The Concert

by Ismail Kadare

  For the first time Krams smiled faintly.

  “You’ve given me good news, ShkretëtirsI named you that because of the Sahara…Sorry if I offended you. People sometimes give me nicknames, and I must say I couldn’t care less.”

  He remembered the reception at the Romanian Embassy and consulted his watch. He probably couldn’t get there in time, but anyway he said goodbye to the Moroccan, took one more short stroll through the main drawing room, then unobtrusively slipped out.

  The rain still hadn’t stopped. His hair was soaked before he got to his car. What lousy weather, he grumbled. It took him a good tee minutes to get to the Rue Saint-Dominique, where the last guests were coming out of the Romanian Embassy. They were still saying goodbye to one another as he came up. Then, after turning away, they would keep going back again for another few words. Juan Maria had noticed that when people got drunk their affability could be as irritating as their touchiness. So just as one of them beamed at him and opened his mouth to greet him, he turned tail, leaped into his car, and drove off in no particular direction. No question of going to the Vietnamese Embassy at this hour. Even if the reception there wasn’t over yet, he didn’t feel at all like going now. His evening had been completely spoiled.

  He drove along slowly, still undecided what to do. The sidelights of the cars coming towards him cast what looked like pools of blood on the road. He’d wasted an evening of which he’d expected so much!

  On he went, as fast as the traffic allowed, fidgeting in his seat and every so often thumping the steering wheel with impatience. How could he escape and whiz along freely, without being stopped by the traffic lights?

  He was in one of those states of excitement where the spirit feels shackled by the body. Cramped limbs, the impossibility of speeding - everything conspired to frustrate him.

  He’d heard that this happened sometimes when you were in love (at first he’d hadn’t liked to admit that it hadn’t happened to him - but after all, what did it matter?). It might occur if you were obliged to perform some trivial task in the presence of the unattainable beloved…

  And he’d spent the whole blessed evening just tearing from one embassy to another.

  It was only the second time he’d had this feeling quite so strongly. The first time was during the famous autumn when there was talk of a split within the socialist camp. As soon he’d heard the first rumours he’d felt, as a militant progressive, that his whole being was ready. It was something he’d been waiting for with the same eagerness as others, spurred on by puberty, or in erotic dreams or whatever, longed for a woman. He remembered that whole period as one of semi-delirium… Days and nights of endless conversation in cafés, especially the Madrid and the Cardinal Heated arguments, sleepless nights, doubts, hesitations, a lightning trip to Tirana, other journeys to Moscow and Peking, then back to the Cardinal and more sleepless nights. And in the end, his choice: to be on the same side of the barricades as the Albanians and the Chinese, against the Soviets.

  At the time a lot of people couldn’t understand why he’d made that choice. To begin with it gave rise to all kinds of speculation, thee some started to sneer. What could possibly have made him drop the Soviets and come down on the side of the Albanians and the Chinese? Could he have been motivated by mere self-interest? That wouldn’t wash — everyone knew the Soviets had much more to offer careerists than little Albania and poverty-stricken China. In the end it had to be admitted that Krams’s choice had been dictated neither by sordid nor by sentimental considerations. He must have had some other reason.

  And now history is going to repeat itself more or less exactly, he thought, still smiling coldly. The split between China and Albania was an open secret, and the same people as before would try to puzzle out why he took one side rather than the other: self-interest, romanticism, a weak spot for the under-dog, loyalty to the party line…

  The lights from shop windows, falling obliquely on his face, made his smile look enigmatic. He hadn’t yet told anyone what he really thought, but on the whole he inclined towards the Chinese. And this not because of the logic of events, nor because of sentiment, still less out of cynical calculation. No, it was something over and above all that. Something which transcended even principle, and probably left Krams himself altogether out of account.

  The mass of cars had come to a halt at an intersection, and their drivers, hunched up on their seats, separated from one another by thick windowpanes, their eyes fixed on the traffic lights, looked far away, out of time. Krams thought of the interpretations, supported by all kinds of ridiculous guesses at motive, that people were going to put forward to explain his decision to side with the Chinese, But no one would find out the truth, He was all the more certain of this because he knew he himself was incapable of putting it into words.

  More than once, in the rare moments when his thoughts managed to reach, though dimly, the depths of his being, he’d wondered when this love - if it could be called that - had been born in him, this feeling which for some reason he thought of as group life. It must have happened when he was still only seventeen or eighteen - he’d forgotten by now the initials of the little group whose meetings he used to go to every evening after supper, as he’d forgotten lots of other details about it. But the unparalleled delight he took in debate, especially when it involved the possibility of a split, the regrets which a schism might bring, the pleasure of seeing a new group come into being, and the thrill of taking what often seemed a real risk — all this was still quite fresh in his memory.

