The Concert (20 page)

He was talking now without even looking at her.

“People in this country are always telling stories and jokes about the Chinese, and I expect they always will. But it's got nothing to do with racism, whatever some may think.”

“No…Good heavens, what a crush! It's like being packed in a tie of sardines!”

The visitors were cruising around in complete disorder. They seemed to have come there to meet one another rather than to study Chinese ceramics. Everyone was beaming, contributing to one great meaningful smile. They came and went, eyes sparkling, ready to burst out laughing at the slightest excuse.

“And there's the old guard for you!” said Skënder.

“So what's their position?”

“They're gaga. If they still had all their faculties they'd be lamenting now instead of exulting as they did when we broke with the Soviets.“

“But why should they be downcast?” asked Silva. “Perhaps they're cherishing some hopes, now as then?”

“They've no reason to hope. We're drawing away from China at the very moment China's moving towards America. And so…”

“Yes, you're right.”

“But they're completely past it, and can't understand the situation. Unless they're only pretending…”

Silva started to laugh.

Then, from their right, there came a sudden noise, followed by cries of “What is it?” “What's happening?” Heads turned, but no one could make anything out from a distance.

The crowd drifted towards the centre of interest. The more impatient elbowed their way forward. Others could be seen coming back in the other direction, wearing smiles of satisfied curiosity.

“What's happened?” Skënder asked one of these.

“Someone's broken a vase.”

“Good gracious!” Silva exclaimed,

“A Chinaman knocked it over by accident,” said the man. “I don't know what would have happened if it had been one of us!”

Silva thought for a moment of Victor Hila. Scraps of conversation could be heard all round: “That beautiful vase — smashed to smithereens!”…“I was sure someone had knocked it over!”, “What? Who'd have dared?”…“Well, Ï never!”…“It was very valuable, too!”…“Still, I suppose it's a good sign”…

Silva, turning round to see who'd spoken the last few words, was surprised to see the man they'd noticed a little while ago, looking at the poster. He was rubbing his hands, and his face was flushed with satisfaction.

“Let's slip away,” said Skënder.

And after having strolled around for a little longer, they left. He went with her for part of the way, and as they parted she could feel on her lips a trace of the collective smile worn by the visitors to the exhibition. It was colder now and she walked faster. As she strode along she wondered if she'd been right not to tell Skënder Bermema that her brother had been expelled from the Party. Perhaps he might have been able to give her some explanation? Anyhow, she'd contrive to mention it to him another day.

As she was passing the Café Riviera, where the lights were on because of the overcast sky, a sudden intuition made her turn and look in through the window. And her whole being was invaded by a deep, burning sensation, spreading like ripples when a drop of water fails into a tank. There, sitting on a bench near the front of the café, Gjergj was sitting with a young woman. “What could be more natural?” she told herself. And then, as if to check the waves of pain that were pulsing right through her body, “So what?” So what if he was sitting in a café with a woman - that wasn't the end of the world! But some blind force, stronger than her own will, made her do something that offended against her owe code of conduct and her own dignity: she looked again. The young woman - or girl — sitting with Gjergj was pretty. In the course of the two or three seconds that Silva had spent looking at her (I only hope I didn't look
again]
she thought later), her mind took it all in: their pensive look, the way the girl was toying with her coffee cup, the smoke from his cigarette, and, worse still, the dangerous silence that reigned between them. How shameful! Silva reproached herself, swiftly turning her head away. How horrible! But between “shameful”, which applied to herself, and “horrible”, which applied to what she'd just seen, there was an enormous distance. “How horrible!” she said again, forgetting her own unseemly behaviour. It seemed to her a mere drop compared with that other ocean of evil.

