Ismail Kadare - The Concert

And now that was all over. The temples of both sides would be razed to the ground as if by an earthquake. To tell the truth, when Krams imagined this happening he saw church steeples collapsing rather than minarets. This may have been because he had a soft spot for the latter, due either to his many friendships with people in the third world or to some unavowed sympathy with Islam.

But the abolition of religion wouldn’t have pleased Krams so much if it hadn’t been the prelude to something else. He was sure the churches would bring down all the rest of the old culture with them in their fall: centuries of literature transcribed by copyists in monasteries, medieval ikons, painters, poets, philosophers…But even that wasn’t enough — there were still countless things left to abolish: ceremonies, modes of thought and ways of life, a vast body of manners and customs, including the traditional dinner parties that were Krams’ own pet aversion. He’d spent some time studying this phenomenon and had discovered that the business of eating and talking at the same time, especially in the evening — in other words dinner parties in the contemporary sense of the term, which according to Krams were one of the worst scourges inflicted on the human race — had been invented by the ancient Greeks. He really believed that, unless these indulgences were done away with, it would-be quite impossible to bring what was called the new man into being. He had even sketched out an article on Dinner parties, last barrier to the creation of the new worlds in which he would examine birthday parties, funeral banquets, Christmas dinners, New Year suppers, Maundy Thursday, late-night conversations and the rest, as variants of the one decadent institution, (In his view, it was no accident that dinner suggested the end of the day.) And the abolition as soon as possible of this custom was an indispensable condition of real human progress.

But all that could wait. The first thing he had to do was go and see — check up on these incredible events on the spot and with his own eyes.

His first awakening in Tirana without the sound of church bells struck him as quite marvellous. The thought that the sky had been rid of that nuisance kept coming back to him and filling him with amazement. He would never have dreamed that the great change could have started like that.

He longed to find his former guide and say, “Well, which of us was right — you or me?” But the guide was a different person now. This wasn’t surprising — the other man had probably been denounced by someone. Krams himself would never have done such a thing, but he did think his former escort had only got what he deserved. Or rather, he thought so until he discovered that his new guide was worse than the one before. Their first set-to was over the two million Albanians living in Yugoslavia. Krams regarded the debate about Kosovo as quite out of date, a relic of romantic nationalism (R.N., he dubbed it mentally), and he was amazed to see Albanian communists bothering about such things. He’d imagined they’d risen above such chauvinistic prejudices. The guide lost his temper, and the argument moved from the subject of bourgeois and proletarian ideas about patriotism to that of outmoded national heroes (O.N.H.’s, thought Krams), Then came the Greater-Serbian Rankovic’s genocide of the Albanians in Kosovo (Krams thought this quite unimportant compared with the daily exploitation of the working classes), followed by the events in Cambodia. “Nobody knows where Cambodia begins,” said the Albanian guide viciously, “Is it on Khmer soil, in Peking, or in certain cafés in Paris?” Then he glared at Krams as if to say, “Maybe Cambodia begins in yon!”

Juan Maria could scarcely contain his wrath, but back in his hotel he cooled off. After all, there was no real reason why he should take offence. Despite certain excesses, he wasn’t basically against what was happening in Cambodia. Let people call him Juan the Anti-Lifer, a ghost, a demon, the incarnation of sterility — that, in his own way, was what he was. If he had anything to worry about it wasn’t that, bet rather the fact that being called such names still upset him. It only went to show that his inner evolution wasn’t yet complete.

One day he saw a funeral procession in the street, and this reminded him of his friend’s reference to the Balkan mourners.

He didn’t set much store by manifestations of this kind, and if he asked his guide to take him to a funeral it was so that when he got back home he could phone his friend and say: “I went to one of those ceremonies you were talking about, and the tears were just ordinary tears, that’s all.”

But his escort said that instead of taking him to a funeral he was going to take him to a cemetery. Or rather to two — the ordinary city cemetery and the cemetery reserved for national martyrs.

