Ismail Kadare - The Concert

“How are you?” asked the other. “Well? I expected to see you at the reception tonight”

“I did drop in,” said Krams.

“Really?”

“I only stayed for a minute. We must have missed one another.”

“Probably.”

“Well, I’m very glad to see you, comrade Struga,” said Krams. “Have you been in Paris long?”

“Just a few days. How about you? Sit down for a while if you’re not in too much of a hurry. These people are members of the reconstructed Portuguese Communist Party, Perhaps you know some of them?…This is comrade Juan Krams,” he said, turning towards the Portuguese. “I acted as interpreter for him when he was in Albania.”

Krams now looked at the others for the first time. He had met two of them before. The others were strangers to him.

“We came here straight from the Rue de la Pompe,” explained Besnik Struga.

“A pity I didn’t see you there, but it’s a stroke of luck finding you like this,” said Krams.

The others made room for him at their table.

“Sure I’m not disturbing you?” he said before sitting down.

“Not at all,” one of the Portuguese reassured him. “On the contrary.”

“We were talking about the third world,” said another.

“Very interesting!”

As soon as he sat down, Krams realized this was the table he’d been looking for in vain the whole evening. The discussion soon turned into an argument, chiefly between Krams and Besnik Straga. The Portuguese only put in a word here and there, until finally the other two held the field alone.

“Well, it’s as I expected,” said Krams, after a pause. “All the rumours about China and Albania disagreeing on a whole lot of fundamental questions are true.”

“Apparently,” answered Struga, He gazed at his coffee cup, picked it up, put it down again in the saucer, then went on, with a sidelong glance at Krams: “And i suppose the rumours about you taking China’s side in ail this are true too!”

“Apparently,” said Krams, smiling.

The argument then flared up again, but the courtesy which had restrained their debates the year before was now abandoned.

Krams insisted that it was crazy and unforgivable to deny the existence of the third world. Struga maintained that the division of the world into three was a myth which flew in the face of scientific objectivity.

As Krams listened to Struga he felt a twinge of jealousy. This man was present at the Moscow Conference, he thought. He’d have liked to forget that this lent Struga a certain superiority, bet there was no denying it. What wouldn’t he himself give to have been there! Would there be other meetings like it in the future? In other words, meetings where everything was smashed to bits and then rebuilt as if after some apocalyptic catastrophe in which the fault line ran through the whole cosmos.

The discussion moved from the third world to the Sino-American rapprochement and back again. Krams tried hard to keep calm. He could bear anything except people denying there was such a thing as the third world. Again the exchanges grew heated.

“That’s what your Mao Zedong says!” Struga interrupted at one point.

Krams looked at him in surprise.

“Our Mao Zedong?” he said with a bitter smile, “You mean he’s not yours any more, if I heard you correctly?”

“You heard right,” said Besnik. “Yours.”

Krams shook his head.

“How strange,” he said. “I’d never have thought it could come to this.”

“What’s so surprising?” asked one of the Portuguese. “Everyone has to make his own choice…”

“Of course, of course,” said Krams placatingly. “And I choose Mao. With pleasure!”

Then he picked up his cup, and drank down his now cold coffee in three gulps.

“What ravings!” exclaimed the observer on duty at the station near the North Pole, taking off his headset for a moment. “My God, what ravings!” He rubbed his ears as if to get rid of the painful buzzing, then put his earphones on again. It was the busiest part of the day and he couldn’t take more than a few seconds rest without the risk of missing an important signal.

The diplomatic receptions being held in the various European capitals had jest ended, and most of the radio messages reported the comments the guests had exchanged in the midst of the hubbub, between whiskies. Such circumstances naturally enhanced the stupidity of their remarks, though these would have been stupid enough anyway. The radio officer laughed whenever he came upon the same conversation reported differently by two different embassies. The whole hotchpotch seemed to belong not to a number of different receptions but rather to a single long one which had been going on from time immemorial and would continue until the end of the world…Don’t you think there’ll be great upheavals in Yugoslavia when Tito dies?…As many as there will be in Spain after Franco…But Tito’s different! …Of course, of course!..Have you seen who’s on the Chinese committee for the funeral? …Romania…Romania’s foreign policy…“Hell, I missed that bit!” said the radio officer. But he wasn’t too worried — he knew he’d hear the same phrase again, probably so many times he’d get sick of it…Hey, here were our two lost pigeons again…Then came something, apparently not very important, about Portugal. The European parliament… N.A.T.O. interests in the Mediterranean…Spain doesn’t intend …If the price of oil goes on rising. My God, how often must they go on repeating the same thing?

The observer’s job was to record only messages relating to the communist world; all the rest were of no interest. But he was supposed to monitor everything. And apart from the fact that the communist world had poked its nose into all the problems of the human race, it sometimes happened that an apparently harmless conversation — about religious violence in Ireland, for instance — had some sort of relevance to Soviet missile bases in the Arctic. No message was negligible — that was the essence of the monitor’s instructions. “Don’t go telling yourself that a message missed by you will be picked up by one of your colleagues. Act as if you were the one and only monitor in the world…” And another thing. Uncoded messages were often as interesting as those sent in cipher. Some countries, especially the smaller ones, afraid their codes might be deciphered by their larger neighbours, sent highly important messages in clear in the hope that they might thus escape notice.

In the Middle East…Soviet interests, of course, but. So apparently Albania was never a satellite of China…A rapproche. meet with Moscow couldn’t be excluded…N.A.T.O. in Greece…Now that the bases in Greenland…Have you seen who’s on the Chinese committee for the funeral? Naturally, old boy — the make-up of those committees is always frightfully significant…And what do you think’s going to happen in the Persian Gulf?…And the Dead Sea?

Tell yourself you’re the only person listening in the whole world …He shook his head to try to keep himself awake. One of these days I’ll go out of my mind! he thought. Hearing your neighbour’s blatherings through the bathroom wall was enough to drive you barmy — if you had to listen to those of the whole world! The “world’s murmuring”…He vaguely remembered reading somewhere, or perhaps he’d heard it in a conversation that some authors had tried to write the total book, which would contain all the truth in the world in a condensed form. Sometimes people cited examples, in which the author had almost succeeded, as in a novel called Finnegans Wake ,which the radio officer hadn’t read.

He started to giggle. How could anyone write the Book of the World in a two-roomed fiat? He was the only one who could write it, or even write a single chapter of it, up in the solitude of this icy waste where there was still hardly any difference between night and day, as in the time of Chaos, And its title ought to be the Ravings of the World, the “World’s Delirium”!