Ismail Kadare: The Concert

To tell the truth, the half-death he seemed to experience down in that cave struck him as the state that suited him best. The strange days he spent there, divided between existence and non-existence, enjoying the advantages of the one and avoiding the traps of the other, partook of both heaven and hell. His thoughts became clear and strove to pierce to the uttermost depths of consciousness. He was surrounded by nothing but mud and stones; the only things present were the earth and himself — the leader of the biggest country in the world in direct contact with the terrestrial globe, without any intermediaries, theories, books or officials between them. Where else could the expression “Middle Kingdom” be better understood? As time went by, mornings and evenings merged into one, whole days were reduced to a single afternoon, and a eight might vanish altogether, or else consist only of midnight itself, like a dish containing only the choicest parts of the most delicious fruits. He slept and woke, drowsed and dropped off again. There were times when he felt as if he were dead; others when he felt as if he’d been resurrected, drugged, or made into a saint or a god.

He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed on any account, but now through his half-sleep he became aware of a kind of whispering coming from the entrance to the cave. The guards must want to tell him something. What could have happened? he wondered. War? An earthquake? The murmur came nearer. It must be something important for anyone to dare to come and spoil his peace and quiet.

“What is it?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

He heard them mumbling something about a letter. Didn’t they know he didn’t receive mail down there in his Cave? But they went on muttering, and he eventually distinguished the name of Jiang Qing. So the message was from her.

“Leave the letter with me, then,” he said. Or rather thought he said. ln fact he’d formed the words only in his head.

A letter from out there, thought he, as if it were a missive from another world. What are they up to? Aren’t they tired of it all yet?

There in the depths of the earth, amid the rocks of the cave, the letter seemed like some alien object, charged with hostility. If it hadn’t been from his wife he’d never have opened it: as it was, it was some time before he made up his mind. The message was brief, informing him of the latest events in the capital and of Zhou Enlai’s illness, and ending up with the information that the president of Albania had written to him…

Featherbrain, he thought to himself, averting his eyes from his wife’s writing. Who ever heard of anyone sending letters underground?

Letters go to every corner of the Universe,

But nobody ever saw one go underground…

He wasn’t sure if he’d read these lines somewhere or if he’d just made them up.

“How often have I told you the thing I hate most when I’m down here is getting letters! And now, not content with writing yourself, you have to tell me about another letter from someone else! … The world must be going mad up there!”

The rustle of the paper in his hand made him look at it again.

So the president of Albania had written to him, had he? An official letter, it seemed, but without any of the usual pleasantries. On the contrary, the whole thing was downright disagreeable. Outrageous, even.

The concluding phrases were the most caustic, Albania objected to the U.S. president’s forthcoming visit to China, and was more or less openly asking for it to be cancelled.

Mao Zedong fumed. Why hadn’t the stupid woman told him that to begin with? The anger which in other circumstances would have filled him by now seemed merely to hover around him like some chilly breath, not knowing how to gain admittance. The earth and the rocky cave had done their work.

A letter from Albania, eh? It must have taken some time to get here. H’mm…He realized it would take him at least thirty-six hours to get really angry. That would give him time to think about it. So — he said to himself yet again, trying to get his thoughts in order — this is a letter from Albania. He must consider things as simply as possible, Not that he could have done otherwise down here, even if he’d wanted to. Sometimes he would speak his thoughts aloud as if to explain them to the earth and the rocks. That was one of the reasons he liked coming here: being able to expound things in the most elementary fashion to the cave, making it understand the affairs of the world…So this letter came from a long way away. From Albania. A little country on a contemptible continent called Europe, inhabited for the most part by white men-who dislike us as much as we dislike them. The one exception is Albania, our ally. Our only ally on that evil continent. And now Albania, a mere one-thousandth of the size of China, has the cheek to write me a letter. Not an ordinary letter — a positively belligerent one, in which that tiny country not merely refuses to obey but actually tries to impose its will on me. Albania is asking for punishment, and I shan’t fail to oblige.

Mao Zedong was getting a headache. All this thinking, after several days of virtual unconsciousness, seemed to have exhausted him, I ought to have read the letter more slowly, he said to himself. He tried to be detached, to transport himself mentally to the plateau of Tibet, which seemed to him all the more uninhabited because he himself had never been there. “You really ought to pay a visit to the Roof of the World,” his wife had suggested several times. “It would be really appropriate.” He had joked about it and accused her of vanity, but deep down inside he did consider making such a visit. So much so that he’d spent some time reading the works of the Tibetan hermit Milarepa. And now Milarepa’s poems, full of the terror inspired by the Himakyas, began to come back to him, together with the names of the caves the hermit lived in. He even remembered some of the phrases he’d learned in preparation for the journey: shos-dbying , for example, the Tibetan name for that primal state, beyond being and non.beieg, which had always fascinated him; dje-be , the ten goods, and mi-dge-beu , the tee evils, the first of which he’d later made use of in his instructions to Communist youth, while the second were included in army regulations.

Shi-gnas , he said aloud. But he realized that the more he tried to follow the hermit’s teachings and strive for serenity, the more the letter preyed on his mind, Shi-gnas , he said again, and then repeated the same thing in Sanskrit: samatha . But still to no effect. It was the same as with sleeping pills: either they put you out like a light or else they kept you awake indefinitely.

It was all of no use: in the end he just gave in and lost his temper. The letter seemed more and more monstrous. Relations with Albania had been deteriorating for years through that country’s owe fault, but hitherto he had turned a blind eye. His colleagues had grown increasingly irritated: how long, they said, are we going to put up with their whims and fancies? But Mao had been patient, ignoring Albania’s coldness during the Cultural Revolution, their attitude about Shakespeare, and lots of other nonsense. When the Sino-Soviet frontier crisis blew up, his colleagues had come to see him, blue in the face with rage at the Albanians’ intolerable attitude: instead of coming out directly and unequivocally in support of us, their allies, they’d actually said there were faults on both sides, and that China’s territorial claims smacked of nationalism. That crowned all! They were setting themselves up as knights errant, nobly committed to their principles, like characters out of the Chanson de Roland! Ugh, what cheek! “Now do you see?” they had demanded. But again Mao had turned a blind eye. “Just wait,” he’d said. “I’m saving it all up. One of these days they’ll get into a row with Yugoslavia over, what’s it’s name?…Kosovo, and then well pay them out.”