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.
The son looked astonishingly like his father, tall and good-looking. Therefore, whenever he entered the Daiti Hotel, everybody looked at him a bit startled, even those who knew him well. As if the spirit of the dead patriarch was walking among them. Looking at him you suddenly found yourself in the company of a ghost. But was he a ghost, I wonder? At least, in 1994 the son was greeted with such reverence that I found it perplexing to see. Demonstrating reverence (born out of fear of his father) to this insignificant son, they bowed to the shadow of a man and his times—and not to the shadows of the thousands of people executed or dead in labor camps and prisons during his reign. So yes, in his presence people were reminded of his father, and this is how the late first secretary continued to live on for yet another generation. Reading my mother’s diary, I wondered: How much longer will Albania live with its ghosts?
But on the other hand, my mother did not burn her diary, though she could have done so. She had both the time and the opportunity, and I am sure she contemplated it. Today I take this as a good sign, a sign of faith in me, in the next generation. This is the reason why I brought the diary to you, to make it public in whatever form you see fit. It is about time!
About the Author
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ was born in Croatia in 1949. Her nonfiction books include How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a feminist critique of Communism that brought her to the attention of the public in the West; The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War, a personal eyewitness account of the war in her homeland; Café Europa: Life After Communism (Penguin); and They Would Never Hurt a Fly (Penguin). Drakulić is also the author of the novels Holograms of Fear, which was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was short-listed for The Best Foreign Book Award by The Independent (UK), The Marble Skin, The Taste of a Man (Penguin), S. (Penguin), and Frida’s Bed (Penguin). A writer and journalist who was published in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Book Review, and The Nation (where she is a contributing editor), as well as many other European magazines and newspapers, she now lives in Sweden and Croatia.
Advance Praise for A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism
“Orwell taught us in Animal Farm that a satirical fable could introduce us to Stalinism. For our own postcommunist age, Slavenka Drakulić summons her own group of animals, each with its own literary genre, and each with a story to tell about life in a communist country. The mouse and the mole, the pig and the parrot, the raven and the bear, the cat and the dog, all seek and find ways to remind us of a time and place, and so teach us the difference between stale commemoration of the graying past and the warmth and wetness and dread and darkness of life truly and bravely recalled. This daring triumph of literary style transforms a receding epoch into the eternal present, beautifully rendering the dilemmas of life under communism as sharp instances of moral tragedy and poignant examples of the limits of self-knowledge. Literature here is an aide de memoire, not just of historical experience, but of why we choose to forget.”
Praise for Café Europa: Life After Communism
“Profound and often bitingly funny… you’ll never think about capitalism, modern history, or your perfect, white, American teeth in the same way again.”
“Insightful… Café Europa not only helps to illuminate the political and social problems facing most of Eastern Europe, but also sheds new light on the daily life of its residents, their emotional habits, fears, and dreams…. Moving and eloquent.”
“Where less sensitive observers might only bemoan the legacy of communism, Drakulić knows her people well and sees the redeeming nature of all their human frailty; for their sake, we should read her book.”
“An important and timely book that deserves the widest possible audience.”
Praise for They Would Never Hurt a Fly
“In this powerful series of reports from The Hague’s international courtroom, Slavenka Drakulić confronts the Yugoslav war’s grand villains and banal perpetrators as she fearlessly contemplates both the individual character of evil and the tragic, chillingly impersonal mechanisms of war. Writing with her hallmark blend of forthrightness, open-eyed irony, and psychological discernment, Drakulić gives us disturbingly intimate vignettes of war criminals who might have been her own (and our) neighbors, even as she illuminates one of our time’s most daunting and urgent questions: How ordinary men and women turn, and are turned, into genocidal killers. An important and a necessary book.”
“In the first in-depth look at the war crimes trials in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić has written a deeply personal and lucid account. She brings to life the men who destroyed Yugoslavia—mediocre people who committed extraordinary crimes.”