The Concert

5

HIGH ABOVE THE SURFACE of the earth, faint traces of life sped steadily across the sky. In the deepening chill of autumn, spy satellites transmitted from one to another a list of the members of the Politbureau of the Chinese Communist Party, arranged in the same order as for the committee appointed recently to organize a state funeral. There was only one slight change from the order as it had been three weeks earlier: the member who wore a towel round his head, the One in the Turban, as sinologists now called him among themselves, had risen from thirty-fourth to thirty-third, thus changing places with his colleague with the two barrels. Insignificant as the change might seem, the experts who were no doubt already rushing to interpret the signs would scrutinize it for the slightest indication that the balance was swinging, even temporarily, in favour of one faction rather than the other. Unfortunately, despite their untiring efforts, the experts had never been able to make out which school either of the two members belonged to. A novice might have thought their rivalry reiected a preference for developing the textile industry on the one hand and the food industry on the other (the towel and the chick-peas), and that the change In the list meant that the first had been given priority over the second. But the explanation was probably to do with something more profound, such as the Chinese economy as a whole; or, more important still, some change in foreign policy or in the state of the class struggle at home. Meanwhile other experts pored with equal zeal over Ming dynasty encyclopaedias and learned treatises on poetic symbolism in order to puzzle out what the towel and the chick-peas might stand for in themselves, and what they might mean when placed in a dialectical relationship.

The spy satellites made no mention of other events. But just before dawn, one of them transmitted the following: “As far as is known, no reply has yet been sent to the Albanians’ letter, This information is derived from a reliable source. It may be that no such letter exists.” In the morning the satellite received a message in reply: “There certainly was a letter from the Albanians. Do everything possible to get hold of the answer.” But there hadn’t been any answer. Though the attaché-case belonging to Gjergj Dibra, now on a Eight from Peking via Karachi to Paris, did contain some important papers, these didn’t include any reply to the letter. It was now eleven in the morning. The heavy aircraft was flying over the plains of southern China, above thin clouds touched by the autumn sun. Every now and thee the sound of the engines reached the ground. “Couldn’t they have re-routed the plane a bit?” grumbled Mao Zedong, a few thousand metres below.

He was quite alone in the midst of the vast plain (his guards were crawling on all fours through the bushes, so as not to be seen). The horizon shimmered in a reddish haze. Mao looked up, trying to see the plane. He was worried not only about his own peace and quiet, but above all about security. These plains grew marihuana, and foreign secret services had apparently got wind of it: the international airlines all seemed to be trying to fly over the area, at low altitudes whenever possible because of what they alleged were difficult atmospheric conditions. But his own idiotic foreign minister and home secretary didn’t understand about this, and spent all their time trying to keep atomic secrets, as if the drugs being grown all over the plains were of less importance. They found it quite natural to concentrate all their attention on the sophisticated sciences of electronics and nuclear technology, ignoring fields and crops, the work of mere peasants. Mao let out a growl, in the access of blind rage that gradually swept over him whenever he thought anyone was daring to underestimate or even despise any work to do with the country. He always regarded such indifference or disdain as directed against his own peasant background, and his elderly brain, instead of dismissing it as a matter of taste or principle, saw it as the sign of a desire to take his place.

Let them guard their little aristocratic secrets. He had more faith in the fields of Indian hemp than in all the bags of tricks produced by electronics, atomic power, and all the other confounded sciences.

This was the fourth day that he’d walked in the fields, and he’d rarely felt as he did now. He’d been right to come here straight from his cave. His eyes half-closed against the light, he gazed over the quivering ruddy surface of the plain.

The red ceremonial flags, the posters, the banners…The anthem, “The East is red”…All the little red books brandished by millions of people…“Do you think I take all these red whatsits seriously?” He laughed to himself at the thought of this question, then suddenly stopped and tried to remember where he’d asked it and of whom; but he couldn’t. “Do you think I take all this seriously?” Oh, now it was coming back to him. It was one of the questions he asked himself in imaginary conversations with important people — politicians, kings, presidents, his own colleagues, his enemies. Deep inside himself he’d accumulated heaps of such questions, all waiting to emerge one day. Or perhaps they’d given up hope of ever doing so; perhaps they were quite dead, and lay there within him only in the form of corpses.

