The Concert (10 page)

The day's work was nearly ended. He went over to the window and stood for a while looking out at the comings and goings in the square. The air felt damp, bet the weather looked too bright for rain.

He heard a key being turned in the lock of a nearby office. Footsteps echoed along the corridor. He looked at his watch and took his owe keys out of his pocket. And a few minutes later he was walking across Government Square as usual, another anonymous pedestrian amidst the crowd of clerks hurrying home.

ALTHOUGH THE RAINS WERE LATE
, it was already autumn. Every morning, clouds would appear on the horizon and fill the sky with pointless peals of thunder, only to vanish at the end of the afternoon without having shed a drop of moisture. After this had gone on for a whole week, people reconciled themselves to the idea that it was going to be a dry autumn. Meanwhile all the other seasonal changes took place as usual: the leaves turned colour, the temperature dropped, the birds migrated. As usual too, painters flocked to the headquarters of the Writers' and Artists' Union to get their annual permits to concentrate on autumnal themes.

But even before anyone noticed the first fallen leaf or the growing scarcity of birds, most people had started to be aware of something else: an obvious fall in the level of seniority among the delegates attending Sino-Albanian meetings. The change might well have begun earlier, but as the national days of both China and Albania fell in the autumn, it was thee that it became unmistakably evident.

No doubt about it, the Chinese delegations were not what they had been. Almost all of them were led by lesser officials than usual: vice-ministers instead of ministers, seconds-in-command instead of generals, assistant directors instead of heads of technology, and so on. And of course these lesser Chinese delegates were met at Tirana airport by members of the Albanian Party who had never appeared before at any official ceremony. As if this were not enough, the composition of the delegations themselves became more and more peculiar, not to say outlandish. Thus a delegation of popular orchestras from South-East China, led by the assistant editor of agricultural broadcasting, was succeeded by a ceramics delegation led by an assistant director, and this in turn was followed by another described merely as a delegation of peasants.

Since it was difficult anyway to find Albanian institutions corresponding to those to which the Chinese delegations belonged, the relatively lowly officials sent to meet them tended to be from bodies that were almost irrelevant. A team of workers from a collective producing Mao Zedong badges had to be welcomed by the assistant head of a ferro-nickel factory, much to the annoyance of the Chinese, who lost no time in pointing out that workshops which turned out badges bearing portraits of Chairman Mao had nothing whatever in common with ordinary factories. Thereupon the organizers tried to find someone else to preside over the official dinner at least, and came up with the assistant head of the Mint.

Another problem was presented by the toasts which had to be proposed at banquets and receptions. Not only had it become necessary to modify their form, but it grew more and more difficult to match the wording of the guests” own toasts. Adjectives were weakened, adverbs strengthened, among many other adjustments. All the guests were constantly on the alert - especially the interpreters, fearful of getting some nuance wrong. Things were even more complicated when it came to reporting these occasions in the newspapers. Whenever a banquet was held in honour of a Chinese delegation, the official in charge of press coverage had to stay on in his office till late at night waiting for the copy to be phoned in. He happened to be on a strict diet, and his colleagues joked that these parties were just as bad for his liver as if he'd actually attended them.

The Chinese were the first to modify the formula used to round off accounts of receptions and banquets given in honour of the delegations. Such occasions had previously been said to have “taken place in a very warm and friendly atmosphere,” At first the Chinese omitted “very”, then they left out “warm”, and finally they replaced the closing words of the communiqués altogether with the phrase, “those present were observed to exchange smiles in the course of the evening.”

The Albanian press stuck to the old formula, except that “warm and friendly” was replaced by the one word, “cordial”.

None of this was lost on the reading public, though some people predicted that this period of coolness would eventually wear off as others had done a few years earlier. Just as trees lost their leaves in winter but flowered again in spring, so the delegations would eventually flourish anew.

