Ismail Kadare - The Concert

He was now within a stone’s throw of the minister’s residence. The sentry on duty outside, muffled up in a black rain-cape, stood still as a statue. The front of the house was dark; a faint light was to be seen at the side windows. Simon slowed down as he approached the gate. The sentry’s rubber cape gleamed wetly.

Simon realized that the time for ordering his thoughts, however inefficiently, was over, and prepared to address the sentry, who seemed to be keeping an eye on him. But at the last moment he suddenly remembered the Chinese business…It was usually during this sort of crisis that the struggle inside the Party flared up…Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He’d wasted his time on all sorts of nonsense, not excluding coffee grounds, and overlooked this blinding truth!

He found himself walking straight past the sentry. What was he doing? Running away? Don’t worry, he told himself, if you want to turn back you can, there’s nothing to stop you. There are still two minutes to go till six o’clock. He went along by the railings for another twenty yards or so, then retraced his steps. But the thought of China persisted. Worse still, the closer he got to the gate the larger the idea loomed, until it seemed to be radiating out from inside the villa. It’s in situations like this…crises like this… that deviationists rear their ugly heads…like rats before an earthquake…He was now only a few feet from the sentry, but he still hadn’t decided whether to go in and see the minister or not. He slowed down and turned to look past the railings at the front of the house, which looked gloomier than ever through the dripping trees. He could feel the sentry’s eyes on him again. Then he heard the rustle of rubber and the sentry’s low voice:

“Do you want to see the minister?”

Simon swung round in amazement.s How did the man know? Could he possibly be aware of his intentions? Without answering, Simon started walking along by the railings again. After a while he slowed down again. But this time he didn’t turn back.

He must have been someone else, thought the sentry, who’d been told to expect a visitor. And he watched the retreating figure vanish in the distance.

Inside the villa, from the window of the main drawing room on the ground floor, the minister watched Simon Dersha disappear. He’s not coming, he observed. He’d been watching his to-ings and fro-ings through the slits in the shutters, and at one point had even reached out to ring a bell. Then he’d remembered the sentry had been warned to expect a visitor. When the figure outside finally walked away from the guard, the minister had almost exclaimed, “What’s that idiot up to? ^Why didn’t he let him in?” In other circumstances he’d have sent someone out at once to ask the man what had happened and why the visitor had gone away. Bet this evening he didn’t feel like it …In other circumstances…The minister gave a hollow laugh. In other circumstances, he told himself, you wouldn’t be lurking behind the shutters waiting for a wretched clerk whose name you can’t even remember to make up his mind whether to come in or not…

Meanwhile the figure had disappeared past the end of the railings. In other words, this wasn’t a matter of chance. For it was no accident, either, that phone calls and visitors had grown scarcer and scarcer during the past fortnight. Dozens of times he’d tried to dismiss his suspicions, but dozens of other times those suspicions had returned to the charge.

He’d spent all the previous week in this state, apart from Thursday evening, after the TV news. But the reassurance this had brought didn’t last long. It had been succeeded by more of those almost deaf and dumb days spent staring at all the telephones on his desk, at all those buttons and lights, at his secretary slinking in for instructions. He’d kept telling himself, “I’m still a minister, damn it!” Nothing had changed. The guards were still there in the ante-room, and then his aides, his assistants, and a whole lot of departmental heads all waiting to do his bidding, just as before…But he knew very well that it wasn’t really like that. Things were different…There’d been a change …He couldn’t have said exactly what it was, but he had the feeling nothing was as it had been.

He’d wondered more than once if he was suffering from some psychological illness, but realized he wasn’t being honest with himself. He’d have been only too glad if it were all the result of a disordered brain. Unfortunately he knew it wasn’t.

He was looking rather drawn, but that could happen to anyone. What he didn’t like was the sound of his voice — it sounded strained, and he was afraid this might give the game away to others. He had tried to disguise the change, to deepen his voice when he spoke, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. At the most it worked on the telephone. He really couldn’t reconcile himself to the change in his voice — it was as if that were the source of all his woes. In his attempts to improve matters he’d done things he’d never have dreamed of before: for instance, he drunk water straight out of the refrigerator in the hope that it would make him hoarse. But to his intense irritation, it didn’t work. His throat, once so sensitive to damp and cold, was unaffected.

His mood changed from frenzy to self-pity, then to a phase of comparative calm. He managed to convince himself nothing had happened, and even if it had, the trouble would soon be over. He’d been in this kind of mood when Simon Dersha rang up. He’d placed him at once, because he was connected with the evening of that other, that fateful phone call. The minister was ashamed of himself now — he even tried to hide from himself the fact that he, a member both of the government and of the Politbureau, had been glad to receive a phone call from so insignificant an individual But he’d enjoyed his lunch, afterwards, more than he had for a long time.

‘I’ll make you a coffee,” his wife had said when they’d finished.

Then he’d gone to his room to lie down, but he couldn’t sleep. However, he couldn’t help feeling slightly better — though only slightly, and the improvement was tinged with bitterness. He’d been put out at the previous lack of phone calls, and this one gave some cause for satisfaction. The man who’d made it was neither a bumpkin nor one of his own entourage. He worked in a ministry, and it was a well-known fact that people like that were good at sniffing out… the minister wouldn’t let himself think the word “changes”. Yes, when it came to…that sort of thing, that sort of man was the first to know.

He gazed up at the bedroom ceiling. His thoughts were in confusion. He’d wondered several times why this humble clerk wanted to see him, but told himself that was of no importance. What mattered was that he should come to see him. When you’re the victim of such…no one will come near you. It’s as if you had the plague.

But what if he was worrying for nothing? he asked himself for the umpteenth time. Supposing all these black thoughts, all these torments, were unfounded? He turned over. Oh, if only that were so, he wouldn’t mind all the anguish! He’d put it all behind him, if only it had been a mistake!

From then on he didn’t try to hide his fears. What still wasn’t clear to him was when it had all begun. But probably Enver Hoxha’s phone call during that dinner party was the turning point, the watershed between before and after. Unless it all began before that, one cold evening on the dreary plain from which he was directing the grand manoeuvres, when he was informed that a group of tank officers had disregarded one of his orders. He had stood at the entrance to his tent staring at the liaison sergeant who’d brought the message — or rather at the square of anonymous face left uncovered by the hood of a raincoat: just the lower part of a forehead, eyes, mouth and two patches of cheek.