Ismail Kadare - The Concert

Mao himself was perfectly at ease. For the simple reason that he knew another secret. Never mind the bomb and the damage to the undercarriage — Lin Biao was dead already. Killed not in mid-air, as their feeble brains might imagine, nor in the Mongolian desert, but on Chinese soil.

As they dithered around him trying to tell him their worries, Mao looked them over sardonically. They always forgot he came from a peasant background — and a peasant always trusts terra firma better than the sky. Could he possibly have been so reckless as to let Lin Biao fly around before he was killed? He couldn’t afford such a luxury. That was why he’d said “Let him go!” so placidly, He’d known he was talking about a corpse.

So Lin Biao and his wife and son had died, like the vast majority of human beings, on earth. On a landing strip or in a hangar in some remote airfield. Or else they were liquidated even more coldbloodedly inside the marshal’s official residence, as they were taking a stroll round the garden after breakfast. They were shot with a machine-gun through the iron railings, and their bodies were put in a van and driven to the little military air-base. There the bloody corpses were lashed to their seats in the waiting plane.

If Mao was so calm it was because he knew all that. Bet he had never confided in anyone except Zhou Enlal. The reason for his silence was simple: he was protecting his owe prestige. He felt that the planting of a bomb on a plane and the sabotage of its landing gear were strategems which might have damaged his reputation, whereas a ground operation was something quite different. He hadn’t even spoken about it to Jiang Qing. Zhou was seriously ill and hadn’t got long to live, so the secret was safe with him. As for the killers, they would soon follow their victims to a place where they could tell no tales.

Meanwhile the little army plane was flying over northern China. Deep silence reigned on board. No questions were to be heard, no gunshots — only the monotonous purr of the engines. The bullets which were soon to put the whole world in a turmoil were already in the bodies. Every so often the corpses, now beginning to cool, would slip down off the seats. One of the killers had probably thought it enough to fasten them into their seat belts.

Gjergj felt a tremor go through the giant plane, and leaned towards the window. The lights had gone on asking passengers to fasten their seat belts. They were apparently about to land. Night was falling; the tiny purple-glinting windows far below seemed to belong to another planet. The plane was bumping more often now. Gjergj ‘s ears were hurting. The ground was coming closer and closer, and he found himself glancing towards the place beneath the wings where the landing gear would soon emerge, with a faint jolt that would run right through the fuselage.

What a relief! This torture would soon be over. He was sure that as soon as the plane had touched down he would be free of all these chaotic obsessions. But the landing was taking a very long time. The mauve lights of the airport building vanished to the right, as if they’d fallen into an abyss. Was he still going to have to keep churning up the same old jumble of thoughts in his skull, when after all the whole affair could be reduced to the story of a dead body being thrown over the Chinese frontier?

Yes, that’s it, he thought, his temples throbbing as the air in the cabin was depressurized. The story of a dead body being dumped. In the old days, bandits used to leave the bodies of their victims at their enemies’ door. Mao dumped them at the door of the nearest super-power. Tossing corpses into forts and citadels in order to terrorize the defenders was a custom as old as time. He remembered, too, how the ashes of the false Dmitri of Russia were shot over the Polish border in a cannonball. All quite typical of such countries. And hadn’t Mao threatened them in exactly those terms when he said, “I'll scatter your corpses in the air?”

The body of the plane creaked loudly as it descended through the semi-darkness. Gjergj was still holding his briefcase on his lap. The metal buckles gleamed faintly. The Soviets had been just as mysterious over Beria. He’d vanished more than twenty years ago, and his disappearance was still an enigma. People said there wasn’t even any trial or firing squad — he was just killed at a meeting of the Politbureau. One version said somebody had strangled him with his bare hands. Then the body was hastily buried. Whereas he, the amazing Mao, airily tossed corpses from one country to another as if with a catapult.

Why can’t I get these images out of my mind, thought Gjergj. Again he peered out of the window, but all he could see was the damp impenetrable darkness. Where had the earth gone? How much longer were they going to have to wander around in space? He leaned his head against the cool glass, feeling the plane’s vibration run right through him. Then suddenly, a long way in front of him, he saw a multitude of little lights, not only mauve but also red and green and blue, winking and flickering in the darkness. He felt his heart grow warmer, he was filled with a delightful languor. The plane’s wing blotted out the lights on the ground for a moment, but he sat on with his forehead pressed to the glass as if he could still see them. His thoughts had drifted home again to his loved ones. Their faces, wreathed in smiles, succeeded one another in his memory until for some reason or other it came to a halt on ae episode he hadn’t remembered for a long time. What he recalled was his first moment of real closeness to Silva, in an avenue strewn with dead leaves — he still didn’t know its name. It lay between the main boulevard and Elbasan Street, and they’d just come away from an evening party — they hardly knew one another as yet. Under the streetlights the yellow leaves stretched out like a sumptuous expanse of gilding glowing with the patina of time. They noticed a scrap of paper amongst the leaves — a piece from a musical score, with the notes still legible. He pointed at it. “Look, some Mozart!” he said. She laughed. He glanced at the dark buildings bordering the avenue: “I think this is quite near the hostel for music students.”

The memory of this interlude was almost painful. Gjergj thought of the moment just before they made love, when her eyes were about to cast off sight just as her body was about to strip itself of clothes. Then came the moment when he was bending over her white belly and that which was waiting, unbearably intense, below…

The heavy fuselage jolted when the plane touched down on the landing strip. The engines shrieked as the pilot throttled back. Multicoloured lights quivered frenziedly on either side. “How wonderful to be going back!” he exclaimed. In three days’ time he would be in Tirana. The plane slowed down, panting heavily. What airport was this, then? He looked around in the hope of seeing some name among the lights, but they still jigged about drunkenly and were dumb. Anyhow, what did it matter? The main thing was that he would soon have left ail this behind. Then he remembered that he hadn’t even sent his family a telegram. How could he have forgotten? But never mind, it still wasn’t too late. He peered out of the window again in search of a name. The stewardesses had just announced something…But how did one write a wire in these parts — in Latin characters or Arabic?

The plane came to a stop at last, and the passengers got ready to disembark.

Gjergj smiled to himself as he stood up. He was going to send that telegram anyhow, even if it had to be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Silva got the telegram the next day. It was growing dark and she was tidying up the refrigerator when there was a ring at the door. Then she heard Brikena calling from the hall: