A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Slavenka Drakuli ć (VIII THE UNUSUAL CASE OF THE PSYCHOTIC RAVEN) #11

VIII THE UNUSUAL CASE OF THE PSYCHOTIC RAVEN

Look, I have here a notebook from my mother. She died last week, and I came to Tirana to attend her funeral. I found it among a few possessions my mother took to the hospital with her. I am now bringing her notebook to you because you are my old friend and publisher. I would like you to tell me what to do with it, if anything. Is it perhaps worthwhile publishing it—maybe not in this form, but as a contribution to a book about Communism in Albania? No, no, let me try again: What I want to say is that her notes should be published if you were to find them interesting. I don’t know if this is the time to do it either—you know better than I what it means. I have been living in America for such a long time, fifteen years now, that I don’t really know how things work in Albania any longer. I only remember that, when I studied here in the nineties, I often heard “it’s not the time yet” for mentioning or publishing this or that. So, who am I to say?

Leafing through this handwritten notebook both out of a daughter’s sentimentality and curiosity, I discovered something interesting. Apart from notes about books she had read of late, thoughts for articles she intended to write, and quite lucid observations about her own illness, I found a kind of short diary from December 1981. Well, not a diary exactly, but notes about just one very particular case she had to deal with as a psychiatrist at the Tirana Psychiatric Hospital. As you can see for yourself, this slim, older volume was carefully glued into another notebook. Not only that, it was written with a pencil rather than a pen. I imagine she did it on purpose, so that she could erase certain details in case of an emergency. I mean, it is now 2009, and yet Mother took these notes to the hospital with her. Why? What was she hiding? Of whom was she afraid, even today?

As I started to read it, I soon discovered that she had good reason not to want to part with it, even on her deathbed. In it, she describes a meeting so peculiar that at first I was not sure whether I should believe it ever really happened.

The first entry is dated December 18, 1981:

This afternoon a raven flew into my doctor’s office through an open window. I was alone. My nurse had gone out on an errand, and perhaps that was the moment he had been waiting for. Nevertheless, I offered him a seat, but he preferred to stand during this first, brief, conversation. To an ordinary person he probably looked just frightened. But I immediately saw that he was in a state of a shock. He was shaking violently, could not concentrate, and had difficulty speaking—all the symptoms of severe distress were there. My first reaction was to give him an injection of a tranquilizer, which he refused. I was worried that he might experience a heart attack in such a state. He clearly was confused, disoriented, and delusional. Possibly a temporary psychosis?

After a while, he managed to tell me that he had come to ask if it would be possible to see me in private. Normally, if I had been on-call, I would have given him an injection and admitted him to our acute psychiatric ward. I would then have reported the case at our morning meeting the next day, whereupon the head of the psychiatric unit would have decided what kind of treatment he would get. If, after a few days of observation I had been put in charge of writing the report, he would have been diagnosed as not a very severe case and would have been injected with some more tranquilizers. Unfortunately, we do not have much choice in our methods of dealing with such patients. If, on the other hand, he had been diagnosed as a severely ill patient—well, then he would have been subjected to the more drastic so-called standard procedure. I happen to disagree with it, but I cannot say it so openly.

When Comrade Raven asked me to see him privately, I was taken by surprise. Who could have possibly told him about my interest in individual therapy (not to mention psychoanalysis, a word that I barely dare to write down)? Now it was my turn to get agitated: Such a visit could mean the end of my career. But I tried not to show him how much his question had startled me. My interest in different practices within psychiatry was not really a secret, because I had written academic articles about it. However, they were only about theory—presenting the ways in which colleagues in other countries dealt with particular kinds of psychosis. That was considered daring enough. But I had gone even further, and only a couple of close friends and colleagues know that I am actually treating a few patients privately (without payment, of course). Therefore, Comrade Raven’s presence in my office and his request could have meant only one of two things: that someone from our small circle of doctors had sent him to me for help—in which case I should have been informed. Or that my secret was out and Comrade Raven was here to arrest me. My “sin” was punishable in the same way as witchcraft. For a split second I had doubts as to which of the two was the case. But his state could not have been faked easily, so I decided that it really did not matter who he was, because Comrade Raven needed my immediate help.

I calmed him down and tried to find out what had happened to him. But my usual questions made Comrade Raven still more agitated, even frightened. I saw that there was no other way to soothe him than to promise that I would see him later that evening.

