Ismail Kadare - The Concert

The bits of poetry were so ethereal they looked as if the slightest breath might harm them, turn them solid, The psychological notes were incredibly subtle, with streaks of unorthodoxy that made them all the more compelling.

“Snow in Tirana, 18 January 1967, the morning after the inauguration of the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg. The prince waking up under the snow. His cloak and his horse all white. Inhabitants of the capital crowding round. A voice says: ‘The snow’s a good sign, a good omen…’”

He skipped a few pages.

“The beach at Dürres in the 30s. The fashions in bathing costumes. Loulou the courtesan’s sunshade. The king’s afternoon coffee time. The whole history of the monarchy is there: alliances, factions, rivalries, sexual perversions. And the sand, the sand…”

Some pages further on there were observations about winter, “Hail falling outside. The windowpanes rattle, the shutters bang against the walls. Bet harsh and stinging as it may be, hail has something feminine about it that seems to pervade the rest of the day. The morsels of ice come down as if there were furious women up in the sky, tearing the beads from their pretty necks and hurling them to the ground. And if one listened properly one would hear their angry voices saying, through the rattling windowpanes, ‘I’ll never take you back again — never!’“

Streets and parks were described turning white. It might have been only a dream, but the page on which it was written had a date: 17 March, Under the date was a hasty note: “I1.30, urgent meeting at the vice-minister’s.”

Skënder went on leafing through the notebook. The handwriting seemed to get more and more careless.

He tended to pause at the poetry, perhaps because it was comparatively rare. “How often have I ignored your tears …” “I loved you and knew it not…”

One morning when I woke

The world without you seemed empty.

I realized what I’d lost,

And knew what I had gained.

My sorrow shone like an emerald,

My joy glowed like a sunset.

Which was the brighter of the two

My heart could not decide.

To whom were those lines addressed? He couldn’t remember. He’d never told anyone about this phenomenon in case it was seen as the affectation of a philanderer, though he cared as little about that sort of criticism as about the more facile kinds of praise. As a matter of fact, in most cases he genuinely had forgotten the origins of his poems. Even when one seemed to refer to a real-life episode, the nature and dimensions of that episode would somehow change, would merge with other episodes. And the same applied to the person originally invoked: his or her own eyes might well, in Skënder’s verses, come to shed the tears of another. As time went by these modifications, these individual landslips, built up into something like a shoal of shifting sands, and Skënder, coming upon a set of initials in the title of a poem, would pause in surprise, having remembered the lines as dedicated to someone else.

“Happiness and to spare. Viola…”

He smiled.

Had she really been called Viola, or had that name stayed in his memory because she was studying the violin? He could remember quite clearly the night of their chance meeting, one May; the hours they’d spent dancing together; then her hair spread out on the pillow. As he gazed at those tresses — and looking at the hair of a sleeping woman always seemed to him like watching a projection of his dreams — he tried to understand why she was toying so lightly with her own happiness, heedlessly drawing him with her to the brink of hell. She was beautiful, and he’d thought to himself she had happiness and to spare, like a pond brimming over in spring. Perhaps her happiness too needed to be drained, to avoid some fatal excess…

As he read on, first his fingers and then his whole body grew deathly cold.

“…The sound of music wafted in through the north-facing windows; from those facing south came the strains of another song…”

“…Inside his studio, all was golden silence. His wife, still beautiful, but pale from her recent abortion, sat on the couch reading a magazine. It seemed to him the walls of the room had pulled back to contain these treasures, garnered not from gain but from loss …He reached out and touched her pale cheek…”

“…Evenings at the Strazimirs’. I used to enjoy these gatherings. There was always something more than met the eye — a hidden sweetness that even shone out of the stones in the women’s rings. Sometimes it seemed to me these jewels lit up before the eyes of their owners’ did. While the women themselves still held back, their diamonds and rubies would sparkle at each other in anticipation…”

Enough! Skënder pushed the book aside. He was well aware that, next time he opened it, these loops and scrawls would have finally disintegrated there in their coffin; would probably be quite illegible. As often happens in such circumstances, the colder, harder side of his nature now got the upper hand.

“That’s that!” he exclaimed harshly, slamming the book shut. He felt it was the existence of its contents that had made him feel so on edge.

The notes he’d written since he’d been in China were lying nearby. Perhaps, to even things up, he ought to crumple them up too — ought to curse them and check them away. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Instead he drew up a chair, pulled the lamp nearer, and started to read.

…Yesterday, at a commune called “Sino-Albanian Friendship”, we were introduced to a trifshatars . It took me hours to find a way of translating those blasted ideograms into some sort of equivalent in Albanian. Literally it’s something like “man-triple-peasant”, but it might be clearer to render it as “3 x peasant”. But even that doesn’t felly convey the essence of the person we met yesterday — a sample of a new race of men, the natural product of a climate dominated by the philosophy of Mao Zedong, a unique human type with an exceptionally high rusticity ratio. There he stood on the edge of his rice-field, as difficult to describe in ordinary language as to paint in ordinary colours. According to our Chinese escorts, he was a new type of peasant, from whom all individualism had evaporated like moisture from a well-fired pot — devoid of any vestige of intellectualism, free of all traces of urban mentality and all that goes with it.

He’d been elected to represent the commune at the great Peasant Congress soon to be held in Peking, no doubt in the presence of Mao Zedong himself.

“I suppose the Congress will celebrate the birth of this new Chinese peasant,”! said,

“Not necessarily,” said one of our guides. “China’s a big country, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the popular masses produced even more advanced models.”

“You mean 4 x and even 5 x peasants?” I asked. “What do you suppose they would be like?”

My tone implied, “Who needs monsters like that!” My guide had got the message and looked at me askance. I turned to C–V— for support. But he was scowling at me with disapproval too.

THE COMMITTEE FOR THE BEGETTING OF LEÏ FEN — SYNOPSIS FOR A SHORT STORY.

The committee had been pregnant with its offspring for some time. While everyone knows the gestation period for a woman is about nine months, no one knows how long it lasted in the case of the Virgin Mary, from the time she was impregnated by the Holy Ghost to the time she gave birth to the Infant Jesus. This being so, the length of the committee’s gestation period would hardly have mattered if there hadn’t been a phone call, a week before, from the General Bureau, insisting on an immediate delivery.

The committee members didn’t know what to do. There’d been rumours going around Peking lately, suggesting that theirs wasn’t the only committee established for this purpose: there were others in the capital equally pregnant with the thoughts of Mao Zedong. As a matter of fact, the man who’d rung up from the General Bureau (or Zhongnanhai , as they called it) had not only given the order very curtly, but he hadn’t bothered to disguise the threat that hung over them if they were late: their offspring would simply be rejected. Let their committee make no mistake: it wasn’t the only one from whom the State had ordered a child.