The Concert

by Ismail Kadare

  The headset, which was now dangling from his hand, was emitting poor little twittering noises. Drivel away, he told them — I’m not going to listen any more! He’d been gazing for some time at the wall, at the day’s date on the calendar. There was a blue ring round it, picking it out as marking one of the only two dawns visible from here in the whole year. In six months of polar darkness, he had never once seen the sun rise. He had come there during that polar night, and now for the first time he was going to see the day. Mustn’t miss this! he thought.

  He dropped his headset on the floor, put on his anorak and walked over to the door. It did occur to him that he ought to wake his colleague to replace him, but he dismissed this insignificant thought from his mind.

  The sen now really was rising. It was incredibly white, stunning as a cry, but constantly shrinking at the edges so as to let you pass. The monitor made his way across the ice in a kind of trance, not looking back. Except once: and when he saw the little building, so small and sombre in the distance, like a witch’s cottage, with all that idiotic chatter inside, he felt like roaring with laughter.

  i'm not mad, he told himself. It’s just that my head is full of the light of a thousand mornings rolled into one. Or rather, with the light of a hundred and eighty-two dawns.

  He walked on towards the pure expanses of ice far away from the noisy hut. If he’d turned back he’d only hâve heard a lot of ramblings about the two Germanics, the Roman Empire and the seveeteenth century. It wasn’t worth it. Such things weren’t important enough to deserve a backward glance.

  18

  PROBLEMS WERE ARISING EVERYWHERE, A Sudden drop in the temperature followed by two earthquakes in succession in central Albania seemed designed to complete the picture. The first green shoots of March and the open-air cafés opening up by the artificial lake outside Tirana - all the things suggesting holidays and the pleasures of the beach seemed shocking and incongruous, like a grin at a funeral.

  The docks were cluttered up with heaps of chrome ore which the Chinese had deliberately omitted to load. As if the slump in oil production wasn’t enough, the sudden fall in prices on the world market invoked the country in considerable financial loss. But chrome and oil weren’t the only sectors affected. The entire structure of foreign trade was shaken. Export agents hastened abroad in search of new markets, but European companies weren’t in any hurry to oblige. The sound of telex machines was rarely heard these days.

  Such representatives of European firms as did arrive at Tirana airport all had long hair and extravagant beards — some real, but some false, according to two or three Albanian sales reps who’d met their owners a couple of months before, since when there would not have been time for such beards to come into being naturally. This was confirmed by a brief report specially prepared by the Central Institute of Hygiene, which said that even in extreme circumstances a human hair cannot grow by more than one and a half centimetres per month,

  There had already been grotesque scenes in the past between foreign visitors and Albanian officials, ever since Tirana airport had been equipped with a barber’s shop. Newcomers were promptly taken there if their hair or beards “were an affront to the honour of the country of arrival.” This gave rise to much resentment and sometimes to angry outbursts: one visitor took one look in the glass after his unruly mop had been shorn off, and burst into tears, sobbing “What have they done to my Sylvana?” But on the whole such disagreeable incidents were either avoided or hushed up.

  Now, however, it was different. Both sides seemed to have decided to stick to their guns. The visiting sales reps refused to sit meekly down in the barber’s chair, and the Albanian officials declined to make any concessions. The former protested loudly and threatened to go home on the planes they’d just arrived by, contracts or no contracts.

  Some of them actually did so.

  But only to return a fortnight later decked out even more extravagantly, their locks and whiskers longer than before (some even went in for “punk” — unheard-of!). Then the same scenes unfolded as before, with the same protests and the same refusals, and back the visitors marched to their plane, whose pilot already had the engines running, it was at this point that one of the foreigners, going up the steps to the aircraft, uttered the fateful words, “You see - the same as ever!” In this phrase lies the explanation of what followed.

  This “The same as ever!”, relayed to high places, together with all that it implied (“You’re just as pigheaded as you were before,’ “You won’t learn, will you?” “That’s right — turn your backs on the outside world !”), soon brought a riposte, which duly made its way down again and exhorted the lower echelons: “Don’t yield an inch!”

  “You really are cracked!” exclaimed the agent of yet another foreign firm the next day. “You’re the crazy ones!” replied the Albanian official who was dealing with him. What the official meant was: “You envoys from the capitalist world surely don’t still expect us to change our policy and open up to the outside world?” etc. Meanwhile the barber had appeared in the doorway of his shop, brandishing his scissors menacingly.

