. It had no secret or symbolic meaning, nor was it even convenient for Helena’s final exams.

  But nobody believed this. Our families thought only of whatever it might conceal, and each clan was sure that the other side knew what they themselves didn’t, until one day Helena’s mother arrived with a pale face at the girls’ dormitory to ask frankly if the reason was not the unspeakable one …

  After all these doubts were dispelled, it seemed likely that a ‘constructive outlook’, as the recent phrase for a positive attitude went, would prevail. But this did not happen. Just when the two fam
ilies were preparing for a rapprochement, we two, Helena and myself, became uneasy.

  Our anxiety was about the promise of a modern marriage that we had been announcing proudly everywhere: in cafés, in after-dinner conversations with friends and in my books. (As if one book in Albanian were not enough, a second had now come out in Moscow, translated into Russian by no less than David Samoylov, who was not only Jewish, but was rumoured to have been semi-engaged to the ‘princess’, as people referred under their breaths to Stalin’s daughter …)

  So we had to keep our promise that we would be … marr … ied … differently. Was this mere talk?

  For the first time I became aware of what it meant to come up against a myth that was more than two thousand years old. Of course, we could act it out, but there was an alternative myth, equally ancient, if not older than this rite itself: abduction.

  Astonishingly, in this country where nothing was allowed, there had been an unprecedented wave of abductions, especially among the cooperative farms. Kidnapped brides, who were really women engaged without their families’ agreement, were turning up everywhere. In short, abduction, which lay at the root of the marriage rite, had become comical and was no longer considered a scandal.

  The bride. The Nibelungs. Marriage with a dead man. I tried to put these myths out of my mind and almost regretted how I had scoffed at virginity, not to mention other things.

  Time was passing. Helena and I had finally agreed, first of all, to exclude our families from the ‘event’, and replace both sides with her friends from the faculty and ‘my’ writers and artists.

  Helena’s friends were amazed at the news.

  I felt the absence of Bardhyl B., who would have put the event in a global perspective, comparing it to a new future for Europe or something similar.

  I didn’t find it hard to make our arrangements known at home. The Doll listened in total bewilderment, without uttering a word, apparently waiting for my father to announce his surprise or opposition, and unaware that the latter was still under the sway of the yellow bulletin.

  Helena had still not mentioned anything to the Gushi family, but her silence had deepened their suspicions. Rumours circulated about an imminent scandal. Because her family no longer hoped for any response from Helena, her father was said to have taken it upon himself to solve the mystery. He found out where my father drank his morning coffee, put on his best suit and, discovering my father alone at a table, extended to him a visiting card left over from the time of the monarchy, with the words ‘Dr Pavli Gushi, pharmacist’.

  The conversation was difficult, especially at first. Not only was Helena’s father sensitive by nature, but he did not find it easy to explain a situation that became twice as hard to resolve before my father’s inscrutable stare.

  He started very cautiously: There was no question of interfering, especially as they were young … but because of this … their fate … perhaps … although both sides … as you might say … we parents … our duty …

  When he realised that the man opposite him did not understand, or was pretending not to, he changed his approach. Perhaps you know that your son and my daughter …

  One can well believe (and he himself confessed as much afterwards) how having heard something of my father’s character he waited fearfully for a rebuff along the lines of: I don’t know anything about this. I don’t go into these things.

  But amazingly the reply was totally different.

  ‘I know.’

  Later we analysed their conversation blow by blow and agreed that the moment when my father pronounced the words ‘I know’ must have been decisive in not bringing this conversation to a sudden end.

  What really happened between them?

  Probably each had expected from the other bitter remarks like: ‘Stop your son bothering my daughter,’ or, ‘Doctor, you would do well to convince your daughter, and then come to me,’ and so on. But the magic phrase ‘I know’ had been uttered, and this banished any harsh words and even thoughts along the lines of: This man shows me his doctor’s degree, but he doesn’t know that I read the yellow bulletin, which is like reading the thoughts of the devil.

  My father’s ‘I know’ was deeper than any ordinary knowledge, because it acknowledged that Sunday lunch. This lunch was linked to the whole mystique of sharing bread at table, of eating together, something which goes far beyond eating, involving the most elevated conception and sworn covenant of the protection of a guest.

  Helena had eaten bread in our house, and so, obscurely and irrationally, had created a profound connection with the Kadares, arising out of unknown regions.

  Inadvertently, Helena had acquired a prerogative, that of a guest before that of a bride.