Reading Mother’s notes was very confusing for me. My first reaction was that this must have been some kind of mistake, or at best a joke. Why would a patient enter through the window in the first place? Was she serious when she wrote that it was a bird? Or was there something hidden behind this description? If so, how was I supposed to understand it?

Obviously she took the notes to the hospital knowing that they would come into my possession after her death, so they must have been especially important to her. But I must confess that, at the very beginning, I wondered if the notes weren’t the fruit of my mother’s imagination. Or if she hadn’t perhaps written them already under the influence of her not yet manifested brain tumor (which was discovered much later—luckily it was one of the slow-growing kind). Or were they the result of some of the medications she had been taking for her constant migraine? After all, she could have even been hallucinating. How else could I explain to myself the fact that my mother, in her diary, described a patient as—a bird? My mother was a psychiatrist, not a veterinarian! And even if she had been a veterinarian, it seems rather strange that a raven would have had the ability to talk, although there have been cases of this very intelligent bird being able to utter a few words.

I mean, yes, she worked with all kinds of delusional patients, but she would not have written something like this in her diary—look here, she wrote raven without quotation marks. She would not have written that without a reason. Besides, my poor mother was not very good at pretending! For example, in the next sentence she invites the “bird” to sit down. How naive she was, if indeed her intention was to hide something. And almost right away she calls this bird “Comrade Raven”?

The other thing I found strange in this excerpt was her claim that psychoanalysis, or even individual psychotherapy, was punishable. Surely she did not mean punishable by law, because there is no reference to it in the law at all. She must have meant ideological condemnation of this Western—and therefore, by definition, negative and dangerous—practice. By the way, I happen to know that there is astonishingly little psychoanalytical practice even today. Not only in Albania but in the whole of the formerly Communist Europe as well. Obviously, the Communists did not care about individuals, much less about the problems of their psyche. I visited Mother at her workplace a few times to get an idea…

Now, listen to this sentence again: “He had come to ask if it would be possible to see me in private.” This, I believe, must have been a very unlikely request at the time. First of all, the word “private” is a highly suspicious word in itself, in any context. In a Communist country where there is hardly any privacy, it is loaded with negative meaning, suggesting that a person has something to hide. Otherwise, why privacy? A stranger doesn’t walk into your office, much less fly in through the window and ask to see you in private—and in a human, if agitated, voice. She rightly suspected him of being an agent provocateur sent by the secret police. My mother was a pioneer when, as early as 1993, she started psychotherapy, publicly, with individuals in her work with hospital patients. In 1981, as she writes, she started this practice in great secrecy and with only a few nonhospitalized patients. What were the risks involved in seeing patients privately at that time? There was no such thing at all as private practice in Albania in 1981. I imagine she would not only have been stripped of her license, but also imprisoned. Therefore, it was perfectly possible, if the rumor about her seeing patients outside of the hospital leaked out, for an undercover policeman to have been sent to her disguised as a sick man imagining he was a bird. I have heard of such provocations, although Mother never spoke about it.

But I also asked myself another question: Was this birdlike person perhaps someone she recognized, someone well-known, a public person, so to speak? This might have been her motivation for disguising his identity so carefully and hiding her notes about him. Perhaps, besides her professional consideration, there was another, more personal one—her fear of him? But I asked myself all these questions before finishing my reading….

I realized that she must have written about this case in a coded language. Raven was his code name in the diary; she never mentions his real name, or any other particular characteristic of his looks or profession, except for his symptoms. If discovered, she could have claimed that the man required therapy and had been referred to her just because, in his severe state of acute psychosis, he identified himself with a raven.

However, the question remains—and I can see it in your eyes—why that particular bird, why a raven? I intuitively sensed that this name held the secret of the story, the secret of the person. I remember from my school days—as you surely do, too—that in Albanian mythology a raven is the bearer of bad news. Often it symbolizes death. It could also be a witness to something horrible. Was the name chosen as an indication she wanted to give to a future reader, to me? As if, by choosing this name for her patient she wanted to prepare me for the kind of problem she had to deal with?

Yes, I believe she was trying to warn me that what I was about to read was a dark, dangerous, perhaps mortally dangerous, story. And yes, she wanted me to read it only after she had gone.