  The same as ever…Sempre gli stessi …So the visitors’ behaviour was a stratagem, aimed at testing Albania and assessing the scale of its present difficulties. The news of what was happening soon spread by word of mouth all over the capital. One young literary lecturer who’d spent half his sabbatical rummaging through the archives found what he said was a parallel incident in a medieval chronicle. In the fifteenth century a certain Albanian fortress, which had been besieged by the Turks for so long that its supplies were almost exhausted and its inmates beginning to go hungry, gave a mêle a huge feed of corn and threw it over the ramparts. When the Turks opened up the mule and found all the undigested corn, they thought the people in the fortress must have plenty of food to spare, and gave up all hope of starving them into surrender. So they abandoned the siege and went away,

  This tale gave rise to great controversy in literary circles. The analogy was considered very doubtful. The situation of present-day Albania bore no resemblance to that of the ancient fortress, which was suffering from a genuine famine, and the sending away of the sales reps was nothing like the throwing of the mule over the ramparts. But in the meanwhile the literary review which had published the text had come to the attention of foreign secret services, and though no one knew how they had interpreted it, the incident ie question was repeated a week later. The same reps as before reappeared at Tirana airport - as obstinate as any mules!

  Again they were asked to visit the barber’s shop. Again they refused, turned on their heels, and made for the waiting plane.

  Then for some days there was practically no traffic at the airport. Very few planes landed or took off, and if one did, the airport staff waited in vain for any hairy reps to disembark.

  One rainy day an elderly customs official who’d been suffering for some time from high blood pressure looked out and saw a kind of black cloud hovering over the landing strip. Now the official had seen the Chinese prime minister arrive here and appear in the doorway of his plane no fewer than four times. And since the cloud was hovering at about that level; and perhaps because the customs man had heard about the Chinese prime minister’s ashes being scattered from a plane; and perhaps also because he’d been having dizzy spells lately — well, for some or all of these reasons, he thought the wandering black cloud was the tormented spirit of Zhou Enlai.

  It was a boundless ocean, a galaxy of plots, secret machinations and bloody putsches. It was full of the names of monosyllabic victims, whose heads plunged down into the depths and then bobbed up again in a slow dance of death. Some were still red from the burning breath of the present, some dull, cold and covered by the dust of oblivion. They came and went as in a spiritualist séance, scarcely knowing themselves whether they sought revenge, victims or a return to the void.

  Enver Hoxha turned the pages of his political journal one by one. He’d been keeping it for years, and it contained t
housands of pages about China. A few hours ago he’d had it brought to the house on the coast where he was speeding the weekend. He pushed the small globe away to make room on his desk for the journal. Through the window he could see the deserted coast, with its sand hardened by the winter. His glance came to rest now on one page, now on another, now on a date, now on a heading: Tuesday, 6 October 1964 — bad signs; Thursday, 10 November 1966 — explanations of Kan Cheng…

  He’d known some of the people mentioned in these pages personally. Others, long swept away by the changes and chances of the age, were represented by words, intrigues or thoughts that had reached him through reports or radio messages. All this ought to be made available to the world at large, he thought.

  His fingers went on turning the pages: Wednesday, 17 February 1971 - Chen Potah sentenced to death for treason; Monday, 15 November 1971 - Reflections on China; Dürres, Saturday, 28 July 1972 - The Lin Biao “plot”.

  He paused at this entry. He’d devoted several pages to the various versions of the marshal’s death, and the doubts he’d had about it at the time…The plane had crashed…Caught fire…That’s all anyone knew. According to an Ottawa paper, Kissinger had told the Canadian prime minister that ballistics experts had found bullet marks in the wreckage of the plane…Why should shots have been fired inside the cabin? Who had done it, and why?

  He shook his head. An endless series of infamies, that was the only way to describe it.

  He looked for his pen among the scattered pages, then underlined the words “Reflections on China”. That was what he’d call his book. It was right that the world should have access to this testimony — it could only be of use to it. He underlined “Reflections on China. again: it would be hard, he thought, to find another country and another people who’d known China as closely as his own country and his own people.

  From the corner of the table the small globe cast its shadow over the papers. Sometimes he’d harboured dark thoughts about that globe. Such terrible thoughts they might almost have made it fall out of its trajectory. But this hadn’t happened.

  Zhou Enlai,… Tcheng…Tchang…They kept appearing and reappearing, as to the summons of a gong echoing through time.

  He looked up from his desk and gazed out again at the deserted coast. A telephone rang somewhere in the depths of the villa. When, after a short while, someone knocked at the door and told him the blast furnace at the steel complex had been unblocked by means of an explosion, he could still hear the echo of the telephone ringing in his ears. The messenger was hovering in the doorway,

  “Anything else?”

  The man’s expression foreshadowed his answer.

  “One man was killed in the explosion. Another was blinded. There were some other casualties.”