The farther she left the café behind, the more irreparable seemed what she had seen there. The long light-brown hair, the whirls of cigarette smoke lazily enfolding them both…She'd have to be very stupid not to see there was something between them. She realized how fast she was walking by the sound of her own heels on the pavement. It seemed to come from far away. Then she felt a temporary calm descend on her, though she was well aware it was false respite, a grey, barren flatness bound in the end to emphasize the underlying pain. This was the reason, then, for his over-affectionate telegram. For that over-insistent “fondest”. Of course, a part of that effusion, perhaps the main part, was really directed towards the other woman! She saw again in her mind's eye the intimate moments of their first night together after his return, moments cruelly lit by the thought that he'd done the same things the next day, or the day after that, in some anonymous room with the other woman.

She was overwhelmed by a jealousy all those long years of happy marriage could do nothing to modify. She made a last effort to throw it off, contain it. Wait - perhaps it isn't really like that, perhaps it was only a coincidence. But the stronger, the dominant part of herself soon stifled that appeal to wisdom. You had to be very naive not to suspect Gjergj and that woman were up to something. Blind as she was, she'd told herself that sort of thing happened only to other people, never to Gjergj and herself. She'd believed like a fool in her happiness, and all the time it was rotten to the core. She'd shut her eyes to ail possibility of danger, smug as the most empty-headed of women. All the signs had been there, but with an unforgivable lack of shrewdness she hadn't even noticed them. Hadn't she found him, several times lately, lying on the sofa reading love poetry? Once she'd even asked him, “What are you reading that for? I've hardly ever seen you open a book of poems…” He'd answered, “I don't really know why…No particular reason…” She must be quite bird-brained not to have thought about what might lie behind such a change. Nor was that all. After he got back from China, not content with reading poetry he'd also taken a liking to chamber music. Quiet pieces mostly, the kind that promotes daydreaming. Yesterday evening she'd found him lying on the sofa, his head leaning on his right arm, listening to some Chopin. What more did he have to do to proclaim that he'd fallen in love? she raged inwardly. All there was left for him to do was draw hearts and arrows on the walls of the apartment. If he did she'd probably ask: “What are those funny symbols, Gjergj? Could they have anything to do with your feelings?”

If at least the two of them had been cowering at the back of the café, she wouldn't have seen them, she thought bitterly. But no, regardless of what anyone might think they'd sat right by the window, as if to exhibit themselves to the whole of Tirana. The anger she'd been feeling against herself now turned on him. He might at least have refrained from trying to pull the wool over her eyes with his sham affection, his sugary telegrams and what followed. He ought to have had the guts to show his indifference openly, to go off the deep end, throw scenes, make all the neighbours come running
—
it would have been more honest than that deceitful calm.

It wasn't as if
she
hadn't had the opportunity to deceive
him! 
Her jealousy suddenly mingled with a thirst for revenge. Against her will she imagined herself hurrying to a secret rendezvous. Some day as full of treachery as today, she would take off her clothes for a man, swiftly, impetuously, without shame, to make her vengeance more complete. Scenes followed one on another in her mind, but they gave her no satisfaction…She knew she could never behave like that. But what else could she do?

She was no longer heading for home. She'd changed direction, as if working out another, more cruel way of punishing him. And she did have an idea now. It only remained to put it into action. She soon found herself near a bus-stop. She was still in a state of shock, and didn't ask herself why she was waiting there. It wasn't until the bus came and she got on it that she realized where she meant to go. To the cemetery. To Ana's grave.

Her tear-filled eyes distorted everything that passed before them. She felt as if she was about to burst out sobbing, not so much because of what had just happened as at finding herself in one of those periods in her life when Ana's absence seemed particularly terrible. How irreplaceably wonderful Ana would have been in such circumstances! Silva imagined herself having a cup of tea with her sister in some shop, and telling Ana her troubles. She would have been ready to endure much worse sufferings if only she could have told Ana about them.

The bus was full and drove along slowly. Silva was impatient. She thought she glimpsed a familiar face amongst the crowd, and turned her face to the window to avoid being spoken to. For many of those she knew, she was still one of the inseparable Krasniqi sisters, and their names were always linked together in people's conversation. Today Silva didn't want to talk to anyone.