But the one that had just occurred to him was still alive and kicking, and needed only to be spoken. “Do you think I take all this scarlet seriously?” He tried to summon up the laughter of an interlocutor whose face he’d seen recently in a newspaper. Laughing eyes, a strong jaw …It was the face of the American president. The phrase that had taken shape in his mind somehow or other in order to be addressed to someone or other — perhaps Chiang Kai-shek, or Tito, or Haile Selassie, or the Pope — had now fallen to the lot of the American.

“Do you think…?” No, he didn’t really believe in all that red. If it came to that, he preferred the ruddiness of the marihuana to the riotous colour of the flags. It was still too soon to say so yet. But it wasn’t too soon to think it. It might even be a bit late.

He swiftly looked around. The guards were nowhere to be seen. He could almost believe they didn’t really exist, and that his rural existence was protected only by plants — maize, cabbages, soya.

Fields sown with dreams, with senselessness…Not so, gentlemen! he exclaimed inwardly, When people can’t sleep, don’t they take sleeping tablets? But what we were dealing with was the disturbed mind of a whole planet. A lot of nonsense was talked about the way human affairs should be ordered, but no one really bothered about it seriously. People went in for every kind of philosophy, but forgot that what was necessary to one man was equally necessary to a thousand, a million, to the five billion inhabitants of the world. They agreed that one individual whose mind was overwrought might need tranquillizers, but when the mind of the whole race was involved they condemned these fields as full of dreams and senselessness…

As for Mao himself, he wasn’t very impressed by all those — isms. He had his own opinions about the evolution of things and the future of the world. Unlike most people, and in contrast to what he himself had thought a few years ago, he’d recently come to the conclusion that the world had developed further than it ought to have done: this was one of the causes of mankind’s present ills, and of the catastrophes that would overtake humanity in the future if something wasn’t done. It was urgently necessary to take steps to bring the mind back within its former limits. If the human brain were not restored to its elementary simplicity it would destroy the world. This was one of the universal truths that Mao had discovered.

One day when he was having tea with Guo Mozo, Guo had told him the debate about the human mind was one of the oldest in the world. Didn’t Greek legend present it as the origin of the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus?

“So you might say,” Mao had answered almost jokingly, “there were two party lines on the subject on Olympus?”

“Exactly, Chairman,” said Guo Mozo. “Zees wanted to replace humanity by another species with a less complex brain; in short, as we say nowadays, to create a new man.” (Mao had a fleeting vision of Lei Fen.) “Prometheus took the opposite point of view.”

“Let those who want to go along with Prometheus,” answered Mao. “We’re on the side of Zeus.”

Guo Mozo had looked at him reverently. “And who more suitable than you, Chairman,” his eyes seemed to say, “to play the part of Zeus?”

Mao’s narrowed gaze encountered no obstacle on all the vast expanse before him. These glowing plains would be part of the arsenal in his great campaign. The reports he’d read four days ago on China’s secret exports of marihuana had been encouraging. Hundreds of tons had already been sent to Europe, and hundreds more were on their way there. But more still was needed. How many tons would it take to drug the whole population of the world for twenty-four hours? No one yet knew. But start with Europe, Jiang Qing had advised him a little while ago, and the whole world will be high: it’s Europe’s brain that is the most dangerous. That’s what I’m trying to do, he’d answered, but it’s not as easy as it looks. If sown on a soil composed of sobriety and wisdom, hundreds of tons of dreams or nonsense — call it what you like — would melt like snow in the sun if not backed up by other, more devious measures. The brainwashing of the human race was a titanic undertaking. If you didn’t destroy the things that fed and stimulated the mechanisms of the mind, it would be like trying to drain a lake without stopping up the rivers running into it. Then he’d told her about his plan to destroy the existing educational system, to close the universities, to reduce the number of books and go back to the era when they were copied by hand. No one needed to read more than a dozen books in a lifetime, and most of those ought to be about politics. Mao had managed to do all this in China itself during the Cultural Revolution, but what was the good? — he hadn’t been able to carry it further. True, he’d done so in Cambodia, and tried — unsuccessfully — to do the same in Ceylon, but those two countries were still only in Asia. And his dream had been to extend his policy much further. Into Europe, Yes, Europe …

He would rather not have thought about Albania on a day like this, but it came into his mind unbidden. He’d had such high hopes of Albania! But be patient, he told himself: all things come to him who waits…It was too soon to give up hope. He’d issued new instructions, and there was to be a complete overhaul of the official attitude towards Albania. Something must be done; the lynx would soon be tamed.

