Ismail Kadare - The Concert

His aide swallowed.

“The only person to act as guide to the Albanian delegation and exchange a few words with them was Van Mey,” he said, “If that mike hadn’t disappeared we’d have a tape of what he and the Albanians said to one another.”

“Really?” said Tchan.

Even after two years he could still remember their agitation about the loss, but he couldn’t remember the details. Had they written a report? he asked.

“Of course,” said the other. “Shall I go and get it?”

Tchan nodded.

When the aide came back and started to read out the report, Tchan remembered quite clearly the day he’d been told one of the independent mikes was missing because the person wearing it had been killed a fortnight ago. They hadn’t been able to recover the device from his anorak, for the simple reason that the anorak had disappeared. After searching the victim’s flat and finding out he’d had neither family nor close friends in N—, they tried the crematorium. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been functioning at the time of Van Mey’s death because of a fuel shortage: they’d had to bury the body in the old town cemetery, “To hell with him and his mike!” Tchan had cried, “Write a report and bring it to me to sign!”…And so the case had been closed.

“It was my fault,” he admitted now. “Bet how was I to know that our relations with Albania would sink so low, and that that cursed mike…”

“Of course,” said one of his assistants, “How could you have known?”

“What’s done is done,’ said another. “No point in talking about it now.”

“Wrong!” roared Tchan, “I’ll raise that mike from the dead if I have to!”

And he gave the gruesome order.

12

That very evening two lorries stopped outside the old cemetery, now used only for bodies that couldn’t be dealt with by the crematorium because of fuel shortages. Tchan and his two assistants got out of one truck, and a few municipal workers out of the other. The sexton was waiting for them at the gate, a lantern in his hand and his face dark with terror.

“Lead the way!” commanded Tchan.

They set off in silence along a path, the man with the lantern leading and the others occasionally shining their torches.

“Here it is,” said the sexton, pointing to a mound of earth.

The torches gathered round and then were switched off, leaving only the faint light of the lantern on the grave.

“Switch on the headlights of the lorries,’ ordered Tchan, drawing back a pace or two. “Then get cracking!”

They proceeded almost in silence. The headlamps came on quite suddenly., casting a white light tinged with mauve. The workmen spread a tarpaulin by the side of the grave.

Tchan watched the picks and shovels at work, while the sexton leaned over from time to time, presumably to tell the workers when to stop piling the earth at the side of the grave and start putting it on the tarpaulin. They’d decided to sift the earth that might contain, among the dead man’s bones and what remained of his clothes, the lost mike.

Tchan was so obsessed his head was splitting, though he had high hopes of getting his hands on the precious device. He’d show the Zhongnanhai what he was made of! Maybe Mao himself would come to hear about it. Tchan looked up from time to time: he hoped it wasn’t going to rain! Spadefuls of earth were starting to fall on the tarpaulin. Any one of them might hold the treasure. The sexton couldn’t remember Van Mey’s funeral now, but he did tell them that when someone died instantly in an accident and didn’t go into hospital (the bulldozer had practically cut Van Mey in two), they were usually buried in the clothes they were wearing at the time.

“Careful,” someone called. “You’ve reached the skeleton.”

The heap of earth on the tarpaulin went on growing. They were going to sift as much soil as possible to be on the safe side. Heaven knows how long this would have gone on if Tchan hadn’t suddenly called a halt.

“That’ll do,” he said. “No point in digging up the whole cemetery.”

The first drops of rain began to fall, and they hurried to remove the tarpaulin before it got any heavier. As it was it took six of them to lift it on to the lorry.

“Lucky we got away before the storm!” said Tchan as the lorries drew away.

It was raining hard by the time they got back to headquarters. There were lights in the windows of the lab, and the lab assistants were waiting in silence, wearing sinister long rubber gloves. Again it took six men to carry the load upstairs. Then they set about crumbling up the soil.

Tchan stood watching with folded arms. Bits of skeleton and stone were put on one side to be looked at again later if nothing was found in the earth. The skull seemed to be grinding its teeth at them. “Gnash away as much as you like,” Tchan muttered. “You won’t stop me finding your Yoke!”

Every so often a chill ran down his spine, either with unnamed apprehension or because it had been so cold and damp in the cemetery.

It wasn’t yet midnight when one of the lab assistants came on a button belonging to the anorak. That lifted their spirits. Twenty minutes later they found the mike itself. Only then did they notice that they and everything around them, including the floor and the tables, were covered with mud.

13

Was it really on the same night, or did people’s memories run the two horrifying and unforgettable events together and make them coincide? But even if the second spiritualist séance did take place a few days before or a few days after the finding pf the mike, it wasn’t surprising if people thought of the two things as happening together.

Be that as it may, Van Mey’s two friends, together with the medium, had met for another séance to commemorate Van’s death and summon up his spirit. The meeting they’d all planned, at which they were to have invoked Qan Shee, had of course not taken place.

They’d been sitting round the table for some time. The candle flames flickered more lugubriously than ever, and the medium’s face looked more pallid. He’d been in a trance for a long while, but his painful breathing, broken by occasional rattles^ suggested that something was preventing him from making contact with the dead man.

According to later evidence it must have been at exactly this moment that, in the lab not far away at Public Safety headquarters, Tchan and his assistants had started to play the tape taken from Vae Mey’s qietingqi . Their faces were ashen as they listened to the voice from — beyond the grave. It sounded slow and hoilow, like a disc being played at the wrong speed. And like a ghost.

“The tape must be damp,’ said Tchan, bending o?er the machine.

“Not surprising after being in the ground all that time,” said one of his aides.

The voice-was scarcely audible, and interspersed with dull thuds. Tchan wound the tape backwards and forwards to eliminate the blanks. Suddenly they all started. In the midst of the other noises there arose a shriek, abruptly cut off.

“The accident,” said Tchan.

He must have been right, for the sinister cry was followed by a hubbub that might well have been made by a crowd gathering round the dead man. Further on in the tape, thought Tchan, there must be a recording of the corpse being taken from the crematorium to the cemetery — perhaps even of the burial He wound the tape forward, and thought he heard the sound of spadefuls of earth falling on the body. After that there was an ever-deepening hush. My God, thought Tchan: that’s what they mean by silent as the grave …

He listened transfixed until the end of the tape. He must be the first person in the world to possess a sample of the silence of death. Now he could say he had gone down among the shades.