“Now, how could I tell anyone but you what I saw — a murder committed by a soul? But you agree that what I saw could indeed have been his own dark soul that pushed him into performing such an act? Metaphorically speaking, you say. Why did I never think of that? Of course, it is possible that he fought with himself and that his own bad conscious forced him into suicide. He had a lot on his conscience; maybe that is what killed him in the end. He was his own worst enemy; every man is. But in your interpretation that would mean the man in question had a conscience, which I am not so sure about.”
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.
My reading of her notes is this: Comrade Raven did not pretend to be a bird, the bearer of bad news. He did not imagine or hallucinate blood. He was a person in power who saw the suicide of the prime minister that night. But the man could not keep his secret any longer and just cracked. He perhaps really lapsed into a temporary psychosis. It probably does not happen very often in his line of work, but one cannot exclude such a possibility. And he felt a strong urge to tell what he saw, to get it out, to confide in somebody. In all probability he was unlikely to talk to a friend or his wife. Whom could he turn to, I ask you, but to a professional who would keep his secret (“how could I tell anyone but you?”)?
I can tell you that I was not only puzzled by the symbolism of the raven, or the question of Raven’s identity, but also — as I mentioned to you earlier — by the form my mother had chosen to express herself. You see, from what I read and detected, and there are many other interesting details in her notes, as you will undoubtedly discover yourself, I am convinced that Raven was not only a witness, but also the executor.
Whoever that persona was, he was sent to the minister not only to deliver the judgment of the powers that be, but to execute it as well.
My mother, once burdened by his terrible secret, confided it to her diary — but not in simple words. She chose the form of a fable. The story of a bird — very much in the tradition of folktales. I think she was careful to compose his story in a literarily convincing way. Her fear and her conscience turned her into a writer — but isn’t that often the case in many a dictatorship? Not that it helps; many writers have experienced just the opposite. Therefore, she hid it carefully.
From some of her comments (and I read you only a few) I see that she, too, suspected that Raven himself had been present in the room both before and during the suicide. Her suspicion — or, better said, her intuition — was that he was there in order to actually explain to the minister that suicide would be the only honorable way out of the impossible situation he had put himself in. Should the minister have had any doubts, that is. Maybe he did not have any doubts; yet Raven spoke about a battle of some kind. Could the two of them have been arguing? After all, according to the notes it seems that their conversation lasted quite a while.
In the end, the one who dispatched him had to be sure of the result, it seems, so the shadow persona waited until the “self-execution” (Mother uses that expression in one place) was over and checked that the minister was dead. Like a real professional. If we are to take the whole fable seriously, which she obviously did.
You will notice that she does not write further of this highly unusual “case” or of this “patient.” That is strange to me (or not strange; it’s indeed logical, depending upon what interpretation you prefer). Had Raven been a true patient, there would have been plenty of material to analyze and write about in scientific publications or conference papers. Why did she stop writing about him so abruptly?
Well, in a way she did not stop. She continued to write about the suicide of the minister. But from another, public side this time. Mother wrote about the real case that had actually motivated her patient — the visitor, witness, or whatever he was — to visit her:
Sure enough, during the next few days the suicide of the prime minister was in the news: The prime minister had been found dead at his home; he had killed himself as the result of a “nervous breakdown.” The news report was short and scarce of details. Therefore, as usual, gossip filled the space left by the news. There were so many gossips in town; his death shook the place almost like an earthquake. Of course, the official story was that he was suspected of collaboration with the so-called enemy forces of the KGB, the CIA, UDBA, and whatnot.
The unofficial story, however, was that one of his three sons was engaged to marry a girl from a highly suspicious background: Her family had relatives in America. At first there was no obvious reaction to the news of the engagement, but then the buzz started: What was the meaning of the prime minister allowing such an act? It was not a simple act of engagement like any other. Being so highly positioned in the Communist Party and the state hierarchy carried certain obligations in his private life, a great responsibility indeed. Therefore, the main question was how to interpret the engagement of the prime minister’s son with a person from a politically “wrong” family — since a family was still an important feature of individual identity in Albania. In a country that prided itself on never giving in to “enemy” bourgeois ideology, could this engagement be a sign of liberalization? On the other hand, it could be just the opposite, a sign of the weakness of the class struggle, an error of judgment by the minister, perhaps a, for him, fatal error.
After only a couple of weeks, however, the prime minister had canceled the wedding. In doing so he demonstrated that his loyalty to the party came first and to his family only second. To admit his misjudgment in public was no small thing to do, yet he thought that he would thus save face. After all, he was the number two man in power; this gesture should have meant something.
However, after a few months of speculation it became obvious that the first secretary had decided to interpret the engagement as a sign of weakness. The old Communist should have known better than to give in to his son’s desire to marry into such a highly unsuitable family, it was rumored to be said. He’s become too soft, too bourgeois, it was whispered. If he cannot control even his own son — how is he supposed to lead the whole country one day?
The minister, indeed, seemingly had lost his grip on power, because the essence of power is control.
A tragic love affair, Romeo and Juliet, some said afterward. But in Albania no one was preoccupied with what happened to the youngsters. Should one indulge the feelings of two youngsters when the security of the state could be at stake? Was it worthwhile to make such a risky decision? Surely the successor was aware of the problematic family when he approved the engagement? If he was not, it speaks even more against him as a future first secretary. The first secretary as a matter of principle should not trust anyone, not even his friends, much less a family with such suspect members. Rather, he should have followed good old Stalinist credo: Trust is good — but control is better.