In Cambodia, on the other hand, things were going quite well — better even than he’d expected. And all over the world his followers were supporting him and had gone over to the attack. For the first time ever, the thrones of such supreme masters as Shakespeare and Beethoven were toppling. Someone had suggested that a Chinese pianist who had played a Beethoven sonata should have his arms cut off. That might sound barbaric, but it was not. Monsters like Shakespeare and Cervantes were more harmful than any emperor. They wielded absolute power; they were tyrants of the mind, colonizers of the brain. Kings could easily be overthrown, decapitated, or relegated to oblivion; but those other scourges managed to survive through the ages with their power unscathed and even enhanced. But now their supremacy was about to end. He, Mao Zedong, had come into the world to challenge them. Their time was up. Like the kings and the tsars, they would be given their marching orders: Chairman Cervantes, Prince Beethoven, Generalissimo Shakespeare, Count Tolstoi, and so on…Compared with him, Mao, what a poor figure other, minor world-changers cut: they had merely overthrown some monarch or prime minister, while he alone had stood up to the evil Titans and would deliver the whole human race from the unwholesome spell of art.

He’d had scores of thousands of individuals put on trial and punished, but he still wasn’t satisfied. Some had been sent to the provinces, consigned to muddy ditches and rice-fields. They’d been beaten and spat upon. They’d been made to forget they’d once been writers, and then terrorized by being reminded of some novel they’d written, as if it had been a crime. As for those who couldn’t forget, they’d been driven to suicide. And yet he felt he hadn’t done enough.

Every so often he would rehearse in his mind, like a kind of play, a meeting which resembled sometimes a gathering of the Greek gods on Olympus and sometimes a session of his own Politbureau, For the next point on the agenda, I call first upon Prometheus…Then on Chen Pota.

In any case, Zeus had been wrong to chain Prometheus to a rock. That only made a martyr of him. Marx himself had said so, thus spreading confusion among the world proletariat.

If he had been Zeus, Mao wouldn’t have put Prometheus in chains or hurled down thunderbolts upon him. He would have sent him to the rice-fields, amid the mire and the people.

The ancient Greeks knew plenty of things but they didn’t know the power of the paddy-field. The paddy-field, with its mud and its night soil…Nothing like it for destroying a man and making him disappear without trace.

Mao had a file, perhaps the one he cherished most, labelled “Letters from the Rice-fields”. In the last few years he’d received letters of every kind from all sorts of people: from prisoners on the eve of execution, from widows, from fallen ministers begging him for clemency, from unemployed embalmers, and so on. But those from the rice-fields were the only ones he enjoyed looking through again from time to time. They were from writers deported for a period of re-education in the provinces or in out-of-the-way villages. “Thousands of us here in the water and the mud thank you, O God, for delivering us from the demon of writing …”

Mao liked to get out the file and compare recent letters with earlier ones. He noticed that they grew more and more scrappy, their sentences thinner and thinner, akin to the dullness of the earth. Lord, he thought one day, soon they’ll only be seeding me senseless ramblings like the blatherings of someone with apoplexy. And after that I shouldn’t be surprised if one of them just dispatches a piece of paper smeared with mud, a few scattered characters like grains of rice miraculously left behind after a flood.

He smiled at the thought of it. Then he could be said to have got the better of the writers! He’d always felt a deep aversion for them, but after he married Jiang Qing, and especially after she began to get old, his dislike had become almost unbearable. He knew, as the foreign press had recently reminded him, that she was influenced by her past as a third-rate film actress, and the jealousies, failures and permanent humiliations she’d undergone, though she probably hadn’t told even him about the worst of them. He knew or could imagine the real reasons why this belated settling of old scores had become an obsession with her, but as it chimed with his own ideas he didn’t disagree with it. One day he went so far as to tell her so.

“You’re an out and out egoist, and it’s a personal matter with you. I’m a poet myself, but I don’t hate other poets out of jealousy or spite. It’s because they do harm that I can’t stand them, not out of any personal animosity. And when I’ve got rid of them all I’ll even feel a certain regret, as one might after having to pull up a beautiful but noxious weed. You, on the other hand… But you’re a woman, so I suppose one mustn’t be too hard on you…”

He well recalled that unforgettable July night in Shaoshan when they’d sat up till dawn talking about the future of the world.

