Ismail Kadare - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

At last they came to a halt at the edge of a copse.

“Beautiful scenery, isn’t it?” the police chief said. “Itold you you wouldn’t be bored.”

He got out first, and looked around. The driver opened the trunk and took out a blanket and two bottles of water, which he set down beside his boss.

Mark and the policeman sat down as if they were about to have a picnic.

“Marvelous scenery, you must admit,” the chief said again.

Then he took a pair of binoculars from his bag and began to adjust the focus.

“I have to look at something,” he said suddenly as he put the binoculars to his eyes.

What a magnificent police force! No two ways about it! Mark thought, ironically. God alone knew what there could be to observe in these boondocks.

“Do you want a turn?” the other man asked as he offered Mark the binoculars.

Mark took the instrument, placed it on the bridge of his nose, and steered it toward the area that the police chief had been watching. As he turned the focus knob, the mountains raced nearer with frightening speed. He thought he could make out the overgrown bushes that masked what was supposed to be the secret entrance to the deep storage depot of the National Archives. A strange association of ideas brought his girlfriend’s genitals to mind. Then he thought of the head of state making his way into the depot the day after assuming supreme power.

He was intensely eager to learn something more about that whole story. But he restrained himself, remembering he had vowed to ask no questions until he had managed to get the main matter off his chest.

He handed the binoculars back to their owner, and with a slight feeling of guilt repeated the police chief’s own words back to him:

“What a marvelous view! …”

He sensed that he was being looked at sourly. Was the chief so naive as to think no ill? Maybe he ought to interrogate the policeman about some case or other. About the bank holdup, for instance. Or even, so as to seem even more loyal, to ask him if they had any chance, from their vantage point, of seeing the robbers on the move.

He made up his mind to ask that question and waited for the chief to put down the binoculars before speaking.

When his companion lowered his arm, Mark saw that his eyes had gone quite empty, as if their former liveliness had stayed stuck to the viewfinden He must have seen something, Mark thought to himself. Something he would rather not have seen. How else could he account for the policeman’s expression, halfway between weariness and annoyance?

“Unless I’m mistaken, you have something to say to me,” the police chief said at last.

Mark took a deep breath before launching into his subject. The policeman listened without interrupting once. He batted his eyelids several times, then opened them wide before shutting them completely.

“Hmm, so that’s what it’s about,” he mumbled when Mark had finished, then took up the binoculars again.

He looked into the far distance for a moment.

“So that’s what it’s all about,” he repeated, as if he could see in the viewfinder whatever it was that had surprised him.

“I’m not asking for an immediate answer,” said Mark. “I do realize that my request is extremely unusual. I must ask you once again to forgive me.”

“Fine, fine,” the policeman murmured.

Mark wanted to break the ice that had formed between them by moving on to some other topic, something harmless or amusing. He had only worried that the police chief would answer him with a decisive no.

As he racked his brains for a subject that might lighten the atmosphere, maybe something about the NYPD methods featured in the papers recently, or about the training some Albanian policemen were getting in America to learn about those methods, he stumbled onto a quite different tack and came out with the view that humanity, up to the present, had been following a completely wrong path.

The police chief began to listen with rapt attention. I must be crazy, Mark thought, to choose a time like this to start philosophizing!

“Could I look through the binoculars one more time?” he asked point-blank, perhaps to avert a complete rupture between the two of them.

The policeman handed him the glasses.

“If you should happen to see anything suspicious, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll have a little nap.”

Mark stretched out his hand and took the binoculars. He had never imagined things would proceed in such an ordinary way.

He clapped the instrument to his eyes and directed it once more toward the mountainside. And as before, the mountains swooped first to the left, as if to shake off the snow from their peaks and shoulders, then to the right, and then came to a relative degree of rest. The summits stayed icy sharp, all the same, and the dark streaks etched into their sides seemed to have no intention of reaching an arrangement with the world down below. “If you happen to see anything suspicious, let me know,” Mark mumbled, repeating the policeman’s words like an incantation. As the chief was asleep, that meant that he, Mark, was now deputizing for him. You could tell he was asleep by the change in his breathing and by the regular dilation of his nostrils. Up above, in fact, everything looked suspicious, even the foreign body that had fallen from the sky — the snow.

Lord, what is the great sin that has been committed and is all around us? Mark wondered. He immediately realized why the whole world looked suspicious to him. It was because of the dense mass of brambles that hid the tunnel that led to the Secret Archives. As they resembled a woman’s entrance, so they spread the awareness of sin far and wide. His mistress had cheated on him for sure during her stay in Tirana, and afterward too. Maybe even with her own brother. He steadied the binoculars with both his hands. As he was almost certain that the tunnel’s entrance was on the narrow rocky shelf he had in his view, he was expecting to pierce its secret any minute now. On the surface of the human body, there were only two small spy-holes through which the image of the outside world could enter the inner darkness. The terrestrial globe must also have a similar passageway through which you could go from one zone to the other. Men had been looking for it for thousands of years, to no avail. He thought of Ulysses sacrificing a sheep, three thousand years ago, in the hope that the smell and color of its blood would help him find the passage.

Mark could hear the police chief snoring, as if in the far distance. He propped himself up on an elbow, to hold the binoculars more steadily.

Up in the heights, the undergrowth was rustling in an anxious wind. All around, everything seemed unsettled and expectant. Guilt might suddenly make its appearance; Mark was afraid of dozing off and missing it.

Don’t drop off! he ordered himself. Keep the vigil a little longer. You only get one chance at this in a lifetime.

And then they did indeed begin to appear, in a long line. Not the bank robbers, but a procession of official cars. The first to stop was a long black limousine, but the man who stepped out of it was not the Albanian dictator. His beetlelike eyebrows gave him away: Mark recognized Leonid Brezhnev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Next to step out was Walter Ulbricht, and behind him two cloaked figures costumed as for a fancy-dress ball.

They’re all looking for the same thing, Mark thought.

He was sure that the Guide of the Albanian People, though he had been here once before, would return. He wouldn’t miss his chance to be in this parade of rubble.

And indeed Hoxha did come, but he arrived late — which was a deception, of course, since he was actually early, doing everything as he always did, back to front, like the registration plate on his limousine. As tricky as ever! Mark exclaimed.