At first, when she suggested the nearby park as their meeting place, he almost went mad with fear! “The other birds might hear us,” he whispered to her. Since under no conditions would Commrade Raven talk to her in the hospital, my mother agreed to see him privately. Mother writes that she had no alternative if she wanted to help the poor creature than to see him outside of the hospital. The “creature,” she writes, thus adding to the ambiguity surrounding the person in question. By the way, this is another word that can have a negative connotation. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that, in this respect, she deliberately wanted to create confusion for the possible unintended reader.

I have to tell you, I was totally amazed that my mother risked so much to write this in 1981. In my view, this must mean that the creature was someone special in her eyes—that he had a grip on her. Or that he possibly had even threatened her. The further on I read, the more concerned I became about this strange decision of hers to write about it.

Apparently, after they met that very evening, she jotted down that Raven had repeatedly said that he had seen something happen in the house of the prime minister. He could not stop seeing the picture in his mind’s eye. “Blood, very much blood,” he told her. “That word was a trigger,” Mother noted. “Whose blood did you see, Comrade Raven?” she asked him. It took her some time to understand that Comrade Raven, as she continued to call him, was highly psychotic because of the terrible event he had witnessed the previous night.

However, that same evening, during his second visit, he seemed coherent enough to tell her what had happened! Because, if she diagnosed him as highly psychotic, I suppose he could not have expressed himself in the precise sentences I found in her notebook. So, either he was psychotic and the story was constructed from bits and pieces. Or the persona was not psychotic at all, and this was her way of dealing with the information that he, for some reason, had confided to her. This is also a realistic option in interpreting her notes, as you will see later on. It takes a special talent to read between the lines—as we were all trained to do—but at the same time not to overdo it. When there is no information, only symbols, riddles, and guesswork—as was often the case in Albanian newspapers and books—there is a problem. One needs to decide which interpretation is the more plausible.

“It happened during the night between the seventeenth and eighteenth, in the protected zone of the Bllok,” Comrade Raven said. “As it happened, I was positioned on a maple tree near the villa of the prime minister. Perched on a branch overlooking the first floor, I could clearly see his study with its dark-wood desk and old-fashioned lamp, his chair and paintings hanging on the wall. I could also see his bedroom (he sleeps separately from his wife). I perhaps should say that, although there are curtains on that window, on the said night the curtains were not drawn.

“As I am sure you yourself noticed, there was a storm last night. It was raining heavily, strong gusts of wind bowed the trees, and dramatic bolts of lightning created a heavy atmosphere. Ominous, one might say in hindsight.”

Here Mother tried to interrupt him—this word ominous bothered her and she wanted him to focus on it, on his choice of the word—but Comrade Raven indicated that he didn’t want to be interrupted. See, it was already obvious to me that he didn’t want to be taken on as a case, to be analyzed, that is. But Mother didn’t see that yet, which surprised me. She didn’t know that he only wanted her to listen to him.

More description follows, then Comrade Raven comes to the point:

“At first nothing happened. It was already late at night, past midnight, but the man sat there at his desk, almost motionless. After a while he stood up, looking at his watch and then through the window, as if expecting a visitor. A moment later he turned his head toward the door. He did not nod or show any sign of recognition. But I am sure that someone entered his study at this point. However, I couldn’t say that for a fact. I only saw a giant shadow against the white wall in the room. Why do I even think of it as a man’s shadow? I could not say if it was a man’s or a womanʹs; it did not have the distinct shape of a human being or any distinct shape at all, for that matter.

“It is this shadow that bothers me now… For the next few hours, it dominated the room of the minister, somehow looming over him, overwhelming him. No, not for a moment did I see the person who owned that shadow—if indeed there was one. I only saw something, another presence (that would be the most exact word) moving in the room, bending over the man at his desk, the light, the wall… Looking at the scene from outside, it appeared to me as if this shadowy presence was reproving the minister. That it was threatening him. Because the closer it came to him, the more he leaned back in his chair, until he just slumped, covering his face with his hands—as if to protect himself against an assault. It was a desperate gesture, as if he were saying, Why don’t you believe me? and at the same time pleading for understanding—not for mercy, no! I don’t think so, although the atmosphere appeared to me as menacing… And in view of what happened afterward, when the shadow… well…

“Perhaps I should have come closer to the window. But I couldn’t, because of the storm.