It was an oppressive, damp night, stifling the end of every sentence into groans. They’d both been excited at the thought of the world of the future, purified of art and literature. “How marvellous it will be to purge the world of such delusions and unhealthy emotions!” she had cried, though she cracked her knuckles with a certain amount of apprehension. She knew it was a difficult task, and kept asking him, as if for reassurance, about the chances of success. He duly reassured her, and she replied, almost as if she were actually drunk: “And music too — on another night such as this well rid the world of that too, so that the whole planet is as deaf as a post!” The theatre, the novel, poetry — they were all to be dealt with in the same fashion. The only subject left for the imagination to work on — she didn’t say this explicitly, but he could guess what she meant — would be their own two lives. Or rather hers. And was it such a wild idea, after all? What other woman since Creation had had the leader of a billion men for a husband?

All these things could be brought about somehow or other. Autos-da-fé had been common throughout the history of mankind, and it was quite feasible to close theatres, smash pianos, drag thousands of writers through the mud, and even return the human brain to a less complex state and make the imagination wither away. These things were all interconnected: the elimination of one brought about the destruction of another, jest as the fall of one beam can lead to the collapse of a whole roof. But there was still one thing more difficult to dispose of than all the rest. Twice, almost trembling, she had asked him: “What about life itself? What are we going to do about what people call the good life, with its after-dinner conversations, and love …?” More out of fear than anything else she’d had to make two attempts at explaining what she meant by love. After much beating about the bush she’d finally brought it out: she was talking about love in the usual sense of the word — the relationship between men and women. Mao had listened to her in silence, then, with the same deliberation as before, he explained that all the aspects of life she had referred to, not excepting love itself, would eventually fade away. After-dinner conversations would disappear, if they hadn’t died out already, for the simple reason that there wouldn’t be any more dinners (you couldn’t describe a mere bowl of rice as a dinner!). As for love, that was only a question of time…

Except that his ideas were untinged by any personal ambition, their views had recently tended to grow more and more alike. True, Mao had been very much in love with his first wife: when he dedicated one of his most moving poems to her, Jiang Qing had responded with hysterical tears. But in the course of the last few years his opinions about love, as about a number of other things, had changed.

Jiang Qing, glad to see love relegated at last to a place among the other undesirables, began to talk more passionately, more fanatically even, than before, for hours and hours which he would always remember as her night. She whispered in his ear that love was their personal enemy (she no longer bothered to call it the enemy of China or of the Revolution), as ruthless as the rest and in many ways more unrelenting than they because more insatiable. She maintained that this wretched relationship between the sexes used up a large part of the world’s total resources of love, thus depriving him and her of their own due share: it hijacked the love that should rightly come to them, she went on tearfully. Again he interrupted her calmly. “Don’t worry, Jiang Qing,” he said, “love will be abolished too.” And he explained that love wasn’t as powerful as it might seem: it hadn’t even existed until comparatively recently., In the ages of barbarism it took the form of mere sexuality, and even in classical times its affective content was limited. It was the European Renaissance that had fostered the disease and turned it into the most widespread epidemic in the world. Bet the winged monster would eventually die as rapidly as it had been bore, after having already said goodbye to the things that had nurtured it — the arts, literature and all the other nonsense. He described the various stages of the war to be waged against it: the first thing to do was reduce love to what it had been before the Renaissance. The second phase would deliver it a fatal blow by reducing it to sexual relations pure and simple. Thus the danger would be to ail intents and purposes eliminated. “But how long will it take, for God’s sake? How long will it take to finish it off?” she asked impatiently, almost in anguish. He had given her some sort of limit, he couldn’t recall exactly what, but he did remember her sighing because she didn’t think they’d live to see it. Soon afterwards, when he first heard of lovers in Cambodia being summarily executed after being found talking about love instead of politics, he’d reminded her of her sceptical sigh that hot damp night.

They’d talked till dawn, that strange summer night, discussing subjects that had probably never been debated before since the world began. “Anything that might encourage love must be abolished,” she murmured. “Women’s shoes, jewellery, dresses, hair-dressing…” “But we’ve done that already, practically!” he answered. “Such extravagances haven’t existed in China for a long time.” “Not in China, perhaps,” she complained, “but we must look much further — the rest of the world is full of them!”

