The Concert

by Ismail Kadare

  “But Chinese works me up, my pet!”

  She pulled a face.

  “You’ve got a positive gift for sullying everything!”

  He opened his satchel to take out the papers that had to be translated.

  “Keep those horrible hieroglyphics out of my sight!” she shouted. “And don’t go getting undressed - we’re going to see the Kryekurts. We haven’t congratulated them yet on Mark’s engagement.”

  “Whatever you say, my owe.”

  Half an hour later they were going through the Kryekurts’ gate, bearing a large cake. As usual, Hava Fortuzi glanced at the outside staircase leading up to the first floor of the villa. The vines that twined all over it looked pretty lifeless at this time of year.

  Inside the house, in addition to Hava Preza, Musabelli, and several other of the Kryekurts” usual guests come to offer their congratulations, there was an elderly couple the Fortezis hadn’t met before. The newcomers got the impression they were interrupting a very pleasant conversation,

  “Forgive us for being so late,” said Hava Fortuzi. “We couldn’t help it. Ekrem’s up to his eyes in work as usual, and I had a headache…Still, we’re here now! All our best wishes to Mark!…But isn’t he here?”

  “Thank you, thank you!” said Emilie. “Mark’s in the other room with his fiancée. He won’t be a moment…”

  “Don’t disturb them on our account,” laughed Hava Fortuzi, with a wink.

  “He’s teaching her French.”

  “Oh, French! I think I can speak that kind of French myself!” Hava Fortuzi gurgled, “Ekrem, do you remember the French lessons you used to give me when we were engaged?”

  The elderly couple looked shocked. Emilie pursed her lips.

  “And to think it’s Chinese that you’re trying to teach me now!” Hava Fortuzi’s mirth had suddenly turned to tears.

  “There, there, Hava, my dear…” whispered Ekrem, who knew his wife was subject to these mood swings.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d lost control of herself, But her host and hostess and their guests were taken aback. Only Musabelli wore his inevitable smile,

  “Please forgive me!” said Hava Fortuzi, taking a handkerchief and pocket mirror out of her bag.

  “It doesn’t matter in the least, my dear,” said Hava Preza, “It can happen to anyone.“

  “It’s so sad to see how fast time Hies.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “She’s hypersensitive,” Ekrem explained to the elderly couple. “She may react like this to anything, good or bad. She’s always been like this."

  Hava Fortuzi was peering into her compact and trying to repair the damage her tears had done to her mascara. When she had made herself presentable again, she cheered up.

  “We’re so glad about Mark’s engagement,” she said, shutting her compact with a snap, “Ekrem and I often wondered what he was waiting for…”

  “His poor grandmother used to worry too, when she was alive …”

  Ekrem looked at a large photograph hanging on the wall

  “Poor Nurihan, how happy she would have been if she were here today!”

  Now it was Emilie’s turn to burst into tears.

  “And what about you? How’s the work going?” asked Hava Preza to change the subject. “From what Hava says, I gather you’re very busy.”

  “Well…I did have a slack period, bet now, yes, I am pretty occupied.”

  “In other words," said Hava Preza, “relations with China are set fair again. Let’s hope we shall be the better for it! We were talking about it just before you came. And I thought to myself that you, Ekrem, were the person best placed to tell us what’s what.”

  As soon as the conversation turned back to China, the elderly couple seemed to perk up. Gradually everyone joined in, including Musabelli, and all agreed on one point: the improvement in relations with China was welcome^ and they only hoped nothing would happen to spoil it. Occasionally, as they spoke, they would turn to the portrait of old Nurihan, as if asking her for her opinion. She was made for this kind of debate! Each of them thought how surprised she would have been if she could have heard what they were saying! It had all been so different the last time, when Albania broke with the Soviets: for days on end they’d whispered together here in this room, hoping the crisis would get worse and the two governments scratch one another’s eyes out as soon as possible,, shaking with fright at the least sign of a rapprochement and breathing sighs of relief when such signs turned out to be wrong. Now it was quite the opposite: they trembled at the smallest hint of a rapture, and wished with all their hearts that Albania’s friendship with China would last for ever.

