The Concert (6 page)

He tried to laugh through his wrath, but it was too soon for that. You'll see what the old man's still capable of ! he muttered stoutly. Don't imagine I didn't foresee this when I made you a present of all those factories and industrial complexes. Comrades were always coming to me and complaining, The things we're sending those Albanians, whereas they …! Just wait and have patience, I told them. I knew they were very annoyed; perhaps the letters purporting to come from the official were really written by my assistants, or by Lie Biao, or even by Jiang Qieg — they've always been impatient, that lot. I, on the other hand, have always bided my time, in accordance with the old Chinese proverb, “Don't worry: wait by the bank of the river, and it will bring you the head of your enemy.” And now the time has come. We couldn't really teach the Albanians a lesson a few years ago, before they'd started laying the foundations of their chemical factories, their steel complex and their big hydroelectric plants. No - now's the time to twist their arm, when they're in the middle of building them. But the comrades couldn't wait: every time we sent Albania a new turbine or the equipment for a new factory they sweated blood, their eyes flashed. “What are we going to ask for in return?” they kept demanding. “Wait till they really get started building and then we'll see,” I told them. This exasperated them, though of course they didn't show it. Perhaps they muttered among themselves that the old man was getting past it, or even that I was frittering away our country's heritage. While I was just thinking: Wait a bit longer…

Finally the laughter broke through, Mao propped himself with one hand against the wall of the cave and nodded. The moment has come, he thought. The building work is in progress, and all the sites are as vulnerable as open wounds. A half-finished steel complex or an abandoned hydro-electric dam are no better than ruins. When everything's left high and dry, that's the time to start thinking about dictating terms. Now I can torment them just as I like. For every factory I shall demand a sacrificial victim. For every chimney, for every turbine, for the smallest bit of funding. You're going to have to pay back something in return for everything you've had, I'll say. You're going to have to strip away your insufferable pride, your history, your art, your intelligentsia …I know you quail at the thought of an impoverished intelligentsia, of writers abolished by - a stroke of the pen. Perhaps you don't feel you can wipe out your literature as we have wiped out ours? Perhaps you shrink from seeding pen-pushers to prison, or out into the rice-fields, or forcing them to clean the latrines? I'm such a kind old gentleman I'll show you how to manage by a completely different method, apparently diametrically opposite from ours. Have a vast renaissance! Create hundreds of novelists a year, and thousands of poets, by calling any report containing a bit of dialogue a novel and any rhymed petition a poem, and you'll see that after a few years your literature will have vanished without trace. No one will accuse you of doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you'll always find admirers ready to acclaim you for nurturing all those writers. What an unprecedented flowering!…And you must do the same with all the rest: give and it shall be given unto you. For every turbine, every credit, give something: for every electronic brain, give part of your own brain. But wait - that's nothing compared with what I'll ask you for next. For you'll have to give your Party too! I know how unacceptable that may sound to you; how barbarous and sinister, I realize it's your dearest, most inviolable and undisputed possession, and that you've based all your security, your present and your future upon it. I know all that. But wait: I may be an old man, but I'm not so stupid as to ask you to violate the inviolable or question the unquestionable. No, not at all Far be it from me to do such a thing! Besides, what good would it do me? Without your Party your whole country would go down the drain and I'd lose you for ever. You'd move away, you'd drift off. So I wouldn't dream of entertaining such an idea. We must act with the Party, always with the Party, my pets - but with a Party that's slightly more…what shall I say?… more open! Wait — hear me out! It's not as bad as it may sound. If I'm not mistaken, you've got a flag with a two-headed eagle on it, haven't you? So why should the idea of a Party with two lines strike you as so terrible? It's unacceptable and barbarous, you say? Very well, let's say no more about it - well think of something else. We're not short of symbols, thank God.

He'd discussed it with Zhou Enlai. He himself had made a few suggestions, and Zhou had met one of their ministers, a general, and was preparing to get in touch with various important elements in the Albanian economy. Zhou had come round to his own way of thinking: you couldn't do anything in Albania without the Party, In fact, you had to start with it. And if you managed to mould it, to manipulate it a bit, everything else would follow. Things would take a new course, the ramparts of the citadel, as they liked to call their country, would be no more than camouflage, and their pride would turn into its opposite, their disobedience into docility. And from then on out they would never again dream of writing a letter to oppose an invitation to an American president.

For a few seconds Mao lost the thread of his thoughts, but then he managed to find it again. All right, keep your Party thee, he said aloud, but on one condition: make a few alterations, I'm not asking anything very difficult
-
just a bit of a change, a little mutation, as the scientists say. You refuse? In that case the factories will stop going up, the blast furnaces will go out, the dams will crumble, everything will shrivel up into a skeleton. Usually, when a country is reduced to rubble, it's because of a war, but in your case it will be the débris of peace, than which nothing is more horrible: bodies unburied, souls on the scrap-heap, epidemics, death itself…And Tartar hordes, wolves and jackals with scraps of fur and women's finery in their jaws…

Mao Zedong let himself burst out laughing at last, and went on stroking the wall of the cave as if he was trying to wheedle it. The time was now ripe for blackmail Our people on the spot could exploit the situation. According to reliable sources, China had open or covert supporters inside the Albanian government, on the Central Committee even. The “sleepers” could finally emerge from their slumbers. The real game was about to begin. Now you're going to pay all your outstanding debts. I'm going to tighten the screw -slowly, week after week, month after month, season after season. Sometimes I'll pretend to slacken off for a bit, so that it'll hurt all the more when I tighten up again. And so it will go on until you're at your last gasp, and you yourselves offer me more than I've ever asked of you. Ha ha!

