Ismail Kadare - The Concert

She said as much to Gjergj when she went back into their bedroom and bent over him,

“Did you miss me? Really? Very much?”

She went on murmuring sweet but earthy nothings into his ear until laughs and whispers changed into choking gasps, in accordance with the great paradox of nature that expresses the height of human pleasure by the sounds of suffering.

Only afterwards did Silva get round to telling her husband the other half of her news. Then:

“And what about here?” she said, “Anything new?”

He told her what had been happening while she was away — in particular, about the sacking of high-ranking officials. More dis. missals were expected, even some punishments. Although the last plenum of the Central Committee had taken place quite recently, another was likely to be held quite soon, and the signs were that its decisions would be more severe. Silva was about to ask about the fate of the minister in charge of her own department when Gjergj mentioned the word “plot”.

“What?” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

“People say they’ve uncovered a plot, but for the moment it’s top secret”

For some reason, Silva thought of her brother, but she didn’t say so. If anything had happened concerning Arian, Gjergj would have told her.

“They’re holding meetings all over the place,” he said drowsily, Thee, before he dropped off again:

“I’m so glad you’re back.”

That was what she usually said to him.

The meetings went on well into the evening, especially in government offices. Those who had to write their owe autocritiques stayed up later still, sometimes even till dawn. Meanwhile venerable scholars and academicians slept, as did writers, even those who went in for novels and other lengthy genres, and lecturers who’d had to prepare their lectures for the next day, not to mention translators from ancient Greek, lexicographers, graphologists, writers of anonymous letters, people who wanted divorces, and even writers of love letters, though they usually lay awake for a couple of hours at least after putting the last touches to their billets-doux. In short, everyone whose work, feelings or circumstances made them use pen and paper eventually slept, except the people who had to write their autocritiques.

For some it was the first time they’d gone through this ordeal, and their sufferings were particularly horrible. But even the veterans had a hard time. They were used to the traumatic experience of the self-examination itself, but it no longer brought them the relief the novices experienced. They knew how terribly depressing it was to read out a confession you were sure would have moved your audience deeply, only to meet with looks of complete incomprehension, usually followed by the question, “Is that all, comrade X? You don’t think you might have left something out? Dig deeper, dig deeper!” The novices knew nothing of this. They themselves were so moved by their own outpourings they expected their judges to be equally affected, and already saw in their mind’s eye the sympathy and pity that would no doubt earn them clemency and forgiveness. The mere thought of this made some of them actually shed tears in anticipation, weeping over their autocritiques as slighted suitors might weep over their love letters.

A window that still had a light ie it after midnight seemed to radiate an aura of guilt. Some people who had never been criticized or rebuked for anything whatsoever woke up in the eight, rummaged blearily for pencil and paper, and started to write an autocritique that had never even been asked for!

As the meetings went on and all sorts of people made their confessions, a great similarity began to emerge in the autocritiques, even though their authors’ circumstances, professions and offences had nothing in common. So much so that rumour had it that, for a modest sum, certain hacks were ready to churn out autocritiques to order. No one could prove it, but humorists and song-writers found it a very fruitful subject for satire.

In such a context the unfortunates still poring over their own confessions felt more isolated than ever.

As time went by there came to pass what they had striven above all to avoid: they became more and more cut off from ordinary people, and were drawn closer and closer to the world of the guilty. Even when, as was usually the case, they didn’t know one another, their names were more and more frequently quoted together in accounts of what was going on. They’ started to exist in a universe apart where they drifted about together in groups, like ghosts. And it was when they were in this misty, twilight world that memories painfully recurred, or seemed to recur, to them: an official reception at which a Chinaman had reminded them of a conversation they’d had together in China, in the Hotel Peking; a party at the house of an unnamed Albanian minister; a conversation about the abandoning of former oil-fields or the encircling of a Party committee. And so on.

The vagueness and solitude of the realm they inhabited caused their autocritiques, even when written in a perfectly normal style, to be fell of confusion and irrelevance, with answers to anticipated questions, admissions of deeds they’d resolved never to reveal, the most fearsome hypotheses, together with countless suspicions, anxieties, hopes and outbursts of anger. And at the actual meetings, even though they still hoped to be able to keep something back, their interrogators always came quite close to at least part of what they were trying to suppress. Moreover, in their reports to the Central Committee, the people appraising their cases would sometimes add their own comments, even their suppositions about what the speaker was allegedly trying to hide; and while some of these hypotheses were correct, others were not.

Notes designed to supplement the Central Committee records, by a delegate to meetings of various Party organizations in the Army. The question at issue; what is known as AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO HAVE THE PARTY COMMITTEE OF THE TOWN OF X— SUEEOUNDED BY DETACHMENT N— OF THE TANIS. Follow-up to previous analyses, which arrived at mo definite conclusions .

N.B. These noies are not set out here in their final order. For further information see accounts of the meeUngs themselves .

Extracts from the autocritique of staff signals officer S—: 1 am guilty, absolutely guilty, e?en though it might be said that I am only a vehicle, a cog in the machinery of command. That’s what it says in army regulations, though I personally think they should be reviewed. In our army, no one can be happy to be a robot. That’s what distinguishes it from the armies of bourgeois and revisionist countries. When I was given- an order that harmed the Party, Î ought, though I’m only a simple soldier, to have blocked the order, sent it back to where it came from, said to the person who sent it: I will not send it, for this, that or the other reason. But, comrades^ I didn’t do that. Like a mindless robot, not thinking that I was unwittingly helping to strike a blow at the Party, I transmitted the order to the tanks. My lack of ideological maturity, my merely superficial study of Marxism-Leninism, and so on, e,

Second signals officer (P-); I have nothing to add. I am guilty. We’re both guilty.

Questioner: You claim you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong. But did you regard the order as wrong in itself?

S—; Wrong?! don’t know …A bit strange, yes, but not wrong. It came from above, so I thought it couldn’t be wrong. But of course, in the Party there’s neither high nor low …so that’s true of the army too — that’s what makes it different from bourgeois-revisionist armies…

Q: Right, that’ll do. Another question. It was a long way from operation headquarters to the tanks, wasn’t it? Nearly an hour on a motorcycle combination.