The Concert

by Ismail Kadare

  Disappointed by listening in direct, he waited eagerly for the first “harvest” from the temporary mikes, the ones placed in private houses and bedrooms, and above all those fixed to people’s clothes. There were seven of these, almost the number prescribed in the bi-monthly plan. Tchan was sure that what was recorded on these tapes would prove to be the most important part of their work.

  Everyone was waiting for them and trying to conceal the gleam of anticipation in his eyes.

  One morning when he walked into the building where he worked he sensed that they had arrived. He couldn’t have said where he felt it first: by the box where the sentry stood; as he passed some of his colleagues on the stairs; or in the characteristic silence of the corridors. Anyhow, when his assistant came into his office, Tchan knew already what he was going to say:

  “Comrade Tchan — the first tape …!”

  “It’s come, has it? Bring it in at once.”

  “I’ve got it here.”

  Tchan had given orders that no one was to listen to it before he did. He was very excited. He locked the door, lit a cigarette, and asked his assistant to start.

  After an hour’s listening he was even more disappointed than he had been by the permanent mikes. His assistant tried to catch something of interest by rewinding the tape several times, but it consisted mainly of silences with crowd and traffic noises in the background. There was an occasional hoot from a taxi, or a car door banging; the few odd scraps of speech were of no significance whatsoever. But what could be more natural? Tchan tried to reassure himself. He ought never to have listened to this tape just as it was, even before his closest assistants. It was like a great mass of mud and stones which would have to be carefully sifted if it was to yield the least particle of gold.

  “The sound quality’s very good, isn’t it?” said his colleague,

  Tchan nodded wearily. What more could you expect from a soulless piece of apparatus? He remembered his speech about the human ear. If he could have talked to his old spies now he’d have treated them with even more deference.

  But his disillusion didn’t last long. Three days later his assistant received the first serious results, selected from tapes on mini-mikes that had just been recovered.

  Tchan shut his eyes so as to concentrate better. The recording contained complaints about the state, the Cultural Revolution the unprecedented shortages and the universal chaos. Some people objected to the banning of ancient customs, others to anything that undermined the authority of the Party. Thee came some very dubious remarks made by the first secretary of the Party in N— to some dinner guests of his: he was being malicious and sarcastic at the expense of the central government Tee-hee, Tchan chuckled. His relations with the first secretary had cooled since he’d summoned Tchan to ask him for a report about the installation of the qietingqis. Tchan had refused to tell him anything, and the first secretary had flown off the handle. After they’d exchanged a couple of quotations from Mao Zedongs Tchan, realizing the first secretary had the advantage of him on that score, decided to tell him straight: “I’m not accountable to anyone but the Zhongnanhail” At the mere sound of that dread name the first secretary started to stammer so much that Tchan almost felt sorry for him. “I’m not even accountable to my minister,” he’d said to soothe him down a bit. And now here the fellow was, making fun of him to his guests: “He’s not a bad sort, old Tchan, but he really is as thick as two planks!”

  Laugh away, thought Tchan grimly. His face showed no expression. His assistant stopped the tape and glanced at him to see if he wanted to go on listening.

  “Perhaps more out of curiosity than for the actual content… ?” suggested the aide. “It’s only a private matter…intimate, really…very intimate …Though perhaps one might detect something that’s-… Well, the way the couple try to imitate the West, even in. their physical relationship…a certain excess in their love-making… In short, they adopt capitalist ways of doing it, like …like.,.”

  This last, unfinished phrase made Tchan’s mind up for him, and he signed to his assistant to start the tape again. They both listened in silence, as before. Not a muscle moved in the director’s face.

  From the loudspeaker there came first the panting of the man, then that of the woman, quieter. She was almost sobbing as she implored him not to do something which she apparently at the same time desired: “No, not like that …No, please, not like that… It’s wrong…Don’t you think it’s wrong?…Ah…”

  “Well, at last we’ve got something really important,’ said the assistant when the couple’s moans had ceased…

  From the very first words, director Tchan had known why his aide had kept the next bit till last. He knitted his brow. This was what he called results! Just what he’d been waiting for all this time. Words hostile to Jiang Qing. He started to break into a cold sweat. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard people insult her…So why was he so worked up? …The black-souled Empress Vu was an angel of light compared with this one…The old dodderer must have gone soft in the head to put up with such a viper…Director Tchae had heard all this before, or rather read it in his spies’ reports, bet it was another matter altogether to hear the words spoken by human voices and accompanied by malicious laughter.

