Ismail Kadare - The Concert

Lin tried to feign indifference, but it was clear that he was astonished,

“But you yourself admitted you had me killed in a car!”

“Yes… But afterwards, during the night…”

“What? What happened during the night?”

So you don’t know as much as you’d like everyone to think, thought Mao. As for how the plane was brought down, neither you nor anyone else will ever know.

All but the grasses will seek in vain

To find the truth of the Mongol plain…

How could he make sure this couplet would survive him?

Mao groaned. The nurse helped him turn on to his other side.

* * *

It looks as if he’s going to die tonight, thought the observer at the North Pole, easing off his headset.

The satellites and teletype machines were going great guns…He remembered a very cold night when he’d slept at his maternal grandfather’s for the first time. The dogs barked a lot, but that wasn’t what had frightened him. Even now, after all these years, he couldn’t forget how one of them had bayed and bayed, and how his grandfather had said, “Someone in the village is going to die tonight”

Someone is going to die tonight on this planet, he thought with a shudder, The obituary notices were ready. The ravens were waiting for the signal to take flight.

He put his headset back on again and adjusted it. Mao Zedong was still in a coma. The rambles he could hear were in his own stomach. No matter how much he twiddled the knobs, all he could hear were death rattles…

Ekrem Fortuzi huddled over the radio, his brow furrowed in concentration, trying out various wavelengths. He still cherished a faint hope that some station, somewhere, would be more optimistic about the state of Mao Zedong’s health. But they all seemed conspiring to say he was slowly dying.

“Ekrem,” his wife called from her pillow. “Are you coming to bed or not? — this is the third time I’ve asked you!”

“Just coming!”

“I shan’t call you again. Mind you don’t wake me up!”

“I'm coming now, my dear,”

He stood up, looked first at the radio and then at the bed, then bent down and switched the set off.

“About time,” said his wife, making room for him. “You drive me mad with your Chinks!”

“Your talcum powder does smell nice,” he whispered.

“All I ask is that you don’t speak Chinese at the psychological moment,” she said. “I'd rather you spoke Italian.”

“Because that reminds you of Luigi, I suppose?”

“Of course not! What are you getting at?”

“I know it does remind you of him!”

“It doesn’t, I tell you! It’s just that I can’t bear the sound of Chinese any more!”

“Admit it does remind you of him, and I’ll do whatever youwant.”

She didn’t answer.

“Go on, admit it!”

“Well, it does remind me of something. But it was all so long ago …”

“Right, I’ll speak Italian then …But remember — no Chinese, no Italian! Do you see what I mean?”

“No — what?”

“I told you before: no Chinese, no hope of Italian either. But that’s enough philosophy. Or rather, let’s philosophise down here…like this… Amore mio …”

Their grunts and groans gradually died down. Thee in a clear voice, not at all breathless, she said.

“You spoke Chinese again!”

“Did I? I didn’t notice.”

“You’re hopeless!”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to get round her any more. She was well aware of it, so she turned over and went to sleep.

He lay still on his side of the bed until she had dropped off, then he got up and tiptoed over to the radio. He switched it on, very low, and put his ear to the loudspeaker. He stayed like that for a long time, and might have remained there in a kind of lethargy till dawn, if at a certain point his wife hadn’t heard him let out a sob.

“Ekrem!” she cried, in a fright. “What’s the matter?”

He couldn’t bring out any words. She stared at him wide-eyed, and was about to jump out of bed and come 0ver to him when he managed to stammer:

“Mao is dead.”

She looked over at him with pursed lips.

“Idiot!” she said.

But he wasn’t listening. He went on weeping, sobbing out every so often:

“My Mao, my own little Mao, you’ve gone… you’ve gone…”

“He’s round the bend,” she thought. “He’s gone completely bonkers!”

He went on talking to himself, mostly in Chinese, but reverting to Albanian for the affectionate diminutives he knew only in his own language.

“My own little Mao — and to think that while you were giving up the ghost I was making love like a pig!”

I’ll have to take him to see a psychiatrist, she thought. Tomorrow!

Her first impulse was to make fun of him, insult him, but suddenly, seeing him so forlorn, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He must be the only person in Europe who was carrying on like that. She got out of bed, threw a cardigan round her shoulders, and went over to him.

“Ekrem,” she whispered. “What’s wrong? Come to bed, or you’ll catch your death of cold.”

Though she was still quite angry, she’d made an effort to speak gently. But he went on weeping buckets, perhaps even worse than before.

“He had to die some time!” she said soothingly. “He was very old — everyone said he was decrepit! What did you expect? Everyone knew he was at his last gasp. Come to bed, dear.”

“I can’t! Leave me alone!”

He’s nuts. she thought again. My God, what’s going to become of him?

“I can’t, you see,” he went on. “I feel all hollow inside. I studied his works very seriously — I was the only person in the world who understood all the nuances of his philosophy, I’ve compared the original texts with the English and French translations — they’re not at all accurate…I fell in love with him, we understood one another so well …He was so good …he didn’t believe in the horrible class struggle!”

“All right, all right/” she said, “you’ve told me all that before. Now come to bed before you get bronchitis, like last winter!”

“I kept telling you, but you only, made fun of me. He was our only hope, our star…”

Here we go, she thought.

“… and now it’s ‘gone out, our star has disappeared. We’ve all had it now. We’re finished. And you don’t even realize,”

“It might be just the opposite,’ she suggested, trying to reassure him. “Perhaps they’ll find a reason now for getting closer to China again. It’s always like that — people wait for a death in order to fix something that wasn’t working properly. They’ll say he and his obstinacy were the cause of all our differences …”

“But he was so good, so gentle, soft as velvet. And his face…his face was so smooth too …”

“Be that as it may, I'm sure it’ll work out as I say. They’ll blame him for the cooling off in our relationship, and well patch things up. Then everything will be all right.”

“Do you really think so? I don’t believe it for a minute.”

“Of course! It can only make things better.”

“And what if they go wrong again? He was a poet and a philosopher — a natural peacemaker. Where are they going to find another like him?”

“Others will be more liberal — you can be sure of that. The Chinese are fed up to the teeth with the Long March or whatever you call it…”

“Zhang Jeng,” he said.

“Well, they’ve had it up to here with the Zhang Jengl What they want now is peace, comfort and women…Don’t they say that at the Hotel Peking there’s a room where the Chinese leaders speed their evenings with ballet dancers?”

“If only things could turn out like that!” he sighed.