Ismail Kadare - The Concert

“Quick, quick — remove the bodies!”

Zhou Enlai and the chief bodyguard stood at a distance, watching what was going on.

The soldiers approached the blackened heap, which was still giving off a smell of ashes and burning rubber. A couple of headlights lit up the scene. The remains of the car were all tangled up with bits of the missile and with the arms and legs of the dead. Some of the metal was charred, some — perhaps parts of the rocket — was still shiny. At first sight the heap of débris could have been the remains of a traffic accident or of a plane crash.

The soldiers extricated the corpses and carried them over to the van. The smell, combined with that of the burnt tyres, was revolting.

“And now get in the van yourselves!”

Inside the van the smell was even worse.

“Where are we going?” asked one of the soldiers.

No one answered. At their feet lay two formless black masses. Who were these unfortunate wretches?

The van drove on and on until it came to a lonely landing strip. Dawn was jest breaking. In the distance you could just make out the shape of an aircraft.

“Quick! Quick!” said a voice again.

The soldiers dragged the bodies — they left black trails behind them — on to the landing strip. Then on to the plane. Not into the hold. Into the cabin, where they were placed on a couple of seats.

“Now get on yourselves.”

The two soldiers climbed on board. The door closed.

“Where are we going?” one of them asked as the plane rose above the clouds.

As before, there was no answer.

The soldiers, who had been up all night, occasionally drowsed off. Their hands and faces bore black traces from where they had handled the corpses^ but they were so worried they didn’t notice.

“Where are we?”

Down below there was a flat expanse that looked like the Mongolian desert.

… The plane was found soon after it crashed^ about midday. The Soviet frontier guards examined the débris and the charred bodies with interest. No one, however expert, could have told the difference between one and another. Except for two of them. They had been burned to a cinder twice.

H

The likeness between the remains of the car destroyed the previous day and those of the crashed plane was probably the source of the subsequent duplication.

The plane appeared to have come into being during the night, after everyone had gone to bed. One might say that Mao , Zhou and the burned-out car all created it in their sleep.

It was as if, after the group of watchers had melted away in the silence of the night near kilometre 19, the blackened mass of metal, rising ep like a Balkan ghost from the grave, re-assembled itself in a shape that suggested an aircraft.

Perhaps that is how the story will be told two hundred years from now, three hundred, a thousand. If it’s remembered at all.

After the nightmare, then, the débris awakened. Silent and black as ever, but now thousands of kilometres away.

That was how the dream mechanism worked, with all its discontinuities, illogicalities and inversions of time and space.

Much later on, simplified by time, the sad story of the marshal will probably be told as follows: Lin Biao was invited by the Chairman to a dinner at which he was murdered. That night his corpse rose up and went away, far away to the Mongolian desert.

I

But what about the bullets in the charred body? And the firing of shots in the plane?

Oh well, it’s impossible to get to the whole truth in this business.

You’d have to be inside the heads of each of the two protagonists, Mao and the marshal — preferably both at once — to find out what really happened. And even then…

MACBETH’S LAST WINTER. SYNOPSIS FOR ANOTHER VERSION OF THE TRAGEDY

It’s not true that I killed Duncan for his throne. The murder I'm accused of is a typical case of an act the law condones as being committed in self-defence.

Unfortunately people have got the story all wrong. I don’t deny that those (if there still are any) who think Duncan was killed by his own guards are completely mistaken. Bet anyone who thinks I myself killed the king because I was greedy for power are even farther from the mark.

Fifteen years have gone by since it happened. And rumour about Duncan’s death has grown more and more rife all the time, until this winter it has reached epidemic proportions.

I myself am responsible for the confusion. It would probably have been better if I'd explained at the outset exactly how it happened, instead of kidding myself I could conceal at least half of the truth. No doubt I should have said from the very beginning that Duncan dug his own grave (tyrants often do), and I merely toppled him in.

As a matter of fact, having known the ins and outs of the horrible business all along, I was sure I was telling the truth when I said Duncan had been killed by himself — in other words, by his own servants.

But my own certainty wasn’t enough to exonerate me. Not that common talk and gossip in streets and taverns were to blame for that, still less the ham actor, Billy Hampston, who wrote a play based on such rumours (and had his manuscript confiscated by my secret police for his pains).

No, it was someone else’s fault, and that someone was, surprising as it may seem, none other than Duncan himself.

This is how it happened.

For a long time he had looked on me with suspicion. This was the result of the mania which most rulers suffer from, and which makes them doubt anyone on the basis of mere slander or calumny. Or perhaps he cultivated the suspicion himself, in order to justify his hatred of me and the hostile schemes that followed from it. It’s not unusual for people to hide from themselves, as too shameful, their real reason for disliking-someone, and to try to justify their aversion by explanations even they themselves don’t really believe in.

I had observed some time before how jealous Duncan was of me, though in fact it was my wife who had noticed it first. To begin with she’d detected it not in him but in his wife. “I can see something malevolent in her eye,” she would say, as we were coming home from some court reception. I used to contradict her: “I don’t get that impression at all! The queen seems very friendly to both of us…” But she persisted, and in the end she convinced me. This didn’t in the least affect my esteem for Duncan himself. Too bad if the queen’s like that, I thought. What matters is what he thinks himself.

But my wife, my beautiful and intelligent lady, would listen angrily and say, “If a wife is jealous, sooner or later the husband will be jealous too.”

And that’s what happened. Duncan’s looks grew cold, and thee grew colder. Gradually other people began to notice it. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of days of anxiety. I did all I could, regardless of expense, to win over some member of the king’s entourage, so as not to be taken unawares.

When Duncan told me he was coming to stay for three days as a guest in my castle, most of the people who had detected a coolness between us thought this visit would bring it to an end. Needless to say, my enemies were appalled and my friends were delighted.

“Why do you both look so gloomy?” the latter asked us. “Aren’t you glad that difficult situation will soon be a thing of the past?”

We pretended to cheer up at this, but our hearts were still heavy. For we knew what all the rest did not: namely, that Duncan was coming not to end our falling-out but to bring about my destruction.

His plan (which I learned of through my spy) was both diabolical and extremely simple: during the third night of his visit there was to be a noisy incident outside his bedroom door which would wake him up. Then he and his suite would rush from the castle, and before the sun had risen the rumour would have spread everywhere that Macbeth had tried to murder his guest, the king, in his sleep.