“May I use your telephone for a moment, please?” he asked.
Still laughing, the boss nodded towards the phone, and Dersha went over and dialled a number. Silva and Linda exchanged glances. At each tern of the dial, the boss’s laughter grew less. Finally, as before, they heard a phone ringing at the other end of the line, but again there was no reply. Simon’s face, though anxious, still wore its previous blissful expression. It looked as if it had been left there by mistake. At length he hung up.
“So what did he do then, this Victor?” said the boss. “That is his name, didn’t you say?”
Simon Dersha was still sitting there as if trying to make his way into the others’ universe, but the unwonted expression on his face prevented Silva from speaking freely. She made an effort and made some comment on Victor’s plight, at which the boss began to laugh louder than ever. Stealing a glance at Simon, she thought she now saw a tinge of irony in his happiness.
He slipped out of the room unobtrusively when the boss’s hilarity was at its height.
“What’s the matter with him, wandering around all morning like a sleepwalker?” said Linda, not even bothering to lower her voice.
“Don’t pay any attention.”
“No, but did you take a good look at him? I’ve never noticed that navy blue suit before, and I think it makes him look very weird!”
Silva nodded.
The boss sighed, as he usually did after he’d been laughing. Then the whole office lapsed once more into silence.
“You think you’re so wonderful, don’t you?” said Simon Dersha inwardly in the neighbouring office. And he indulged in a condescending smile. As recently as yesterday the laughter still ringing in his ears would have made him feel lonely and excluded. But now the mirth, the larking about that had once tortured him like something precious for ever beyond his reach, seemed tarnished and worthless. He felt completely free from the inferiority complex he’d always suffered from in relation to his colleagues. And this miracle had come about in a single night, like something out of a fairy tale.
If they only knew where I was yesterday evening, he thought. All morning he’d been tore between the desire to tell them where he’d dined the previous day and a kind of inexplicable reticence. He’d seen from the way they looked at him that they were wondering what was the matter. And at the thought that what had happened to him was beyond anything they could possibly have imagined, he was filled once again with delight.
The previous evening he’d been to dinner with one of the best-known members of the government. It was like a dream; sometimes he couldn’t even believe in it himself. Perhaps that was why, this morning, he’d tried three times to phone the friend who’d introduced him to the minister in the first place, and then taken him to the dinner party: he just wanted to exchange a few words with him about it, in order to convince himself that the miracle really had happened. But as ill-luck would have it, he hadn’t been able to get through.
The miracle had taken place in stages. It had begun a week before with a phone call from a man with whom Simon had remained on friendly terms since they’d worked together in a commercial firm, and who had since risen to become a vice-minister. The man had told him that one of these days -- he’d tell him the exact date in due course - he’d take him to dinner in a place he’d never even dreamed of. When the two of them had eventually met for coffee and the other man had said what that place was, Simon had been dumbstruck. Was it really possible, he kept stammering, that an ordinary pen-pusher like him, a person of no importance…?
“But that’s just it,” the other had replied. “Ordinary people, honest unassuming workers, are the very backbone of both the Party and the State. Do you see, Simon?”
Then, lowering his voice:
“I don’t mind admitting I don’t know myself why the minister suddenly felt the need, or the desire, whichever you like, to set up more direct relations, outside ordinary office routine, with workers from various areas of activity. If you ask me, politicians think that kind of contact helps them keep their finger on the pulse of public opinion. Well, a few days ago he told me he’d like to meet someone from the Ministry of Construction, an ordinary worker, not a senior official — he was already up to his eyes in senior officials! In short, when he told me he wanted to find out what went on from just a humble, honest, ordinary worker. I thought straight away of you.”
As he remembered these words, Simon felt as if his eyes were still misty with tears. He’d spent days afterwards waiting anxiously for a phone call from the vice-minister. Sometimes it seemed to him their conversation had never taken place. Other doubts followed. What if the minister had changed his mind? What if he really had said that about wanting to get to know ordinary people, but had only been speaking generally, and Simon’s friend had been mistaken in trying to invoke him? At one point he decided it was all wishful thinking on the part of his friend, and foolish naivety on his own. He’d almost given up hope when his friend finally phoned. Not only had he thus kept his promise, but he also gave Simon the exact date and time of the dinner party they were to attend together. Even now, several days later, it gave Simon a pleasant glow inside to think of that phone call.
He was alone in his office now. He could hear the sound of doors opening and shutting along the corridor, but they seemed very far away. He thought again of his colleagues in the other office, and it filled him with sardonic satisfaction to remind himself that from now on it was they who should be envying him, and not the other way round. Henceforth he could look down on their humdrum existence, with its chatting and joking and noisy laughter over their morning coffee. Up till today, when they passed him - greeting him, if they did so at all, as if he were almost beneath their notice -- they’d probably asked each other how the devil the poor wretch managed to get along, apparently devoid of any object in life. The contrast was so striking he’d often agreed with them: “They’re quite right, really — I wonder, myself, why I’m alive at all.” And he used to reflect thus quite humbly, with a resignation untinged with resentment, placidly accepting the role of unobtrusive spectator of other people’s lives. Sometimes, seeing them burst gaily in and out of one another’s offices, he’d try to imagine the relationships that existed between them. If one of them looked especially bright or tired first thing in the morning, he scented a special significance in the fact, as in the tone of his colleagues’ voices when they exchanged furtive phone calls. Sometimes his imagination ran away with him even further, and he had visions of them naked in one another’s arms, their faces buried in shadow and mystery. Then he would heave a sigh, and say to himself under his breath: “No, I can’t be cut out for that sort of life.”
