Ismail Kadare - The Concert

Oh no, said the envoy, pockets were definitely out. He passed on to the possibilities offered by linings. For this you had to be able to unpick a seam and sew it up again, or else make a small and as near as possible invisible opening in the material. But you couldn’t do this when your man was actually wearing his clothes. So you had to get into his house when he wasn’t there, under the pretext of mending a tap, etc. Your problem was then solved, if the victim owned a spare suit. But most of them didn’t. Then what? You might put the mike in another garment that was just hanging in the wardrobe, waiting for the appropriate season. But that involved the problem of having to keep someone intended as a winter victim under surveillance the previous summer, and vice versa, which would make intelligence gathering impossibly complicated. There was only one solution, said the envoy from the capital, and that was to wait for, and take advantage of, the moment when the suspect took off some garment in a public place. This might be during a morning session of physical exercises, in a theatre or office cloakroom, while he was taking part in the mass cross-country run in spring, or in some private sport or other. You might have to follow him for months before you got a chance to slip him his qietingqi . As for getting it back again, you didn’t wait for him to go to the public baths or for the next spring marathon: yoe just watched till he went home one night, and then faked a burglary,during which you managed for a few moments to get hold of his jacket or trousers or whatever.

But your troubles weren’t 0ver even then, or if — ideally — you got access to the garment in a cloakroom, (By the way, a padded anorak was best for concealing things in.) Not to mention the fact that its owner might leave the meeting or office or factory before you expected him to (there were ways of avoiding this), you needed both skill and sangfroid to remember precisely where you’d placed the bug and extract it neatly without damaging the garment it was in. (This was referred to as “gathering in the fruit”.)

And all the aforementioned precautions had to be multiplied a hundredfold in the case of the rare and costly independent mini-mikes. These had their own recording spool, and were so expensive they’d only been produced in very small numbers so far. Their advocates argued the advantages of a device which could function independently of the listening centre, wherever the suspect happened to go, and which worked continuously day and night until its battery ran out. It was of course especially necessary to recover this type of microphone when its work was done.

Director Tchan knew all these dangers and difficulties, and more, so when the technicians came and announced that they’d placed five bugs and two independent mini-mikes in the anoraks of the relevant suspects, he rubbed his hands with glee.

“But don’t forget,’ he reminded his men, “that you’ve only done half the job so far. The other half may well be much harder!”

5

Despite strict and repeated exhortations to secrecy, a rumour grew up, vague and fearful at first, and then increasingly distinct, though still concealed: they were installing bugging devices, people said, in the town of N—.

Director Tchan tried in vain to trace the leak. His aides were equally unsuccessful though they resorted to threat and even actual arrests. What worried Tchan most was that the representatives of the Zhongnanhat were still in town. If the rumour came to their ears there’d be the devil to pay. He cherished a faint hope that they might leave before they suspected anything: after all, who were they going to End out from except him} But one day the sourer of the two ettvoys said curtly: “There’s a lot of talk in the town about microphones. How do you explain it?” Tchan quaked and tried to babble something. He couldn’t believe his eyes when the envoy smiled.

“Quite natural,’ he said. “It usually happens,’

Tchan still didn’t see what he meant.

“Isn’t it disastrous? Won’t it sabotage …?” he began.

Now I’ve put my foot in it, he thought. Why did I have to go and meet trouble halfway? But to his amazement:

“Oh no!” said the man from the Zhongnanhat . “It has advantages as well as disadvantages. The best thing is that it makes everything into a kind of myth. People invent so many fantastic stories about the microphones that in the end the rumour, which makes everyone vigilant to begin with, gradually lulls them into a kind of lethargy. And that’s when the hour of the qietingqis has come!”

Tchan was so relieved he lit a cigarette. He couldn’t wait to get the first results of this new intelligence technique. Meanwhile he went on receiving information through the earlier network — that is, via the human ear. His own spies, probably the first people to learn of the advent of the microphones, were sure to be annoyed, and afraid these newfangled devices would put them out of a job. Director Tchan had been told of murmurs to this effect, and eventually their resentment reached such a pitch he decided to summon his crack spies to a meeting. They were the fine flower of their profession, and their deeds would go down to posterity, Hun Hu had spent three days and three nights lying like a corpse in the morgue: he suspected his victim wasn’t quite dead, and hoped to extract one last word from him before he finally gave up the ghost. Xin Fung had been decorated by Chairman Mao himself for keeping a factory under surveillance for a hundred hours, while standing near a giant cutting machine. He was completely deaf ever after. Others had made other sacrifices in the service of their profession: some had deserted wives and children, others had renounced marriage altogether. Chan vung was perhaps the star of N—’s spying fraternity: he had’gouged his owe eyes out in order to Improve his hearing.

le view of all this, Tchan spoke to them with special warmth and consideration, invoking the glorious, three-thousand-year-old tradition of surveillance which in China had been put at the service of the people, No technique^ however advanced, could take the place of the ear, for the human factor was always the most important — only a technocrat or a revisionist could think otherwise. Then Tchan turned to the possibility of using listening devices. These were special appliances designed for special cases, above all those involving foreigners: they had nothing to do with their own great domestic surveillance. Just as agriculture used modern technology as well as beasts of burden; just as medicine relied both on highly trained specialists and on barefoot doctors; so intelligence too would employ not only microphones but also the human ear, which would still play the most important part in surveillance. Carried away by his own eloquence, Tchan embroidered on this theme, maintaining that a microphone was only a pale imitation of the human ear. This ear, reared on the quotations of Mao Zedong, was irreplaceable. And, he implied in conclusion, so were they, his audience.

The spieSj reassured, dispersed, and m the next few days sent in a mass of information unprecedented in both quantity and quality. As he looked through the weighty file oe the desk in front of hifn, Tchan meditated oe two possible reasons for this iniux. Either the spies themselves were working with extra zeal to show they were far from being mere has-beens. Or the ordinary people, confronted with a future in which rumour would be superseded because of the microphones, were taking advantage of what time remained to have a good gossip.

Tchan rubbed his tired eyes. Either of those two reasons would account for that fat file. Probably both.

The spies seemed to have taken particular care to report popular resentment against the qietingqis Tchan noticed, smiling sardonically. Perhaps they cherished a lingering hope that this might help get rid of the horrible things.