Unhurriedly, as if savouring a good wine which one keeps in one's mouth as long as possible to enjoy the bouquet, Mao imagined the future Sinization of Albania. First the abolition of the intelligentsia and the downgrading of education, then the erosion' of history, the consigning of heroes to oblivion, and the emergence of the first new men, the Albanian Lei Fens (what were the first new tractors in comparison?) Rumour had it that they'd already introduced some Chinese elements into the choreography of their ballets. Such portents were still as rare as the first spring flowers, but they would gradually multiply. After the deeds would come the words, and after the words the thoughts. Their reservations about being European would slowly dry up, like water in a citadel under siege. Then one last onslaught and Albania would surrender …It was inevitable…Asia first set its heart on Albania some seven centuries ago. And having acquired it, kept it for five hundred years. Early in the twentieth century, though, Albania, the cunning lynx, managed to escape. But that was the last time it did so, and now there was nowhere for it to go. Little by little, quietly, without any clash of swords, it would come back to Asia, this time for ever. It would be a magnificent moment in the age-old history of China. The first country in Europe to be “Sinified”. And like a patch of leprosy, “Sinification” would gradually spread northward, first to central Europe and then still further. It would be the first victory of Asia over Europe - a victory fraught with consequence. An epoch. making revenge. Therein lay the real significance of Mao's owe achievement. Unfortunately very few eyes were capable of perceiving it. But great achievements are never seen from close to: only from a distance of years or even centuries can they be appraised justly. So moan away, you benighted fools, and write your anonymous letters: your sight is still as dim as that of a month-old baby. Whereas I am about to enter my eightieth year!

Once again Mao lost the thread; once again, after some time, he found it again. He pondered about how long the process of “Sinification” would take. Perhaps the first results wouldn't be apparent until he was ninety years old, or a hundred and forty; but that didn't matter. Even if the change wasn't complete until he was a hundred and eighty or three hundred and twenty years old, it still didn't matter. He'd started seeing life and death as indistinguishable long ago. In his opinion there was only a trifling difference between the two: until a certain year he would go on breathing and moving about. Afterwards…But this was of no more importance to him than moving to a new house or a new job was in the life of an ordinary individual. He saw his life, or perhaps rather his life-and-death, as one and indivisible. Perhaps that was the main reason why every so often he buried himself underground.

Again his mind wandered, and when he collected his thoughts it was the letter from Albania that came to mind. His anger seemed to be concentrated in his extremities, especially his hands. The one still leaning against the wall plucked at the stone as if to pull it down. Every time he did this he thought how earthquakes were caused. How silly of the Greeks' god Zeus to think he could bring them about from a distance, from up in the clouds. The globe had to be shaken from below, from down among its foundations.

Mao's hand was still on the rock, as if he had no doubt that the earth had begun to tremble and that a cataclysm was about to take place up above.

That's the whole difference between you and me, said he, looking in the direction where he supposed Europe, the ancient Greeks, and the whole of white humanity to be.

THOUGH SILVA WALKED
as fast as she could, she still arrived at the ministry slightly late for work.

Greeting, as she rushed past, a porter almost invisible behind his window, she hurried on up the stairs, and in the first-floor corridor almost collided with Victor Hila, an old acquaintance she hadn't seen for a long time,

“How are you?” she asked him, still out of breath. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

He looked at her rather vacantly, and only then did Silva notice how tired and depressed he looked, and how ill-shaven.

“I'm here on business,” he muttered with a vague wave of the hand. “Can you tell me where the chief vice-minister's office is?”

“I'll take you there. Come along.”

She led the way, glad to be of help. Though she didn't see him very often now Ana was dead, she tried to be nice to him, as to all the friends whom the two sisters had once had in common and who now represented a subtle link with the past.

“Here we are, Victor,” she said kindly.

He mumbled his thanks and knocked at the door without even offering to shake hands.

He must be out of sorts or upset about something, she thought as she made her way to her own office. Such behaviour would have offended her, coming from anyone else; but not from him…

“Good morning,” she said as she opened the door.

“Good morning, Silva,” answered her boss.

His addressing her by her first name suggested he hadn't noticed she wasn't on time, but as she hung up her raincoat she apologized anyway.

“I'm afraid I'm a bit late…”

Linda, looking over from her desk, treated her to a mischievous wink. She'd done her hair differently, and looked even younger than before. She's only twenty-three, thought Silva as she opened a drawer and took out the files she needed. Why must she try to make herself seem younger still?

No one spoke. It was now, first thing in the morning, that the silence that usually reigned in government offices weighed most heavily on the people that worked there, preventing them from exchanging a few words about what they'd done the night before, repressing their comments on the latest interesting bit of news. The panes in the tall baroque windows seemed to filter out all the interesting whims and fancies of the weather, admitting only such light as was needed to work by. Beneath his sleeked-back hair the boss's smooth expanse of brow hung motionless over his desk. Silva, sitting close to Linda, could feel almost physically how eagerly her friend longed to turn and talk to her.

As the morning wore on, Linda's impatience communicated itself to Silva, and every time the phone rang or someone knocked at the door they both waited with bated breath for their boss to be called away.

But though he answered several phone calls they never heard him say, “Very well - I'll be right along.” Then, when they'd almost given up hope, he just got up of his own accord and left the room.

“Thank goodness!” said Linda as soon as he'd gone, “I don't feel a bit like work today.”

“I like your hair-do — it suits you!”

Linda's face lit up.

“Really?”

“When I came in just now I thought to myself, ‘Why does she want to look even younger than she is?'“

“I'm not as young as all that!”

“You don't know how lucky you are!” Silva exclaimed. “My God, if you're not young, what am I?”

Linda looked at her.

“Well, I wouldn't mind changing places with you,” she said.

“What?” exclaimed Silva, feeling herself start to blush for some reason or other.