The Concert (42 page)

But Friday morning went by, and so did Friday afternoon, and even when dusk was falling they still hadn't made any progress. In fact, the later it got, the more hopeless it seemed. “My God,” groaned the chairman, “now we're really in a mess!”

There was no shortage of suggestions from all quarters, but the meeting kept coming back to where it had started. They felt as if they were shrouded in a thick fog which no one knew how to break through. No sooner would they start debating whether their man should die from natural causes or by accident than an argument would start up as to the kind of final illness that would be most suitable. It mustn't be one of the spectacular, far-fetched maladies that bourgeois intellectuals deemed appropriate for the heroes of their novels: they didn't want any heart attacks, brain haemorrhages or any other maladies indirectly glorifying intellectual labour; nor would they hear of diabetes or leukemia. What they wanted was something nice and ordinary, as simple as the rest of the hero's characteristics and as much a target for the intelligentsia's mockery: a stomach ache, or one of those diseases you get from working in the country or from contact with beasts of burden. Then someone pointed out that a lot of precious time had been wasted on medical talk, when it still hadn't been settled whether death was to be caused by illness or accident. So there they were back again, trying to choose between chance and necessity, fatal accident or mortal illness. This was accompanied by endless quotations from Mao, and these contradicted one another so often, and thus gave rise to such complicated debates, that everyone lost the thread of the argument. They then strayed off to a consideration of the different kinds of accidents, in case this option should be adopted. Was it to be an ordinary accident or an extraordinary one? - a choice even more ticklish than that between ordinary and extraordinary illness. For if the hero was to be run over by a train, fail off a horse, die in a fire or drown in a river, the considerations such happenings aroused might eventually conflict with the general Party line, or affect the struggle between the two factions within the leadership, or, worst of all, add to speculation (it gave you goose-flesh to think of it!) about who was to succeed Chairman Mao.

For hours the committee was buried in these considerations. They ruled out letting the hero be trampled to death by a horse: such an image might provide ammunition for the reactionaries, who claimed that the peasantry hampered the progress of the revolution. They were about to consent to his being run over by a train when someone pointed out that this conflicted with Mao's notion that the country should encircle the town: for in this scenario the train (the town) could be said to triumph over the hero (the country). So then they had another think about falling off a horse, until it occurred to two or three members of the committee that the two solutions might be combined, and the hero might perish trying to save a horse from being run over by a train. At first this was greeted as a marvellous idea, but its drawbacks soon became evident. In the course of discussion the permutations and combinations of man, horse and train became so involved that the committee abandoned the tangle in despair. Fire and water then came under review, but they too proved unsatisfactory. For one thing, weren't fire and lames symbols of the revolutionary movement? And as for water, didn't Mao have a special feeling for rivers — witness the many references to them in his Thoughts, and his famous swim in the Yang-Tse, after which millions of Chinese had flung themselves into the sea, into rivers, canals, lakes and ponds and even into cisterns. It would be positively indecent to have the hero drown in a river! — almost tantamount to suggesting that Mao himself had lured him to his fate!

It was half-past three in the morning, and the committee was still discussing the last point on the agenda. Everyone's lucidity was fading fast. All minds would soon be blank, or worse. If we don't finish soon, groaned the chairman inwardly, we'll all go round the bend! At half-past four they were still going on about rivers and ponds and trains trying to run horses over, but by now it was all mere babble. As dawn was breaking, one member of the committee suddenly shouted, as if he'd just woken up: “What, isn't he dead yet? Strangle him, then, for the love of God! Bash him on the head! Anything you like, so long as you put a stop to
our
agony too!”

This outburst at least had the virtue of bringing the chairman to his senses. Mustering such strength as still remained to him, he declared: “I suggest we just say he dies by accident, trying to save a comrade. That's the best I can do. It's all too much for me.”

The others all nodded agreement. Their heads were all so heavy the chairman was surprised their necks could support them.

