Ismail Kadare - The Concert

The headset, which was now dangling from his hand, was emitting poor little twittering noises. Drivel away, he told them — I’m not going to listen any more! He’d been gazing for some time at the wall, at the day’s date on the calendar. There was a blue ring round it, picking it out as marking one of the only two dawns visible from here in the whole year. In six months of polar darkness, he had never once seen the sun rise. He had come there during that polar night, and now for the first time he was going to see the day. Mustn’t miss this! he thought.

He dropped his headset on the floor, put on his anorak and walked over to the door. It did occur to him that he ought to wake his colleague to replace him, but he dismissed this insignificant thought from his mind.

The sen now really was rising. It was incredibly white, stunning as a cry, but constantly shrinking at the edges so as to let you pass. The monitor made his way across the ice in a kind of trance, not looking back. Except once: and when he saw the little building, so small and sombre in the distance, like a witch’s cottage, with all that idiotic chatter inside, he felt like roaring with laughter.

i'm not mad, he told himself. It’s just that my head is full of the light of a thousand mornings rolled into one. Or rather, with the light of a hundred and eighty-two dawns.

He walked on towards the pure expanses of ice far away from the noisy hut. If he’d turned back he’d only hâve heard a lot of ramblings about the two Germanics, the Roman Empire and the seveeteenth century. It wasn’t worth it. Such things weren’t important enough to deserve a backward glance.

PROBLEMS WERE ARISING EVERYWHERE, A Sudden drop in the temperature followed by two earthquakes in succession in central Albania seemed designed to complete the picture. The first green shoots of March and the open-air cafés opening up by the artificial lake outside Tirana — all the things suggesting holidays and the pleasures of the beach seemed shocking and incongruous, like a grin at a funeral.

The docks were cluttered up with heaps of chrome ore which the Chinese had deliberately omitted to load. As if the slump in oil production wasn’t enough, the sudden fall in prices on the world market invoked the country in considerable financial loss. But chrome and oil weren’t the only sectors affected. The entire structure of foreign trade was shaken. Export agents hastened abroad in search of new markets, but European companies weren’t in any hurry to oblige. The sound of telex machines was rarely heard these days.

Such representatives of European firms as did arrive at Tirana airport all had long hair and extravagant beards — some real, but some false, according to two or three Albanian sales reps who’d met their owners a couple of months before, since when there would not have been time for such beards to come into being naturally. This was confirmed by a brief report specially prepared by the Central Institute of Hygiene, which said that even in extreme circumstances a human hair cannot grow by more than one and a half centimetres per month,

There had already been grotesque scenes in the past between foreign visitors and Albanian officials, ever since Tirana airport had been equipped with a barber’s shop. Newcomers were promptly taken there if their hair or beards “were an affront to the honour of the country of arrival.” This gave rise to much resentment and sometimes to angry outbursts: one visitor took one look in the glass after his unruly mop had been shorn off, and burst into tears, sobbing “What have they done to my Sylvana?” But on the whole such disagreeable incidents were either avoided or hushed up.

Now, however, it was different. Both sides seemed to have decided to stick to their guns. The visiting sales reps refused to sit meekly down in the barber’s chair, and the Albanian officials declined to make any concessions. The former protested loudly and threatened to go home on the planes they’d just arrived by, contracts or no contracts.

Some of them actually did so.

But only to return a fortnight later decked out even more extravagantly, their locks and whiskers longer than before (some even went in for “punk” — unheard-of!). Then the same scenes unfolded as before, with the same protests and the same refusals, and back the visitors marched to their plane, whose pilot already had the engines running, it was at this point that one of the foreigners, going up the steps to the aircraft, uttered the fateful words, “You see — the same as ever!” In this phrase lies the explanation of what followed.

This “The same as ever!”, relayed to high places, together with all that it implied (“You’re just as pigheaded as you were before,’ “You won’t learn, will you?” “That’s right — turn your backs on the outside world!”), soon brought a riposte, which duly made its way down again and exhorted the lower echelons: “Don’t yield an inch!”

“You really are cracked!” exclaimed the agent of yet another foreign firm the next day. “You’re the crazy ones!” replied the Albanian official who was dealing with him. What the official meant was: “You envoys from the capitalist world surely don’t still expect us to change our policy and open up to the outside world?” etc. Meanwhile the barber had appeared in the doorway of his shop, brandishing his scissors menacingly.

The same as ever… Sempre gli stessi …So the visitors’ behaviour was a stratagem, aimed at testing Albania and assessing the scale of its present difficulties. The news of what was happening soon spread by word of mouth all over the capital. One young literary lecturer who’d spent half his sabbatical rummaging through the archives found what he said was a parallel incident in a medieval chronicle. In the fifteenth century a certain Albanian fortress, which had been besieged by the Turks for so long that its supplies were almost exhausted and its inmates beginning to go hungry, gave a mêle a huge feed of corn and threw it over the ramparts. When the Turks opened up the mule and found all the undigested corn, they thought the people in the fortress must have plenty of food to spare, and gave up all hope of starving them into surrender. So they abandoned the siege and went away,

This tale gave rise to great controversy in literary circles. The analogy was considered very doubtful. The situation of present-day Albania bore no resemblance to that of the ancient fortress, which was suffering from a genuine famine, and the sending away of the sales reps was nothing like the throwing of the mule over the ramparts. But in the meanwhile the literary review which had published the text had come to the attention of foreign secret services, and though no one knew how they had interpreted it, the incident ie question was repeated a week later. The same reps as before reappeared at Tirana airport — as obstinate as any mules!

Again they were asked to visit the barber’s shop. Again they refused, turned on their heels, and made for the waiting plane.

Then for some days there was practically no traffic at the airport. Very few planes landed or took off, and if one did, the airport staff waited in vain for any hairy reps to disembark.

One rainy day an elderly customs official who’d been suffering for some time from high blood pressure looked out and saw a kind of black cloud hovering over the landing strip. Now the official had seen the Chinese prime minister arrive here and appear in the doorway of his plane no fewer than four times. And since the cloud was hovering at about that level; and perhaps because the customs man had heard about the Chinese prime minister’s ashes being scattered from a plane; and perhaps also because he’d been having dizzy spells lately — well, for some or all of these reasons, he thought the wandering black cloud was the tormented spirit of Zhou Enlai.