The Concert

11

A FEW BIRDS CROSSED the vast north-west frontier. Some others took off from the jungle, accompanied by millions of insects, to over-fly the southern borders. Nothing and no one could cross the Himalayas, and the seaboard turned back any birds setting off from that direction. So the plane carrying Skënder Bermema and C–V—, his colleague, was one of the relatively rare winged objects to enter Chinese air-space that winter morning. The thought of their delegation being invited on the occasion of the Day of the Birds had given rise to all the inevitable pleasantries. But most of these had been exhausted before they left Albania, the last of them on the way to the airport, and now all that was left of the joke was a half-hearted smile or two. The great day was today or the day after, but they weren’t likely, thought Skënder Bermema, to see any actual birds. His thoughts, already numbed by sleeplessness arid the fatigues of the journey, were assaulted by the immense space that seemed to rise at him from below.

That’s China down there, he kept telling himself, to drive home what was happening to him. But apart from the sight of three or four birds crossing the Mongolian frontier, his mind was a blank,

C–V— drowsed beside him, his head leaning on the back of his seat. His open mouth and heavy though not loud breathing made him look rather vulnerable, but didn’t evoke any pity. Perhaps you’re dreaming of a world without writers, thought Skënder. Well, you’ve got a country like that underneath you, the first in the history of the human race.

Almost before he’d completed the thought, Skënder himself fell asleep. The plane drilled on into the great continent. Below, half China was in the grip of winter. Men, animals and plants all struggled against the cold. Vast, dark, unexplored caves in the bowels of the earth, the kind that engender earthquakes, contained only silence. Another metastasis silently formed in the Chinese prime minister’s right side. But this was only one of billions of phenomena to occur that winter’s day.

The Hsinhua press agency didn’t announce the delegation’s arrival until forty-eight hours later. A brief communiqué ended with the words: “Our Albanian guests were met at Peking airport by the official in charge Cheng.” Next day there was another terse bulletin about the dinner held for the guests at the Peking Hotel, hosted by the same official in charge Chung.

“What’s his job then, ‘official in charge Chung’?” asked Skënder Bermema, examining the communiqué, “What’s he in charge of? I’ve never seen anything so vague.”

C–V— shrugged,

“The Writers’ Union has been dissolved — someone had to meet us and invite us to dinner.”

“That strikes you as normal, does it?” asked Skënder gloomily.

C–V— looked evasive and shrugged again, as if trying to avoid an argument.

“It’s their business,” he muttered.

The next day their programme took them off to south-east China. Every provincial paper gave its own muddled account of the event. One connected the visit with the Day of the Birds, another linked it to a campaign to exterminate sparrows, while a third talked of the inauguration of a large incubator. But if the provincial press was vague, that was nothing compared with the nebuiousness of the reception the two writers received from their erstwhile Chinese colleagues, now squelching about in the paddy-fields. These unfortunates, far from thinking of writing anything about the visitors, were terrified of birds and anything else that might evoke their now despised art. They’d been under the impression that writers had been wiped off the face of the earth for ever, and now here were two of them roving all over China! Their reaction was a mixture of excitement, terror, confusion and curiosity (why had they come?). The total effect was one of aversion from themselves and anything that reminded them of what they used to be. They were particularly uneasy at night, perhaps because they then sensed the presence of the visitors somewhere up in the sky. They tossed and turned on their pallets, groaning in their sleep. Why had they done it?

The two Albanians flying overhead from province to province were unaware of all this. Only once, late in the evening, when their plane was coming in to land over some nameless town, Skënder Bermema, looking casually out through the window, thought he glimpsed something tragic through the moonlight glittering over the rice-fields. There must be writers there somewhere, he thought drowsily. He stared at the muddy waters as if looking for traces of human souls.

Peace be upon them, O Lord, he found himself murmuring. He was surprised at these words from his distant past. He was still more amazed to realize that his hand, slowly and clumsily, as if weighed down by the clay of the graveyard, had just made the sign of the cross.

As soon as he opened his eyes Skënder thought it must be Sunday. It seemed to be written on the silk curtains of his hotel room. Unable to pursue his thoughts further, he turned over and went to sleep again, muttering, “It’s Sunday.” He woke again, and went to sleep again, a little later, rejoicing in the fact. They’d been in China for three weeks and this was their first day of rest.

He was exhausted. At one point during the night it had seemed to him, for some reason, that this build-up of fatigue was due to the chain of Byzantium, the great rusty chain that had been lying on the bed of the Bosphorus since 1449, when it was put there to protect the city from the Turkish fleet. There it still lay, lonely and overgrown, unseen by human eye. The idea struck Skënder as so unbearable he heard himself groan in his sleep.

