Ismail Kadare: The Concert

The letter was in the briefcase belonging to Gjergj Dibra, a diplomatic envoy travelling on the night plane from Paris to Peking. For some time now he had been flying over the Arabian desert. If it had been so dark that you couldn’t see anything, Gjergj would have found the resulting sense of isolation quite bearable. But it was a clear night, and the moon revealed not only the empty sky stretching out beneath the plane but also the equally arid expanse of barren sands below.

Every so often Gjergj would turn away from the window, resisting the lure of all that emptiness, but after a few moments he couldn’t help turning back again. Thousands of feet below, the moon seemed to be wandering over the surface of the desert like a lifeless eye — a coldly mocking eye holding the image of the sky prisoner, just as the retina of a dead man is said to retain the image of his murderer. And indeed, thought Gjergj, the sky had killed this part of the earth, turning it into a wilderness.

He drew sharply away from the window, and for want of anything better to do asked the stewardess to bring him a coffee. It was his fourth, but what did it matter? He had no intention of trying to sleep.

When he’d finished his coffee he had to make an effort to prevent himself from turning back to the window again. But even without actually looking down at it, he could feel the pull of the desert. For the umpteenth time he tried to distract himself by imagining himself back in his apartment, among the guests at the little party his wife was giving for their daughter’s birthday. He looked at his watch. They must have left the table by now, he thought. But he could still conjure up the various phases of the dinner itself: the comings and goings from room to room of Silva and Brikena, the vase of flowers on the table, the cheerful bustle of the guests arrival, the clinking of glasses. They’d certainly have thought about him. He tried to imagine what they’d said, but that was difficult — it was easier to imagine their smiles and laughter. He reviewed the probable list of guests: his sisters, their husbands, the children, Suva’s brother, his owe mother, his niece Veriana, and either Beseik Strega or Skëeder Bermema. He spent some time wondering which of the two had been there. It didn’t seem possible that either should be absent. Perhaps they’d both come, he thought — and before he could stop himself he found he was looking out of the window again. The empty darkness gaped beneath him, wanly lit by the moon, like an X-ray photograph. Yes, Besnik and Skënder probably both went to the party, he thought dully. All human passions seemed small and trivial compared with that great void.

He sat for a while with his eyes closed. Every so often his hand brushed against the metal lock of his briefcase, reinforced by the red seal of the foreign ministry. Throughout this whole dreary journey he hadn’t let the briefcase out of his sight for a second. He knew it contained an official document of the utmost importance, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what it was about.

Drowsy though he was, he made another attempt at summoning up his daughter’s birthday party in his mind’s eye, but something prevented him from actually entering the flat. Every time he tried, he found himself lingering wistfully outside the door, like a stranger. At the thought of suddenly appearing in the doorway with all those people eating and drinking and talking; of all the familiar gestures he’d have to go through to ring the bell, kiss Silva and their daughter, and then greet the guests, his fingers grew numb and powerless. He realized this was because he was still gripping his briefcase. What is it, Gjergj? their eyes all seemed to be asking. What have you got in that briefcase?

He shook his head and opened his eyes. He must have dozed off, and his hand, clutching on to the handle, had gone to sleep too. He sat on for a while without moving, trying not to look out at the void, then briefly nodded off again, though more lightly now than before. The same sequence of images as before, but swifter this time, led him back to his daughter’s birthday party.

Once again the briefcase prevented him from going in and mixing with the guests. I shouldn’t have kept it on my lap, he thought — thee remembered the iron rule decreeing that he must always have it with him wherever he went. It had been decreed that there was nowhere else in the whole world for the briefcase to be except with him.

Opening his eyes again, he saw a kind of break in the sky, ahead of the plane and on the same level, but far away in the distance, perhaps over central Asia. The dawn.

He asked the stewardess where they were, and she told him they were already over China. The sun was rising. Below them, hidden by a layer of mist, lay the largest and most ancient country in the world. Gjergj gazed out of the window. The sun, a ruddy patch strangely resembling the wax seal on his briefcase, seemed to be struggling over the horizon. Two or three times he thought he glimpsed the earth, but he couldn’t be sure. The engines of the plane throbbed as if with great effort. Still staring out of the window, Gjergj asked himself how was one supposed to deliver a letter to a country like this? Surprised by his own question, he felt like some mythical envoy of antiquity, charged with delivering a message to an empire that was deaf. He went on trying to catch a glimpse of the earth, but in vain: he almost doubted if it still existed.

More than a thousand metres below the belly of the plane lay the land of China, with its population of nearly a billion. Other billions lay beneath the land itself, most of them changed long ago into handfuls of mud. But that autumn morning, out of the billions of Chinese still alive, one had chosen for his own peculiar reasons to be under the earth already, hidden away in a cave. This one was Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.

He had gone back to his underground isolation some days before. He knew very well that every time he did so the people always found out about it eventually, and that they wouldn’t rest until they found out why he was there. His enemies said it was because he was in a blue funk, as he had been when he hid here during the Cultural Revolution. That was understandable enough at the time, others argued, but why was he down there again, now that things had settled down? Perhaps in order to get used to the idea of death, suggested a third group: hadn’t he sensed its approach a long time ago? Others shrugged their shoulders:, that might be the correct explanation, but then again there might be some other reason known only to Chairman Mao himself…

One thing was certain: for some time he had resumed this old habit: perhaps he himself didn’t quite know why. He scoured reports on the rumours circulating about it so eagerly you might have thought he’d forgotten why he’d gone down there, and felly expected to read the explanation in the reports. In fact, he’d come to believe that a head of state’s most useful actions were those which remained incomprehensible not only to others but also to himself. They lent themselves to such a vast range of different explanations. There were always people ready to suggest a meaning for some enigmatic piece of behaviour, while others sprang forward to contradict them and offer another interpretation. Then came another group who thought they were the ones who knew best. And so on and so forth ad infinitum . Meanwhile the action in question was kept alive precisely because it was veiled in obscurity, while hundreds of others, clearer, more logical and more useful, were consigned to oblivion.

The reports informed Mao that many of the rumours put forward religious or mythological reasons for his retreat. One view was that as he already knew all that was said about him on earth, he wanted to find out what was whispered about him underground, where his supporters were no longer in the majority. On the whole he preferred the mythological theories to those that stuck to fact. He liked to think of himself sleeping under the earth for a while and then, like some ancient god, reawakening with the lush new grass of spring.