Ismail Kadare - The Concert

Still the same as ever, thought Silva. Impulsive, hot-headed, a magnet that attracted every kind of trouble — just as he’d been when she first got to know him at the time of the break with the Soviets, when she and Ana used to go to some of his famous dinner parties. If she remembered rightly, it was on one of those occasions that Ana had met Besnik…

“X-rays of the chap’s foot, diplomatic notes — you get the picture?” Victor went on. “For a whole week I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat! And why?” He lowered his voice. “Because of a lousy Chink! A saboteur!”

“What?” cried Linda. “That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone call a Chinaman a saboteur!”

Victor looked from one to the other of them.

“I suppose you both think I'm exaggerating a bit. Perhaps. I was reprimanded once for being too excitable. Maybe I'm wrong — I admit it’s quite possible. The government knows more about these things than I do. Bet as far as I’m concerned, the Chinese…”

“Be careful! Don’t go putting your foot in it again!” teased Linda.

He smiled.

“I know I must seem a bit crazy. Instead of concentrating on things that really matter, I just keep wondering if that confounded X-ray has got there.”

The other two started to giggle again.

“Why should you worry about that?” said Linda. “If you really trod on his foot by accident, it couldn’t have left much of a bruise…”

Victor lowered his eyes and smiled into his beard.

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “I did it on purpose.”

Linda’s peal of mirth made two or three people tern round.

Victor knocked back his glass of brandy.

“What else could I do?” he said, glowering. “For a whole month he’d been driving me up the wall, the swine, keeping me waiting for some papers I needed. Every day he had some new excuse for putting it off. ‘I didn’t have time yesterday,’ he’d say. I was busy reading the works of Chairman Mao… And today 'I have to think over what I read yesterday…' I don’t know how I kept myself from strangling him! That’s right — laugh! It’s obvious you two have never had to deal with a Chinaman!”

As they laughed, Linda kept her eyes on his drawn, ill-shaven face.

“Ping — that’s the bastard’s name,” said Victor, “comes and walks round the factory every morning with his foot done up in a bandage or a plaster or some Chinese old wives’ concoction. Can’t you just see him, pacing up and down for everyone to see? Perhaps he expects someone to put up a statue to Ping the hero, victim of Victor Hila, the Albanian bandit? You think that’s funny? Well, it leaves me suspended — do you hear? — suspended! Neither on earth nor in heaven. And no one will answer my questions!.. Still,” he sighed, “perhaps it’s not the government’s fault. I suppose the Chinese keep pestering them about what they’ve done to punish me. A few days ago my boss said, ‘What got into you, Victor? A nice mess we’re in because of what you did …”

The women, finally said goodbye and left the cafeteria.

“A nice chap, isn’t he?” said Linda as they went upstairs. Silva nodded.

“He’s been like that all the time I’ve known him. He’s hardly changed at all.”

Silva’s face wore a hesitant smile.

“Really nice,” she murmured, as if to herself.

Back in the office, the boss still hadn’t returned. Linda collected some papers and took them along to the typists. Silva sat for a moment with her elbows on her desk. She didn’t feel like working. She got up and went over to the window, looking out at the square with its surrounding ministries and the grey, rainy day. She moved across to the radiator. It felt only lukewarm. “I only hope there won’t be any shortages…” Why had that phrase come back to her? From what recess of her consciousness had it arisen, the hope that Ana had so often expressed at the beginning of that inauspicious period when the future had seemed so unpredictable? It was a hope doomed to remain unfulfilled, for shortages were to become part of their way of life…And if history were to repeat itself, thee they might expect more of the same gloomy medicine…But still, it couldn’t have happened as fast as all that! And it was common knowledge that the boiler responsible for the central heating was unreliable — there’d been talk once or twice of replacing it. No, she was letting her imagination run away with her, she decided, going back to her desk. This time everything’s different. It’s all so quiet.

The door opened and the boss came in, followed by Linda. Strangely enough, the boss looked quite cheerful now, and when Linda asked Silva something, he volunteered the answer himself — a tacit sign of reconciliation. He started to talk about the Chinese, and Linda told him about Victor Hila. He was still roaring with laughter at the story, his mirth punctuated with his characteristic yelps, when there was a knock at the door and Simon Dersha reappeared.

“May I use your telephone for a moment, please?” he asked.

Still laughing, the boss nodded towards the phone, and Dersha went over and dialled a number. Silva and Linda exchanged glances. At each tern of the dial, the boss’s laughter grew less. Finally, as before, they heard a phone ringing at the other end of the line, but again there was no reply. Simon’s face, though anxious, still wore its previous blissful expression. It looked as if it had been left there by mistake. At length he hung up.

“So what did he do then, this Victor?” said the boss. “That is his name, didn’t you say?”

Simon Dersha was still sitting there as if trying to make his way into the others’ universe, but the unwonted expression on his face prevented Silva from speaking freely. She made an effort and made some comment on Victor’s plight, at which the boss began to laugh louder than ever. Stealing a glance at Simon, she thought she now saw a tinge of irony in his happiness.

He slipped out of the room unobtrusively when the boss’s hilarity was at its height.

“What’s the matter with him, wandering around all morning like a sleepwalker?” said Linda, not even bothering to lower her voice.

“Don’t pay any attention.”

“No, but did you take a good look at him? I’ve never noticed that navy blue suit before, and I think it makes him look very weird!”

Silva nodded.

The boss sighed, as he usually did after he’d been laughing. Then the whole office lapsed once more into silence.

“You think you’re so wonderful, don’t you?” said Simon Dersha inwardly in the neighbouring office. And he indulged in a condescending smile. As recently as yesterday the laughter still ringing in his ears would have made him feel lonely and excluded. But now the mirth, the larking about that had once tortured him like something precious for ever beyond his reach, seemed tarnished and worthless. He felt completely free from the inferiority complex he’d always suffered from in relation to his colleagues. And this miracle had come about in a single night, like something out of a fairy tale.

If they only knew where I was yesterday evening, he thought. All morning he’d been tore between the desire to tell them where he’d dined the previous day and a kind of inexplicable reticence. He’d seen from the way they looked at him that they were wondering what was the matter. And at the thought that what had happened to him was beyond anything they could possibly have imagined, he was filled once again with delight.

The previous evening he’d been to dinner with one of the best-known members of the government. It was like a dream; sometimes he couldn’t even believe in it himself. Perhaps that was why, this morning, he’d tried three times to phone the friend who’d introduced him to the minister in the first place, and then taken him to the dinner party: he just wanted to exchange a few words with him about it, in order to convince himself that the miracle really had happened. But as ill-luck would have it, he hadn’t been able to get through.