Ismail Kadare - The Concert

When he got home he found Mao’s invitation to dinner awaiting him. They usually did meet like that after either of them had been away on holiday. The marshal heaved a sigh of relief. Everything was the same as before. In his euphoria he forgot to ask where his daughter was. Someone had said something about her — she would be late home, she was out somewhere with her fiancé…But he’d been too preoccupied with the invitation to take much notice…

D

So there was an invitation. But not to Peking. Merely to dinner.

And the words “Where are we going?” were uttered, bet not by the marshal, and not in his car. They were spoken first in a small van, then on a plane, by someone whose name remained unknown. But that was later.

Meanwhile the bullet-proof car drove on in silence towards Mao’s house. Night was falling, It was still only early autumn, but the turning leaves had already lost some of their brightness. In a way that made the landscape more beautiful.

The marshal looked out at it as they went along. This part of the outskirts of the capital was particularly appealing at this time of year. Probably that was why Mao had invited him out here, rather than, as he usually did, to his house in Peking.

The lamps by the entrance to the villa came into view, it wasn’t quite dark yet, and the light they shed looked chilly.

E

Ten hours later, at dawn, the plane comes into the story.

Where from? Was it a hoax, a figment of the imagination?

That was what people thought at first when they heard the truth, i.e. the current version of the marshal’s death. When it was given out that he had been struck down on the ground, in his car, at kilometre 19 on the road to Mao’s house, it followed automatically that the story about his — or his corpse’s — attempted escape by air, together with the details about his being in a hurry, the shots, the suggestion that the plane be brought down by means of a rocket, the words “Let him go,” the charred corpses in Mongolia, and so on, were only inventions designed to camouflage the truth.

But if that was the first reaction, the voice of reason whispered, “But a plane really did crash in Mongolia! Here, inside China, we can dress things up in any way we like, but when they happen on the other side of the frontier they’re beyond our control.”

So a plane really did go up in flames. Shot down on Mongolian territory. With Chinese corpses on board. Was it a mere coincidence, exploited to make people think this was the plane on which Lin Biao had tried to flee? This didn’t seem very likely, as even the most inexperienced investigator would have had no difficulty in seeing that the charred bodies weren’t those of the marshal and his wife.

So the business of the plane couldn’t have been accidental It really did have something to do with Lin Biao, whether in reality or in some fictional account of it. Was the plane necessary as the only way of proving that Lin Biao had tried to escape to the Soviet Union? That would have been rather expensive. A more plausible explanation was that the plane journey was part of some previous plot that for some reason was abandoned. But rather than waste it — after all, this was in the middle of an economy drive, when every-thing possible was being recycled — the people concerned pressed it into service as a smokescreen.

The discarded scenario was probably also the source of the rocket, the invitation, and Mao’s “Let him go.” But such details were modified to fit into the new plan: the urgent invitation to Peking became an invitation to dinner, and the rocket was fired at a car instead of a plane. As for the words, “Let him go,” they seem really to have been spoken, bet in different circumstances. Something like this? One of Mao’s personal bodyguards suggested, “Let me kill him after dinner, in the hall,” but Mao said, “Let him go, knowing there was a nice big rocket waiting for him at kilometre 19."

Thus the rocket and the words “Let him go” figured together both in the reality and in the rumour, though in a different order.

And the plane still had its place in the story. Whether as an empty shell or a delusion, it was still too early to say. For a good billion Chinese it carried Lin Biao, still alive bet pale with terror, on his attempted escape. For the inner circle around Mao, it carried only his corpse,

“It was Zhou who saw to the details of this business,” Mao had said the following morning, drinking tea while the plane was still m Chinese airspace. “We shall all be called on some time to say what happened, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm., I have good reason to believe he is dead by now.”

The others didn’t dare ask questions, especially as Mao told them bluntly he himself didn’t know the ins and outs. They just sipped their tea, imagining what had happened. They all saw it differently except for one thing: a bloody corpse in a seat on a plane, with someone trying to fasten the seat-belt to keep it from slipping about.

But was that what really happened?

Silence. As they went on drinking tea, each one in his mind’s eye went up the aluminium steps to the plane, stepped inside, and then drew back…

F

In the First Rumour about the death of Lin Biao there was always a reference to a drawing back. The marshal felt a sudden chill run down his spine before he stepped into the plane, and then drew back.

It was never explained. Some said Lin Biao was so frightened he scarcely had the strength to climb up to the door of the plane and had to be practically dragged inside. Later, when it was suggested that the murderers might already have been on board, Lin Biao’s drawing back was explained as a recoil from the sight of those unknown faces. In any case, it was too late. The plane door closed upon him.

When, in due course, the theory that the killers were already on board the plane collapsed, like so many others, the idea that Lin Biao drew back became absurd. Even so, people still referred to it, whether as some kind of clue or as a sign that the marshal had a mysterious presentiment.

But the whole thing was incongruous, and those who studied the question could easily guess that it wasn’t the victim who had shrunk back, but the people concerned with his fate, who projected their own reaction on to him. First, thinking he had been alive when on the plane, they’d been shocked at the image of his corpse. Then they’d received a second shock on contemplating the body itself. And then they attributed their recoil to Lin Biao himself, lending him their eyes and making him look at his own image and draw back from that.

As in all eightmares, these imaginings involved inversions in time and space, and other unnatural concatenations.

So Lin Biao hurries over to the plane on which he is to escape (in accordance with his own plans, or someone else’s, or merely in somebody’s dream?). Once on board he finds his own bloody corpse sitting there. He recoils in terror; turns away in the hope that it’s only a hallucination; and thee sees his own corpse again, in a different form…

G

To understand what really happened you have to go back to kilometre 19 on the main road, jest after the car was hit by the rocket.

A voice went on calling “Quick! Quick!” and it didn’t take the soldiers long to realize that these were no empty words. But they weren’t being asked to mend the road. Nor to repair the kilometre-marker, which had been so battered and singed that the “I9” was hardly legible any more. The soldiers weren’t being exhorted to clear away the débris, either, No, it was the charred bodies they were to do something about. Someone pointed first at the corpses,then at a small van that had driven up unobserved.