But now the situation was reversed, A single dinner party, and everything was turned upside down as if by an earthquake. And he could feel within himself not merely a combination of euphoria and scorn, but also the first stirrings of blind rage. He couldn’t have said whether his anger was directed against the others or against himself. It was a frustrated wrath, provoked by the length of time he’d been living in a kind of limbo because of his own submissiveness and lack of jealousy. And it was accompanied by the dim stirrings of a desire for revenge. But this feeling was still very faint indeed: it was alien to his nature, and found it hard to take root there.
They’d been talking about China, he mused. He’d heard other discussions on that subject lately: it had been mentioned at the dinner party itself, though he hadn’t been able to concentrate sufficiently to catch exactly what was said. Everything seemed dim and vague, apart from what had actually been happening to him, which he couldn’t get out of his mind. It must be like that, he thought, when you were in love. Not that he’d ever been in love himself, but other people were always going into such raptures on the subject it must be pretty wonderful But he was sure his present feelings were more wonderful still, and more lofty, because more rare.
Most people, if not all, had been in love. But very few had had the experience of dining with a minister
.
Yet again he recalled what he’d felt like just before it was time for him to set out. He’d decided to wear a navy blue suit which he’d had made some years back out of some expensive Polish material. He’d kept it for special occasions, and in due course it had come back into fashion again. He remembered trying to select a shirt, and how his wife had hovered around him with an expression that struck him as somehow disagreeable. Looking at himself in his dressing-table mirror, he’d been struck by something rather pitiful about the rawness of his carefully scraped cheeks and the redness of his neck inside its stiffly starched collar. Just as he was leaving, his wife asked him for the umpteenth time if he’d remembered to take a handkerchief, and all the way to his destination he’d worried about what he would do if he suddenly sneezed in the middle of dinner. He tried to dismiss the incongruous thought from his mind, but it was no good: he kept remembering a story he’d read at school, about a minor official who sneezed in the presence of some bigwig. The grown-up Simon quickened his pace and told himself he was a civil servant in a socialist country: his situation had nothing in common with that of a bourgeois pen-pusher who swooned away in terror because he’d sneezed in the presence of a superior.
Simon Dersha’s nervousness subsided somewhat when he was joined on the way to the party by the vice-minister, then grew again as he noticed that his protector too had lost some of his usual self-assurance. The nearer they got to the minister’s residence the more their conversation languished, until at last the only sound to be heard was that of their footsteps. Several times one of them said “What?” though the other hadn’t said anything. The street was only faintly lit, which made the damp surface of the road and the iron railings round the gardens look even darker than usual “This is it,” said the vice-minister in a scarcely audible voice as they came to a two-storey villa.
Memory is governed by laws of its own. Simon’s mind was a blank as to the time between the moment when the vice-minister said “This is it” and the moment when they entered the villa. But he could remember the dinner itself quite plainly: some parts of it seemed engraved in his memory for ever, while others were still suspended in a kind of mist, a tantalizing cloud of vagueness.
There were four or five other guests, all distinguished officials who would have been the centre of attention at any public gathering, but who were here reduced to mere ciphers in comparison with their host.
Alone in his office, Simon Dersha lit a cigarette. No, he really couldn’t recall the miracle in its entirety. It was like something you can only swallow if you break it up into pieces; otherwise it might choke you. Simon sighed. Fortunately, he thought, it all passed off without my dropping any bricks. And he was right. The minister had turned to him a few times, asking how the building of the big factories was getting on, especially the power stations in the north where the Chinese were working. Simon had answered as best he could.
He would have been hard put to it to endure any more particular attention, especially as, during the dinner, he had a feeling that every dish was a trap. He couldn’t relax until they came to the cheese and the fruit: then, thank God, the problems were over -- he was in no further danger of splashing himself with some elaborate sauce. He hadn’t needed to use his handkerchief, though he’d taken it out of his pocket a couple of times and pressed it mechanically to his nose: the smell of clean, well-ironed linen was pleasant and reassuring. Yes, things really couldn’t have gone any better. Not the slightest thing had happened that might have made one say, as is so often the case, if only this or that hadn’t happened; perhaps I ought to have answered such-and-such a question differently.
There’d been only one incident, but it was nothing to do with him - so far from it, indeed, that even now he couldn’t have said whether it was a good thing or a bad. It consisted of a telephone call. At about half-past ten, just as they had finished the second course — the one that was the most difficult to handle without any spills -- one of the phones had started to ring…Even though so much time had elapsed since, Simon had the feeling, every time he recalled the phone conversation which had followed, that recalling it was his last hope of jolting his memory into lucidity, for it must have been the most significant part of the whole evening. But it hadn’t seemed so at the time, and his memory of it was as of something distant and irrelevant.