Krams had visited the latter before, on his first trip, but now, compared with the city cemetery, it made a different impression on him. While the graves of the martyrs were all the same, standardized, right down to the inscriptions and even the tombstones themselves, the ordinary graves presented an infinite variety of size, shape, style, symbol and sentimental epitaph. Distinctions were at their most evident among the dead. Perhaps that’s where the great change begins, thought Krams: in the sky, where you no longer heard the sound of bells, and in death. Yes, that might well be it, though as yet he’d never heard of the “new dead”.

He could feel his thoughts getting hopelessly scrambled. This was one of his rare lapses from lucidity. He was jolted out of his preoccupation by the guide, who nodded towards a tombstone of white marble:

“My wife’s grave,” he said,

“What?”

“My wife’s grave,” said the guide again, pointing to a photograph set into the headstone.

“Oh…I’m sorry…I didn’t know…”

“No need to apologize,” said the other, his eyes fixed on a bunch of wilted roses lying on the grave. “She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”

Krams waved his hands about helplessly. He felt horribly embarrassed, and couldn’t think of anything to say. So he kept on saying, “I’m sorry."

He’d felt ill at ease ever since he came. Human beings have good memories — it’s one of the human race’s worst afflictions, Mao Zedong had said to him during their one and only interview. And when Krams asked him if he thought there might ever be a relatively simple way of explaining the complex mechanisms of the memory, Mao answered, “That’s exactly what I’ve been working on lately.”

As he often did when his ideas were undermined or challenged from without, Krams shut himself up in his hotel room earlier than usual, and sat himself down amid all the papers he’d brought with him. It was only when he was surrounded by documents that he felt completely safe. There, away from noise, perfumes, and unwelcome phone calls, he would steep himself in work until his mind settled down again. His enemies might call this world of his a verbal desert, a wilderness of empty phrases, a political Sahara — for Krams himself it was the only world worth living and fighting for. He liked to pore for hours over the notes he’d written about everything relating to it: parties, splinter groups of left or right, Trotskyites, communists, Euro-communists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists; their theories, tendencies, sub-tendencies, strategies and tactics, transfermations, conflicts, and international connections. He knew that small world as well as he knew the palm of his hand: he’d belonged to some of its movements and even to their leadership, and after taking part in endless discussions within one group after the other had ended up in “Red Humanity”, But although he was affiliated to one group, he felt linked, if only through hostility, with the whole galaxy revolving around him: the Organizing Committee for a Revolutionary Movement (the O.C.R.M.), with Trotskyite leanings, a large proportion of Spaniards on its boards, and a considerable network of foreign relations; the Movement of the 22nd of March (M 22), which had anarchist sympathies and was against democratic centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat; the Communist League (the CL), a large almost folkloric organization with Trotskyite leanings which made little distinction between Stalinists and revisionists, since it regarded the latter as Stalinists who’d changed their name to make it easier for them to betray the communist movement. Those who took part in this group’s demonstrations had had to shout “Ho-ho-ho-Ho-Chi-Minh” when Ho Chi Minh was the current idol, and “Che-che-che-Che-Guevara” when Guevara was in vogue, and now members of “Red Humanity” were expected to hail “Ma-ma-ma-Mao-Zedong”. Then there was Workers’ Straggle (W.S.), also Trotskyite, which didn’t always draw the line at almost fascist violence; the Centres of Communist Endeavour (C.C.E.), whose militants unfortunately enjoyed an authority acquired during the Second ‘ World War; the Proletarian Left (P.L.), which claimed to be Maoist and carried out acts of sabotage in order to promote unrest, in accordance with the Guevarist slogan “Provocation-Repression-RevolutionI”; not to mention the United Workers’ Front (U.W.P,), the Marxist-Revolutionary Alliance (M.R.A.), the Anarchist Groups for Revolutionary Action (A.G.R.A.), the Anarchist Federation (A.F.), the International Situ-ationists (I.S.), and so on and so forth. All these groups, together with their platforms, their lines and their positions on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Party, the state and the future, made up a seething microcosm of passions which Juan Maria Krams wouldn’t have exchanged for anything else in the world.