Ismail Kadare - The Concert

She couldn’t wait to get rid of the caller, and when she’d put the receiver down she checked that she’d done so properly. That was what she always did, she reflected, when she was expecting a call Stop it! she told herself. She was behaving like a little girl, expecting “him” to telephone. Even if he did, what difference would it make?

Linda hadn’t seen Besnik Struga again since Silva had introduced her to him. She hadn’t even spoken to him, except once or twice, briefly, when he’d rung up and asked to speak to Silva. But she couldn’t hide it from herself that she liked him; she liked him very much. So she hadn’t been surprised to find herself thinking about him; her thoughts were only light and fleeting, easily conjured up and easily dismissed. She’d told herself everything would remain as airy as a watercolour, tranquilly pleasing as a fantasy of happiness. They lived in the same city — they were bound to meet again some time… And that was as far as her thoughts went, drifting back and forth without casting anchor. Still free.

But now, one fine morning, when she opened the door on an empty office, things had changed.

She’d had a premonition the day before, when she realized she was going to be alone in the office while her colleagues were away. That evening she’d imagined herself pulling the legs of people who rang up to speak to the boss: “Comrade Defrin? Yes, I’m comrade De-freeze… What can I do for you?” and so on. Yes, the phone would ring — but what if were “him”, asking for Silva? So what? she’d thought, trying to kid herself. But in vain.

And now, this morning, she thought she actually heard the phone ring. And even though she soon had to conclude that it was a trick of her imagination, the shock was enough to turn dream into potential reality. Her feminine intuition told her he liked her. If he rang to talk to Silva and was told she was away, mightn’t he go on talking to Linda herself? Mightn’t he even ask, in passing, what she did with herself in the afternoon?

She shivered again. Now she realized it was because “he” hadn’t rang up.

She went over to the window, and looked out at Government Square, humming sadly and tunelessly to herself.

It was still too soon to talk of suffering in connection with this new mood of hers. The feeling wasn’t yet fully formed. It was still malleable, like the bones of an infant. But before long it would find its permanent shape.

There was a knock at the door. Linda didn’t need to look round: she knew it was Simon Dersha.

“Telephone still not working?” she said, with her back still to him.

He looked at her for a while without answering. He was still wearing his navy-blue suit, and normally Linda would have teased him about it. Perhaps because she hadn’t done so, Simon, as she now saw, went on gazing at her. She suddenly realized how worried he looked. Why hadn’t she noticed before?

“What’s wrong, Simon?” she asked guiltily.

He shook his head wearily, as if he’d been waiting for her to ask that.

“I’m not at all well,” he mumbled.

Linda moved away from the window and came towards him,

“What is it? What’s the matter?” She was about to add, “Do tell me if there’s anything I can do for you,” but as if trying to anticipate and avoid her question, he shook his head twice and went out, closing the door behind him.

How odd, Linda thought. She felt ashamed of using the word suffering, even in thought, about her own frame of mind, which she was now inclined to put down to caprice. She walked briskly back to her desk, her lethargy gone, and got down to work at once, so as not to relapse. At the same moment Simon Dersha was sitting down at his desk in the next room, muttering, “Oh, what a mess I'm in, what an awful mess!” Then he bent over a mass of pages covered with his slanting scrawl

For the last week he’d been writing his own autocritique. No one had asked him to, and he hadn’t even asked himself where and to whom he was going to read it. Was he going to deliver it in court, or send it through the post? He hadn’t bothered with any of that. The main thing for him was to write it. Whether he would read it to the minister, the union, in court, at a fair, or anywhere else, was neither here nor there.

That was why the style in which it was written kept changing. One part was very academic, with digressions on general, ideological and sociological problems; another took the form of a psychological analysis; yet another section was in dialogue form, with questions and answers as in a police interrogation. He had also peppered his text with quotations, especially in a kind of profession of faith where he described his origins and social status: here he quoted twice on one page from Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State . Further on, in a passage describing how he came to meet the vice-minister responsible for ail his woes (every time he re-read this section he wondered what woes he meant — but he didn’t know the answer), the autocritique became a kind of detailed narrative, relating all their conversations and telephone calls, and dwelling particularly on the invitation to the fateful dinner. But even this section strayed into digressions on general principles: in one he considered the significance of banquets and dinners, relating them to tradition and popular philosophy…And so on.

The evening at Minister D—’s was described in exhaustive detail, starting with his meeting with the vice-minister who was to take him there, and who turned up five minutes late, going on to their walk to the minister’s residence, and thence to the dinner itself. The guests were described, together with their conversation, which was much less weighty and interesting than he had expected. Then, in the middle of the evening, came the phone call from the leader of the Party, and the perturbation, he thought he saw on the minister’s face after he had hung up.

"And what about the rest of you? And you yourself — weren’t you at all affected?"

"Well Yes, to start with. He was, certainly. He had Enver Hoxha at the other end of the line. That was no joke! We all ought to have been thrilled."

"Ought to have been? Weren’t you all really thrilled?"

That’s what I was just going to explain. As I said, the minister himself, despite all his efforts to disguise it, was terribly downcast. It was only natural that his anxiety should communicate itself to us. Everything suddenly wilted away, and everybody, beginning with our host himself, wanted the dinner to come to an end as soon as possible.

Oh, so you wanted the dinner to end as soon as possible, just after a phone call that would have added life and zest to any other gathering? But you lot…! Delve into your conscience, Simon Dersha, and dig out the real reason for your anxiety. Well? Or is your mind full of foreign propaganda, and the calumnies our enemies perpetrate against our leader? While all of you were banqueting, he was going without sleep to work for the people. And instead of being happy to hear his voice, you were all terrified. I suppose you all told yourselves: “He’s going to put me in jail, liquidate me.” Isn’t that the truth?

I don’t know what to say. Yes, I'm a miserable wretch.

Did you discuss it amongst yourselves?

No.

Not even when you first started hearing rumours about minister D—?

No, not then either. I tried to get in touch with the vice-minister, but I couldn’t reach him on the telephone…

In spite of its exhaustiveness, this part of the autocritique was shorter than that devoted to Simon’s second visit to the minister or rather his abortive attempt to go and see him about his brother’s posting. Like the previous section, this one digressed: there were remarks on the principles of postings in general, based on quotations from the decisions handed down by two plenums; this led to consideration of a popular misconception on the matter — a misconception apparently shared by his brother and sister-in-law, and by himself. Before giving a detailed account of his route to the minister’s villa (not forgetting the coldness of the weather and the emptiness of the streets), he spent a few lines expatiating on his own petty-bourgeois psychology, his bourgeois-revisionist views on personal happiness, and other old-fashioned survivals due to his lack of contact with social reality.