The Concert (29 page)

He really did see himself as a tragic figure, but he accepted his fate. He knew deep down inside that he'd chosen what side he was on in this new schism. Even if the Chinese would one day disappoint him, he'd made up his mind to support them. The third world was territory where he could sow his ideas: and if they failed to take root in the towns and the country, he would take them into the desert, among the primitive tribes where it would take at least a thousand years to make people understand the meaning of “autumn sadness”. Cambodia starts in you …“But what is it that starts in
you
, then?” he cried angrily, narrowly avoiding a collision with a car in the next lane. The other driver put his index finger to his forehead and yelled, “Are you crazy or something?” “It's all of you who are crazy!” Krams bawled back. “All of you without exception! Crazy and small-minded!”

He
had never acted out of base self-interest! Even when, during his visit to China, the small community of resident Europeans had bristled with rumours, half amused and half sarcastic, that Mao Zedong was going to make him his
pao pe
or godson. The rumours weren't entirely without foundation, but even so Krams hadn't indulged in dreams of power or hoped for any other vulgar advantages. True, he had sometimes imagined or even hoped he might one day become a leader — but no ordinary leader. He agreed with those who thought a real leader shouldn't have any power: but he went further still. Marx, Christ, Buddha and Che Guevara hadn't wielded any power, yet they had ruled, in a way, through their books, their ideas or their words. Krams thought a leader should be without even those adjuncts: he should be a kind of demiurge of the international workers' movement, half committed but half anonymous, without books or ideas of his own, and if possible without a name. But this was all a long way off still …For the present he was just the militant leftist Juan Maria Krams, an ascetic according to some, for others the Don Quixote of the movement. Some people called him Huan Mao Maria, or Marihuana for short, since his trip to China and the first accounts of Mao's plan to subvert Europe through drugs. The nickname had been pinned on him out of malice, but all in all he didn't really mind.

He was now driving towards the
grands boulevards
. He hadn't yet decided whether to go to the Café de Madrid, where the Latin American militants usually met, or to the bar frequented by the Portuguese, But finding himself near the latter, he parked the car and went in. The place was fairly empty, and as he looked around for a familiar face he suddenly froze. It must be telepathy! he thought, going over. The other man looked up, seemed equally surprised, and came forward to greet him.

“Great minds think alike!” exclaimed Krams, holding out his hand. “Fancy finding you here! …I was just remembering some of our earlier meetings.”

“How are you?” asked the other. “Well? I expected to see you at the reception tonight”

“I did drop in,” said Krams.

“Really?”

“I only stayed for a minute. We must have missed one another.”

“Probably.”

“Well, I'm very glad to see you, comrade Struga,” said Krams. “Have you been in Paris long?”

“Just a few days. How about you? Sit down for a while if you're not in too much of a hurry. These people are members of the reconstructed Portuguese Communist Party, Perhaps you know some of them?…This is comrade Juan Krams,” he said, turning towards the Portuguese. “I acted as interpreter for him when he was in Albania.”

Krams now looked at the others for the first time. He had met two of them before. The others were strangers to him.

“We came here straight from the Rue de la Pompe,” explained Besnik Struga.

“A pity I didn't see you there, but it's a stroke of luck finding you like this,” said Krams.

The others made room for him at their table.

“Sure I'm not disturbing you?” he said before sitting down.

“Not at all,” one of the Portuguese reassured him. “On the contrary.”

“We were talking about the third world,” said another.

“Very interesting!”

As soon as he sat down, Krams realized this was the table he'd been looking for in vain the whole evening. The discussion soon turned into an argument, chiefly between Krams and Besnik Straga. The Portuguese only put in a word here and there, until finally the other two held the field alone.

“Well, it's as I expected,” said Krams, after a pause. “All the rumours about China and Albania disagreeing on a whole lot of fundamental questions are true.”

“Apparently,” answered Struga, He gazed at his coffee cup, picked it up, put it down again in the saucer, then went on, with a sidelong glance at Krams: “And i suppose the rumours about you taking China's side in ail this are true too!”

“Apparently,” said Krams, smiling.

The argument then flared up again, but the courtesy which had restrained their debates the year before was now abandoned.

Krams insisted that it was crazy and unforgivable to deny the existence of the third world. Struga maintained that the division of the world into three was a myth which flew in the face of scientific objectivity.

As Krams listened to Struga he felt a twinge of jealousy. This man was present at the Moscow Conference, he thought. He'd have liked to forget that this lent Struga a certain superiority, bet there was no denying it. What wouldn't he himself give to have been there! Would there be other meetings like it in the future? In other words, meetings where everything was smashed to bits and then rebuilt as if after some apocalyptic catastrophe in which the fault line ran through the whole cosmos.

The discussion moved from the third world to the Sino-American rapprochement and back again. Krams tried hard to keep calm. He could bear anything except people denying there was such a thing as the third world. Again the exchanges grew heated.

“That's what your Mao Zedong says!” Struga interrupted at one point.

Krams looked at him in surprise.

“Our Mao Zedong?” he said with a bitter smile, “You mean he's not yours any more, if I heard you correctly?”

“You heard right,” said Besnik. “Yours.”

Krams shook his head.

“How strange,” he said. “I'd never have thought it could come to this.”

“What's so surprising?” asked one of the Portuguese. “Everyone has to make his own choice…”

“Of course, of course,” said Krams placatingly. “And I choose Mao. With pleasure!”

Then he picked up his cup, and drank down his now cold coffee in three gulps.

“What ravings !” exclaimed the observer on duty at the station near the North Pole, taking off his headset for a moment. “My God, what ravings!” He rubbed his ears as if to get rid of the painful buzzing, then put his earphones on again. It was the busiest part of the day and he couldn't take more than a few seconds rest without the risk of missing an important signal.

