Ismail Kadare - The Concert

One day when he was having tea with Guo Mozo, Guo had told him the debate about the human mind was one of the oldest in the world. Didn’t Greek legend present it as the origin of the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus?

“So you might say,” Mao had answered almost jokingly, “there were two party lines on the subject on Olympus?”

“Exactly, Chairman,” said Guo Mozo. “Zees wanted to replace humanity by another species with a less complex brain; in short, as we say nowadays, to create a new man.” (Mao had a fleeting vision of Lei Fen.) “Prometheus took the opposite point of view.”

“Let those who want to go along with Prometheus,” answered Mao. “We’re on the side of Zeus.”

Guo Mozo had looked at him reverently. “And who more suitable than you, Chairman,” his eyes seemed to say, “to play the part of Zeus?”

Mao’s narrowed gaze encountered no obstacle on all the vast expanse before him. These glowing plains would be part of the arsenal in his great campaign. The reports he’d read four days ago on China’s secret exports of marihuana had been encouraging. Hundreds of tons had already been sent to Europe, and hundreds more were on their way there. But more still was needed. How many tons would it take to drug the whole population of the world for twenty-four hours? No one yet knew. But start with Europe, Jiang Qing had advised him a little while ago, and the whole world will be high: it’s Europe’s brain that is the most dangerous. That’s what I’m trying to do, he’d answered, but it’s not as easy as it looks. If sown on a soil composed of sobriety and wisdom, hundreds of tons of dreams or nonsense — call it what you like — would melt like snow in the sun if not backed up by other, more devious measures. The brainwashing of the human race was a titanic undertaking. If you didn’t destroy the things that fed and stimulated the mechanisms of the mind, it would be like trying to drain a lake without stopping up the rivers running into it. Then he’d told her about his plan to destroy the existing educational system, to close the universities, to reduce the number of books and go back to the era when they were copied by hand. No one needed to read more than a dozen books in a lifetime, and most of those ought to be about politics. Mao had managed to do all this in China itself during the Cultural Revolution, but what was the good? — he hadn’t been able to carry it further. True, he’d done so in Cambodia, and tried — unsuccessfully — to do the same in Ceylon, but those two countries were still only in Asia. And his dream had been to extend his policy much further. Into Europe, Yes, Europe …

He would rather not have thought about Albania on a day like this, but it came into his mind unbidden. He’d had such high hopes of Albania! But be patient, he told himself: all things come to him who waits…It was too soon to give up hope. He’d issued new instructions, and there was to be a complete overhaul of the official attitude towards Albania. Something must be done; the lynx would soon be tamed.

In Cambodia, on the other hand, things were going quite well — better even than he’d expected. And all over the world his followers were supporting him and had gone over to the attack. For the first time ever, the thrones of such supreme masters as Shakespeare and Beethoven were toppling. Someone had suggested that a Chinese pianist who had played a Beethoven sonata should have his arms cut off. That might sound barbaric, but it was not. Monsters like Shakespeare and Cervantes were more harmful than any emperor. They wielded absolute power; they were tyrants of the mind, colonizers of the brain. Kings could easily be overthrown, decapitated, or relegated to oblivion; but those other scourges managed to survive through the ages with their power unscathed and even enhanced. But now their supremacy was about to end. He, Mao Zedong, had come into the world to challenge them. Their time was up. Like the kings and the tsars, they would be given their marching orders: Chairman Cervantes, Prince Beethoven, Generalissimo Shakespeare, Count Tolstoi, and so on…Compared with him, Mao, what a poor figure other, minor world-changers cut: they had merely overthrown some monarch or prime minister, while he alone had stood up to the evil Titans and would deliver the whole human race from the unwholesome spell of art.

He’d had scores of thousands of individuals put on trial and punished, but he still wasn’t satisfied. Some had been sent to the provinces, consigned to muddy ditches and rice-fields. They’d been beaten and spat upon. They’d been made to forget they’d once been writers, and then terrorized by being reminded of some novel they’d written, as if it had been a crime. As for those who couldn’t forget, they’d been driven to suicide. And yet he felt he hadn’t done enough.

Every so often he would rehearse in his mind, like a kind of play, a meeting which resembled sometimes a gathering of the Greek gods on Olympus and sometimes a session of his own Politbureau, For the next point on the agenda, I call first upon Prometheus…Then on Chen Pota.

In any case, Zeus had been wrong to chain Prometheus to a rock. That only made a martyr of him. Marx himself had said so, thus spreading confusion among the world proletariat.

If he had been Zeus, Mao wouldn’t have put Prometheus in chains or hurled down thunderbolts upon him. He would have sent him to the rice-fields, amid the mire and the people.

The ancient Greeks knew plenty of things but they didn’t know the power of the paddy-field. The paddy-field, with its mud and its night soil…Nothing like it for destroying a man and making him disappear without trace.

Mao had a file, perhaps the one he cherished most, labelled “Letters from the Rice-fields”. In the last few years he’d received letters of every kind from all sorts of people: from prisoners on the eve of execution, from widows, from fallen ministers begging him for clemency, from unemployed embalmers, and so on. But those from the rice-fields were the only ones he enjoyed looking through again from time to time. They were from writers deported for a period of re-education in the provinces or in out-of-the-way villages. “Thousands of us here in the water and the mud thank you, O God, for delivering us from the demon of writing …”

Mao liked to get out the file and compare recent letters with earlier ones. He noticed that they grew more and more scrappy, their sentences thinner and thinner, akin to the dullness of the earth. Lord, he thought one day, soon they’ll only be seeding me senseless ramblings like the blatherings of someone with apoplexy. And after that I shouldn’t be surprised if one of them just dispatches a piece of paper smeared with mud, a few scattered characters like grains of rice miraculously left behind after a flood.

He smiled at the thought of it. Then he could be said to have got the better of the writers! He’d always felt a deep aversion for them, but after he married Jiang Qing, and especially after she began to get old, his dislike had become almost unbearable. He knew, as the foreign press had recently reminded him, that she was influenced by her past as a third-rate film actress, and the jealousies, failures and permanent humiliations she’d undergone, though she probably hadn’t told even him about the worst of them. He knew or could imagine the real reasons why this belated settling of old scores had become an obsession with her, but as it chimed with his own ideas he didn’t disagree with it. One day he went so far as to tell her so.

“You’re an out and out egoist, and it’s a personal matter with you. I’m a poet myself, but I don’t hate other poets out of jealousy or spite. It’s because they do harm that I can’t stand them, not out of any personal animosity. And when I’ve got rid of them all I’ll even feel a certain regret, as one might after having to pull up a beautiful but noxious weed. You, on the other hand… But you’re a woman, so I suppose one mustn’t be too hard on you…”