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.
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.