The diplomatic receptions being held in the various European capitals had jest ended, and most of the radio messages reported the comments the guests had exchanged in the midst of the hubbub, between whiskies. Such circumstances naturally enhanced the stupidity of their remarks, though these would have been stupid enough anyway. The radio officer laughed whenever he came upon the same conversation reported differently by two different embassies. The whole hotchpotch seemed to belong not to a number of different receptions but rather to a single long one which had been going on from time immemorial and would continue until the end of the world…Don't you think there'll be great upheavals in Yugoslavia when Tito dies?…As many as there will be in Spain after Franco…But Tito's different! …Of course, of course!…Have you seen who's on the Chinese committee for the funeral? …Romania…Romania's foreign policy…“Hell, I missed that bit!” said the radio officer. But he wasn't too worried — he knew he'd hear the same phrase again, probably so many times he'd get sick of it…Hey, here were our two lost pigeons again…Then came something, apparently not very important, about Portugal. The European parliament… N.A.T.O. interests in the Mediterranean…Spain doesn't intend …If the price of oil goes on rising. My God, how often must they go on repeating the same thing?

The observer's job was to record only messages relating to the communist world; all the rest were of no interest. But he was supposed to monitor everything. And apart from the fact that the communist world had poked its nose into all the problems of the human race, it sometimes happened that an apparently harmless conversation - about religious violence in Ireland, for instance - had some sort of relevance to Soviet missile bases in the Arctic. No message was negligible - that was the essence of the monitor's instructions. “Don't go telling yourself that a message missed by you will be picked up by one of your colleagues. Act as if you were the one and only monitor in the world…” And another thing. Uncoded messages were often as interesting as those sent in cipher. Some countries, especially the smaller ones, afraid their codes might be deciphered by their larger neighbours, sent highly important messages in clear in the hope that they might thus escape notice.

In the Middle East…Soviet interests, of course, but. So apparently Albania was never a satellite of China…A rapproche. meet with Moscow couldn't be excluded…N.A.T.O. in Greece…Now that the bases in Greenland…Have you seen who's on the Chinese committee for the funeral? Naturally, old boy - the make-up of those committees is always frightfully significant…And what do you think's going to happen in the Persian Gulf ?…And the Dead Sea?

Tell yourself you're the only person listening in the whole world …He shook his head to try to keep himself awake. One of these days I'll go out of my mind! he thought. Hearing your neighbour's blatherings through the bathroom wall was enough to drive you barmy — if you had to listen to those of the whole world! The “world's murmuring”…He vaguely remembered reading somewhere, or perhaps he'd heard it in a conversation that some authors had tried to write the total book, which would contain all the truth in the world in a condensed form. Sometimes people cited examples, in which the author had almost succeeded, as in a novel called
Finnegans Wake
,which the radio officer hadn't read.

He started to giggle. How could anyone write the Book of the World in a two-roomed fiat? He was the only one who could write it, or even write a single chapter of it, up in the solitude of this icy waste where there was still hardly any difference between night and day, as in the time of Chaos, And its title ought to be the Ravings of the World, the “World's Delirium”!

The signals went endlessly on, sometimes interspersed with bits of popular radio programmes…Germany will fulfil its responsibilities towards Europe …If the Russian tanks…The Balkans, troubled as ever…
Non, je ne regrette rien
… Talking of the Dead Sea…

They can't get away from the Dead Sea this evening, can they, he thought, lifting his hand to take off his headset… But just as he did so…

“That's what your Mao Zedong says,” said the Albanian communist. And this took the European leftist leader aback. “Does that mean he's not
your
Mao any more?,…”

That'll do for now, growled the monitor, writing all this down on his notepad. Still on about the cooling-off in relations between Albania and China…He took off his earphones, and imagined what his head must look like without his headset. Small and insignificant…

From outside came the howling of the wind over the snow. It sounded like a primitive cry. He sat for a moment gazing at his headset almost in surprise, then slowly donned his magic ears again and went on listening.

SIMON DERSHA KNOCKED
, then put his head round the door, Linda and Silva exchanged glances.

“May ! use your phone?” he asked, “Ours is out of order.”

He was wearing his navy-blue suit, as he had been a few days ago, when he came to phone before and couldn't get any answer. As he dialled, Silva thought back to that day. How time flew!

“But you've only dialled three digits!” said Linda, who'd been watching him.

When he hung up and turned to look at them the two women were astonished at how haggard he looked.

“Just like me!” he said almost guiltily. “I can't think why I'm so absent-minded!”

“You can always try again," suggested Linda.

“What? Oh yes, of course,… But…” And he waved his hand as if to say there was no point.

Linda looked at Silva again. Simon made as if to go out, then changed his mind and came back to the phone. He reached out for it cautiously, as if it were red hot, and was just about to dial when the door opened and in came the boss, Simon immediately put down the phone.

“Go on, go on,” said the boss jovially, sitting down,

“No, thank you,” stammered the other, “I was only bothering you because our phone's out of order,”

“Please! Make yourself at home!” the boss insisted. “You can come here and phone as often as you like.
We
don't hesitate to trouble our friends if
our
phone's on the blink!”

“Of course! Thanks very much,” said Simon, still edging towards the door.

“But you haven't made your call! And all because of me! Am I such an ogre?”

“No, on the contrary! It's my fault… Bet it isn't important…Î can phone later…It's not urgent.”

“As you like,' said the boss.

Simon Dersha quietly let himself out. Linda and Silva smiled.

“A bit touched,' said Linda, putting a forefinger to her temple.

“Do you think so?” said the boss. “I thought it was me that put him off.”

“No, He'd been hovering around the phone for ages, not daring to call properly. He just dialled three digits and made up some excuse.”