When the phone rang, the host had risen from the table to answer it, leaving his guests still laughing at some pleasantry.
“Yes… Hallo, Comrade Enver…”
The guests exchanged glances. It must be Him. This would anyway have been an important, an unforgettable occasion. But such a phone call, at such a late hour, made it doubly important. A memorable dinner, during which Comrade Enver had rung up…Even now Simon felt his heart miss a beat at the thought of it, though he wondered whether something significant really had occurred, or whether it was merely the product of his own anxiety. But no, he decided: his uneasiness had been a reaction to something outside himself. The first thing that had alerted him was the way the minister spoke. His voice had been quite calm to start with, but then there’d been a sudden check, and he’d looked as though he’d suffered a shock. The change in the minister’s voice produced an even deeper silence among his guests, so that the belated clatter of a fork on a plate made every head turn towards it. As for the phone conversation itself, it had apparently concerned the most unremarkable of subjects: the caller was asking for explanations about the expulsion of certain tank officers from the Party. This was a subject of relatively minor importance, certainly not enough to render the minister speechless. Still, as Simon had reflected later, on his way home, it was rather astonishing that the leader of the Party himself should phone up so late at night on so insignificant a subject. But then perhaps it wasn’t so surprising after all. The fact that he’d rung up at that hour might just as easily mean that the subject of the conversation was one of those minor matters one puts off till the end of the day - maybe it had suddenly occurred to him after dinner.
Throughout the rest of the evening Simon had done his best to dismiss that phone call from his mind, and it seemed to him that everyone else, including his host, was doing the same. The minister was still very affable and vivacious, but every so often, in the midst of the conversation, he seemed to freeze, and his eyes went dull and vague - like Simon’s recollections. But when he took the trouble to think things over for a moment he felt reassured. The phone conversation and the minister’s twinge of anxiety seemed quite normal The sort of thing that happens all the time, he told himself: you’d need to be really looking for trouble to think it unusual And that, though his first reaction was always one of doubt and resentment, was the conclusion he always came to eventually whenever he looked back on the incident.
Walking home with the vice-minister, his general state of euphoria was disturbed two or three times by the memory of the phone call. He even allowed himself to refer to it once, but his companion only said, “Yes, quite…” This made Simon think his own experience hadn’t been purely subjective. But after a little while he managed to put it out of his mind.
And now, here in his office, he did so again. I really am hopeless, he told himself. I had that incredible stroke of luck, that wonderful opportunity, and all I can do is look for complications! All his calculations about the phone call seemed utterly absurd. Waves of exultation swamped his uneasiness yet again, and he started to think once more of the office next door and the trivial conversations of its occupants. Even his official superiors all seemed less important than before. And this time his feeling of triumph lingered: everything seemed easier, more within his reach. At one point, though, his eye lighted on the telephone that wasn’t working that morning. He remembered the unanswered ringings in the vice-minister’s office, and sighed.
The day’s work was nearly ended. He went over to the window and stood for a while looking out at the comings and goings in the square. The air felt damp, bet the weather looked too bright for rain.
He heard a key being turned in the lock of a nearby office. Footsteps echoed along the corridor. He looked at his watch and took his owe keys out of his pocket. And a few minutes later he was walking across Government Square as usual, another anonymous pedestrian amidst the crowd of clerks hurrying home.
4
ALTHOUGH THE RAINS WERE LATE, it was already autumn. Every morning, clouds would appear on the horizon and fill the sky with pointless peals of thunder, only to vanish at the end of the afternoon without having shed a drop of moisture. After this had gone on for a whole week, people reconciled themselves to the idea that it was going to be a dry autumn. Meanwhile all the other seasonal changes took place as usual: the leaves turned colour, the temperature dropped, the birds migrated. As usual too, painters flocked to the headquarters of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union to get their annual permits to concentrate on autumnal themes.
But even before anyone noticed the first fallen leaf or the growing scarcity of birds, most people had started to be aware of something else: an obvious fall in the level of seniority among the delegates attending Sino-Albanian meetings. The change might well have begun earlier, but as the national days of both China and Albania fell in the autumn, it was thee that it became unmistakably evident.
No doubt about it, the Chinese delegations were not what they had been. Almost all of them were led by lesser officials than usual: vice-ministers instead of ministers, seconds-in-command instead of generals, assistant directors instead of heads of technology, and so on. And of course these lesser Chinese delegates were met at Tirana airport by members of the Albanian Party who had never appeared before at any official ceremony. As if this were not enough, the composition of the delegations themselves became more and more peculiar, not to say outlandish. Thus a delegation of popular orchestras from South-East China, led by the assistant editor of agricultural broadcasting, was succeeded by a ceramics delegation led by an assistant director, and this in turn was followed by another described merely as a delegation of peasants.
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