A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (19 page)

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.