The Concert (41 page)

Streets and parks were described turning white. It might have been only a dream, but the page on which it was written had a date: 17 March, Under the date was a hasty note: “I1.30, urgent meeting at the vice-minister's.”

Skënder went on leafing through the notebook. The handwriting seemed to get more and more careless.

He tended to pause at the poetry, perhaps because it was comparatively rare. “How often have I ignored your tears …” “I loved you and knew it not…”

One morning when I woke
The world without you seemed empty.
I realized what I'd lost,
And knew what I had gained.
My sorrow shone like an emerald,
My joy glowed like a sunset.
Which was the brighter of the two
My heart could not decide.

To whom were those lines addressed? He couldn't remember. He'd never told anyone about this phenomenon in case it was seen as the affectation of a philanderer, though he cared as little about that sort of criticism as about the more facile kinds of praise. As a matter of fact, in most cases he genuinely had forgotten the origins of his poems. Even when one seemed to refer to a real-life episode, the nature and dimensions of that episode would somehow change, would merge with other episodes. And the same applied to the person originally invoked: his or her own eyes might well, in Skënder's verses, come to shed the tears of another. As time went by these modifications, these individual landslips, built up into something like a shoal of shifting sands, and Skënder, coming upon a set of initials in the title of a poem, would pause in surprise, having remembered the lines as dedicated to someone else.

“Happiness and to spare. Viola…”

He smiled.

Had she really been called Viola, or had that name stayed in his memory because she was studying the violin? He could remember quite clearly the night of their chance meeting, one May; the hours they'd spent dancing together; then her hair spread out on the pillow. As he gazed at those tresses — and looking at the hair of a sleeping woman always seemed to him like watching a projection of his dreams — he tried to understand why she was toying so lightly with her own happiness, heedlessly drawing him with her to the brink of hell. She was beautiful, and he'd thought to himself she had happiness and to spare, like a pond brimming over in spring. Perhaps her happiness too needed to be drained, to avoid some fatal excess…

As he read on, first his fingers and then his whole body grew deathly cold.

“…The sound of music wafted in through the north-facing windows; from those facing south came the strains of another song…”

“…Inside his studio, all was golden silence. His wife, still beautiful, but pale from her recent abortion, sat on the couch reading a magazine. It seemed to him the walls of the room had pulled back to contain these treasures, garnered not from gain but from loss …He reached out and touched her pale cheek…”

“…Evenings at the Strazimirs'. I used to enjoy these gatherings. There was always something more than met the eye — a hidden sweetness that even shone out of the stones in the women's rings. Sometimes it seemed to me these jewels lit up before the eyes of their owners' did. While the women themselves still held back, their diamonds and rubies would sparkle at each other in anticipation…”

Enough! Skënder pushed the book aside. He was well aware that, next time he opened it, these loops and scrawls would have finally disintegrated there in their coffin; would probably be quite illegible. As often happens in such circumstances, the colder, harder side of his nature now got the upper hand.

“That's that!” he exclaimed harshly, slamming the book shut. He felt it was the existence of its contents that had made him feel so on edge.

The notes he'd written since he'd been in China were lying nearby. Perhaps, to even things up, he ought to crumple them up too — ought to curse them and check them away. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Instead he drew up a chair, pulled the lamp nearer, and started to read.

…Yesterday, at a commune called “Sino-Albanian Friendship”, we were introduced to a
trifshatars
. It took me hours to find a way of translating those blasted ideograms into some sort of equivalent in Albanian. Literally it's something like “man-triple-peasant”, but it might be clearer to render it as “3 x peasant”. But even that doesn't felly convey the essence of the person we met yesterday — a sample of a new race of men, the natural product of a climate dominated by the philosophy of Mao Zedong, a unique human type with an exceptionally high rusticity ratio. There he stood on the edge of his rice-field, as difficult to describe in ordinary language as to paint in ordinary colours. According to our Chinese escorts, he was a new type of peasant, from whom all individualism had evaporated like moisture from a well-fired pot - devoid of any vestige of intellectualism, free of all traces of urban mentality and all that goes with it.

He'd been elected to represent the commune at the great Peasant Congress soon to be held in Peking, no doubt in the presence of Mao Zedong himself.

“I suppose the Congress will celebrate the birth of this new Chinese peasant,” ! said,

“Not necessarily,” said one of our guides. “China's a big country, and it wouldn't be surprising if the popular masses produced even more advanced models.”

“You mean 4 x and even 5 x peasants?” I asked. “What do you suppose
they
would be like?”

My tone implied, “Who needs monsters like that!” My guide had got the message and looked at me askance. I turned to C— V— for support. But he was scowling at me with disapproval too.

THE COMMITTEE FOR THE BEGETTING OF LEÏ FEN -SYNOPSIS FOR A SHORT STORY
.

The committee had been pregnant with its offspring for some time. While everyone knows the gestation period for a woman is about nine months, no one knows how long it lasted in the case of the Virgin Mary, from the time she was impregnated by the Holy Ghost to the time she gave birth to the Infant Jesus. This being so, the length of the committee's gestation period would hardly have mattered if there hadn't been a phone call, a week before, from the General Bureau, insisting on an immediate delivery.

The committee members didn't know what to do. There'd been rumours going around Peking lately, suggesting that theirs wasn't the only committee established for this purpose: there were others in the capital equally pregnant with the thoughts of Mao Zedong. As a matter of fact, the man who'd rung up from the General Bureau (or
Zhongnanhai
, as they called it) had not only given the order very curtly, but he hadn't bothered to disguise the threat that hung over them if they were late: their offspring would simply be rejected. Let their committee make no mistake: it wasn't the only one from whom the State had ordered a child.