“Then the shadow left the room, or at least moved somewhere where I could not see it any longer.

“He was a very proud, I dare say, very stiff man. I am sure he pleaded for understanding. But understanding of what? And to whom? Whose was that ominous presence in his room on that terrible night of the storm? They say that the Devil can be recognized by his lack of a shadow. But I thought afterward—what is one supposed to call a shadow without a man? Can you tell me, Comrade Doctor?”

Well, I certainly am not willing to believe that Raven engaged in such metaphysical questions that evening with my mother. The shadow must have had a distinct shape, you know. It loomed and looked gigantic because of the effect of the light, no doubt. But it was definitely a man who visited the minister, someone he knew well, since he showed no surprise. An old friend, perhaps? My question is more down-to-earth: Why did Raven (see, I accept the Aesopian language of my mother) spy on the minister that night, unless this was precisely his duty?

Anyway, my mother just listened as he went on:

“The minister sat at his desk for a long time; I thought heʹd fallen asleep. Then he stood up and came to the window again. I clearly saw his very pale face as he pressed his forehead against the cool glass.

“What happened afterward occurred in plain view. But—how to tell you? I did and I did not see it. How can I explain it? If it hadn’t been for that shadow, whose presence was almost more real than the minister himself, I’d say I had witnessed a classic suicide. The minister first took a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote a short note—I mean, it didn’t take long, the writing. Then, as if he had an afterthought, he reached for another sheet of paper and wrote something; this time it took longer, because he paused several times. Only then did the minister take a pistol from the drawer and put it on the desk, keeping it under the palm of his hand a while, as if warming it up. As far as I could see, he did not look desperate but rather calm. But before he pulled the trigger, I realized that he saw the shadow again! It had never left his room… The minister looked at it, his eyes wide open with fear, and then quickly pulled the trigger. As his head fell forward, I saw first a fountain of blood gush out, and then crimson drops slowly slide down the wall behind him…

“And then… and then… I saw the most incredible, most horrendous thing happen. I saw it—I did!—the shadow come up to him and lean over his body, as if checking to see that he was really dead. It then switched the light off and left the room. I swear I saw the light go off.

“When I think now that I am the last being who saw him alive…”

Here Mother writes in her notes that, at this point, she suggested that he might have taken some substances and suffered from a hallucination. But my impression is that she wrote this not as a real possibility but only as part of what she thought was her carefully constructed fable. In any case, he responded to her:

“Was I imagining a shadow? Hallucinating? Seeing the effect of the lamp light that night? Yes, that is of course possible. But what confuses me is that the whole thing, the duel between that wretched man and the shadow, lasted so long. Probably a couple of hours, although it seemed to me like the whole night now. Could I have really been looking at some kind of play that nature had arranged for me? Or was it a shadow-theater performance? No, I don’t think so…

“You see, I am convinced that the shadow was… his soul. What is a shadow without a body? If it is not another shape assumed by the Devil, then it must be the soul. But the minister’s soul was a dark, menacing, evil soul. Yet, his own! This was the most tragic thing for me, to see how dark his soul was.”

I think that my mother wanted to comment on this but then gave up. There are traces left of her writing that she obviously erased. It must have been fascinating for her to hear raven (or Raven, or whoever that person was) mention both the Devil and the soul. Albania was proud of being the first atheist country in the world! No churches to pray in here; they were all turned into storehouses or assembly halls, over two thousand of them, of all denominations. It also meant that religious concepts and expressions such as the Devil and the soul were exorcised from the language. From the public language, that is. Yet it would have been highly unlikely that a person used them even privately, and in such a matter-of-fact manner, as if he really believed they existed! Well, perhaps not, if that person also was really a patient believing he was a bird, of course. But what if this person was only disguised as a patient by my mother? So he could say what he wanted, all the while being treated (in her notes) as a psychotic persona. I think that she might have herself put these religious words into Raven’s mouth, just to illustrate to the outsider (the unintended reader) how sick he was, since no person in his right mind would ever utter them.

