Ismail Kadare - The Concert

To stop the other going into explanations of the inexplicable, Krams asked him if he’d heard anything about the U.S. president’s projected visit to China.

“Yes,” said the Moroccan, “I have heard some rumours. But as far as Î can make out, it’s only bluff.”

“Bluff?”

The Moroccan nodded.

“Yes. You can say “bluff in French, can’t you? Anyway, a great booby-trap, just like the business of the hundred Mowers.” He laughed.

“Who told you that?”

“A friend I can trust, Mao intends to find out who’s pleased at the news and who’s going to try to take advantage…And then — bang! Like the last time. They’ll strike without mercy, obliterate, destroy. There’ll be another Cultural Revolution even more terrible than the first. And those who escaped the typhoon last time won’t be able to escape this,…”

“Really?” said Krams thoughtfully. “So there’s not going to be any visit?”

“I don’t know about that,” the Moroccan answered. “The visit may go ahead, but it won’t make any difference — the trap will work anyhow.”

For the first time Krams smiled faintly.

“You’ve given me good news, Shkretëtirs I named you that because of the Sahara…Sorry if I offended you. People sometimes give me nicknames, and I must say I couldn’t care less.”

He remembered the reception at the Romanian Embassy and consulted his watch. He probably couldn’t get there in time, but anyway he said goodbye to the Moroccan, took one more short stroll through the main drawing room, then unobtrusively slipped out.

The rain still hadn’t stopped. His hair was soaked before he got to his car. What lousy weather, he grumbled. It took him a good tee minutes to get to the Rue Saint-Dominique, where the last guests were coming out of the Romanian Embassy. They were still saying goodbye to one another as he came up. Then, after turning away, they would keep going back again for another few words. Juan Maria had noticed that when people got drunk their affability could be as irritating as their touchiness. So just as one of them beamed at him and opened his mouth to greet him, he turned tail, leaped into his car, and drove off in no particular direction. No question of going to the Vietnamese Embassy at this hour. Even if the reception there wasn’t over yet, he didn’t feel at all like going now. His evening had been completely spoiled.

He drove along slowly, still undecided what to do. The sidelights of the cars coming towards him cast what looked like pools of blood on the road. He’d wasted an evening of which he’d expected so much!

On he went, as fast as the traffic allowed, fidgeting in his seat and every so often thumping the steering wheel with impatience. How could he escape and whiz along freely, without being stopped by the traffic lights?

He was in one of those states of excitement where the spirit feels shackled by the body. Cramped limbs, the impossibility of speeding — everything conspired to frustrate him.

He’d heard that this happened sometimes when you were in love (at first he’d hadn’t liked to admit that it hadn’t happened to him — but after all, what did it matter?). It might occur if you were obliged to perform some trivial task in the presence of the unattainable beloved…

And he’d spent the whole blessed evening just tearing from one embassy to another.

It was only the second time he’d had this feeling quite so strongly. The first time was during the famous autumn when there was talk of a split within the socialist camp. As soon he’d heard the first rumours he’d felt, as a militant progressive, that his whole being was ready. It was something he’d been waiting for with the same eagerness as others, spurred on by puberty, or in erotic dreams or whatever, longed for a woman. He remembered that whole period as one of semi-delirium… Days and nights of endless conversation in cafés, especially the Madrid and the Cardinal Heated arguments, sleepless nights, doubts, hesitations, a lightning trip to Tirana, other journeys to Moscow and Peking, then back to the Cardinal and more sleepless nights. And in the end, his choice: to be on the same side of the barricades as the Albanians and the Chinese, against the Soviets.

At the time a lot of people couldn’t understand why he’d made that choice. To begin with it gave rise to all kinds of speculation, thee some started to sneer. What could possibly have made him drop the Soviets and come down on the side of the Albanians and the Chinese? Could he have been motivated by mere self-interest? That wouldn’t wash — everyone knew the Soviets had much more to offer careerists than little Albania and poverty-stricken China. In the end it had to be admitted that Krams’s choice had been dictated neither by sordid nor by sentimental considerations. He must have had some other reason.

And now history is going to repeat itself more or less exactly, he thought, still smiling coldly. The split between China and Albania was an open secret, and the same people as before would try to puzzle out why he took one side rather than the other: self-interest, romanticism, a weak spot for the under-dog, loyalty to the party line…

The lights from shop windows, falling obliquely on his face, made his smile look enigmatic. He hadn’t yet told anyone what he really thought, but on the whole he inclined towards the Chinese. And this not because of the logic of events, nor because of sentiment, still less out of cynical calculation. No, it was something over and above all that. Something which transcended even principle, and probably left Krams himself altogether out of account.

The mass of cars had come to a halt at an intersection, and their drivers, hunched up on their seats, separated from one another by thick windowpanes, their eyes fixed on the traffic lights, looked far away, out of time. Krams thought of the interpretations, supported by all kinds of ridiculous guesses at motive, that people were going to put forward to explain his decision to side with the Chinese, But no one would find out the truth, He was all the more certain of this because he knew he himself was incapable of putting it into words.

More than once, in the rare moments when his thoughts managed to reach, though dimly, the depths of his being, he’d wondered when this love — if it could be called that — had been born in him, this feeling which for some reason he thought of as group life . It must have happened when he was still only seventeen or eighteen — he’d forgotten by now the initials of the little group whose meetings he used to go to every evening after supper, as he’d forgotten lots of other details about it. But the unparalleled delight he took in debate, especially when it involved the possibility of a split, the regrets which a schism might bring, the pleasure of seeing a new group come into being, and the thrill of taking what often seemed a real risk — all this was still quite fresh in his memory.

And that had been only the beginning. Gradually the fascination grew: a universe hitherto unknown to him began to swallow up his whole existence. Not only did he first allow and thee encourage the passions to die away in him — he also banished from his life every other object of desire: his boyhood craze for collecting things; winter sports; the sea; the theatre; the melancholy of autumn; the Greek gods; astronomy; history; his parents. Some of these things became quite alien to him, the rest grew merely meaningless. He now had quite new interests. He found a deviation from a party or group line more captivating than all “his memories of summer holidays. His life was entirely filled with the congresses of the various parties, and of the new groups and sections which had come into being since the break-up of the Marxist-Leninist communist parties; with their plenums, their programmes, the fluctuations of their policies, the different tendencies that grew up in their midst; with the reformists, the syndicalists, the paths to socialism, the conflicting views about the use of force, about pacifism, intimidation, anarcho-syndicalism, the historic compromise, the third world…