Ismail Kadare: The Concert

THE WINDOW LOOKED DOWN on the street, where the passers-by, all muffled up, seemed to be hurrying along as fast as they could, A three-wheeled delivery van pulled up beside a tobacco kiosk, where drivers often stopped to buy cigarettes.

It struck old Hasiyé that the van was attracting a lot of attention. She wiped a space in the misted windowpane to get a better look.

Yes — three or four people had paused to stare at what the van was carrying: a tub containing a lemon tree. She could imagine the questions they’d ask the driver as he got back into his seat. “Where are you taking it?” “Where do they sell them?”

Suddenly the old woman thought she recognized Ana among the crowd. She was just going to tap on the window to attract her attention when she remembered that Ana was dead — had been dead for a long time.

She sighed. More and more often lately she found herself not only getting the order of events mixed up, but also confusing real facts with things seen only in dreams. She tended to mix up the living and the dead, too, but she didn’t mind too much about that. Most females of her age had the same problem: it was supposed to be typical of old women. Sometimes she thought that was why people treated them with respect.

She looked out into the street again. Ana was still there. Beautiful as ever, she was standing somewhat apart, gazing with a melancholy smile at the people hovering around the lemon tree. Why don’t you just go on sleeping peacefully under the ground where you were buried? thought Hasiyé.

She could hear her grandson learning his lessons in the other room: “Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus!” Would there never be an end to all this anger? she muttered to herself. Of late it had been getting worse instead of better.

She picked up her coffee cup and examined the grounds. They were muddy and hard to read, but that didn’t surprise her. What future could an old crone like her expect?

“Sing, O goddess, the wrath…” She felt like yelling at her grandson, and at the world in general, for that matter, to go to the devil and take their wrath with them — there was far too much of it already!

Enough, enough! Don’t keep dinning it in our ears!

She glanced outside again, but this time she couldn’t see any van, or any lemon tree, or any people staring. I must have been seeing things, she thought. Or perhaps I fell asleep for a moment.

Then she nodded off again, but now what she seemed to be looking at were the bowels of the earth. Not underground caverns or catacombs which man really may see, but closely packed geological strata unvisited by light, impenetrable to the human eye. Nearby, invisible too, lay latent earth tremors and other nameless, formless menaces.

There was a faint rumble of thunder in the distance. Then the whole sky was rent by a long, sickly roar.

“Strike! Strike!” muttered old Hasiyé, not knowing who she was talking to, or why.

The bell had rung loud and long, and as Silva opened the door she prepared a smile of welcome for the first of her guests. But instead of them she saw a man with a tub on his shoulder, and emerging from the tub — a barrel sawn in half — the branches of a lemon tree,

“This is Gjergj Dibra’s house, isn’t it?” he said,

“Yes,” she answered, taken aback. “Is that for us?”

“You ordered it, didn’t you?”

And without more ado he walked into the hail

“Where shall I put it?” he asked impatiently.

The tub must be pretty heavy.

“Careful!” she said. Then, opening a door: “In here, please.”

The man stumped across the room as Silva opened the French window on to the balcony.

“Anywhere here will do,” she said. “We'll find a better place for it later on.”

The man put the tub down, straightened up, and paused for a moment to get his breath back.

The phone rang in the hall.

“A lemon tree is all I needed!” thought Silva,

The man began to drone out instructions,

“You’ll need to spray it with insecticide every three months, and change the earth every six. And if there’s a frost, cover it 0ver with cellophane or it’ll shrivel up in a single night,”

But Silva didn’t pay much attention. Her guests would be arriving at any minute, she hadn’t prepared the salad yet or carved the roast, and she still had to change and tidy herself up.

The man seemed to notice her impatience.

“I’m sorry,” he said. I’ve come at a bad moment.”

“Oh no — it’s quite all right!” she said penitently. The man had hauled a heavy load all the way up to the third floor. She might have made more effort to conceal her irritation.

“Can I offer you something?” she said, trying to make amends as they went back through the hall.

“No, thanks,”

“Oh, you mustn’t refuse,” she insisted. “It’s my daughter’s birthday/.

When at last the door closed behind him, Suva went back to check the dinner table. She was tempted to add a few finishing touches, but in fact did nothing but stare absently at the coldly glittering array of plates and glasses. Thee the doorbell rang again and roused her from her daze. She recognized her daughter’s ring.

“Would you be a dear and make the salad and carve the meat while I have a shower and change? I’m sure I must smell of cooking!”

“Leave it to me, Mother!”

Silva looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she undressed. Had she put on weight round the hips? She stood there pensively for a moment, as if she’d forgotten where she was. Then the phone rang again in the hall and roused her from her reverie.

She turned on the shower, anxious to get on as fast as possible now before the guests arrived. They were all friends, apart from a couple of Brikena’s teachers, so they hadn’t been asked to come at any definite time.

She came to a halt again back in her bedroom, wondering what to wear. But she soon felt cold, and settled for a mauve dress that she knew Gjergj liked. It still fitted perfectly: she must have been wrong about putting on weight. “I don’t understand why you keep fussing about your figure,” her husband sometimes complained. “A woman doesn’t really blossom until she gets to your age!” (She was well aware he was being tactful in putting the emphasis on flowering rather than on ripeness, and she was secretly grateful.) “I may be old-fashioned, but I don’t see why a woman in full bloom has to be as skinny as a rake!”

Silva smiled to herself as she looked in the glass. As often happened on birthdays and other festive occasions, the putting on of the dress had suddenly divided the day into two. Amid the seemingly never-ending rush of preparation there always came a moment when iuster was transformed into celebration. As she buttoned the neck of her dress, Silva realized the magic moment had arrived.

She didn’t take long over her hair, just doing it the way Gjergj liked it, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he was away and wouldn’t be able to see it.

“Oh, Mother — you do look lovely!” cried Brikena when Silva emerged into the hall

Silva smiled at her, threw a casual look at the table, and for some reason she herself didn’t quite understand, began to wander aimlessly round the flat. Usually she liked to sit down and wait for her guests, but today that pleasure was spoiled by not knowing exactly when they would come.

Her daughter’s voice came from the kitchen:

“I’ve done the carving, Mother — do you want to see?”

Finally Silva sat down in an armchair in the living room with her eyes half closed. It had been a really exhausting day, with her husband not there to give her a hand. A good thing! had that shower, she thought. The statuettes on the bookshelves, relics of her days as an archaeologist, loomed through the October dusk like a row of ghosts foregathering to exchange some secret. But the slightest noise or interruption would be enough to deprive them of their mystery and turn them back into figures of clay and stone,