“Now, how could I tell anyone but you what I saw—a murder committed by a soul? But you agree that what I saw could indeed have been his own dark soul that pushed him into performing such an act? Metaphorically speaking, you say… Why did I never think of that? Of course, it is possible that he fought with himself and that his own bad conscious forced him into suicide. He had a lot on his conscience; maybe that is what killed him in the end. He was his own worst enemy; every man is. But in your interpretation that would mean the man in question had a conscience, which I am not so sure about.”

This was the last she heard from Raven. He disappeared from her life as suddenly as he had entered it—however, this time not through the window. At least, she doesn’t bother to mention this detail any longer. He left a doubt behind, a hint, a seed of suspicion that, after all, it might not have been a simple suicide but rather a kind of assisted suicide—even if assisted by the mysterious shadow. Although it remains unclear what Raven meant by the shadow. Or what he really saw, for that matter.

• • •

My reading of her notes is this: Comrade Raven did not pretend to be a bird, the bearer of bad news. He did not imagine or hallucinate blood. He was a person in power who saw the suicide of the prime minister that night. But the man could not keep his secret any longer and just cracked. He perhaps really lapsed into a temporary psychosis. It probably does not happen very often in his line of work, but one cannot exclude such a possibility. And he felt a strong urge to tell what he saw, to get it out, to confide in somebody. In all probability he was unlikely to talk to a friend or his wife. Whom could he turn to, I ask you, but to a professional who would keep his secret (“how could I tell anyone but you?”)?

I can tell you that I was not only puzzled by the symbolism of the raven, or the question of Raven’s identity, but also—as I mentioned to you earlier—by the form my mother had chosen to express herself. You see, from what I read and detected, and there are many other interesting details in her notes, as you will undoubtedly discover yourself, I am convinced that Raven was not only a witness, but also the executor.

Whoever that persona was, he was sent to the minister not only to deliver the judgment of the powers that be, but to execute it as well.

My mother, once burdened by his terrible secret, confided it to her diary—but not in simple words. She chose the form of a fable. The story of a bird—very much in the tradition of folktales. I think she was careful to compose his story in a literarily convincing way. Her fear and her conscience turned her into a writer—but isn’t that often the case in many a dictatorship? Not that it helps; many writers have experienced just the opposite. Therefore, she hid it carefully.

From some of her comments (and I read you only a few) I see that she, too, suspected that Raven himself had been present in the room both before and during the suicide. Her suspicion—or, better said, her intuition—was that he was there in order to actually explain to the minister that suicide would be the only honorable way out of the impossible situation he had put himself in. Should the minister have had any doubts, that is. Maybe he did not have any doubts; yet Raven spoke about a battle of some kind. Could the two of them have been arguing? After all, according to the notes it seems that their conversation lasted quite a while.

In the end, the one who dispatched him had to be sure of the result, it seems, so the shadow persona waited until the “self-execution” (Mother uses that expression in one place) was over and checked that the minister was dead. Like a real professional. If we are to take the whole fable seriously, which she obviously did.

You will notice that she does not write further of this highly unusual “case” or of this “patient.” That is strange to me (or not strange; it’s indeed logical, depending upon what interpretation you prefer). Had Raven been a true patient, there would have been plenty of material to analyze and write about in scientific publications or conference papers. Why did she stop writing about him so abruptly?

Well, in a way she did not stop. She continued to write about the suicide of the minister. But from another, public side this time. Mother wrote about the real case that had actually motivated her patient—the visitor, witness, or whatever he was—to visit her:

Sure enough, during the next few days the suicide of the prime minister was in the news: The prime minister had been found dead at his home; he had killed himself as the result of a “nervous breakdown.” The news report was short and scarce of details. Therefore, as usual, gossip filled the space left by the news. There were so many gossips in town; his death shook the place almost like an earthquake. Of course, the official story was that he was suspected of collaboration with the so-called enemy forces of the KGB, the CIA, UDBA, and whatnot.

The unofficial story, however, was that one of his three sons was engaged to marry a girl from a highly suspicious background: Her family had relatives in America. At first there was no obvious reaction to the news of the engagement, but then the buzz started: What was the meaning of the prime minister allowing such an act? It was not a simple act of engagement like any other. Being so highly positioned in the Communist Party and the state hierarchy carried certain obligations in his private life, a great responsibility indeed. Therefore, the main question was how to interpret the engagement of the prime minister’s son with a person from a politically “wrong” family—since a family was still an important feature of individual identity in Albania. In a country that prided itself on never giving in to “enemy” bourgeois ideology, could this engagement be a sign of liberalization? On the other hand, it could be just the opposite, a sign of the weakness of the class struggle, an error of judgment by the minister, perhaps a, for him, fatal error.