  It wasn’t until his aide had left the room that Tchan began to feel a little calmer. He lit a cigarette, though there was another, still unfinished, resting on the ashtray. The material supplied by these mikes was clearly quite a different kettle of fish from the work of his spies. They merely reported things orally or in writing, relying on their memories, and the value of their evidence depended not only of the acuteness of their hearing but also on their training, talent, culture, and state of mind at the time. However reliable and devoted they were, there was always an element of uncertainty about their reports, which might exaggerate things or play them down, distort them wholly or in part, or even invent them altogether. It depended on the individual spy’s ambition, his recent successes or failures, and his personal relations with the suspect, if he happened to know him. The spies looked down on agents provocateurs and ordinary informers as underhand, unreliable, and often corrupt. “We don’t skulk around deceiving people,” they boasted. Our work is clean and straightforward: we put our ear to the wall or the ceiling and report truthfully. We heard this or that, or we didn’t hear anything at all Whereas informers and agents provocateurs — ugh! they make things up, they slander people, they settle personal scores…” Nevertheless, the spies themselves weren’t always entirely objective, whereas this new equipment was honesty itself, and reported everything exactly as it was, fully and impartially. Now Director Tchan really could pride himself on doing his job properly.

  Now he really could listen in. The implications were dizzying. The whole chaos and tumult of humanity would now be wafted up to him. This morning’s work opened up vistas of light and darkness, ecstasy and horror. He thought of the mysterious power exercized by the demons of old. What could they do that he himself couldn’t do now?

  8

  Van Mey met his friends at the end of the week. They swapped the latest news as usual; as usual it was awful, and could only get worse. A fierce power struggle was said to be going on among the factions in Peking. The winter would only bring new waves of terror. Apparently Mao wasn’t well

  “An Albanian delegation came to the factory yesterday,” said Van Mey, “and I had to take them round.”

  “What were they like? What did they say?”

  “Hard to say, really. I took them to the shop floor, as we usually do with foreigners, but they just looked and smiled. You couldn’t tell what they were thinking.”

  “How can they like what they see? And they don’t know half the horrors we have to live with…”

  “All they see is just window-dressing,’ said Van Mey.

  “But it’s not very difficult to see past it.”

  “Perhaps they do see past it, but they pretend not to,” said Van Mey. “In Albania, apparently, pe
ople go to concerts to listen to Beethoven - the women wear lipstick and jewellery. The delegation must have noticed how barren and monotonous our lives are here.”

  “But they pretend not to notice. Partly for political reasons, partly because they think this sort of life is quite good enough for the Chinese.”

  “Do you think so? Well, I think their own lives will gradually become just as arid as ours. Then they’ll understand how awful it is, but by then it’ll be too late.”

  “All the time I was taking them round I wanted to say to them: ‘Are you blind? How can you possibly not see what’s going on here?'”

  “That would have been sheer madness!”

  “Maybe, but if I’d had the chance Pd have whispered a message to them in the few words of French I know. Pd have told them, ‘Don’t believe anything you see — everything is going to the dogs!’ But it was quite impossible! I only had about half a minute alone with one of them, and as soon as I opened my mouth the other guide showed up. But I think that Albanian guessed something.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Almost certain.”

  They went on trudging along the muddy road, amid the rats left by the wheels of heavy lorries. It was cold.

  “Well probably be able to meet next week for you know what… The medium is going to get in touch. So on Thursday or Friday …”

  “ill be there,” said Van Mey. “Without fail!”

  9

  Every morning now when he got to his office, Tchan, instead of looking at the papers, or any urgent reports, or his timetable for the day, sat straight down and listened to the tapes that had been recovered during the previous night.

  After which, he usually looked very down in the mouth, and was in a bad temper for most of the morning. His assistants had noticed all this, and had tried to think of a way of getting him to listen to the tapes at the end of the day instead of at the beginning. But all their efforts were vain. And to think this was only the start! What would it be like when the weather got really cold and people got even more discontented? The qietingqis” tapes would overflow with complaints.

  They were full enough now, in the middle of autumn. It was hard to see how they could hold more, or more sinister, grumbles. Everyone and everything was castigated, no one and nothing was spared. Insults were directed as much against members of the Party as against yesterday’s men. Supporters of Zhou Enlai bad-mouthed supporters of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing to the top of their bent, while the latter did the same to Deng Xiaoping, and all of them joined together to criticize Mao. Tchan couldn’t believe his ears. He wound the tape back. But there it was — he hadn’t been imagining things. What a diabolical racket!

  On many a morning Tchan found himself burying his head in his hands, or clenching his jaw so hard he could scarcely feel it. What was all this clamour? According to the proverb, water must go murky before it can start to clear. Was this the explanation? He shrank from this hypothesis. But Chairman Mao couldn’t have made a mistake. It must be the Chinese themselves: they had been getting more wicked lately.

  Tchan felt his own attitude hardening daily. He had sent one report to the Zhongnanhai via the two envoys, who had jest left N—, and he was now preparing another. When instructions came from the capital, he would strike. And he would strike without mercy, so that the citizens of N— would remember it for generations.

  Later on, at the end of the day’s work, he pet his report in an envelope, sealed it, and sent it, together with two tapes, to the villa in Peking where foreign delegations were put up. The covering note read as follows: “As none of our staff speaks Albanian, we are sending you, for decoding, some tapes concerning the Albanian delegation which has just left N—.” Tchan was exhausted. He locked up his office and went out to the waiting car, “Home,” he told the driver.