  As if to get old Nurihan on their side, bet also to reassure them-selves, they listed all the advantages they could expect to enjoy from such a relationship. How stupid they’d been to be so hostile to the Chinese at first! How sarcastic they’d been about the customs, dress and language of the Chinese, when in fact these same Chinese were really their salvation! It wasn’t jest a matter of their rapprochement with the Americans, which had come about only recently and served to open their eyes. Long before that there had been other, incredible scraps of information. At first they’d rejected them as absurd inventions, dreams or slanders. But after going into them further and seeking evidence from people who’d been there, they’d come to the conclusion that the Chinese were treating former capitalists very well: some had been made assistant heads of factories, and even, as a signal favour, given a percentage of the profits. This had produced many sighs among the old guard in Tirana: some former factory owners, their hands shaking with age or illness, even started to work out their possible future gains. But they soon had to yield to the facts: however delightful the effects of Sino-Albanian friendship, it was highly unlikely that such a state of affairs would exist here, at least for another couple of generations. After that, who could tell? Their morale then plunged to a very low ebb, until a fresh crop of rumours came to pep them up. Forget about your percentages and other such foolishness, they were told, All that’s over and done with. Consider instead the real advantages we can get out of the Chinese. Haven’t you heard what’s going on there? A storm has been unleashed, sweeping all before it. And recently they’ve turned on the Party, and they’re trampling it underfoot. Imagine, a communist country smashing its own Party! It’s a miracle, and that’s putting it mildly! That’s what you want to watch in China, never mind about the rest. The Party’s the key to everything. When you attack the Party you attack the very foundations. And after that, there’s nothing left standing. All is disintegration and chaos. It’s only people like us, in our little corner, who are left in peace. And you dare to complain? Hush! Keep quiet! Not a word! We’re in the front seats, watching the show. In Shanghai and Peking the communists cut one another’s throats. The class struggle, the war between the schools of thought and the party lines or whatever the hell they call them now — all this has been transposed to within the Party itself. Their hatred is directed against one another now. And who performed this miracle? The Chinese themselves! And you have the cheek to criticize them? You don’t realize what it means to have the communists tearing one another to pieces? Perhaps you’d rather they turned against us? So stop ranting on about the Chinese - just bow your heads and say a prayer for them! They’re a godsend to us, the instrument through which divine Providence has chosen to help us!

  Such were the arguments that had been bandied about before and that they now adapted to the present situation. That was the truth, and time had confirmed it even beyond their expectations. But now, as then^ enthusiasm was punctuated by doubt: would the Chinese continue in the same vein? Mightn’t it be a false spring, one of those shows they’re so good at? When they’d finished settling scores amongst themselves, mightn’t they round more furiously than before on the ex-bourgeois? “You rejoiced too soon! You thought we’d forgotten you, did you? Well, now we’re going to hit and club and decapitate any of you we can lay our hands on.”
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  “I’ll never forget when they launched the slogan, Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools compete among themselves,” said Hava Preza. “That gave us all a flicker of hope again. At last they’re loosening their grip a bit, we told ourselves. But what happened? It was only a monstrous trap, one of the most extraordinary ever. The unfortunate butterflies flocked to the meadow covered with daisies, but instead of nectar they found only poison.”

  “Alas!” sighed Musabelli.

  “That was the whole object of the exercise,” said Hava Preza. “To attract the butterflies to their doom.”

  “Alas!” sighed Musabelli again.

  “And do you remember what happened next?” The hand holding Hava Preza’s cup shook so much that a couple of drops of coffee splashed unnoticed on her dress. “Instead of having a meadow with a hundred flowers in front of us, we were confronted by the Gobi Desert, as poor Nurihan used to say.”