Then she suddenly stood up and went into another room, After a while she came back wearing a uniform that was half military and half more like that of a prison warder. For a moment he had to shut his eyes: he couldn’t stand the sight of her got up like that, with that wretched cap covering her sparse hair, those trousers clinging to her body — it was horrible, as if there were nothing left of her, not even the bones. He was well aware why she adopted his ideas on the reform of mankind so eagerly, but seeing her like this he realized she would go on trying to translate that dream into reality until she died. “From now on,” she whispered, “I shall dress like this not only when I’m with you, nor even just at meetings of the Politbureau, but everywhere — in public, at the big parades in Tienanmen Square, and even at official receptions, under the very noses of the foreigners.” Her words convinced him that if her sacrifice was going to be complete, the reward she expected would be no less so. I must be careful, he thought: this woman is consumed with ambition. But she shall have her reward! He couldn’t remember very clearly now what he’d actually said at the time, nor even what he’d thought. No doubt he’d made a few half-joking, half-serious remarks: “As you faded, so beauty too faded from the world;” “the world must mourn for your lost youth;” “it’s not you, but the world, that has grown old” — that sort of thing. And: “I once heard of a book about a young man whose face remained unchanged, while the effects of time could be seen only in his portrait…Someone must pay for the passing of your youth, Jiang Qing. All the women in China aren’t enough for you? I knew you’d say that! Very well, let all the women in the world pay, then!”

He reminded her that some women in Europe thought as she did.

She listened eagerly, feverishly. “Some women,” he said, “have lost no time in adopting my ideas, even in the heart of Europe, in Paris — people call them Maoists. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

“Of course,” she answered, “but there aren’t very many of them — just a drop in the ocean. What a task it will be to change all the others! Perhaps it would be a good idea to start with the women in Albania? The alliance between our two countries would make things easier.”

“Yes, you’re right,” he answered. “That’s what we’ll do. The Albanian women will be the first ones in Europe to be de-feminized. I’m told they managed to throw off the veil after being forced by Islam to wear it for five hundred years. But we are much stronger than Islam!”

As dawn approached, their conversation grew more and more incoherent: sometimes he would nod off, sometimes she sounded as if she were talking in a waking nightmare. She would get into a rage, then a moment later be overcome by an icy wave of doubt. “Unsex all white women, master!” she cried out once as in a dream. Thee became cast down again at the thought of how long it would take. She was afraid everything would peter out when he died. She feared he himself might not be determined enough. He reassured her as best he could. “Don’t worry! Once we get the thing started there’ll be no stopping it,” If it hadn’t still been ie the future, he might have quoted the example of Cambodia: “Look at Cambodia — it started there with hatred of culture and ended up with hatred of everything else. Now they’re even allergic to buildings in their cities!” As it was, he just had to listen to her breathless fretting: “What if this? Supposing that?”

It was getting light when he started talking about marihuana. Perhaps the rosy gleams of dawn made him think of it. Perhaps he thought it was time to put an end to her ravings. At any rate, he suddenly heaved a sigh and said: “There’s another way I can achieve my ends.” Then he told her of what his enemies called the latest bee in his bonnet — his marihuana plan.

“When I gave orders for farmers to start growing it, a couple of months ago, everyone thought it was for the four or five billion dollars it might bring in. The idiots! My reasons were quite different…”

She listened open-mouthed.

“I’d have told you about it before,” he said, “but I was waiting for an opportunity like tonight.”

Then he rambled on about the waves of red that would eventually spread out over the whole earth like-ripples on a pond, and about the hallucinations that would fill all those gradually softening brains. A few years’ addiction to the drug brought about a weakening of the mind, while a few years more produced further deterioration, and so on until the persons concerned had lost about half of their mental faculties.

“And that’s the key to the whole thing,” he murmured. “That’s what will make all the rest quite easy — do you see?”

