Ismail Kadare - The Concert

For hours the committee was buried in these considerations. They ruled out letting the hero be trampled to death by a horse: such an image might provide ammunition for the reactionaries, who claimed that the peasantry hampered the progress of the revolution. They were about to consent to his being run over by a train when someone pointed out that this conflicted with Mao’s notion that the country should encircle the town: for in this scenario the train (the town) could be said to triumph over the hero (the country). So then they had another think about falling off a horse, until it occurred to two or three members of the committee that the two solutions might be combined, and the hero might perish trying to save a horse from being run over by a train. At first this was greeted as a marvellous idea, but its drawbacks soon became evident. In the course of discussion the permutations and combinations of man, horse and train became so involved that the committee abandoned the tangle in despair. Fire and water then came under review, but they too proved unsatisfactory. For one thing, weren’t fire and lames symbols of the revolutionary movement? And as for water, didn’t Mao have a special feeling for rivers — witness the many references to them in his Thoughts, and his famous swim in the Yang-Tse, after which millions of Chinese had flung themselves into the sea, into rivers, canals, lakes and ponds and even into cisterns. It would be positively indecent to have the hero drown in a river! — almost tantamount to suggesting that Mao himself had lured him to his fate!

It was half-past three in the morning, and the committee was still discussing the last point on the agenda. Everyone’s lucidity was fading fast. All minds would soon be blank, or worse. If we don’t finish soon, groaned the chairman inwardly, we’ll all go round the bend! At half-past four they were still going on about rivers and ponds and trains trying to run horses over, but by now it was all mere babble. As dawn was breaking, one member of the committee suddenly shouted, as if he’d just woken up: “What, isn’t he dead yet? Strangle him, then, for the love of God! Bash him on the head! Anything you like, so long as you put a stop to our agony too!”

This outburst at least had the virtue of bringing the chairman to his senses. Mustering such strength as still remained to him, he declared: “I suggest we just say he dies by accident, trying to save a comrade. That’s the best I can do. It’s all too much for me.”

The others all nodded agreement. Their heads were all so heavy the chairman was surprised their necks could support them.

The secretary noted the form of death agreed on, and the chairman was about to close the file when a voice cried: “What about the name? We’ve forgotten to give him a name!”

The baptism didn’t take long. They gave their man the first name that came into their heads. Lei Fen, And the file was closed.

The sun was rising as they straggled, silent as ghosts, out of the chairman’s office. The chairman himself sat on for a while at his desk. The file lay in front of him. Then he got up, went over to the window, and watched his colleagues walking away along the empty road. They were as unsteady on their feet as if they’d just given birth!..

And then his dazed mind realized what he and his committee really had done: they’d just given birth to a dead man.

Morning found the chairman still there, sitting alone with his file. He gave it to the first messenger who arrived, to deliver to the Zhongnamhai . Then, while the man went down the stairs, he went back to the window. He waited to see the messenger emerge and go off down the road with the file under his arm. Then he had to restrain himself from running after him, shouting out to the passers-by, “Stop him! Bring back the monster before it’s too late! Kill him as if he were a bastard! Choke this anti-man, this seb-man,this new-born non-man!” Then he himself would catch up with the messenger, snatch the file away from him and tear it to shreds in full view of everyone. As he imagined the scene he clenched his trembling hands, driving his fingernails into his palms as if he were wresting from the file the flesh and bones of the man he and his committee had borne and then killed with such pain.

“Monster!” he croaked, trying to make out the figure of the messenger, now vanishing in the distance. “Monster in the file, spreader of plague — there’s nothing to stop you now from infecting the whole of China!”

…Yesterday, meeting with Guo Moruo. He made a very adverse impression on me. He kept saying, “Do you know what! am, compared with Mao Zedong, on the score of intelligence? A three-month-old baby,” Then he told us he was worried because the enemies of the régime didn’t speak badly enough of him. It kept him awake at night.

“I’m still an intellectual,” he said several times, “I’m going to wallow in the mud, then go and purify myself in the river,”

I thought about the trifshatars…

THE HOUR OF THE RIGHT — SYNOPSIS

“Listen — this time you can be sure I’m right: the hour of the right has come!”

“I don’t believe you… Don’t look at me like that! I just don’t believe you, that’s all And if you want to know what I really think, I'll tell you without mincing my words: I don’t want to hear any more about it, I’ve had it up to here! I don’t care whose hour has come — the hour of the right, or of the left, or of the half-left, or of the quarter-right! I don’t want to know, and that’s that! I just want to live the few days left to me normally. I can’t bear to listen to all that stuff any longer. I’m tired of it, exhausted by it, I can’t take any more!”

“If you want to stop up your ears that’s your business. Perhaps you don’t want to be committed any more? Perhaps you’ve grown immune to poison?”

“Stop, Lin Hen — that’s enough!” said the other, burying his head in his hands.

They were both sitting in an old tavern where tea was served in tin cups and soon got cold.

“Don’t take what I say too hard, Lin Hen. I can’t help it either. My nerves are in shreds.”

“Do you think mine are any better?”

“Perhaps not…But still…” — one hand was unbuttoning his shirt — “… you haven’t got marks like these on your body. Do you see these scars?” He was almost shouting now. “I’ve had them since the days when ‘a hundred flowers were blooming,' when like a fool I thought the hour of the right had come. And do you see this other mark, under my breast? That’s a souvenir of the next hour that came, the hour of the left, when in order to wipe out the memory of the hour of the right I tried to be more to the left than necessary, and went to a meeting and stuck a picture of Mao into my own chest.”

He drank a few sips of tea, then went on more slowly and thoughtfully.

“I got blood-poisoning, and barely escaped with my life. Because the infection itself was nothing compared to the suffering I had to endure in hospital. My wound became a bone of contention. The staff was divided in two, one group maintaining my wound was an ordinary injury that required normal treatment, their opponents claiming that Mao’s picture could be a source of infection, and that I’d injured myself deliberately so as to discredit him. These arguments took place across my bed, where they kept putting on and taking off my bandages according to which party was in charge, and needless to say the debaters soon came to blows. The hospital became a battlefield. I had a raging fever and long periods of delirium, but what I saw in my lucid intervals was even worse than the scenes in my nightmares. Each of the two competing sides got the upper hand alternately. When the right were in the ascendant, the barefoot doctors were beaten to a jelly and their popular remedies trampled underfoot or thrown out of the window. Bet not for long. When everyone least expected it, the tide of battle would turn and the left be on top again. Thee — I still shudder at the thought of it — they would tear off my bandages and call a meeting to examine the prescriptions of their predecessors for detecting implications hostile to Chairman Mao. The following week there would be another reversal, and the doctors of the right, whom their opponents, after giving them a suitable thrashing, had set to cleaning the toilets, emerged once more in their white coats. And so on…And all the time I was getting worse …I shall never forget it as long as I live! That’s why even now my hair stands on end whenever I hear the words 'left’ and ‘right’. You see, Lin Hen, I have seen hell with my own eyes, and that’s why I don’t, why I won’t…!”