  “She wasn’t often wrong,” murmured Musabelli.

  But for some time, without venturing actually to interrupt, Ekrem Fortuzi had been shaking his head to show he didn’t agree with what Hava Preza was saying.

  “Allow me to contradict you,” he said finally, as Hava Preza stopped to take a sip of coffee. “It’s quite natural that you should be sceptical: we’ve often been deceived, sometimes quite cruelly, as in the case of the break with the Soviets, on which we’d built such hopes. But this time, believe me, things are different,”

  “Ekrem’s right,” said one of the other visitors. “It’s not the same this time. Who would ever have thought the Chinese would invite the American president to go and see them? And yet that’s what’s happened.”

  “True enough,” agreed the others.

  “Maybe,” Hava Preza conceded. “I only hope you’re right! Don’t you think I want the same thing as you do? I’ve wished a thousand times that it should be so!”

  “Believe me!” said Ekrem Fortuzi again. He was now quite carried away. “There’s no one in the whole of Albania, perhaps in the whole of Europe, who has studied the philosophy of Mao Zedong as thoroughly as I have, I have unravelled all his secrets, understood all his hints, worked out all the symbolical implications of his slogans in a way that is only possible if you study the original texts. While all of you were making fun of me for learning Chinese, that was what I was doing: trying to find the key to the enigma,”

  “As far as learning Chinese is concerned, you were right,” said Hava Preza. “On that subject you were certainly wiser than the rest of us.”

  “Thanks very much!” said Ekrem. “But where was I?”

  “The philosophy of Mao Zedong.”

  “The enigma.”

  “Oh yes! Well, after going deeper and deeper into Mao’s doctrine I was convinced of one thing: it would be hard to find anyone this century who’s done as much for us, the dispossessed bourgeois, as he has. I suppose that sounds paradoxical to you?”

  “We’re past finding anything paradoxical as far as the Chinese are concerned,” said Musabelli.

  “Mao is our only hope,” Ekrem went on. “He’s the one who’ll save us from the cursed class struggle that hounds us like the Furies!”

  “The class struggle!” said Hava Preza with a shudder. “To think of spending all our lives in the shadow of those three awful words!”

  “And you see them everywhere!” cried Musabelli. “On walls, in shop windows, even in love songs sometimes! Sorry, Ekrem — if you ask me, if there’s one thing well never get free of it’s those words!”

  “With the help of the Chinese I think we shall,” Ekrem answered.

  “I doubt it.”

  “It doesn’t seem very likely to me either,” said Hava Preza,

  “You mark my words,” Ekrem insisted. “Especially in the last few years, when they’ve undergone constant modification, Mao’s thoughts have accorded less and less importance to the class struggle — in the end it’s become as insubstantial as an opium smoker’s dream. Believe me — Mao’s philosophy now secretes a kind of drug that brings oblivion, where everything is reconciled with everything else as on the plains of Purgatory…”

  “Religion deals in reconciliation too,” said Hava Preza. “It’s been talking about it for two thousand years. Not to mention hundreds of philosophers and poets. So there’s nothing new about your Mao.”

  “There’s nothing new about reconciliation itself, I know,” Ekrem admitted, “but you can’t deny that to hear a communist leader talking about it is a bit of a novelty! When religion and philosophy preach general harmony it doesn’t help us a bit — on the contrary, the more they talk about it the worse things go for us! But when Mao Zedong talks about it, that changes everything!”

  “Yes indeed!” chorused the elderly couple.

  “Mao, pastor to a billion human beings, the great helmsman, the red sue of the peoples of the earth, the fourth or fifth great classic of communist doctrine, ha ha!”

  “Ekrem is right!” Musabelli conceded.

  “Absolutely,” said the others.

  “And take this challenge to the Party that we’ve talked about before…Don’t forget the Party’s the main thing, the foundation of everything else. And when the foundations start to crumble you can expect the rest to follow.”