The bus arrived at the terminus. The cemetery was only a few minutes' walk away. Once through the iron gate, Silva almost ran along the path leading to Ana's grave, as if her sister were waiting for her. The cemetery was almost empty, but Silva slowed down so as not to attract attention. At last she came to the grave: its pale marble tombstone seemed to contain the last gleams of day. A bunch of fresh pink roses had been placed beside the faded ones from last week. Who could have brought them? Silva bit her lip with vexation: her mind was in such a whirl she'd forgotten to bring any flowers. She sighed. Some scattered white rose-petals, languishing on the grave, seemed to have melted into the marble. Everything was quiet. A few paces away to the right there was an old woman whom Silva had noticed there several times before: as usual, she had brought her dear departed a cup of coffee. She'd put the cup on the top of the grave, and was either weeping or just bowing and lifting' her head, Silva knelt down, and for something to do used the handkerchief crumpled up in her hand to polish the porcelain medallion on the headstone, it acted as frame to a photograph. Ana smiled out at her, her hair blown slightly by a wind off the sea; you could see the waves in the background. Besnik had taken that snapshot the first summer they spent together at the beach, at Durrës. Yet again Silva felt her eyes brim over, and tears as well as petals now patterned the marble slab. She couldn't take her eyes off the petals: for some reason or other they conjured up more strongly than anything else could have done the idyllic affair between Ana and Besnik, Ana had often told her about that perfect felicity, during thrilling hours they'd spent together in the tea-shop on the third floor of the palace of Culture, when Ana came to collect Silva from the reading room of the library. Later on, after Ana's death, seeing Besnik facing life's ups and downs with such calm indifference, Silva had wondered whether this was because he had already had his full quota of happiness.

Whenever she visited her sister's grave Silva recalled parts of the story of Ana's second marriage. It wasn't because of the grave, with its pale marble vaguely suggesting a bride's veil, the wreath of flowers, and the traditional handfuls of rice. These things belonged to Ana's first marriage rather than her second, for which she had dressed very soberly. No, it was because of something else, something that in a curious way erased the memory of the interminable days of Ana's illness, the months in hospital, the anxious waiting, the operation. Ana's first marriage, to Frédéric, had somehow been swallowed up in those sad memories — had been stripped of its veil, its lights, of everything that was joyful, and had made way for Ana's second marriage as one house may give up its contents in order to furnish another.

“Silva, I'm going to divorce Frédéric…” She well remembered hearing Ana say that. It was on a cold grey day like today, without mercy for anyone who stepped out of line. Ana's face had been paler than usual as she spoke. Before Silva had time to get over her astonishment, her sister had continued, even more amazingly: “I'm going to marry someone else.” “Marry someone else?” gasped Silva. Then she tried to speak more moderately. “Have you gone out of your mind? Haven't you said yourself that for you men are only interesting at a distance, and as soon as they get near you they lose most of their attraction?” “Not this time,” said Ana, “I've been with him — or rather I've been his, as they say — for a week.” “I can't believe it!” Silva had cried. She seemed to say nothing else all those icy weeks. “Fred thinks I've betrayed him lots of times,” said Ana, “but I never did, as you know. Never, Except perhaps once, in circumstances where I…where we both…”

Silva had sat staring at her sister. She was probably referring to her relations with Skënder Bermema which had been the talk of the town but which no one — including Silva.— really knew anything about, Silva was tempted to say, “What's all the mystery about Skënder Bermema? You might at least tell me! You're always making enigmatic references to it …Unless you only met him in a dream, or vice-versa, or unless the gossips themselves dreamed it all up …” But that day Ana had been talking about somebody else, a third man, and that wasn't the moment to try to find out about Skënder Bermema. Nor did a suitable occasion present itself later. Ana never told Silva her secret; she was to take it with her to the grave.