The secretary noted the form of death agreed on, and the chairman was about to close the file when a voice cried: “What about the name? We've forgotten to give him a name!”

The baptism didn't take long. They gave their man the first name that came into their heads. Lei Fen, And the file was closed.

The sun was rising as they straggled, silent as ghosts, out of the chairman's office. The chairman himself sat on for a while at his desk. The file lay in front of him. Then he got up, went over to the window, and watched his colleagues walking away along the empty road. They were as unsteady on their feet as if they'd just given birth!…

And then his dazed mind realized what he and his committee really had done: they'd just given birth to a dead man.

Morning found the chairman still there, sitting alone with his file. He gave it to the first messenger who arrived, to deliver to the
Zhongnamhai
. Then, while the man went down the stairs, he went back to the window. He waited to see the messenger emerge and go off down the road with the file under his arm. Then he had to restrain himself from running after him, shouting out to the passers-by, “Stop him! Bring back the monster before it's too late! Kill him as if he were a bastard! Choke this anti-man, this seb-man,this new-born non-man!” Then he himself would catch up with the messenger, snatch the file away from him and tear it to shreds in full view of everyone. As he imagined the scene he clenched his trembling hands, driving his fingernails into his palms as if he were wresting from the file the flesh and bones of the man he and his committee had borne and then killed with such pain.

“Monster!” he croaked, trying to make out the figure of the messenger, now vanishing in the distance. “Monster in the file, spreader of plague — there's nothing to stop you now from infecting the whole of China!”

…Yesterday, meeting with Guo Moruo. He made a very adverse impression on me. He kept saying, “Do you know what ! am, compared with Mao Zedong, on the score of intelligence? A three-month-old baby,” Then he told us he was worried because the enemies of the régime didn't speak badly enough of him. It kept him awake at night.

“I'm still an intellectual,” he said several times, “I'm going to wallow in the mud, then go and purify myself in the river,”

I thought about the
trifshatars…

THE HOUR OF THE RIGHT – SYNOPSIS

“Listen — this time you can be sure I'm right: the hour of the right has come!”

“I don't believe you… Don't look at me like that! I just don't believe you, that's all And if you want to know what I really think, I'll tell you without mincing my words: I don't want to hear any more about it, I've had it up to here! I don't care whose hour has come — the hour of the right, or of the left, or of the half-left, or of the quarter-right! I don't want to know, and that's that! I just want to live the few days left to me normally. I can't bear to listen to all that stuff any longer. I'm tired of it, exhausted by it, I can't take any more!”

“If you want to stop up your ears that's your business. Perhaps you don't want to be committed any more? Perhaps you've grown immune to poison?”

“Stop, Lin Hen - that's enough!” said the other, burying his head in his hands.

They were both sitting in an old tavern where tea was served in tin cups and soon got cold.

“Don't take what I say too hard, Lin Hen. I can't help it either. My nerves are in shreds.”

“Do you think mine are any better?”

“Perhaps not…But still…” — one hand was unbuttoning his shirt — “… you haven't got marks like these on your body. Do you see these scars?” He was almost shouting now. “I've had them since the days when ‘a hundred flowers were blooming,' when like a fool I thought the hour of the right had come. And do you see this other mark, under my breast? That's a souvenir of the next hour that came, the hour of the left, when in order to wipe out the memory of the hour of the right I tried to be more to the left than necessary, and went to a meeting and stuck a picture of Mao into my own chest.”

He drank a few sips of tea, then went on more slowly and thoughtfully.