  Enver Hoxha sat motionless. The explosion had left one person dead and several injured. He looked at the journal as if the incident were already written there. He had a fleeting vision of war casual-ties, old comrades of his who had probably died of their wounds. They’d met their deaths during a period he’d described as “The Age of the Party”, whereas the victims of the blast furnace, forty years later, were probably young, the same age as the earlier victims’ sons. Their injuries would be different too — wounds caused not by bullets or shells, but by molten metal, the raw material of death…But it all came to the same thing in the end…

  Yes, in taking up the torch, they all took upon their vulnerable shoulders the burden of sacrifice.

  He looked out at the beach again to rid himself of the negative part of the news he’d just heard. The millennium was approaching its end, and his country was going to have to settle its accounts with a world it had never loved. He had done all he could to ensure that Albania should embark on the third millennium in the form he had imparted to it. Bet he still had to see to it that this form lasted for ever, that no one else ever altered it.

  He looked back at his papers again, so fixedly that some of the Chinese names seemed to merge with some of the Albanian ones he’d just been thinking about.

  Jest as at the time of the break with the Soviets, many people would see the rupture with China as a farewell to communism — or to the East, as it was called in some parts of the world. These same people would expect to see the churches reopened and ordinary life liberalized — a general “opening up”.

  But they would rub their hands too soon, as before. And as before he would strike them down without mercy.

  He reached for his pen to write these thoughts down. He thought them over for a while, in order to phrase them with suitable solemnity. When he’d set them down in black and white, he smiled.

  Twenty-four hours before the unblocking of the furnace, at about two in the morning, a telegram arrived on the desk of the duty officer at Central Committee headquarters. It reported the discovery of oil in the area where test-drilling had been in progress for some months. But even before the good news had been transmitted by phone to all the government offices in Tirana, it had already been brought to the capital by the passengers on the early-morning train, who, looking out of the windows as they rolled across the plain, saw flames from the burning oil-well leaping up into the dawn sky. The engine-driver had tooted the whistle several times, and the passengers stood glued to the icy windows gazing spellbound at the column of fire on the horizon.

  Ex-minister D—, handcuffed in his cell in Tirana, awaiting trial, heard those whistle blasts as a series of howls. O God, he sighed. What was the source of all his troubles? The examining magistrate had mentioned the “agitation” he’d felt during the famous telephone call that ill-fated evening — an agitation which he’d never mentioned to anyone, and which he was sure no one had suspected at the time. Apparently that was what it all started from …God, why hadn’t he thought of it before? It was staring him in the face now…It must have been that visitor who never turned up, that minor civil servant whose name he couldn’t even remember — he must be the one who told! Did he come back and lurk around his house like a ghost?. Judas! he groaned. Why didn’t you choose someone else? Why did you have to pick on me?

  Another whistle, longer this time, died away in the distance.

  That same morning, at about a quarter past six, on a stretch of waste ground in the north-west suburbs of Tirana, not far from the railway line, where a week before the former factory owner, Lucas Alarupi, had been found hanging from an old telegraph pole (with newspaper cuttings, pages of statistics and all sorts of other papers scattered around over a radius of about twenty yards) — at this exact spot some municipal workers unloaded several crates from a van. On the crates, beneath some big Chinese characters, was written the word, “Fireworks”,

  The men had been instructed to attract as little attention as possible when destroying all these firecrackers and rockets, but when they’d selected this remote spot they’d forgotten that the railway line ran along beside it.

  In the growing light of dawn they saw the waste lot was typical of those you get near big cities. The muddy ground, the scattered rubbish, the old tin cans, the dew as viscous as rain at night on a rubber cape — all combined to create a kind of lunar landscape. Not a real one, like what we see on our friendly old moon, but one of the sinister kind transmitted by cameras on space flights.

  “Come on, let’s get to work,” said the man who appeared to be in charge, levering open one of the crates. “And mind it doesn’t all blow up in your faces!”

  He took a rocket out of the crate and carefully applied his cigarette lighter,

  “Hell, it must be damp!” he growled. “Pass me another one.”

  The rocket suddenly started to sputter, then, to the shouts of the workmen, flew up into the air and landed a few yards away. It gave out a little flame, and a few sparks, then started to whirl round on its own axis with a stifled hiss. Another leap, and then it exploded, shedding a lurid glow all over the waste lot.

  “Apparently they make all sorts of patterns — dragons and snakes — if you can get them to go high
enough,” said one of the men.

  “That’s why they decided to destroy them,’ said another.

  “That’s enough philosophizing,’ shouted the boss. “Get on with the job - we’re already behind time. Only be careful not to get burnt!”

  Cautiously at first, then more and more recklessly, the workmen let off the crackers and rockets, directed now by a couple of experts, The hitherto dreary waste lot began to glow with all kinds of wild and peculiar illuminations,

  Just then the train whose passengers had seen the oil strike Earning in the distance was slowly approaching the central station. The workmen turned to look at it. The passengers all looked back out of the windows,