Ismail Kadare - The Concert

The miracle had taken place in stages. It had begun a week before with a phone call from a man with whom Simon had remained on friendly terms since they’d worked together in a commercial firm, and who had since risen to become a vice-minister. The man had told him that one of these days — he’d tell him the exact date in due course — he’d take him to dinner in a place he’d never even dreamed of. When the two of them had eventually met for coffee and the other man had said what that place was, Simon had been dumbstruck. Was it really possible, he kept stammering, that an ordinary pen-pusher like him, a person of no importance…?

“But that’s just it,” the other had replied. “Ordinary people, honest unassuming workers, are the very backbone of both the Party and the State. Do you see, Simon?”

Then, lowering his voice:

“I don’t mind admitting I don’t know myself why the minister suddenly felt the need, or the desire, whichever you like, to set up more direct relations, outside ordinary office routine, with workers from various areas of activity. If you ask me, politicians think that kind of contact helps them keep their finger on the pulse of public opinion. Well, a few days ago he told me he’d like to meet someone from the Ministry of Construction, an ordinary worker, not a senior official — he was already up to his eyes in senior officials! In short, when he told me he wanted to find out what went on from just a humble, honest, ordinary worker. I thought straight away of you.”

As he remembered these words, Simon felt as if his eyes were still misty with tears. He’d spent days afterwards waiting anxiously for a phone call from the vice-minister. Sometimes it seemed to him their conversation had never taken place. Other doubts followed. What if the minister had changed his mind? What if he really had said that about wanting to get to know ordinary people, but had only been speaking generally, and Simon’s friend had been mistaken in trying to invoke him? At one point he decided it was all wishful thinking on the part of his friend, and foolish naivety on his own. He’d almost given up hope when his friend finally phoned. Not only had he thus kept his promise, but he also gave Simon the exact date and time of the dinner party they were to attend together. Even now, several days later, it gave Simon a pleasant glow inside to think of that phone call.

He was alone in his office now. He could hear the sound of doors opening and shutting along the corridor, but they seemed very far away. He thought again of his colleagues in the other office, and it filled him with sardonic satisfaction to remind himself that from now on it was they who should be envying him, and not the other way round. Henceforth he could look down on their humdrum existence, with its chatting and joking and noisy laughter over their morning coffee. Up till today, when they passed him — greeting him, if they did so at all, as if he were almost beneath their notice — they’d probably asked each other how the devil the poor wretch managed to get along, apparently devoid of any object in life. The contrast was so striking he’d often agreed with them: “They’re quite right, really — I wonder, myself, why I’m alive at all.” And he used to reflect thus quite humbly, with a resignation untinged with resentment, placidly accepting the role of unobtrusive spectator of other people’s lives. Sometimes, seeing them burst gaily in and out of one another’s offices, he’d try to imagine the relationships that existed between them. If one of them looked especially bright or tired first thing in the morning, he scented a special significance in the fact, as in the tone of his colleagues’ voices when they exchanged furtive phone calls. Sometimes his imagination ran away with him even further, and he had visions of them naked in one another’s arms, their faces buried in shadow and mystery. Then he would heave a sigh, and say to himself under his breath: “No, I can’t be cut out for that sort of life.”

But now the situation was reversed, A single dinner party, and everything was turned upside down as if by an earthquake. And he could feel within himself not merely a combination of euphoria and scorn, but also the first stirrings of blind rage. He couldn’t have said whether his anger was directed against the others or against himself. It was a frustrated wrath, provoked by the length of time he’d been living in a kind of limbo because of his own submissiveness and lack of jealousy. And it was accompanied by the dim stirrings of a desire for revenge. But this feeling was still very faint indeed: it was alien to his nature, and found it hard to take root there.

They’d been talking about China, he mused. He’d heard other discussions on that subject lately: it had been mentioned at the dinner party itself, though he hadn’t been able to concentrate sufficiently to catch exactly what was said. Everything seemed dim and vague, apart from what had actually been happening to him, which he couldn’t get out of his mind. It must be like that, he thought, when you were in love. Not that he’d ever been in love himself, but other people were always going into such raptures on the subject it must be pretty wonderful But he was sure his present feelings were more wonderful still, and more lofty, because more rare.

Most people, if not all, had been in love. But very few had had the experience of dining with a minister.

Yet again he recalled what he’d felt like just before it was time for him to set out. He’d decided to wear a navy blue suit which he’d had made some years back out of some expensive Polish material. He’d kept it for special occasions, and in due course it had come back into fashion again. He remembered trying to select a shirt, and how his wife had hovered around him with an expression that struck him as somehow disagreeable. Looking at himself in his dressing-table mirror, he’d been struck by something rather pitiful about the rawness of his carefully scraped cheeks and the redness of his neck inside its stiffly starched collar. Just as he was leaving, his wife asked him for the umpteenth time if he’d remembered to take a handkerchief, and all the way to his destination he’d worried about what he would do if he suddenly sneezed in the middle of dinner. He tried to dismiss the incongruous thought from his mind, but it was no good: he kept remembering a story he’d read at school, about a minor official who sneezed in the presence of some bigwig. The grown-up Simon quickened his pace and told himself he was a civil servant in a socialist country: his situation had nothing in common with that of a bourgeois pen-pusher who swooned away in terror because he’d sneezed in the presence of a superior.

Simon Dersha’s nervousness subsided somewhat when he was joined on the way to the party by the vice-minister, then grew again as he noticed that his protector too had lost some of his usual self-assurance. The nearer they got to the minister’s residence the more their conversation languished, until at last the only sound to be heard was that of their footsteps. Several times one of them said “What?” though the other hadn’t said anything. The street was only faintly lit, which made the damp surface of the road and the iron railings round the gardens look even darker than usual “This is it,” said the vice-minister in a scarcely audible voice as they came to a two-storey villa.

Memory is governed by laws of its own. Simon’s mind was a blank as to the time between the moment when the vice-minister said “This is it” and the moment when they entered the villa. But he could remember the dinner itself quite plainly: some parts of it seemed engraved in his memory for ever, while others were still suspended in a kind of mist, a tantalizing cloud of vagueness.