Yet at the same time everyone talked of how work had slowed down on many big construction sites, especially those building hydro-electric plants in the north. This was because of hold-ups in supplies of equipment from China. Freighters now took an unconscionably long time to reach their destination, and when they did arrive they might be carrying the wrong cargo. On two occasions ships had turned back without even entering Durrës harbour. All this was said to be part of China's famous “turn of the screw”. Cafés in Tirana were full of stories about this tactic: no one realized that one day the whole country would be its victim.

The Chinese press made no mention of the subject. For weeks their newspapers and airwaves concentrated on accounts of the Spartan life-styles of two of their country's own leaders. One hadn't worn any new clothes since the liberation of China; the other, to save the people unnecessary expense, had no furniture except a couple of barrels, one used as a bed and the other containing his only food - chick-peas. It seemed that the first of the two, easily recognizable from the towel he wore round his head in magazine photos, was engaged in some sort of argument with his opposite number, though exactly what it was about no one quite knew. Some rumours had it that their rivalry, comical as it might appear, was really nothing to do with the two men themselves, who in fact merely symbolized two important factions engaged in a power struggle. Incredible as it might seem, some people were prepared to take all this quite seriously, and to debate it at length. During one television account of the arrival of a Chinese delegation in Mexico, led by the turban-wearing member of the Politbureau, the camera, as if trying to solve the enigma, dwelt for several seconds on the arrangement of the towel round his head.

Such things had apparently so little to do with the late arrival of the freighters that the Albanian ministers concerned about these delays just shook their heads in bewilderment. Meanwhile, foreign press agencies announced that Mao Zedong was seriously ill, if not as dead as a doornail, and that the man who'd been seen at public receptions recently was merely one of his doubles. Some people even said Mao had been dead for ages, and everything that had been going on in China since then was the result of quarrels between two of his doubles, each claiming to be the great man himself.

Some saw a connection between reports of Mao's illness and the recent deterioration in Sino-Albanian relations, and hoped that when he, or one or both of the doubles, got better or died, the situation would be cleared up, things would go back to normal as they'd always done before, and this period would be no more than a disagreeable memory. And so that autumn, the delegations, though diminished, went on coming and going; for the first time in years, an invitation even went out to a delegation of writers. But any lingering optimism was roughly extinguished by a rumour to the effect that the Chinese ambassador had asked for an audience with the Albanian foreign secretary on the subject of an X-ray: if the matter at issue wasn't actually a brawl, it was said to be the bruising of a Chinese foot by an Albanian one.

Linda had a bath and then started to wander aimlessly around her apartment. Ever since breaking off the affair she'd had with a government television engineer the previous year, she'd found the afternoons terribly long. Now and again she would pick up a half-read book from the settee, but she soon threw it down again. Finding herself in the hall, she stopped and looked in the glass. Still undecided as to whether to go to the dressmaker's for a fitting or call on one of her workmates at the Makina Import office, she started to do her hair.

For some reason or other she couldn't get out of her mind a poem she'd read a few days ago, waiting at the hairdresser's:

Ever since you left
I can feel myself gradually forgetting you,
Feel your eyes dying in me,
And your hair, and all

She took out a hairpin and adjusted a couple of small combs. Forgetting someone's hair, she thought as she fiddled with one of the combs. “I can never forget you,” he'd said in his last letter, his last attempt to revive their affair.- “I can never erase anything about you from my memory — your words, your eyes, your hair…” And yet, writing in that magazine, there was someone strong enough to say he
could 
forget. “Feel your eyes dying in me…and your hair.”

People said that when you died it was your hair that died last, Linda smiled, in spite of the comb she was now holding in her mouth. Then she dropped it, put on her raincoat and opened the door, still not knowing where she was going.

