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!
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.