SUSAN MIRON
655
demanded in every step of the dream enterprise - the collection, sorting,
and interpretation process. Mistakes are punished, often by abduction and
murder.
We learn about the labyrinthine world of the Tabir Sarrail through
Mark-Alem, a scion of the aristocratic Quprili family. The paranoid insis–
tence on complete secrecy he encounters at the Palace of Dreams which
"stands alone and apart from human turmoil, outside all competing opin–
ions and struggles for power, impervious to everything and without con–
tacts with anyone," strongly resembles recent Albanian history under
President Enver Hoxha, who managed to cut Albania off from the rest of
the world. (In postwar Albania, religion was banished, beards and long
hair forbidden, and borders were closed. At one point, the government
made complaints about food shortages punishable by prison terms.)
Mark-Alem's mother, who helps arrange for him to work at the
Palace, imagines it to be:
the only institution capable of ensuring her son's happiness. . its
main advantage lay in its vagueness and impenetrability ... Reality
split in two there and led swiftly to unreality, and the resulting misti–
ness seemed ... likely to offer her son the best possible refuge when
storms broke.
Arriving at his low-level post in the Palace during a "busy period,"
Mark-Alem learns that dreams and the files holding them "swell as the
weather grew colder." He hears from a Palace old-timer about "the ebb
. and flow of dreams," and how their quantity is affected by meteorological
and astronomical phenomena. He envisions thousands of makeshift of–
fices, "sometimes mere shacks," from where peasants were obliged to "set
out before dawn and trudge through the rain and mud to relate their
dreams ... Most of them couldn't even read or write, so they came very
early in the day so as not
to
forget their dreams:"
Exhausted copyists mark most of these peasant-dreams "Useless" and
discard them as part of "the winnowing process." Palace clerks work be–
hind mysterious, unmarked doors in a network of windowless passages,
shuflling about in quiet, dazed herds. Mark-Alem rarely sees the same
person twice. "A permanent cloud of apprehension hung over every–
thing," Kadare writes. Frightened and alienated, Kadare's workers (much
like Manea's in "Composite Biography") sit "totally cut off from one an–
other at cold desks strewn with crazy visions conjured up by the minds of
strangers." Ever fearful of getting lost within the Palace, its cellars bursting
with nightmares and wild imaginings, Mark-Alem believes "he'd rather
be on a frozen plain or in a forest infested with wolves. Yes, a thousand