After only a couple of weeks, however, the prime minister had canceled the wedding. In doing so he demonstrated that his loyalty to the party came first and to his family only second. To admit his misjudgment in public was no small thing to do, yet he thought that he would thus save face. After all, he was the number two man in power; this gesture should have meant something…

However, after a few months of speculation it became obvious that the first secretary had decided to interpret the engagement as a sign of weakness. The old Communist should have known better than to give in to his son’s desire to marry into such a highly unsuitable family, it was rumored to be said. He’s become too soft, too bourgeois, it was whispered. If he cannot control even his own son—how is he supposed to lead the whole country one day?

The minister, indeed, seemingly had lost his grip on power, because the essence of power is control.

A tragic love affair, Romeo and Juliet, some said afterward. But in Albania no one was preoccupied with what happened to the youngsters. Should one indulge the feelings of two youngsters when the security of the state could be at stake? Was it worthwhile to make such a risky decision? Surely the successor was aware of the problematic family when he approved the engagement? If he was not, it speaks even more against him as a future first secretary. The first secretary as a matter of principle should not trust anyone, not even his friends, much less a family with such suspect members. Rather, he should have followed good old Stalinist credo: Trust is good—but control is better.

It was also said that, although the first secretary—the minister’s old comrade in arms and friend—was worried about such a development, he said nothing to him. The first secretary was so worried that he suggested a meeting of the Politburo. He decided that the Politburo should deal with this; it should present the problem of the prime minister and give him an opportunity for self-criticism. Surely he would come to his senses; this method always worked. And so the session was convened. As usual, such meetings went on for a few days. Just when the prime minister’s turn came to speak, the meeting ended; it was supposed to continue the next day. Most probably, the first secretary would forgive his friend and successor, the boy would not marry the girl, and that would be it. But the next meeting did not take place. This was fatal for the minister…

Yet one cannot but wonder: Was it perhaps postponed in order to make it fatal?

That night, the night between the first and the second meetings, the minister committed suicide, or “suicide.” It seems that he did not believe that the first secretary would forgive him. He knew his old comrade and friend better, he knew his cruelty—which had escalated with the attacks of acute paranoia he had been experiencing lately, apart from the diabetes and cerebral ischemia he was suffering from. I heard about it in conspiratorial tones from my colleague at the hospital who treated him—we all knew about his paranoia but were not allowed to mention it. The first secretary suffered from insomnia and hallucinations, apart from persecution mania, said my colleague, rather worried about the political consequences his mental state could have. He told me this just a month or so before the whole event—and voilà, there it is, the political consequence, a grand display of his sheer madness!

But then, again, there are people who love conspiracies, and they said something completely different: that the whole affair had been orchestrated. The engagement was only a pretext, a good motive for the first secretary to get rid of his main rival. In other words, it was an inner battle for power.

Therefore, a decision about his funeral must have been highly problematic: where to bury such a person—in the Martyrs’ Cemetery or not? If yes, what was the message? If not, what was the message? Should it be a civilian funeral or not? So many questions… Previously, in a similar case of suicide by a Politburo member, the corpse was buried and exhumed five times! In the end, the minister was not given an official funeral; this status was indicated by the absence of official speeches and any gunfire salute. After a while, his body disappeared from his grave…

As a result of the whole sordid affair, not only the prime minister but also his whole family was arrested without any explanation. His wife and three sons were imprisoned. One son committed suicide. He could not stand torture, I heard. The mother died in prison, and the two other sons are still serving a prison sentence.

In a note from 1985, Mother added that the investigators found two, not one, sheets of paper. One was a letter to his family and the other was a sheet inscribed with only two lines from an old Albanian folk song:

O ju korba qe me hani

syte e zi mos mi ngani.

