Ismail Kadare - The Concert

“Don’t you find it all terribly boring?” a friend had asked him one day. Juan Maria had rarely been so furious. They’d argued till after midnight in the café where the Colombian leftists hung out, near the Place de l’Opéra, then gone on arguing in the street, thee in another bar, and so on until daybreak. They’d hurled fierce accusations at one another, quoting Trotsky, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong one on top of the other, Krams had charged his friend with about seven deviations, and his friend, as day broke, cried, “Do you know what you are, Krams? You’re anti-life, you’re the Devil in person!”

“Yes, I suppose I am, in a way,” he’d answered. “I reject this life in favour of another that is to come,” “And what if this other life rejects you?” said the other. “Has it ever occurred to you that if you move so far away from ordinary human existence, from what you scornfully call the thirst for life’, you might become so twisted that if you ever wanted to change your mind, life might refuse to let you come back, might drive you away as if you were a ghost?” “Rubbish,” he’d replied. “Petty-bourgeois verbiage!” But the other had persisted: “A shadow, Krams, that’s what you are!”

And they’d gone on wrangling in the damp dawn, the shapes of passers-by seeming indeed to move in a world other than theirs. When the two young men separated, perhaps even after they’d begun to walk away, Krams’ friend had turned round and called after him: “Give it all up before it’s too late, Krams! You’ll find more history, philosophy and perhaps even economics in the tears of the old women in the Balkans than in all your plenums and your right, left and centre resolutions!”

Old women singing a funeral song in the Balkans…thought Krams as he drove along now, his eyes on the wet road. The chap was probably referring to something he’d seen on a trip to Albania, He must have been to one of those funeral ceremonies to which Krams himself had so far paid no attention.

Even after all this time, he still felt some of his original disillusion-meet about Albania. He’d rushed there hoping to see a new world inhabited by new men, and all he’d found was the same humdrum old routine of human life: people earning wages, buying furniture and lampshades just as they did everywhere else, putting money away in the savings bank, divorcing, inviting one another to dinner, getting drunk, and occasionally even committing suicide for love.

But where was the new man? On the third day he suddenly asked his guide this question. “The new man?” said the guide, somewhat taken aback. “The people you see all around you — in the café, in the street. They’re the new men!”

They were strolling along Tirana’s main boulevard. Krams felt he’d been had.

“Excuse my frankness,” he said, nodding towards the passers-by, “but the last thing I’d call these people is new men! Look at the way they’re dressed! Look at the way the boys move, look at the girls’ eyes! I don’t know how to describe them.”

The guide laughed.

“They’re just human movements, human looks. Why should they need any other description?”

“That’s not the point,’ said Krams.

So they had their first argument about the new man out there on the boulevard. Krams hadn’t minced his words. The new man was the foundation, the key, the alpha and omega of the whole thing. If he could be brought into being, socialism could be regarded as successful; if not, everything would be in danger of falling to pieces. Krams brought out an idea he’d heard somewhere before: you couldn’t build a new socialism with old bricks. Otherwise, in your Palace of Culture there would be Festiges of the erstwhile Church; in your People’s Assembly, the old Parliament; in your proletarian meeting, the former procession; in your military march, the waltz; and so on. But if one set about making new bricks, thee the buildings, even if they sometimes adopted old forms, would be new in their substance and thus proof against the phantoms of the old world.

“Do you see what I mean?” Krams had asked the guide. “The new brick is the new man. If we get him, the rest will follow. If not, one fine day hotels will tern back into churches, and instead of playing the Internationale , orchestras will play the liturgy.”

The guide had nodded thoughtfully. In theory he wasn’t against what Krams had said, but he couldn’t quite see what this new man was going to be like. “The Chinese are trying to create him,” said Krams. “Oh yes,” said the guide, “I’ve heard about that. I suppose you’re referring to Lei Fee?’’ “Exactly. You don’t seem to like him very much?” “I don’t know what to say,’’ said the guide.

Scraps of other arguments were coming back to Krams. Their discussions had become more and more heated. One day his escort said, “I can’t understand you, comrade Krams, I’ve noticed you’re not interested in the life the people live here, only in certain things…I don’t know how to describe them — dry, theoretical things,’ “Now I don’t understand yow,” said Krams. “I’ll try to explain. By dry, theoretical things I mean, for example, that when it comes to the workers you’re interested only in their unions, not in their daily lives — their pay, their living conditions and so on. When it comes to the intelligentsia, you only want to know the different ways they manage to do their quota of manual work, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear. And take literature: you’ve never asked me what it takes as its subjects, but you’ve asked me dozens of questions about how writers get in touch with the grass roots in order to merge with the masses…”

Here Krams had interrupted, to tell the other he believed that the only great literary achievement of the age of socialism was precisely that — the re-education of writers. He thought it would be wonderful if Albania managed to set a similar example to the rest of the world.

“A horror like that?” said the guide, with a grimace of disgust.

“Do you call that a horror?”

“That’s putting it mildly!” And without trying to disguise his irritation, he told Krams the Albanians had no intention of debasing with their own hands the life they’d managed by twenty centuries of superhuman effort to preserve against famine, war and plague. “And you surely don’t suppose they’d do it just for the pleasure of illustrating somebody’s theories?”

Krams was silent. The fact was, that was exactly what he had thought. He’d hoped the Albanians would be ready to sacrifice their country on the altar of his theories. Now this fellow was saying the opposite. But perhaps he didn’t reject the general opinion? As time went by, Krams acquired the conviction that a lot of people in Albania shared his own views.

Nevertheless, his disillusionment had never quite disappeared. In later years, whenever he heard of what was going on there he felt some of the old bitterness. And then one day he heard on the radio that Albania had banned religion!

He was staggered. The country which had once disappointed him so much was now giving him an unexpected happiness. It had taken a step no one had dared take before. Nietzsche’s dream! His Antichrist! Night after night Krams dreamed of bulldozers overturning churches and cathedrals, campaniles truncated, crosses knocked down. And this, had happened in a country which in the Middle Ages was one of the outposts of Christianity! Wasn’t it on Albania that the first furious tidal wave of Islam broke? Wasn’t Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero, called Christianity’s last bastion in Europe?

The two religions met here in an infernal clash. Neither drew back, and in the end Albania adopted both, and her hero took two names, one Christian, the other Islamic: George and Skander.