  The car had to stop in the Street of the People’s Communes. A crowd was blocking the road.

  “Now what’s the matter?” growled Tchan.

  The driver got out to see. He was soon back,

  “A pedestrian’s been crashed by a bulldozer,” he said, starting up the car again. “A man called Van Mey.”

  “Van Mey?”

  It seemed to Tchan he’d heard that name before. But by the time the car had left the crowd behind, he’d forgotten it.

  10

  And so the winter went by, one of the worst director Tchan had ever known, full of work and worry. Far away in Peking the power struggle apparently still went on, though no one could say which of the two sides was getting the upper hand. Now one and now the other was borne upwards. Only the Zhongnanhai remained unmoved and unassailable, above the mêlée. Tchan felt his own star was hitched to it from now on.

  He’d had to deal with plenty of problems during the winter. Once or twice he’d come quite close to disaster, but in the end chance had been on his side. The microphones were an additional complication. They had become the main cause of tension between him and the other local officials, giving rise to rivalries, intrigues and reversals of alliances. Sometimes Tchan felt he would never struggle free of this imbroglio.

  Meanwhile the installation of microphones went on, with the inevitable ups and downs, pleasant and unpleasant surprises. But Tchan was more used to it now; he’d gradually become immunized, as to a poison, by his daily dose, The same thing seemed to be true of the population in general: the rumours about the mikes had died down, as the enYoys from the Zhongnanhai had said they would.

  But time, though it sometimes hung heavy, was passing by, and Tchan was amazed when, at the first meeting held to exchange information about the qietingqis, one of his subordinates started his speech with the words:

  “It was just a year ago that in accordance with direct instructions from Chairman Mao, our town began installing listening devices …”

  The meeting was attended by two representatives of the Zhongnanhai, different ones this time, who took down copious notes about everything. The speakers dealt with every aspect of micro-surveillance, exchanging experience, drawing conclusions, and calling attention to successes and shortcomings.

  The conference lasted two days, and after it had ended and the Zhongnanhai envoys had left, Tchan realized that everything was going to continue just as before. His attention had been caught by one out of the many speeches he had heard at the meeting. It had been delivered by a young technician, who had entitled his paper, “On some changes brought about in the way people speak by the introduction of qietingqis.” Tchan had noticed this phenomenon himself some time before, but it was like a revelation to hear it spoken of and see it written down in black and white. As a matter of fact the young man had only touched on the subject and not gone into it deeply. His main point was that the task of those whose job it was to transcribe the tapes was getting more and more difficult, for many of the conversations recorded now required decoding if they were to mean anything.

  Tchan had already devoted some thought to this phenomenon, and he now paid it special attention. This was the people’s riposte in their duel with him: they were changing the way they talked so that he couldn’t understand it. It was no accident that the spies themselves had been complaining lately: “Our ears are perfectly all right — we’ve just had them tested. But we can’t make out a word of some of these conversations. Is this some new kind of Chinese that people are talking?”

  Tchan paced back and forth in his office, which was heavy with tobacco smoke. This was more serious than he’d thought. By way of opposition to him, people were gradually inventing a new language, an anti-language. A growing proportion of the tapes was becoming unintelligible. Where would it end? What would happen?

  Perhaps nothing would happen, thought Tchan after a while. If you looked at the matter calmly, it wasn’t so much a case of covert language changing, as of covert language coming to resemble overt language.

  Was he going senile, inventing such ideas? But he couldn’t get it out of his head. Hadn’t the overt language been gradually filled with and event
ually almost taken over by slogans and empty phrases? While the covert language, the one people spoke among themselves, had escaped that process and remained clear and precise. So what was really happening now was that the overt language was gradually infiltrating the covert one, The two were becoming one, and all because of micro-surveillance.

  I’m raving, thought Tchan. If I go on like this much longer I'll end up in the madhouse or in jail. I shan’t listen to the blasted tapes any more. I’ll have a couple of months’ peace.

  But he knew very well he couldn’t do without them for a single day. He was as addicted to them as he was to tobacco, and he’d never succeeded in giving up smoking.

  And so winter went by, the second after the coming of the qietingqis, and then it was spring again. Director Tchan didn’t go crazy, and didn’t end up in jail. He was so busy he didn’t even notice the arrival of summer, and neither he nor his aides took any leave. One morning some dead leaves were blown against the window, followed by a gust of rain, He looked up from his desk for a moment, It was autumn.

  In the same week as the first frost an urgent order came from the Zhongnanhai: in the new situation arising out of the cooling off of relations between China and Albania, top priority was to be given to collecting information about alleged acts of provocation committed by Albanian citizens in China, whether students, embassy staff or members of delegations.

  11

  An hour later, Tchan summoned his aides to his office to tell them about the new instructions.