“I got blood-poisoning,, and barely escaped with my life. Because the infection itself was nothing compared to the suffering I had to endure in hospital. My wound became a bone of contention. The staff was divided in two, one group maintaining my wound was an ordinary injury that required normal treatment, their opponents claiming that Mao's picture could be a source of infection, and that I'd injured myself deliberately so as to discredit him. These arguments took place across my bed, where they kept putting on and taking off my bandages according to which party was in charge, and needless to say the debaters soon came to blows. The hospital became a battlefield. I had a raging fever and long periods of delirium, but what I saw in my lucid intervals was even worse than the scenes in my nightmares. Each of the two competing sides got the upper hand alternately. When the right were in the ascendant, the barefoot doctors were beaten to a jelly and their popular remedies trampled underfoot or thrown out of the window. Bet not for long. When everyone least expected it, the tide of battle would turn and the left be on top again. Thee - I still shudder at the thought of it - they would tear off my bandages and call a meeting
to
examine the prescriptions of their predecessors for detecting implications hostile to Chairman Mao. The following week there would be another reversal, and the doctors of the right, whom their opponents, after giving them a suitable thrashing, had set to cleaning the toilets, emerged once more in their white coats. And so on…And all the time I was getting worse …I shall never forget it as long as I live! That's why even now my hair stands on end whenever I hear the words 'left' and ‘right'. You see, Lin Hen, I have seen hell with my own eyes, and that's why I don't, why I won't…!”

His friend looked at him sympathetically, but with eyes still cool and severe.

“I understand all that. Nevertheless, the hour of the right has come, Vun Fu. In fact, the things you've just told me about are so many warning signs.”

“How can you still believe that?” said the other, buttoning his shirt up slowly, as if wanting his scars to be seen one last time.

“They're going to allow private shops and reopen the churches,' said the other.

Autumn in Peking
A flock of wild geese rises into the sky.
The last golds of autumn are dimmed for ever.
Winter approaches bearing cold and frost.
Its dreary greys, and a plenum to liven it up…

The
datsibaos
in Peking on a rainy day. The long wall covered with dozens of posters fluttering in the wind. Dreariness by the mile. Bits of rain-soaked paper full of thousands, millions of horrible insults. Genuine anti-autumn!

AND YET…I have to write this in capital letters. And not just once, but over and over, three, three hundred times. And yet. And yet. And yet…

And yet, yes, they're a great people, and it would be small-minded not to bear witness to that in these notes. Though they make up only a quarter of the human race, the Chinese have probably endured half of all its sufferings. If anyone ever wrote a
History of Hunger,
 the Chinese would be the main characters. The immense poverty, the immense hunger, the immense backwardness of an old world. The strength that could change all that must have been immense too.

The Chinese have had that strength. You'd have to be insane or reactionary not to admit it. They demolished that old world, and the dust from its ruins now floats over their country. On the one hand are the ravings of the Cultural Revolution, on the other the ancient ghosts, in what immemorial archives did they find the model for their current relations with us? From what imperial chancelleries did they derive these factional struggles for power, the icy guides and officials who separate us like a wall from the ordinary people?

And yet. And yet. And yet…Strange — I think I'm going to miss this country.

SKENDER BERMEMA PUSHED
his notes aside and rubbed his aching forehead. He found it hard to turn away from one last manuscript, though. Should he read it or not?

He'd dashed it off in three nights in a dreary hotel in Chang Ha, on the basis of an incident he'd been told about. Now he was as curious to see what he'd made of the story as if someone else had written it.

And his eyes had started to read it without waiting for him to make up his mind:

SPIRITUALIST SESSION IN THE TOWN OF N —.
SYNOPSIS FOE STORY.

1

The little boat dropped anchor in the river port at N—, just to unload a few crates marked “Insecticide” in black letters. It was late on a cold September afternoon, and by the time the boat had plunged back into the mist, the crates, together with the two men who seemed to be guarding them, were on a Xin Fu track driving hell-for-leather towards the town centre. Later, when a lot of people claimed they could dimly remember that distant afternoon, they found it difficult to specify any details. As a matter of fact, apart from the man in charge of the little port and his two clerks, no one had witnessed the unloading of the crates from the boat or their swift loading on to the lorry. And not even the men in the port had been in a position to notice the strange fact that the Xin Fu truck, instead of pulling up outside some farm commune or municipal office or depot for hotel supplies, had disappeared into the yard at the back of the Department of Public Safety.