A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (18 page)

In the transition from Communism to capitalism, all people are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.

Stray dogs don't fit into that new capitalist Bucharest, and mayor after mayor promises to do something about them. But he never acts. Probably there are many reasons for not acting and, moreover, for not knowing how to act. One could certainly blame it on cowboy capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, bad politics, or disappointment with the EU. But I happen to believe that in Romania dogs are considered as much the victims both of Communism and the democratization process (or the transition period, as they call it) as your own kind. I observe that when an individual in this society feels pretty lost and helpless, he doesn't know how to take responsibility for his own life, much less for that of the poor dogs in his neighborhood. It doesn't help that democracy, so far, means only that those who are up stay up, like in a kind of a merry-go-round of power. It also could be a laissez-faire attitude of this society in general, which hasn't woken up properly from the Communist slumber. Generally speaking, people still believe that there will be always someone “up there” to make a decision in their names—whom they can blame later on. If yesterday it was Communism, today it is the bureaucracy in Brussels. Leaving everything to the higher-ups, not taking the initiative, not willingly acting in the common interest—this, in my modest dog's opinion, is really what our problem is. What do you do
when there's not even an idea of a common interest, a common good
? In a society like ours it needs to be created. The lack of it means that one day we'll wake up to a decision of someone high up that dogs finally have to go. In the name of the EU we'll be swept away for good. Then there will be a short outrage; the party in charge will perhaps lose a few votes. So what?, one may think. But, permit me to say these harsh words: The question is, Who will be next? Gypsies, perhaps? Jews? And why not people with glasses?

Sorry, sorry. As I said, I tend to get carried away. Look at me, an old dog giving speeches! As you can see, in Romania even dogs are political animals.

You could almost take this whole canine story as a metaphor for humans in Romania: victimized, abandoned, poor, hungry for everything, totally disillusioned. But this would be a bad metaphor, because, unlike humans, dogs won't get together and vote for someone like Napoleon (I'm referring to
Animal Farm
, George Orwell's ingenious parable) or go and start a war. And here I would like to leave you, my friend, to ponder over the frustrations that lead to populism—and to wait and see what these newly declassed masses will come up with, who will manipulate them and how.

But before we part, let me tell you just one more story. Have you heard of the “Baghdad Pups”? No? Of course not, this is a typical American venture. It's about stray dogs in Afghanistan and in Iraq and about American soldiers who befriended them. Boys wanted to take their friends back with them to the United States, but it proved to be against the law. However, a certain navy lieutenant was so in love with his dog, Cinnamon (what an idiotic name for a dog, I must say!), that he managed to do the impossible. He gave Cinnamon to a contractor, who took him to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. But the man could not put the dog on a civilian flight to the United States, so he abandoned Cinnamon at the airport. An airline employee gave the pup to a local family. Then the lieutenant's energetic sister stepped in and, with the help of some organization or other, located the lost dog. Now Cinnamon lives happily ever after in Maryland. Americans being Americans, they immediately realized that there are more soldiers who would like to do the same, so they organized “Operation Baghdad Pups.” Their newspapers report that so far more than thirty pet formerly stray dogs have been brought over—don't ask how! The point is that Americans do things by themselves. They don't wait and despair.

Now, what shocked me are the costs of such rescue trips, between four thousand and six thousand dollars per dog. This gave me an idea. True, unfortunately Romania is not occupied by American soldiers. But why shouldn't we take action ourselves and, under the slogan “Exportation, not extermination” (I imagine this could catch media attention), offer our dogs for adoption abroad? I'm sure that there are people willing to take them; costs would be one third of the American costs, if not less. Remember how Westerners were crazy about adopting our children from orphanages? Not that dogs are as popular as white orphans, but one could at least try. For example, what if adoption included a free long weekend in Bucharest with your future pet? Of course, someone is bound to label this “dog tourism,” but I think it is better and more decent than, for example, sex tourism. The more I think about the idea, the more I like it. But being an old and experienced dog, I suspect that Romanians would rather do real business by selling dogs to the Koreans as meat! In fact, I'm surprised that no one has already had that idea. The state would probably subsidize it, and some smart-ass with good connections would get rich over our dead bodies. And then he'd launch himself head-on into politics, including in his program the defense of animal rights! None of that would surprise me—especially because I heard rumors that something similar happened in the Chinatown of Budapest. But what's that you say? I see your face; you're smiling and shrugging your shoulders. You must think I'm mad.

Hey, relax. After all, I'm only a dog!

L
ook, 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:

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.