Free, p.17
Free, page 17
My father knew he would never be like many of his friends, those whose wives needed their husband’s approval before they could even apply lipstick. My mother never wore lipstick, and her will was made of gunmetal. Every time his desire to be consulted encountered my mother’s stubbornness, he faced a dilemma. He could pretend that he exerted control over her actions, reacting as he would have been expected to, with outrage. Or he could admit defeat and go about as if it didn’t really matter. Only he loved her too much for it not to matter. He couldn’t let go without a fight. He never became violent with her; he channelled his anger by smashing crockery. But when his whole body shook with anger and his voice trembled with rage, one could scarcely be sure that the only casualties would be cups and plates.
When my mother announced that she had joined the opposition movement, I assumed that the scene would play out as it had always done. I was wrong. My father gave my mother the bewildered look I was familiar with. But then he turned pale. He did not stand up. He did not move towards her; nor did he wave his finger threateningly. He did not shout. He continued to stare at her incredulously, a grimace frozen on his face, his body paralysed on the chair.
My mother noticed. She must have felt sorry somehow. She too reacted differently. She didn’t just look straight past him, as she used to do, to indicate that my father’s threats meant nothing to her. She felt compelled to explain. She said everything was still controlled by spies. There were former Communists everywhere, both in the government and in the opposition. People with biographies like theirs had to be involved. Someone had to find the courage. Otherwise, things would never change. We would always be represented by the same people. We had to take matters into our own hands, to represent ourselves. It would have been better to take advice perhaps, to make a collective decision. She knew my father might be sceptical; his politics weren’t the same as hers. But she’d had to do it. Now that he no longer had a job, they also needed the connections, to look for opportunities in the future. She seemed to have given some thought to this.
My father listened quietly. He kept his rage locked inside him. When I thought about this episode later, it dawned on me that perhaps he had cared about losing his job more than he’d let on. Perhaps, in his mind, there was a significant difference between being made redundant and taking early retirement. Perhaps, now that he was dependent on the pensions of two women, he felt like less of a man. He could no longer do what other men did: shout, threaten, shake with rage, and throw dishes at the wall. Or perhaps everything around him had changed so much that all the usual responses felt inappropriate, as if they belonged to a different era or could come only from a different person, an older version of himself that he no longer recognized. With all the familiar coordinates gone, he had lost his orientation. He had no explanation for his predicament. He had no solutions either. All that was left was quiet nodding, like the nodding he usually reserved for his bosses at work.
My mother did not stop working when she retired. She entered one of the busiest periods of her life. Shortly after joining the Democratic Party, she became one of the leaders of its national women’s association. She attended party meetings, selected candidates for elections, organized rallies, ran reform campaigns, joined national committees, met foreign delegations. The time that was left, she spent in the archives and in court, pursuing the restitution of family properties that had been confiscated in the past.
“You should stay home a bit more, look after the children,” Nini said to her.
“I’m fine,” I replied, delighted that the once-per-term check on my maths had now slipped from my mother’s agenda. “Mami, you should get a driving licence,” I suggested as an alternative.
“We don’t need a driving licence,” my father intervened, worried that if he didn’t oppose the prospect right away, his ongoing unemployment might promote him to family chauffeur. “It’s not good for the environment.”
That topic usually led to another argument. My mother would say, “Everyone is buying a car. It’s a necessity. Chernobyl was much worse for the environment!”
“What’s Chernobyl got to do with the car?” my father would reply.
My mother would continue, apparently unperturbed: “The metallurgic factory the Chinese built for us, what good did that do to the environment? Our problem is not the environment, it’s that we haven’t got enough savings to buy a car!”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” my father would point out.
Those seemingly innocent exchanges about whether or not we ought to buy a car typically led to wide-ranging world-historical disputes: from the damage to the environment done by the Industrial Revolution to the advances in knowledge enabled by the Space Race; from Eurocommunism to the responsibilities of China; from who had a right to pollute to who sold weapons where; from the Gulf War to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. “It doesn’t follow! It just doesn’t follow!” my father would reply to my mother when he didn’t know what else to say. She rarely changed her mind. “Is that what you say to your crowds in the rallies?” he would ask, finally giving up. “Is that how you prepare your speeches?”
My mother never prepared her speeches. She gave hundreds of them. As I was entering my teens, I was more likely to see her on the platform of a political rally waiting for her turn to speak than to meet her at home for dinner. She stood erect, high up on the stage, and spoke to tens of thousands of people, pausing frequently and modulating her voice, as circumstances dictated, sometimes forcing the audience into a terrifying silence, sometimes rousing the crowds to roaring applause. She always spoke without notes. She delivered her speeches as if she had written them in her head many years ago, as if she had rehearsed every day of her life the sentences that she would later utter. But her words didn’t come across as if they had migrated from the past. They were new, if a little foreign-sounding: individual initiative, transition, liberalization, shock therapy, sacrifice, property, contract, Western democracy. Except for the word freedom; that one was old. But she pronounced it differently, always with an exclamation mark at the end. Then it sounded new.