  “Talking of which, I heard something about some manoeuvres here where some tanks, I think it was, encircled a Party committee…”

  “What? What?”

  “For heaven’s sake don’t pay any attention to that kind of thing! Tanks, Party committees…forget it!”

  “Hava’s right! Let’s get back to the Chinese!”

  “Mao!”

  “Are we really going to owe our salvation to him? Did we have that treasure all this time without realizing its value?”

  “People never appreciate things till they’re oe the point of losing them.”

  “No question of losing him!”

  “Out of the question!”

  “Relations are getting better.”

  “Things always get sorted out in the end.”

  “I thought I’d have a fit when I first heard the rumours about a cooling-off ! Was the Lord going to abandon us again? Just as fate was smiling on us for once, God seemed to be turning his back on us.”

  “Ekrem has shown he’s got more intuition and perspicacity than any of us.”

  “That didn’t stop you making fun of me!”

  “Forget all that now, and recite something to us in that wonderful new lingo of yours.”

  “By the way, where’s Mark got to? He hasn’t even put his head round the door!”

  “Leave him alone — he’s all right where he is! Come on, Ekrem — they tell me you’re jolly good at Chinese!”

  “Well…”

  “Now then, Ekrem, don’t be coy!”

  They could tell that with a bit more persuasion he would perform.

  All this could be dimly heard in the next room, by Mark and his fiancée.

  “Il fait froid,” she read from the textbook open in front of her. Then they both looked up and gazed into one another’s eyes. Hers looked rather tearful and troubled. Il fait froid” she said again faintly, looking at him as if she expected something from him,

  As a matter of fact, soon after they first met and just before they first had physical relations, he had told her about his one previous affair, with a married neighbour whom he’d taught French some years ago. This adventure was closely linked with the words his fiancée had just spoken: when his cliente (the only word he could think of now to describe the young woman) had reached the phrase Il fait froidj they had abandoned the textbook and made love. The brief episode remained his most vivid memory.

  To his astonishment he saw that any reference to this incident upset his fiancée, to whom also he’d started giving French lessons. Every so often she would ask him to tell her about it again: she wanted to know as much as possible about his former neighbour and about his life in general in those days. What is she doing now?
she would murmur, imagining one of those lovely, enigmatic creatures who, having had some ups and downs in their love life, are not supposed to be excessively attached to their husbands. Mark told the little he knew, and promised to show the other girl to her when she came back to visit the house (she had grown up in an apartment on the first ioor). And what about him - the husband? What did he do afterwards? Was that why they separated? Mark shrugged. He didn’t know. He wouldn’t have thought so. If it hadn’t happened for that reason it might well have happened for another. They were both distant and elusive people, seeming to live in another world. As a matter of fact, perhaps it was all really like that then…

  “What do you mean — ‘it was all really like that’?” asked Mark’s fiancée.

  He tried to give her some idea of that unforgettable period when everyone lived in a state of wild hope and expectation…The atmosphere was incomparably more intense then than now, though of course things were the other way round. In those days they (he nodded towards the other room) longed for sudden change, whereas now they wanted things to stay as they were…

  “The two periods seem to have quite a lot of things in common, though,’ mused Mark’s fiancée.

  He almost told her that the similarity between the two situations might have been the cause of their own engagement, but decided to put it off till later, when they knew one another better. But he himself was convinced that this more than anything else was what had made him want to get married.

  “Il fait froid,” she repeated softly, still with the same imploring expression. “Tell me some more about those days.”

  “What else is there to tell? As I said, it was like being in a fog…”

  “Don’t you remember some particular incident?” she asked, undressing so slowly she looked as if she might freeze like a statue.

  “Il fait froid - don’t you think it’s rather cold?”

  “I suppose you think the world’s turned upside down?”

  “What do you mean?” She had been almost panting. Now she held her breath.