[Oh, you ravens devouring me

don’t touch my black eyes]

“It is not clear why this second sheet was not mentioned before,” she commented. Or did it, in some way, point to the possibility that he had been forced into suicide? My mother, it seems, concluded that this definitely confirmed her suspicion of Raven’s role in it all. By the way, on a separate sheet that she perhaps added to the notebook later on—she wrote in red pencil: “I heard from a reliable source that an investigation was launched into his suicide. Allegedly, a man was seen entering the minister’s house late that night. The official report states that his face could not be recognized because of the heavy rain. It is only known that a dark, tall man dressed in black left the house in the early morning hours, walking hastily toward the city. ‘His black coat flew in the wind like the wings of a bird,’ the report added.”

My mother’s only comment was an exclamation mark. My comment, however, is that it is not easy to believe that the writer of this report, based probably on an agent watching the house, perhaps even to ensure that the designated persona finished his task, would express himself in such poetic language. But evidently, in this country, poetry and fiction are more normal than news and information.

At the very end of her glued-in notebook there are only a few additional notes. In 1985 she wrote: “The first secretary is dead, finally.” The other is from 1991, written in pencil again: “Today the two minister’s sons were released from prison.” And again, a couple of months later: “The first secretary’s wife is in jail!” The last note is from November 19, 2001: “The remains of the minister found.”

Of course, I understand that the reason my mother kept her diary in secrecy was because of the strange witness whose identity she kept to herself—but also because she mentioned the forbidden topic, the first secretary’s illness. But it still fascinates me that she died believing that this secret should not be revealed, at least not during her lifetime. I understand that she had no strength left anymore. She feared for me, although I managed to stay in America, to her great joy as well as sorrow, because she could not see me more often.

You see, she lacked faith in democracy. I guess she was not alone; her whole generation did not trust any government at all. Perhaps with good reason. Never mind the political changes; there are still forces and people at work here that could have harmed her, perhaps even me. Indeed, many people in power are the same ones from before! Therefore, better to hush it up, she must have thought. Instead she kept a secret diary and never dared to even mention it to me, not even so many years after the fall of Communism in Albania. Especially not to me. Knowledge of any kind was a curse in our society. The more access to knowledge and information a person had, the more suspicious it was. Therefore, we had a ban on watching foreign TV shows or listening to foreign radio news programs.

She pulled all her strings to send me to America. She did it for a specific reason: Namely, even long after the first secretary’s family had lost its power, she was still afraid of the possible consequences. She was insistent, although I was her only child and she was divorced. I resisted… stupid me! I was young, and my friends were the most important thing to me. I did not care as much about the future; they did not teach us to be ambitious. On the contrary, we learned that we didn’t have to worry; the state would take care of us. And that it was normal to build some seven hundred thousand bunkers to protect us from an imaginary enemy.

As I told you, I am convinced that she must have known exactly who Raven was, perhaps she even knew him personally (he did not come to her for nothing), but she kept the identity of the person to herself. And his terrible secret as well. That event changed my mother’s life and mine. The consequences for her were serious: She stopped believing in the leadership of the Communist Party and, moreover, in Communism as a system. She lost the comfort of thinking that Albanian Communism was just a matter of the wrong people in the wrong place—that the idea was right, only the practice was wrong.

The other day, during my mother’s funeral, seeing her old friends, some of them also ghosts of times past (like the director of the hospital, a party strongman), I suddenly remembered one event. Just before I left for America in 1994 I had a meeting in the Daiti Hotel with a relative who was supposed to arrange for my visa. There I saw the younger son of the late first secretary. He had no real power, except for the power of his family name.

The son looked astonishingly like his father, tall and good-looking. Therefore, whenever he entered the Daiti Hotel, everybody looked at him a bit startled, even those who knew him well. As if the spirit of the dead patriarch was walking among them. Looking at him you suddenly found yourself in the company of a ghost. But was he a ghost, I wonder? At least, in 1994 the son was greeted with such reverence that I found it perplexing to see. Demonstrating reverence (born out of fear of his father) to this insignificant son, they bowed to the shadow of a man and his times—and not to the shadows of the thousands of people executed or dead in labor camps and prisons during his reign. So yes, in his presence people were reminded of his father, and this is how the late first secretary continued to live on for yet another generation. Reading my mother’s diary, I wondered: How much longer will Albania live with its ghosts?

But on the other hand, my mother did not burn her diary, though she could have done so. She had both the time and the opportunity, and I am sure she contemplated it. Today I take this as a good sign, a sign of faith in me, in the next generation. This is the reason why I brought the diary to you, to make it public in whatever form you see fit. It is about time!