When my mother was not in political meetings, she was either rummaging through the city archives to find her family’s belongings, often consulting maps and boundary divisions, or she was in court, trying to recover ownership titles, leading her siblings’ fight to reclaim the thousands of square kilometres of land, hundreds of flats, and dozens of factories that had once belonged to their grandfather, a wood-chopper turned millionaire, shortly before the end of the war. My father and grandmother never took any interest, partly because they did not think the properties could be recovered, and partly because they doubted that they should be.
“Such a waste of time,” my grandmother would occasionally comment, shaking her head. It was often ambiguous whether she meant that politics was a waste of time, or the search for my mother’s famed properties, or both. “One should let bygones be bygones,” she once said to a foreign journalist who came to interview her about having been a dissident in the past and asked about her own family properties. “Everyone is a dissident now. The land in Greece? It’s just mud.”
My mother, on the other hand, would never let go. It was not only the necessity to find sources of income but a matter of principle. The two were somehow combined. For her, the world was a place where the natural struggle for survival could be resolved only by regulating private property. Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course: men and women, young and old, current generations and future ones. Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply had to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced that socialism could never work, even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature. People needed to know what belonged to them and to be able to do with it what they wanted. Then they would look after their assets and it wouldn’t be fighting anymore; it would be healthy competition. She believed that if only one could discover the truth about who was the first owner of anything, all the interactions that followed could be regulated so that not only our family but everyone else, too, would have the opportunity to become as rich as her ancestors had once been.
It was like resuming a chess tournament that had been interrupted halfway through, she said. All of the players had started from equal positions, and some had accumulated an advantage. Then they had been forced to play a different game. That was socialism. When the Cold War came to an end, the games could resume. But the old players had died, and in their place only their designated successors could return to the board. It would have been unfair, my mother thought, to start a different game. All the new players had to do was retrace their ancestors’ moves, keep to the same pieces, play by the same rules.
For her, finding the truth about family property was as much a matter of rectifying historic injustice as of regulating property rights. The only purpose of the state, as she saw it, was to facilitate such transactions and protect the contracts necessary to ensure that everyone could stick to what they had earned. Anything else, anything that went beyond that, encouraged the growth of parasites who wasted money and resources. It was socialism by another name. The state was like a chess tournament director who enforced the rules and checked the clock every now and then. But he could never start giving tips to the players, or changing their moves, or returning pieces to the board, or bringing in a player who had been disqualified. That would have been a perversion of the role. In the end, there would be winners and losers. So what? Everyone knew that; everyone consented to the rules. It was in the nature of the game. It was a competition after all, even if healthy.
15
I ALWAYS CARRIED A KNIFE
ONE DAY LATE IN the summer of 1992, a group of French women from an organization partnered with the one led by my mother announced that they would visit our house. We prepared for their visit as if it were New Year’s Eve. We repainted the walls, brought down the curtains to wash, put our mattresses out to air, scrubbed the insides of the cupboards, and dusted every book on the bookshelves. In the few hours prior to their arrival, the house turned into the battleground of a disciplined, highly organized military unit, armed with brushes, rags, sponges, tubs, buckets, mops, and all the other domestic artillery needed for the operation. Like a general, my mother imparted loud, sharp orders to my father while running around tirelessly herself, turning tables and chairs upside down, monitoring what had been left undone, revealing areas of dirt unnoticed by previous rounds of cleaning. Once the house looked sparkling, she captured my brother and me in the fatal half-hour prior to the arrival of our visitors and brought us to the bathroom to be cleaned. She had no time to check the temperature of the water she poured on us, and she scrubbed our faces with the same fervour she had shown the floors. When that was done, she went to prepare herself.
My mother consulted my grandmother on the dress code most appropriate for receiving representatives of an organization committed to the pursuit of women’s causes. Nini advised a one-piece outfit, and my mother chose an item she had recently found in the second-hand market, a selection in part inspired by all the women she had seen on the soap adverts she associated with Western female emancipation, and in part because it read “Gloria” on the back. (The latter, she thought, denoted a high-end luxury fashion brand.) A knee-length piece of dark red silk, it was adorned with black lace at the bottom, ribbons on the sleeves, and a V-shaped neckline. At the time, it was common for Western items of nightwear that entered the local second-hand market to be confused with regular clothing and worn during the day. In the same period, several of my teachers came to class wearing nightdresses or dressing gowns. My mother had not done it before, not because she could tell the difference but because she wasn’t normally attracted to frilly things. She wore trousers, despised make-up, and brushed her hair without a mirror. The only ribbons and lace she knew were those she and Nini inflicted on me—as a public affirmation that fifty years of dictatorship of the proletariat were unable to crush their will to bring me up as the Balkan version of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita Teresa.