So it was now clear that in Peking, and perhaps in other Chinese cities, there were scores, perhaps hundreds of committees all endeavouring to perform the same task.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the committee chairman as he replaced the receiver, “They've turned this country into one vast maternity hospital!” And within the week all the committees would bring their offspring to the General Bureau, which would choose just one from amongst the numerous candidates.

“Just one,” said the chairman, mopping his fevered brow. And then what? What was going to happen after that? No problem about the rejected infants — they'd be got rid of in the same, way as all aborted babies were got rid of. “But what about us? What will happen to us?” They'd probably be sent to some godforsaken commune in the back of beyond, to toil in the rice-fields under a sweltering sen. Bet not before they'd been made to go through hours and hours of compulsory autocritique, in which they had to owe up to any remaining vestiges of bourgeois mentality - individualism, intellectualism, contempt for the people, and so on. Or might they just be given another chance, and tried out on a different task?

For a while the chairman of the committee was completely knocked out. The only thing he could think of was that no expectant mother had ever gone through what his committee was suffering. He cursed their situation up hill and down dale. Then suddenly his mood changed. He looked at his watch, then started ringing up the members of the committee one after the other. They all sounded as if they'd just had their throats cut.

All that week the committee met in practically permanent session. Sometimes they sat until after midnight. The
Zhongnanbai's
order had been categorical: the file had to be in by Saturday at the latest. It was rumoured that Mao Zedong was taking a personal interest in the matter. He was eager to see the various models submitted by the different committees, and to select from among them one that could be held up as an example to the whole Chinese people. The entire propaganda machine — the press, publishing houses, artists, schoolteachers, universities, television and radio - would be set in motion to popularize the chosen prototype, the
homo sinicus
to which all the Chinese, and even all the Maoists in the world, would be expected to conform.

The members of the committee turned up to every meeting puffy-eyed with fatigue and lack of sleep. The file on the man to come went on expanding like the belly of an expectant mother. Many things about him had already been decided, but others still awaited a solution. Hours were spent discussing each one. For example, though they'd thought it would be quite easy to fix how tall he should be, they soon found they were wrong. At first they reckoned he should be quite tall, but then one section of the committee denounced this as bourgeois individualistic since exceptional stature might be linked with a desire to be different from other people. This section now won majority support with the suggestion that the ideal man should be short, though some thought this might be regarded as a defect. The former advocates of tallness put up a last-ditch struggle for medium height, but this was dismissed as an unsatisfactory compromise. The qualities so far agreed upon for the ideal man were rehearsed — simplicity, modesty, desire to be only a humble cog in the wheel of Maoist thought, and, above all, determination never to distinguish himself by any kind of originality (in other words, to be as ordinary as possible in the most ordinary of possible worlds). The majority concluded that shortness went best with all these characteristics; and so the vote for it was carried.

When this was noted on the file, the chairman still had plenty on his plate. There were a number of points outstanding, and the Saturday deadline was approaching fast.

On the Wednesday and Thursday the committee sat almost nonstop. Age, profession and family status were all dealt with fairly easily: the model man was to be twenty-five years old, a soldier, and a bachelor, without any sentimental attachments but love of his mother. But what about behaviour in everyday life, ideological training, and judgment? These questions took up most of the remaining time. Despite the members” weariness, the committee's discussions became more lively. Although it was agreed that our hero - as one to whom pride, individualism and love of material comforts were all alien — was capable of collecting old toothpaste tubes and selling them for the benefit of the State, one committee member was afraid this might make him resemble negative and miserly characters like Pliushkin in Gogol's
Dead Souls
. This objection was soon swept aside, but it had raised an issue that made the whole committee frown. Our man would have no interest whatsoever in the miserable rags known as novels, they said. They consoled themselves with the thought that future generations wouldn't even have heard of their existence. Not for nothing was the great Mao working to wipe every form of literature off the face of the earth.

There followed some embroidery on the theme of our hero's modesty. His extreme self-effacement might make some people in Europe regard him as degenerate, subhuman. But Mao had taught them to take no notice of what the Europeans thought, or the wicked Americans either. Yes, the committee's creation would be content just to be a tiny, anonymous cog in a wheel And it would be a good idea if he copied this slogan out in his journal

The committee had already decided that the future hero should write down not only his thoughts but also his acts. They had discussed at length whether these records should take the form of letters, articles, or reports made during political training sessions. Other possibilities were denunciations to the Party committee or the relevant ministry. But in the end a kind of personal log-book was judged to be most appropriate. A sub-committee of two was working on a mock-up of this log-book, containing individual examples of thoughts and actions already agreed on in principle.

Thursday's session lasted till three the next morning, when the chairman suggested they take a break before tackling the last item on the agenda. The members, preparing to take an uncomfortable snooze where they sat, were pleasantly surprised when the chairman said they might go home briefly and get some proper rest. No such concession had been allowed so far that week, and they couldn't believe their ears until the chairman repeated what he'd said. The remaining point concerned the hero's death, and the chairman apparently thought the arms of Morpheus an appropriate preparation for deciding it.

It had been established earlier that the hero must eventually die, for only thus could his words and deeds carry their full weight. Moreover, this would enable them to conceal him if necessary from thecuriosity of his contemporaries, especially that of the foreign journalists who were sure to do all they could to obtain an interview with the model man of the new China.

All Friday - the last day before the deadline — was spent deciding on how the model man should die. No one had foreseen that this would be one of the most difficult parts of their task. On the contrary, they'd looked forward to it as a piece of cake, a foregone conclusion.