  And that had been only the beginning. Gradually the fascination grew: a universe hitherto unknown to him began to swallow up his whole existence. Not only did he first allow and thee encourage the passions to die away in him - he also banished from his life every other object of desire: his boyhood craze for collecting things; winter sports; the sea; the theatre; the melancholy of autumn; the Greek gods; astronomy; history; his parents. Some of these things became quite alien to him, the rest grew merely meaningless. He now had quite new interests. He found a deviation from a party or group line more captivating than all “his memories of summer holidays. His life was entirely filled with the congresses of the various parties, and of the new groups and sections which had come into being since the break-up of the Marxist-Leninist communist parties; with their plenums, their programmes, the fluctuations of their policies, the different tendencies that grew up in their midst; with the reformists, the syndicalists, the paths to socialism, the conflicting views about the use of force, about pacifism, intimidation, anarcho-syndicalism, the historic compromise, the third world…

  “Don’t you find it all terribly boring?” a friend had asked him one day. Juan Maria had rarely been so furious. They’d argued till after midnight in the café where the Colombian leftists hung out, near the Place de l’Opéra, then gone on arguing in the street, thee in another bar, and so on until daybreak. They’d hurled fierce accusations at one another, quoting Trotsky, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong one on top of the other, Krams had charged his friend with about seven deviations, and his friend, as day broke, cried, “Do you know what you are, Krams? You’re anti-life, you’re the Devil in person!”

  “Yes, I suppose I am, in a way,” he’d answered. “I reject this life in favour of another that is to come,” “And what if this other life rejects you?” said the other. “Has it ever occurred to you that if you move so far away from ordinary human existence, from what you scornfully call the thirst for life’, you might become so twisted that if you ever wanted to change your mind, life might refuse to let you come back, might drive you away as if you were a ghost?” “Rubbish,” he’d replied. “Petty-bourgeois verbiage!” But the other had persisted: “A shadow, Krams, that’s what you are!”

  And they’d gone on wrangling in the damp dawn, the shapes of passers-by seeming indeed to move in a world other than theirs. When the two young men separated, perhaps even after they’d begun to walk away, Krams’ friend had turned round and cal
led after him: “Give it all up before it’s too late, Krams! You’ll find more history, philosophy and perhaps even economics in the tears of the old women in the Balkans than in all your plenums and your right, left and centre resolutions!”

  Old women singing a funeral song in the Balkans…thought Krams as he drove along now, his eyes on the wet road. The chap was probably referring to something he’d seen on a trip to Albania, He must have been to one of those funeral ceremonies to which Krams himself had so far paid no attention.

  Even after all this time, he still felt some of his original disillusion-meet about Albania. He’d rushed there hoping to see a new world inhabited by new men, and all he’d found was the same humdrum old routine of human life: people earning wages, buying furniture and lampshades just as they did everywhere else, putting money away in the savings bank, divorcing, inviting one another to dinner, getting drunk, and occasionally even committing suicide for love.

  But where was the new man? On the third day he suddenly asked his guide this question. “The new man?” said the guide, somewhat taken aback. “The people you see all around you — in the café, in the street. They’re the new men!”

  They were strolling along Tirana’s main boulevard. Krams felt he’d been had.

  “Excuse my frankness,” he said, nodding towards the passers-by, “but the last thing I’d call these people is new men! Look at the way they’re dressed! Look at the way the boys move, look at the girls’ eyes! I don’t know how to describe them.”

  The guide laughed.

  “They’re just human movements, human looks. Why should they need any other description?”

  “That’s not the point,’ said Krams.

  So they had their first argument about the new man out there on the boulevard. Krams hadn’t minced his words. The new man was the foundation, the key, the alpha and omega of the whole thing. If he could be brought into being, socialism could be regarded as successful; if not, everything would be in danger of falling to pieces. Krams brought out an idea he’d heard somewhere before: you couldn’t build a new socialism with old bricks. Otherwise, in your Palace of Culture there would be Festiges of the erstwhile Church; in your People’s Assembly, the old Parliament; in your proletarian meeting, the former procession; in your military march, the waltz; and so on. But if one set about making new bricks, thee the buildings, even if they sometimes adopted old forms, would be new in their substance and thus proof against the phantoms of the old world.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Krams had asked the guide. “The new brick is the new man. If we get him, the rest will follow. If not, one fine day hotels will tern back into churches, and instead of playing the Internationale, orchestras will play the liturgy.”

  The guide had nodded thoughtfully. In theory he wasn’t against what Krams had said, but he couldn’t quite see what this new man was going to be like. “The Chinese are trying to create him,” said Krams. “Oh yes,” said the guide, “I’ve heard about that. I suppose you’re referring to Lei Fee?’’ “Exactly. You don’t seem to like him very much?” “I don’t know what to say,’’ said the guide.

  Scraps of other arguments were coming back to Krams. Their discussions had become more and more heated. One day his escort said, “I can’t understand you, comrade Krams, I’ve noticed you’re not interested in the life the people live here, only in certain things…I don’t know how to describe them - dry, theoretical things,’ “Now I don’t understand yow,” said Krams. “I’ll try to explain. By dry, theoretical things I mean, for example, that when it comes to the workers you’re interested only in their unions, not in their daily lives — their pay, their living conditions and so on. When it comes to the intelligentsia, you only want to know the different ways they manage to do their quota of manual work, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear. And take literature: you’ve never asked me what it takes as its subjects, but you’ve asked me dozens of questions about how writers get in touch with the grass roots in order to merge with the masses…”

  Here Krams had interrupted, to tell the other he believed that the only great literary achievement of the age of socialism was precisely that - the re-education of writers. He thought it would be wonderful if Albania managed to set a similar example to the rest of the world.

  “A horror like that?” said the guide, with a grimace of disgust.

  “Do you call that a horror?”

  “That’s putting it mildly!” And without trying to disguise his irritation, he told Krams the Albanians had no intention of debasing with their own hands the life they’d managed by twenty centuries of superhuman effort to preserve against famine, war and plague. “And you surely don’t suppose they’d do it just for the pleasure of illustrating somebody’s theories?”

  Krams was silent. The fact was, that was exactly what he had thought. He’d hoped the Albanians would be ready to sacrifice their country on the altar of his theories. Now this fellow was saying the opposite. But perhaps he didn’t reject the general opinion? As time went by, Krams acquired the conviction that a lot of people in Albania shared his own views.

  Nevertheless, his disillusionment had never quite disappeared. In later years, whenever he heard of what was going on there he felt some of the old bitterness. And then one day he heard on the radio that Albania had banned religion!

  He was staggered. The country which had once disappointed him so much was now giving him an unexpected happiness. It had taken a step no one had dared take before. Nietzsche’s dream! His Antichrist! Night after night Krams dreamed of bulldozers overturning churches and cathedrals, campaniles truncated, crosses knocked down. And this, had happened in a country which in the Middle Ages was one of the outposts of Christianity! Wasn’t it on Albania that the first furious tidal wave of Islam broke? Wasn’t Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero, called Christianity’s last bastion in Europe?

  The two religions met here in an infernal clash. Neither drew back, and in the end Albania adopted both, and her hero took two names, one Christian, the other Islamic: George and Skander.

  And now that was all over. The temples of both sides would be razed to the ground as if by an earthquake. To tell the truth, when Krams imagined this happening he saw church steeples collapsing rather than minarets. This may have been because he had a soft spot for the latter, due either to his many friendships with people in the third world or to some unavowed sympathy with Islam.

  But the abolition of religion wouldn’t have pleased Krams so much if it hadn’t been the prelude to something else. He was sure the churches would bring down all the rest of the old culture with them in their fall: centuries of literature transcribed by copyists in monasteries, medieval ikons, painters, poets, philosophers…But even that wasn’t enough — there were still countless things left to abolish: ceremonies, modes of thought and ways of life, a vast body of manners and customs, including the traditional dinner parties that were Krams’ own pet aversion. He’d spent some time studying this phenomenon and had discovered that the business of eating and talking at the same time, especially in the evening - in other words dinner parties in the contemporary sense of the term, which according to Krams were one of the worst scourges inflicted on the human race — had been invented by the ancient Greeks. He really believed that, unless these indulgences were done away with, it would-be quite impossible to bring what was called the new man into being. He had even sketched out an article on Dinner parties, last barrier to the creation of the new worlds in which he would examine birthday parties, funeral banquets, Christmas dinners, New Year suppers, Maundy Thursday, late-night conversations and the rest, as variants of the one decadent institution, (In his view, it was no accident that dinner suggested the end of the day.) And the abolition as soon as possible of this custom was an indispensable condition of real human progress.

  But all that could wait. The first thing he had to do was go and see — check up on these incredible events on the spot and with his own eyes.

  His first awakening i
n Tirana without the sound of church bells struck him as quite marvellous. The thought that the sky had been rid of that nuisance kept coming back to him and filling him with amazement. He would never have dreamed that the great change could have started like that.

  He longed to find his former guide and say, “Well, which of us was right — you or me?” But the guide was a different person now. This wasn’t surprising - the other man had probably been denounced by someone. Krams himself would never have done such a thing, but he did think his former escort had only got what he deserved. Or rather, he thought so until he discovered that his new guide was worse than the one before. Their first set-to was over the two million Albanians living in Yugoslavia. Krams regarded the debate about Kosovo as quite out of date, a relic of romantic nationalism (R.N., he dubbed it mentally), and he was amazed to see Albanian communists bothering about such things. He’d imagined they’d risen above such chauvinistic prejudices. The guide lost his temper, and the argument moved from the subject of bourgeois and proletarian ideas about patriotism to that of outmoded national heroes (O.N.H.’s, thought Krams), Then came the Greater-Serbian Rankovic’s genocide of the Albanians in Kosovo (Krams thought this quite unimportant compared with the daily exploitation of the working classes), followed by the events in Cambodia. “Nobody knows where Cambodia begins,” said the Albanian guide viciously, “Is it on Khmer soil, in Peking, or in certain cafés in Paris?” Then he glared at Krams as if to say, “Maybe Cambodia begins in yon!”

  Juan Maria could scarcely contain his wrath, but back in his hotel he cooled off. After all, there was no real reason why he should take offence. Despite certain excesses, he wasn’t basically against what was happening in Cambodia. Let people call him Juan the Anti-Lifer, a ghost, a demon, the incarnation of sterility - that, in his own way, was what he was. If he had anything to worry about it wasn’t that, bet rather the fact that being called such names still upset him. It only went to show that his inner evolution wasn’t yet complete.