  Encouraged by the breaking of the ice, Dr Gushi became persuaded of the goodwill of the Kadares quicker than he should have been.

  Following an impulse of joy, after the not-very-explicit statement that ‘seeing as this is how matters stand, they should think about everything together’, he started talking about announcing the engagement, preparations, dowry, ring and so forth.

  After each of these words, my father’s face darkened as if he were hearing disastrous news. The doctor noticed this too late. He tried to repair the situation, but it was impossible. The harsh words expected at the beginning of the conversation were uttered at the end: ‘I don’t deal with these things. Talk to my son.’

  The meeting, the first and last, had ended in total misunderstanding.

  Meanwhile the facts collected by a branch of Helena’s family were not promising. Dr Gushi had been naive to think that he could come to an agreement with the groom’s family.

  The Kadares all had a screw loose, everyone knew that. Who had ever heard of a father borrowing money from his twelve-year-old son? And the son going to prison two years later? And running away from home by taxi? And becoming a poet, trying to publish a book with a poem entitled ‘Down with Virginity’, as if virginity were American imperialism?

  ‘It’s up to you. But there’s nothing you can do, if the girl won’t be persuaded, leave this business in God’s hands.’

  The situation in our family was entirely different. It was a mixture of vain nostalgia and a kind of philosophical approach that involved remorse and pangs of conscience over the abandoned house in Gjirokastra. The house was almost three hundred years old, and so few weddings had been held in it, while this callow apartment, not even two years old, was in a hurry to host a wedding even before the plaster was dry (with the milk still wet on its lips, as you might say).

  From the anthropological point of view (as it would later become the custom to say), this remorse was justified. The most recent weddings remembered in the big house were those of my grandmother and the Doll, in 1895 and 1933. None since then.

  Then the family remembered the people who would not be coming to the wedding, the Doll’s father, and my grandmother and her inseparable sister Nesibe Karagjozi, who had recently died. Two or three times, especially when it came to the subject of the big wedding cake (to be ordered from the NTLUS, an acronym whose expansion roughly meant the ‘Socialist Pastry Cooks’ Catering Enterprise’), the big baklava tray was mentioned, but softly and gently, as if it were an old lady who had died in not-very-clear circumstances.

  10

  THE WEDDING, in spite of every prediction, was held on 23rd October.

  I already knew that at the heart of every wedding lay anger, which would inevitably burst out before, during or after the ceremony.

  At our wedding, the hour of anger struck in the third act, immediately after the end of the ritual. It took the shape of an almighty quarrel between the two clans.

  The vexation and resentment came from the most unexpected directions, and was expressed in the strangest ways, from quotations of Engels to Icelandic proverbs. ‘We thought that the Kadares, once they got out of Lunatics’ Lane, would recover their senses, but the opposite has happened, they’re totally out of their minds.’ ‘Leave the Kadares alone,
what about the doctor, why is he looking so woebegone? It’s true what they say …’ (and here followed some Latin or Mongolian proverb).

  I felt that this malice had also infected myself, a sort of revenge for our disdain for tradition. ‘That mother of yours shouldn’t be seen crying in public on the train, heartbroken because her son-in-law won’t call her “Mama” …’

  This barb left Helena open-mouthed.

  They were the first harsh words we exchanged after the wedding …

  ‘My mother, crying on the train …’ she repeated in a low voice, not taking her eyes off me.

  It felt like an epilogue, like the end of a war, when each side tries to take stock of its losses. There was a sense that 23rd October would enter the annals of weddingology, as a ‘failed attempt to achieve epic status’. I seriously missed Bardhyl B., the only person who would have been able to compose a commemorative text in its honour.

  Most of the Kadares were dead, and thus cruelly indifferent. They used this ascendency as they had done thirty years before when they conquered the appalling Dobis. They made light work of crushing the Gushi clan. Nor did the latter’s attempts at talks, or the diplomas of the city’s most famous doctor and pharmacist, help in the least; it was as if Germany, having defeated Poland and France, were to hurl itself blindly against Switzerland.

  Shortly after this we exchanged the large flat for two small ones opposite each other in the centre of Tirana. For the Doll, this cushioned the shock of the division of the household. But her relief was really due to something else: there had finally been a swap, but of apartments rather than mothers.

  There was a vivacious atmosphere in both apartments. Friends, mainly writers and artists, came to help put everything in order, and brought with them their own friends, who brought others in their wake.