He woke and slept, woke and slept again. Time was like a mass of wool, not only because of the peaceful white light that filtered in through the curtains, but also because minutes and seconds tangled with one another to produce a vague sensation now of rest and now of weariness.

The alternation of sleep and waking grew faster: he felt a profound uneasiness. Fragments of dreams first crystallized, then faded…

He was at a meeting of the Writers’ Union. It was unbearably hot, and someone had proposed that authors’ royalties should be abolished. That didn’t bother him — to hell with royalties, but if the? were abolished the temperature would go up…He woke up. smiled, fell asleep again still smiling. After some other, incoherent dreams, he found himself back at the meeting, with someone else suggesting something else should be done away with. He asked the people on either side of him what was going on. Why were they there? What were they going to abolish now? But no one would say. Finally he made it out: they were going to forbid author’s names to be put on their works, C–V— was addressing the meeting. “Comrades,” he exhorted them all, “let us follow the example of the Chinese and stop putting our names on the covers of our books. The glory belongs to the masses rather than to us…” “Yes,” said someone. “With a lousy name like yours you’ve got everything to gain! The sooner the better!” Uproar followed. Those with Muslim patronymics shouted the loudest.

When Skënder woke again, all he remembered was the room where the meetings were held. He hadn’t been in Tirana when those famous proposals were put forward, but he’d heard so much about it he felt as if he’d attended all the meetings. They’d gone on for days, with the heat made even worse by the noisy breaks spent drinking bottles of orangeade. Not to mention the bright red hair of the Tirana Party secretary, well known for his pro-Chinese sympathies.

“I should like to inform the meeting that I have renounced the royalties of four thousand new leks due to me for my latest novel…”

This was greeted by shouts and interjections all over the room. It was hard to tell whether they were expressions of approval or disapproval, or merely sarcastic laughter, C–V— was in the seventh heaven. He was speaking for the third time running. They were still discussing the removal of author’s names from literary works. Q—, the playwright, had just pronounced against it.

“I don’t see what you can put in its place,” he said. “A book is the work of someone, isn’t it? What are you going to put on it? — the name of the place where he was born? the members of his executive committee? perhaps the local farm cooperative!”

Amidst the laughter, C–V— glared at the previous speaker and took the rostrum:

“I don’t at all approve of the way the previous comrade approaches the problem. Nor of the laughter with which he was received. All that is the result of an unwholesome intellectualism which we ought to have thrown off by now. Some people think it’s wrong to suppress authors’ names — they’re quite scandalized at the idea. But I’d like to ask those comrades: don’t you think it’s even more scandalous that thousands and thousand of ordinary people toil away on all the fronts of socialism without asking for their names to be advertised, without seeking any vain notoriety? Have those comrades ever reflected on the fact that our heroic miners, our worthy milkmaids, our noble cooperative farmers have never asked to have their names on coal trucks or milk churns or sacks of wheat? Why do they think it would be so terrible if their names no longer appeared on their books?”

The party secretary nodded his agreement. The Minister of Education and Culture, also at the meetings did the same. But when a voice from the back of the room piped up, “What shall we put instead of the author’s name? The name of a cornfield or of an irrigation canal?” it was greeted with more hoots of laughter. The secretary lowered his large head menacingly, and said loudly to C–V—, “Go on, comrade, even if what you say isn’t to everyone’s taste.”

Skënder closed his eyes for one last doze, then lay for a while trying to make up his mind which was more disagreeable, returning to the world of sleep or plunging into the world of consciousness.

When he woke up for good his head felt heavy. Sunday still seemed to be written all over the curtains, but less clearly than before. The void inside him was so tangible it was as if there were another person beside him. What’s the matter with me, he thought, thrashing about in the bed. But the void wouldn’t go away. He lay still for a few minutes looking up at the chalky white ceiling and depressively projecting concentric circles on to it. He suddenly realized that the strange body inside him was none other than his own unborn novel.

He lay on motionless between the white sheets. For several days now he’d felt the book stirring, groaning, slowly asphyxiating. And now, this Sunday dawn, his novel had started to give up the ghost.

What could he do to keep it alive? Where could he go? To whom could he protest? He could feel the book growing cold inside him, like a corpse. I should never have agreed to come on this trip, he told himself. Wandering around in the midst of this dehumanised society had killed his novel. For days he’d been feeling it leave him, evaporating, drying up as if in the desert.

Well, it wasn’t surprising. He should have expected it. Still lying there, he remembered what Gjergj Dibra had said about the aridity of human contacts in China, He’d laughed at the time, not suspecting he’d be experiencing it himself one day.

