Ismail Kadare - The Concert

So it was now clear that in Peking, and perhaps in other Chinese cities, there were scores, perhaps hundreds of committees all endeavouring to perform the same task.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the committee chairman as he replaced the receiver, “They’ve turned this country into one vast maternity hospital!” And within the week all the committees would bring their offspring to the General Bureau, which would choose just one from amongst the numerous candidates.

“Just one,” said the chairman, mopping his fevered brow. And then what? What was going to happen after that? No problem about the rejected infants — they’d be got rid of in the same, way as all aborted babies were got rid of. “But what about us? What will happen to us?” They’d probably be sent to some godforsaken commune in the back of beyond, to toil in the rice-fields under a sweltering sen. Bet not before they’d been made to go through hours and hours of compulsory autocritique, in which they had to owe up to any remaining vestiges of bourgeois mentality — individualism, intellectualism, contempt for the people, and so on. Or might they just be given another chance, and tried out on a different task?

For a while the chairman of the committee was completely knocked out. The only thing he could think of was that no expectant mother had ever gone through what his committee was suffering. He cursed their situation up hill and down dale. Then suddenly his mood changed. He looked at his watch, then started ringing up the members of the committee one after the other. They all sounded as if they’d just had their throats cut.

All that week the committee met in practically permanent session. Sometimes they sat until after midnight. The Zhongnanbai’s order had been categorical: the file had to be in by Saturday at the latest. It was rumoured that Mao Zedong was taking a personal interest in the matter. He was eager to see the various models submitted by the different committees, and to select from among them one that could be held up as an example to the whole Chinese people. The entire propaganda machine — the press, publishing houses, artists, schoolteachers, universities, television and radio — would be set in motion to popularize the chosen prototype, the homo sinicus to which all the Chinese, and even all the Maoists in the world, would be expected to conform.

The members of the committee turned up to every meeting puffy-eyed with fatigue and lack of sleep. The file on the man to come went on expanding like the belly of an expectant mother. Many things about him had already been decided, but others still awaited a solution. Hours were spent discussing each one. For example, though they’d thought it would be quite easy to fix how tall he should be, they soon found they were wrong. At first they reckoned he should be quite tall, but then one section of the committee denounced this as bourgeois individualistic since exceptional stature might be linked with a desire to be different from other people. This section now won majority support with the suggestion that the ideal man should be short, though some thought this might be regarded as a defect. The former advocates of tallness put up a last-ditch struggle for medium height, but this was dismissed as an unsatisfactory compromise. The qualities so far agreed upon for the ideal man were rehearsed — simplicity, modesty, desire to be only a humble cog in the wheel of Maoist thought, and, above all, determination never to distinguish himself by any kind of originality (in other words, to be as ordinary as possible in the most ordinary of possible worlds). The majority concluded that shortness went best with all these characteristics; and so the vote for it was carried.

When this was noted on the file, the chairman still had plenty on his plate. There were a number of points outstanding, and the Saturday deadline was approaching fast.

On the Wednesday and Thursday the committee sat almost nonstop. Age, profession and family status were all dealt with fairly easily: the model man was to be twenty-five years old, a soldier, and a bachelor, without any sentimental attachments but love of his mother. But what about behaviour in everyday life, ideological training, and judgment? These questions took up most of the remaining time. Despite the members” weariness, the committee’s discussions became more lively. Although it was agreed that our hero — as one to whom pride, individualism and love of material comforts were all alien — was capable of collecting old toothpaste tubes and selling them for the benefit of the State, one committee member was afraid this might make him resemble negative and miserly characters like Pliushkin in Gogol’s Dead Souls . This objection was soon swept aside, but it had raised an issue that made the whole committee frown. Our man would have no interest whatsoever in the miserable rags known as novels, they said. They consoled themselves with the thought that future generations wouldn’t even have heard of their existence. Not for nothing was the great Mao working to wipe every form of literature off the face of the earth.

There followed some embroidery on the theme of our hero’s modesty. His extreme self-effacement might make some people in Europe regard him as degenerate, subhuman. But Mao had taught them to take no notice of what the Europeans thought, or the wicked Americans either. Yes, the committee’s creation would be content just to be a tiny, anonymous cog in a wheel And it would be a good idea if he copied this slogan out in his journal

The committee had already decided that the future hero should write down not only his thoughts but also his acts. They had discussed at length whether these records should take the form of letters, articles, or reports made during political training sessions. Other possibilities were denunciations to the Party committee or the relevant ministry. But in the end a kind of personal log-book was judged to be most appropriate. A sub-committee of two was working on a mock-up of this log-book, containing individual examples of thoughts and actions already agreed on in principle.

Thursday’s session lasted till three the next morning, when the chairman suggested they take a break before tackling the last item on the agenda. The members, preparing to take an uncomfortable snooze where they sat, were pleasantly surprised when the chairman said they might go home briefly and get some proper rest. No such concession had been allowed so far that week, and they couldn’t believe their ears until the chairman repeated what he’d said. The remaining point concerned the hero’s death, and the chairman apparently thought the arms of Morpheus an appropriate preparation for deciding it.

It had been established earlier that the hero must eventually die, for only thus could his words and deeds carry their full weight. Moreover, this would enable them to conceal him if necessary from thecuriosity of his contemporaries, especially that of the foreign journalists who were sure to do all they could to obtain an interview with the model man of the new China.

All Friday — the last day before the deadline — was spent deciding on how the model man should die. No one had foreseen that this would be one of the most difficult parts of their task. On the contrary, they’d looked forward to it as a piece of cake, a foregone conclusion.

But Friday morning went by, and so did Friday afternoon, and even when dusk was falling they still hadn’t made any progress. In fact, the later it got, the more hopeless it seemed. “My God,” groaned the chairman, “now we’re really in a mess!”

There was no shortage of suggestions from all quarters, but the meeting kept coming back to where it had started. They felt as if they were shrouded in a thick fog which no one knew how to break through. No sooner would they start debating whether their man should die from natural causes or by accident than an argument would start up as to the kind of final illness that would be most suitable. It mustn’t be one of the spectacular, far-fetched maladies that bourgeois intellectuals deemed appropriate for the heroes of their novels: they didn’t want any heart attacks, brain haemorrhages or any other maladies indirectly glorifying intellectual labour; nor would they hear of diabetes or leukemia. What they wanted was something nice and ordinary, as simple as the rest of the hero’s characteristics and as much a target for the intelligentsia’s mockery: a stomach ache, or one of those diseases you get from working in the country or from contact with beasts of burden. Then someone pointed out that a lot of precious time had been wasted on medical talk, when it still hadn’t been settled whether death was to be caused by illness or accident. So there they were back again, trying to choose between chance and necessity, fatal accident or mortal illness. This was accompanied by endless quotations from Mao, and these contradicted one another so often, and thus gave rise to such complicated debates, that everyone lost the thread of the argument. They then strayed off to a consideration of the different kinds of accidents, in case this option should be adopted. Was it to be an ordinary accident or an extraordinary one? — a choice even more ticklish than that between ordinary and extraordinary illness. For if the hero was to be run over by a train, fail off a horse, die in a fire or drown in a river, the considerations such happenings aroused might eventually conflict with the general Party line, or affect the struggle between the two factions within the leadership, or, worst of all, add to speculation (it gave you goose-flesh to think of it!) about who was to succeed Chairman Mao.