A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (20 page)

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:

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:

“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.