Ismail Kadare - The Concert

“How is comrade Enver?” asked the Chinaman. “Not too well, eh?”

The minister’s mouth was full of dust and ashes. If only the blasted dinner would end! But his anxiety lasted several more weeks, until the cold afternoon when he finally gave the order to encircle the Party committee.

All the rest of that afternoon he’d felt completely disorientated, pacing back and forth in his tent, peering out now and then and scanning the plain for a messenger. The messenger arrived at nightfall The order hadn’t been carried out. He didn’t let anyone see how shocked he was, stepping back into the tent to conceal his dismay. He wouldn’t listen to any explanations of this act of disobedience — he just pretended not to understand, and kept shouting, “Arrest them! Arrest them!” As he did so he told himself the best thing would be to settle the matter there and then so that no one would know about it, so that the fact that the order was given would be forgotten, today, tomorrow and until the end of time. But it was too late. All he could do now was simulate an anger he didn’t feel, because fear left no room for wrath. So whenever anyone opened his mouth to try to offer some explanation of how the officers accounted for their behaviour, he cut them short, shouting, “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!”

And he didn’t want to know, either. His only desire was for the matter to be buried in oblivion as fast as possible. That blasted suggestion of Zhou’s! Why had he let him pour that poison in his ear? What he had done struck him sometimes as fatal, sometimes as merely premature. His days became full of chill terror. He realized the affair wasn’t going to die of its own accord. The officers themselves had talked to various people. If they weren’t punished they’d probably talk to some more. By some means or other they had to be silenced. One way of intimidating them was to have them expelled from the Party; and he managed that without any difficulty.’But apparently, after they were expelled, they wrote a letter to Enver Hoxha. That was what the phone call had been about, the evening of the dinner. The minister hadn’t slept a wink all that night. He was obviously going to have to explain himself to the Central Committee. But one of his staff convinced him that what the officers had said about him might easily be interpreted as subversion, as propaganda against authority. So in his report to the Committee he maintained that the officers’ behaviour infringed the laws of the Republic, A fortnight later, at the Central Committee, when someone asked what measures were going to be taken against the officers, the reply was brief: “If they’ve broken the law, let the usual measures be taken.” The minister rubbed his hands. So the Central Committee wouldn’t get drawn into details about the officers’ fate? Well, he knew very well what to do with them! He slept soundly that night, the first time for ages. Then he began to wonder: should he send the officers to prison, or leave them unpunished? To tell the truth, he would have swallowed his resentment and let the matter drop if he hadn’t been afraid they’d start talking again. No, prison was safest. His aides agreed with him. One of them suggested it would be best if they were dismissed from the army first, so that their arrest would seem purely political.

The minister had imagined that after the tank officers were arrested his peace of mind would be restored once and for all But on the contrary. It was then that he started to notice the long silences of the telephone and the lack of visitors. Sometimes he put all this down to the current cooling off of relations with China, which was a general preoccupation then. The very name of China sent a chill down his spine. Great’ changes were in the offing, though there was nothing definite yet. Perhaps it would start with economic retaliation?

The silences of the telephone seemed to get longer every day. What’s going on? he wondered. I’m still a minister. No one has criticized me. What have I got to worry about? He dismissed the situation as absurd, grotesque. But after a while the clouds of uncertainty gathered again. Rumour spreads by word of mouth, Zhou Enlai had said: it was as influential in a country’s affairs as the newspapers. If Zhou had encouraged the episode of the encirclement just in order to start such a rumour, it must be because he believed in it. And if he was right to do so, if rumour really was as strong as all that, the lack of phone calls and the absence of visitors was only too comprehensible. The rumour would have told how the minister had ordered the Party committee to be surrounded, how the tanks had refused to obey the order and been thrown in jail for insubordination — and would have ended by asking, Was the order justified? That was quite enough to make people shun him like the plague. No need to arrange for critical articles to appear in the papers, or to dismiss him from his post, and so on, Rumour — curse it! — was more powerful than all of these. He’d sent for the head of army intelligence and asked what he knew about the rumour. The answer took him aback. “We know nothing about anything of the kind, comrade minister.” He’d started to laugh with relief, there and thee, in front of the head of intelligence. Then his laughter changed to a grim smile at his own gullibility. No, what was causing his anxiety was not a rumour in the ordinary sense of the word, but something more subtle, nameless, and all the more pernicious because it was imperceptible. Something that seeped into everything, everywhere, like the air.

Where had it started? Whose mouths had uttered it first? And in what office, institution or mysterious ante-chamber? The most depressing possibilities occurred to him.

The minister had spent the last two months in this state. Meanwhile the Chinese had done nothing. Everything seemed to be paralysed, I did what I could, he explained in an imaginary conversation with Zhou Enlai. I tried to encircle a Party committee with tanks, but it turned out to be impossible. I was lucky to escape with my life. We don’t go in for that sort of thing here, you know. We don’t harm the Party even symbolically, as you suggested — so you can imagine how feasible it is in reality! They’d smash you to smithereens! Smithereens! Ask me to do the most horrible thing you can think of, but not that! Not that, ever!

The television- news on Thursday had reassured him somewhat. It’ll pass, he thought. The phones will ring again, the door-bell will be heard once more. That was what he was thinking when the phone actually rang. It was the clerk. No guest was ever awaited so eagerly. The minister had tried to take an afternoon nap, but he couldn’t sleep. As soon as he got up, his wife asked him:

“Would you like a cup of coffee?’’

At first he thought he’d wait and have one with the visitor, then he said yes please. If the visitor came, he could always have another with him… If the visitor came? How could he doubt it? It was unthinkable that he shouldn’t turn up.

The doubt lingered until Simon Dersha appeared. But then Simon Dersha vanished again beyond the railings.

The minister stood at one of the drawing-room windows. The trees stood outside — massive, dark, indifferent. Once or twice he imagined himself hastily ringing for his bodyguard and his chauffeur, diving into his car as it emerged from the garage, and hurtling along the street after his quarry. The man would try to get away, but he would stop him, clutch him by the sleeve and say tearfully, “What came over you, going away like that? Why are you tormenting me too, as if all my other troubles weren’t enough?”

That is what he imagined, staring out at the garden, with the drops of rain from this afternoon’s downpour still hanging from the branches and reflecting some invisible source of light. Thee he reached out and rang the bell, and did all the other things he’d imagined. But slowly.