The death of human relationships, that was the cause of everything. Human relationships are at the root of everything, and here they’d managed to annihilate them. They’d stifled and dehydrated them until they turned into thorny cacti. “What wouldn’t I have given for an ordinary conversation,” Gjergj had told him. “A conversation between thieves sharing out the swag would have done, so long as it was the real thing!”

He rubbed his temples. Chance alone couldn’t explain what had happened. It had all been orchestrated in accordance with some diabolical plan. In order to do away with literature and the arts, you have to start by atrophying human speech. For three thousand years it had been cultivated. Without this marvel, life would be mere primitive stammerings. And now Mao Zedong had come to strangle it.

Is such a thing conceivable? he wondered. He contemplated the white ceiling. No, it couldn’t be true! He remembered the titles of some Chinese poems he’d read: Conversation by Moonlight, Conversation with My Friend Van on Mount Tian Kun in Late Autumn, Conversation with Lu Fu on the Day of the First Snow…

Carried away by the memory, he threw off the bedclothes and stood up. When he looked in the mirror on the wall his face looked rather pale, and if they hadn’t been his own eyes he’d have said they were cold as ice. Sleep with a blind man and you wake up cross-eyed. Where had he heard that saying?

He looked at the wall between his room and C–V—’s. We may be in the same hotel, thought Skënder, but I’m as far away from him as ever. And leagues away, light-years away from this Chinese Milky Way. So you may think, said a voice inside him. But your novel’s dead, just the same.

He began pacing frantically round the room, not only his expressions and gestures but everything about him reflecting his exasperation. He felt as if the death of his novel had completely destroyed his equilibrium. People talked about lack of vitamins and shortage of red or white corpuscles, but how did you feel when a work you’d been carrying for months in your body and mind was removed?

He was still flinging about when there was a knock at the door. It was C–V—.

“So you’re up, are you?” he asked, poking his head into the room. “Coming down to breakfast?”

Skënder looked at him as if he were a murderer.

“I don’t want any breakfast,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” said C–V—, shutting the door.

Skënder growled. The room felt too small for his pacings. This trip, he thought. Before they’d left, the secretary of the Writers’ Union had said, “There may be some friction between you, but I’m sure all that will be forgotten. I hope the trip will bring you together.”

Skënder growled again. This cursed trip.

Every day the relations between the two of them grew colder. The offer of a cigarette or a lighter, some word exchanged in the car, might seem to ease things for a bit, but by the evening, when they went to their separate rooms, the tension would be worse than ever.

I should never have come, he told himself again. Or at least not with him. He’d thought he’d be able to put up with him. For years he’d despised him, but that was all. ln China his feelings had started to intensify. He’d thought that despite their different views about things, the fact of being thrown together into that great ocean of Chinamen would bring them together. But precisely the opposite had happened.

It had become obvious with Skënder’s first attempts to talk to C–V— about the silly things they came up against everywhere they went. He’d known C–V— had a soft spot for anything Chinese, but he’d never have thought his admiration was such that he wouldn’t listen to a joke about the crass stupidities even the Chinese themselves must be ashamed of. That was Skënder’s last attempt to get closer to his travelling companion. It’s ridiculous! he grumbled, going back to his room at nine in the evening when he’d have liked to talk with someone till dawn in this strange hotel thousands of miles from home. He couldn’t forgive C–V— for being so unapproachable. It would be easier to communicate with an ape! Then he calmed down, reflecting that it was only natural. Given that C–V— was so fascinated by everything Chinese, he was bound to be against any kind of dialogue. And perhaps after all it was better so. Heaven only knew what construction he might have put on what Skënder said to him, and he might well send in a report about it to the Party committee when they got back to Albania, Skënder thought of the day when he’d glanced through the open door of C–V—’s room and seen a lot of papers on his desk. “What are you writing?” he’d asked. “The same as you,” C–V— had answered spitefully.

The same as me, thought Skënder now, standing by his own desk, It too was strewn with papers. Well, one thing is certain, he told himself — we’re definitely not writing the same thing!

He picked up one of the pages, read a couple of lines, thee put it down and looked at another. He hadn’t re-read any of this since he’d started writing it: it was a kind of travel journal, or rather “nocturnal”, since it was during the night that he’d jotted down these impressions, reflections and notes of ideas for future works.

Perhaps this was what had made him abandon his novel? What a depressing thought! He shoved the papers aside. His eye lighted on his suitcase, standing in a corner. He went over to it, slowly and cautiously, as if afraid to break some spell. The draft of his novel was inside the case, right at the bottom.

Good Lord, even the handwriting looked wrong! It seemed to have grown dull and shrivelled from being shut up like that,

He leafed clumsily through the exercise book to which he’d consigned his work. There were all kinds of notes and sketches: parts of chapters, descriptions of characters, different versions of the same scene. Every so often there were scraps of verse, accounts of dreams, chapter headings, odd episodes that might or might nor be incorporated into the novel: such as one passage, for example, called The Soliloquy of the Sphinx, Other scraps: “Three in the afternoon, the time of day he always dreaded…” “Men’s beauty contest, Doomed Heights 1927.”

The bits of poetry were so ethereal they looked as if the slightest breath might harm them, turn them solid, The psychological notes were incredibly subtle, with streaks of unorthodoxy that made them all the more compelling.

“Snow in Tirana, 18 January 1967, the morning after the inauguration of the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg. The prince waking up under the snow. His cloak and his horse all white. Inhabitants of the capital crowding round. A voice says: ‘The snow’s a good sign, a good omen…’”

He skipped a few pages.

“The beach at Dürres in the 30s. The fashions in bathing costumes. Loulou the courtesan’s sunshade. The king’s afternoon coffee time. The whole history of the monarchy is there: alliances, factions, rivalries, sexual perversions. And the sand, the sand…”

Some pages further on there were observations about winter, “Hail falling outside. The windowpanes rattle, the shutters bang against the walls. Bet harsh and stinging as it may be, hail has something feminine about it that seems to pervade the rest of the day. The morsels of ice come down as if there were furious women up in the sky, tearing the beads from their pretty necks and hurling them to the ground. And if one listened properly one would hear their angry voices saying, through the rattling windowpanes, ‘I’ll never take you back again — never!’“

Streets and parks were described turning white. It might have been only a dream, but the page on which it was written had a date: 17 March, Under the date was a hasty note: “I1.30, urgent meeting at the vice-minister’s.”

Skënder went on leafing through the notebook. The handwriting seemed to get more and more careless.

He tended to pause at the poetry, perhaps because it was comparatively rare. “How often have I ignored your tears …” “I loved you and knew it not…”

One morning when I woke

The world without you seemed empty.

I realized what I’d lost,

And knew what I had gained.

My sorrow shone like an emerald,

My joy glowed like a sunset.

Which was the brighter of the two

My heart could not decide.

To whom were those lines addressed? He couldn’t remember. He’d never told anyone about this phenomenon in case it was seen as the affectation of a philanderer, though he cared as little about that sort of criticism as about the more facile kinds of praise. As a matter of fact, in most cases he genuinely had forgotten the origins of his poems. Even when one seemed to refer to a real-life episode, the nature and dimensions of that episode would somehow change, would merge with other episodes. And the same applied to the person originally invoked: his or her own eyes might well, in Skënder’s verses, come to shed the tears of another. As time went by these modifications, these individual landslips, built up into something like a shoal of shifting sands, and Skënder, coming upon a set of initials in the title of a poem, would pause in surprise, having remembered the lines as dedicated to someone else.

“Happiness and to spare. Viola…”

He smiled.

Had she really been called Viola, or had that name stayed in his memory because she was studying the violin? He could remember quite clearly the night of their chance meeting, one May; the hours they’d spent dancing together; then her hair spread out on the pillow. As he gazed at those tresses — and looking at the hair of a sleeping woman always seemed to him like watching a projection of his dreams — he tried to understand why she was toying so lightly with her own happiness, heedlessly drawing him with her to the brink of hell. She was beautiful, and he’d thought to himself she had happiness and to spare, like a pond brimming over in spring. Perhaps her happiness too needed to be drained, to avoid some fatal excess…

As he read on, first his fingers and then his whole body grew deathly cold.

“…The sound of music wafted in through the north-facing windows; from those facing south came the strains of another song…”

“…Inside his studio, all was golden silence. His wife, still beautiful, but pale from her recent abortion, sat on the couch reading a magazine. It seemed to him the walls of the room had pulled back to contain these treasures, garnered not from gain but from loss …He reached out and touched her pale cheek…”

“…Evenings at the Strazimirs’. I used to enjoy these gatherings. There was always something more than met the eye — a hidden sweetness that even shone out of the stones in the women’s rings. Sometimes it seemed to me these jewels lit up before the eyes of their owners’ did. While the women themselves still held back, their diamonds and rubies would sparkle at each other in anticipation…”

Enough! Skënder pushed the book aside. He was well aware that, next time he opened it, these loops and scrawls would have finally disintegrated there in their coffin; would probably be quite illegible. As often happens in such circumstances, the colder, harder side of his nature now got the upper hand.

“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 might 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, 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.