The late afternoon was still warm beneath the dull autumn sky, as if ignoring the seasons. Several times Linda almost went into a shop to buy some material, but each time she changed her mind. She felt relaxed and at ease with herself. For no particular reason, Suva's words came back to her: “I got married during the blockade.” As a matter of fact, her thoughts had lately been turning more and more often to Silva and things connected with her. The surge of happiness she'd felt when she first met her, eight months ago, kept recurring. She now rejoiced in her good luck at working in the same office as Silva, and shuddered at the thought that one of them might be moved. Every so often she found herself adopting one of Suva's expressions or gestures, and while she did her best to avoid copying the older woman, she didn't feel guilty about it. She liked everything about Silva - her face, her way of dressing and doing her hair, the way she spoke on the telephone, the atmosphere around her and the relations she created with everyone, from her fellow secretaries to her superiors. Linda also admired Suva's relationship with her husband, and had even, on the basis of just a few glimpses, taken a liking to the husband himself, with his stern-looking and yet not forbidding face, and the deeply etched lines on his forehead that seemed signs of youth rather than age.

“‘I got married during the blockade,'“ she repeated, smiling. Would she herself get married during this second blockade? She turned towards a shop window so that no one would see her smiling to herself. She certainly liked doing as Silva did, even at the risk of seeming like a pale imitation of her friend. Anyhow, mightn't anything happen during a blockade? Hadn't Silva got married, while her late sister got divorced in order to marry Besnik Struga, and Struga himself, a person still shrouded in mystery for Linda, had broken off his engagement? She'd met Struga, Suva's former brother-in-law, only once, by chance, in the corridor, when he'd come to the ministry to see Silva. But — perhaps because Linda had heard so much about him
—
he'd made a strong impression on her. Most of the people Silva knew were somehow out of the ordinary: her brother, the tank officer, who'd come to see her two days ago, looking distraught; Skënder Bermema, the writer, an old family friend who'd had a rather enigmatic relationship with Suva's sister; and other cousins and acquaintances whom Linda had met or whose voices she'd heard when they'd called in at or rung up the office to speak to her friend. All were interesting; almost all had something in their lives - some phase, some act or some episode
-
that was connected with the Soviet blockade. Linda was growing more and more fascinated by that period, and by anyone who'd been directly involved in it.

And why shouldn't I too get married during a blockade? she joked to herself as she made for the Makina Import building. Bet thee she'd have to find someone to marry. And furthermore, was this really a genuine blockade? By all accounts the other one had weighed down on everyone like lead: a period harsh in itself had been slashed through as by an icy abyss. But it was still hard to say how serious the present crisis might prove. You needed to be a code-cruncher to deduce anything from the articles in the press. But things might not turn out so badly as that: there mightn't be a blockade at all. And detecting a tinge of regret in this thought, as if she could only get married if there was a blockade, she smiled at her own absurdity.

“If anyone suspected the idiotic notions that go through my mind!” she thought. It was a good thing Tirana was big enough for one to daydream as one walked along without bumping into people one knew. Then, paradoxically, she had a feeling someone was watching her. She turned, and thought she recognized a face. The man just nodded vaguely. Where have I seen that ravaged face before, she wondered. And then she remembered. It was in the cafeteria at the ministry.

Linda smiled at him. They both walked on a little way. Then he spoke.

“You're Suva's friend, aren't you? We've met before, if you remember.”

“Yes, indeed!” Linda exclaimed. But he didn't take the hand she'd half extended.

“How did that business about the X-ray turn out?” she asked, laughing.

But he remained serious.

“No developments,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Really?”

She gave him a sidelong look, and her own smile faded. If she'd met anyone else in the street like this, she would have walked on without more ado, but there was something about his downcast expression that made him seem different from other people.

“Perhaps things will sort themselves out faster than you think.”

Victor Hila shrugged, as if to say it was better not to talk about it. They'd been walking along together for some time now, and it seemed to make both of them uncomfortable. Linda had noticed before how disagreeable it is being overtaken in the street by someone you know, rather than just meeting them coming towards you and passing by. Although the man looked even gloomier than he had the other day at the ministry, she resolved to give him the slip at the next shop they came to. Then he, as if reading her thoughts, asked her point-blank: