The Concert

by Ismail Kadare

  “That’s that!” he exclaimed harshly, slamming the book shut. He felt it was the existence of its contents that had made him feel so on edge.

  The notes he’d written since he’d been in China were lying nearby. Perhaps, to even things up, he ought to crumple them up too — ought to curse them and check them away. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Instead he drew up a chair, pulled the lamp nearer, and started to read.

  …Yesterday, at a commune called “Sino-Albanian Friendship”, we were introduced to a trifshatars. It took me hours to find a way of translating those blasted ideograms into some sort of equivalent in Albanian. Literally it’s something like “man-triple-peasant”, but it might be clearer to render it as “3 x peasant”. But even that doesn’t felly convey the essence of the person we met yesterday — a sample of a new race of men, the natural product of a climate dominated by the philosophy of Mao Zedong, a unique human type with an exceptionally high rusticity ratio. There he stood on the edge of his rice-field, as difficult to describe in ordinary language as to paint in ordinary colours. According to our Chinese escorts, he was a new type of peasant, from whom all individualism had evaporated like moisture from a well-fired pot - devoid of any vestige of intellectualism, free of all traces of urban mentality and all that goes with it.

  He’d been elected to represent the commune at the great Peasant Congress soon to be held in Peking, no doubt in the presence of Mao Zedong himself.

  “I suppose the Congress will celebrate the birth of this new Chinese peasant,” ! said,

  “Not necessarily,” said one of our guides. “China’s a big country, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the popular masses produced even more advanced models.”

  “You mean 4 x and even 5 x peasants?” I asked. “What do you suppose they would be like?”

  My tone implied, “Who needs monsters like that!” My guide had got the message and looked at me askance. I turned to C— V— for support. But he was scowling at me with disapproval too.

  THE COMMITTEE FOR THE BEGETTING OF LEÏ FEN -SYNOPSIS FOR A SHORT STORY.

  The committee had been pregnant with its offspring for some time. While everyone knows the gestation period for a woman is about nine months, no one knows how long it lasted in the case of the Virgin Mary, from the time she was impregnated by the Holy Ghost to the time she gave birth to the Infant Jesus. This being so, the length of the committee’s gestation period would hardly have mattered if there hadn’t been a phone call, a week before, from the General Bureau, insisting on an immediate delivery.

  The committee members didn’t know what to do. There’d been rumours going around Peking lately, suggesting that theirs wasn’t the only committee established for this purpose: there were others in the capital equally pregnant with the thoughts of Mao Zedong. As a matter of fact, the man who’d rung up from the General Bureau (or Zhongnanhai, as they called it) had not only given the order very curtly, but he hadn’t bothered to disguise the threat that hung over them if they were late: their offspring would simply be rejected. Let their committee make no mistake: it wasn’t the only one from whom the State had ordered a child.

  So it was now clear that in Peking, and perhaps in other Chinese cities, there were scores, perhaps hundreds of committees all endeavouring to perform the same task.

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed the committee chairman as he replaced the receiver, “They’ve turned this country into one vast maternity hospital!” And within the week all the committees would bring their offspring to the General Bureau, which would choose just one from amongst the numerous candidates.

  “Just one,” said the chairman, mopping his fevered brow. And then what? What was going to happen after that? No problem about the rejected infants — they’d be got rid of in the same, way as all aborted babies were got rid of. “But what about us? What will happen to us?” They’d probably be sent to some godforsaken commune in the back of beyond, to toil in the rice-fields under a sweltering sen. Bet not before they’d been made to go through hours and hours of compulsory autocritique, in which they had to owe up to any remaining vestiges of bourgeois mentality - individualism, intellectualism, contempt for the people, and so on. Or might they just be given another chance, and tried out on a different task?

  For a while the chairman of the committee was completely knocked out. The only thing he could think of was that no expectant mother had ever gone through what his committee was suffering. He cursed their situation up hill and down dale. Then suddenly his mood changed. He looked at his watch, then started ringing up the members of the committee one after the other. They all sounded as if they’d just had their throats cut.

  All that week the committee met in practically permanent session. Sometimes they sat until after midnight. The Zhongnanbai’s order had been categorical: the file had to be in by Saturday at the latest. It was rumoured that Mao Zedong was taking a personal interest in the matter. He was eager to see the various models submitted by the different committees, and to select from among them one that could be held up as an example to the whole Chinese people. The entire propaganda machine — the press, publishing houses, artists, schoolteachers, universities, television and radio - would be set in motion to popularize the chosen prototype, the homo sinicus to which all the Chinese, and even all the Maoists in the world, would be expected to conform.

  The members of the committee turned up to every meeting puffy-eyed with fatigue and lack of sleep. The file on the man to come went on expanding like the belly of an expectant mother. Many things about him had already been decided, but others still awaited a solution. Hours were spent discussing each one. For example, though they’d thought it would be quite easy to fix how tall he should be, they soon found they were wrong. At first they reckoned he should be quite tall, but then one section of the committee denounced this as bourgeois individualistic since exceptional stature might be linked with a desire to be different from other people. This section now won majority support with the suggestion that the ideal man should be short, though some thought this might be regarded as a defect. The former advocates of tallness put up a last-ditch struggle for medium height, but this was dismissed as an unsatisfactory compromise. The qualities so far agreed upon for the ideal man were rehearsed — simplicity, modesty, desire to be only a humble cog in the wheel of Maoist thought, and, above all, determination never to distinguish himself by any kind of originality (in other words, to be as ordinary as possible in the most ordinary of possible worlds). The majority concluded that shortness went best with all these characteristics; and so the vote for it was carried.

  When this was noted on the file, the chairman still had plenty on his plate. There were a number of points outstanding, and the Saturday deadline was approaching fast.

  On the Wednesday and Thursday the committee sat almost nonstop. Age, profession and family status were all dealt with fairly easily: the model man was to be twenty-five years old, a soldier, and a bachelor, without any sentimental attachments but love of his mother. But what about behaviour in everyday life, ideological training, and judgment? These questions took up most of the remaining time. Despite the members” weariness, the committee’s discussions became more lively. Although it was agreed that our hero - as one to whom pride, individualism and love of material comforts were all alien — was capable of collecting old toothpaste tubes and selling them for the benefit of the State, one committee member was afraid this might make him resemble negative and miserly characters like Pliushkin in Gogol’s Dead Souls. This objection was soon swept aside, but it had raised an issue that made the whole committee frown. Our man would have no interest whatsoever in the miserable rags known as novels, they said. They consoled themselves with the thought that future generations wouldn’t even have heard of their existence. Not for nothing was the great Mao working to wipe every form of literature off the face of the earth.

  There followed some embroidery on the theme of our hero’s modesty. His extreme self-effacement migh
t make some people in Europe regard him as degenerate, subhuman. But Mao had taught them to take no notice of what the Europeans thought, or the wicked Americans either. Yes, the committee’s creation would be content just to be a tiny, anonymous cog in a wheel And it would be a good idea if he copied this slogan out in his journal

  The committee had already decided that the future hero should write down not only his thoughts but also his acts. They had discussed at length whether these records should take the form of letters, articles, or reports made during political training sessions. Other possibilities were denunciations to the Party committee or the relevant ministry. But in the end a kind of personal log-book was judged to be most appropriate. A sub-committee of two was working on a mock-up of this log-book, containing individual examples of thoughts and actions already agreed on in principle.

  Thursday’s session lasted till three the next morning, when the chairman suggested they take a break before tackling the last item on the agenda. The members, preparing to take an uncomfortable snooze where they sat, were pleasantly surprised when the chairman said they might go home briefly and get some proper rest. No such concession had been allowed so far that week, and they couldn’t believe their ears until the chairman repeated what he’d said. The remaining point concerned the hero’s death, and the chairman apparently thought the arms of Morpheus an appropriate preparation for deciding it.

  It had been established earlier that the hero must eventually die, for only thus could his words and deeds carry their full weight. Moreover, this would enable them to conceal him if necessary from thecuriosity of his contemporaries, especially that of the foreign journalists who were sure to do all they could to obtain an interview with the model man of the new China.

  All Friday - the last day before the deadline — was spent deciding on how the model man should die. No one had foreseen that this would be one of the most difficult parts of their task. On the contrary, they’d looked forward to it as a piece of cake, a foregone conclusion.

  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, driv
ing 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.