The five visitors turned up in dark professional suits—like a Maoist delegation, my father commented in the kitchen. We sat around them in our living room and served coffee, raki, and Turkish delight. Our visitors didn’t bat an eyelid at my mother’s nightdress; they must have assumed it was either an expression of our culture or a mark of our newly acquired freedom. “We were very impressed by the reaction to your speech in the meeting the other day,” one of them, called Madame Dessous, said to my mother. “It was wonderful to hear such long applause from the audience. Obviously, we couldn’t understand it in Albanian,” she added with an apologetic smile. “We would be very interested to hear what you said about women’s freedom.”
My grandmother, who was helping out with the French, translated Madame Dessous’s words. My mother looked alarmed, like someone sitting an exam who suddenly realizes they have prepared for the wrong questions. “What speech is she talking about?” she muttered to my grandmother in Albanian. “I never said anything about women.” Then, slowly regaining control, she turned to the visitors and declared confidently: “I think everyone should be free, not only women.”
“Doli believes this is a very complex issue,” Nini translated.
The visitors nodded. “Ah, that is certain,” Madame Dessous agreed unreservedly. “We know, under socialism, there was much rhetoric about women’s equality,” she continued. “But what was the reality? Did Albanian women experience harassment?”
There was a brief silence during which my grandmother hesitated again on the translation. The word stuck in my head, but I did not quite understand its meaning at the time. I remember the perplexed look on my mother’s face as she stopped stirring the sugar into her coffee and stared at her interlocutor, pondering the effects of what she was about to say. There was something comic, as well as distressing, about the sharp contrast between the playful sensuality of the dress she had on and the gravity of the pose she assumed. She rested the coffee cup on the table, but then, feeling nervous, reached out to pick up a piece of Turkish delight and stuffed it into her mouth. “Sure,” she replied, while still chewing. Then she cleared her throat. “I always carried a knife.”
Madame Dessous was startled. She receded into the sofa, as if to increase the space between my mother and herself. The rest of the women exchanged uncomfortable looks. “Just a kitchen knife,” my mother hastened to add, noticing the reaction her confession had provoked, and determined to explain. “Nothing fancy.” As the visitors seemed to shrink even farther back, she began to speak. Her words came out quickly and without breaks, like small stones rolling down a steep hill.
“I was young, no more than twenty-five. I had a daily commute to a remote school in a northern village. I had to rely on lifts from casual truck drivers to get back home. In the winter, it gets dark early. You couldn’t hitchhike without a knife. I only used it once. Not to kill or anything.” Then she smiled to herself, as if some hilarious detail had unexpectedly emerged from a neglected corner of her mind. “Only a little tickle on his hand. You know, he was resting it on my thigh. It was uncomfortable.”
My grandmother translated word for word. My mother took a deep breath of relief, evidently satisfied with her own explanation, especially the lightness with which she had succeeded in summarizing what must have been a traumatic episode. But her words failed to achieve the intended effect. The visitors remained motionless. My mother looked at my father as if to ask for help. He had been silent up to that point but clearly knew the story already, and reacted as if each sentence gave him new reasons to be proud. Their eyes met, and he gave her a complicit smile, as if he’d handed her the knife himself. Then he turned to the visitors, confident in his abilities to achieve what my mother had failed to: “This woman’s got fire in her belly!” he said. “She is one of a kind. Do help yourselves to some raki. Doli makes it herself.”
That intervention did not help either. The women reached for the glasses and made a timid noise of approval as they brought the liquor to their mouths, but carefully avoided swallowing. Assailed by new doubts, and feeling that she had reached the limits of her capacity to elaborate, my mother stretched her arm and picked up another piece of Turkish delight. Halfway through the gesture, she changed her mind, returned the sweet to its container, and decided to try a different strategy.
“In the land of freedom,” she began, as if she were about to deliver one of her speeches, “in the United States of America, people are allowed to carry guns. That obviously makes it easier to defend oneself. In Albania, our options were limited. Socialism did not authorize the personal use of firearms. We knew, of course, how to deploy them; we received mandatory military training in school from the age of sixteen. But we had no control over those weapons. Unlike the American people, we were not free to use them when we wanted.”
In general, if my mother could have trained the women in her organization to protect themselves from harassment by using knives, she would have done it. Failing that, she limited her leadership role to coordinating assistance for the visa applications of mothers who wanted to visit their emigrant children. She gathered names, made lists, raised funds for those who needed financial assistance, helped them fill out the forms, and made appointments at the relevant embassies. Officially, the trips were to visit partner associations in various capitals of Europe: Athens, Rome, Vienna, Paris. In reality, the delegates dispersed to different towns as soon as they crossed the border. Only she and another colleague or two attended the planned meetings; the other women went to spend time with their children and grandchildren, and stayed with them for the duration of the trip. On the last day, they reconvened to visit food stalls and explore shopping centres. Not to buy anything, since even the cheapest items were prohibitively expensive. Only, as they put it, “to open their eyes.”