And so they began a new day, hovering between sleep and waking. All that was needed was the hoot of an owl to complete Jiang Qing’s resemblance to Lady Macbeth, as there lay in the next room, with their throats cut, Shakespeare, the Ninth Symphony, the Mona Lisa, and all the drunken governments who, like King Duncan’s drugged grooms, woke too late to prevent the murder…

Mao Zedong took a deep breath as if to drive away the memory of that night. Some time had gone by since then, and what had once been a dream had long since turned into fact. So much so that foreigners had begun to smell a rat. He froze again, thinking he heard the sound of another plane. But when he looked up the sky was empty except for clouds dotted here and there, as before. I must have been dreaming, he thought. Then, a moment later, growled: “They sniff around my marihuana like a pack of hyenas.” But let them fly as low as they liked, let them take photographs, make films, even analyse samples of soil, they would never guess his ultimate object. Their minds are too stale too discover our secrets, he told himself. Even Marx couldn’t have done so, explaining everything in terms of economics and politics as if that were all! He’d have like to remind Marx of Genghis Khan — there’d been no economics or politics, no profits or surpluses, in his tide of conquest: only violence, annihilation, the grinding of everything to dust. How do you explain that, eh, Herr Marx? Your mind can’t cope with our Asian ardours. That’s why you were doomed never to succeed with us.

He realized his thoughts were becoming confused. Europe, marihuana, the need to strengthen the dose again — the various ideas were not combining into any sort of order. “Mari-hua-na,” he mumbled. “Mao-mari-huana.” He laughed. “The thoughts of Maorihuana! Laugh, the rest of you! You’ll still be the first to come crawling to me for mercy! Ave Mao-Maria!” And he laughed to himself again. But this time it was more like a sneer.

They’d say he was raving. It was a word they were very fond of. They were always in a hurry to stick labels on any ideas their sluggish minds couldn’t understand, any concepts a bit larger than what they were used to. “Cosmic ravings” indeed! Of course, if someone’s mind isn’t capable of standing back and regarding the world impartially, everything strikes him as crazy. But his mind was capable. He could stand a thousand yards back from the world and examine it closely, even though he was only a tiny particle compared with the whole cosmos. Not for nothing was he the spiritual leader of a billion men. It was this multitude that conferred on its guide the power of seeing the world in its true proportions. You had only to look at it properly to see a tiny globule revolving in the heavens like millions of others, inhabited by at most four or five human beings: one white, one yellow, one red and one black. The white is physically the strongest, with a well-nourished brain that enables him to dominate the other three. These submit to him because they have neither the physical nor the mental strength to oppose him. And so the days (the centuries) go by, until the yellow man happens to discover a plant, which he slyly boils and gives to the white man to drink. The white man swallows it, has sweet dreams, and his mind is weakened. He goes on drinking the potion for years. And then comes the day (the century) when the yellow man, seeing the white man at the end of his tether, seizes the opportunity to wrest his power from him, Now, thinks he, it’s my turn to rule the world. What a pity it’s not a bit bigger!

That’s all. The rest was just stuff and nonsense. This was the whole history of the globe, past and present. A waste of time to discuss it further. To complicate things was mere foolishness. And now he was brewing the potion for the whole of mankind.

Mao blinked, thee looked out over the landscape. This was the cauldron in which he brewed his philtre. The red steam rose to the brim. Was the world troubled? Then its fever must be soothed as soon as possible. This was what he’d been working towards for a long time: he was going to give the world a sleeping pill of his owe making.

He felt drowsy too. Again he thought he could hear a plane, but once more when he looked up the sky was empty. “That’s how the problems of the world might be settled,” he thought. “It’s too small a one to be worth any more bother. I could have dealt with a world that was much bigger.”

The roaring sound returned. But this time Mao didn’t look up, “It must be just a buzzing in my ear,” he thought.

Gjergj Dibra’s plane had been flying for ages over the Arabian deserts. The return journey seemed so long it was as if the desert had grown larger since the journey out. He’d given up looking out of the window a long while ago: the monotony of the scene below only made the time creep past more slowly. He tapped nervously at the locks on his briefcase, which as always he was holding in his lap. It was a bit fatter than it had been on the way out, but sealed in the same way. Yet, though he knew nothing of its contents, his intuition told him that even though it might look heavier, its contents were in a way less weighty than they had been.

And he was right. The briefcase didn’t contain any reply to the letter from Albania to China. At first sight the papers it did hold had nothing to do with the letter. Some of them dealt with economics: four reports trying to explain the freighters’ delay. The fifth document was a long memorandum, accompanied by maps and sketches and drawn up by seven Chinese experts, warning that the main compensating dam serving the northern hydro-electric power stations might burst if there was an earthquake. Work on the site should be halted at once in order that the necessary precautions might be taken. Documents 7 and 8 were accounts of a long series of negotiations between the two economic delegations, strewn with misunderstandings arising largely out of language. The ninth document was the X-ray of a Chinaman’s foot, together with two interpretations of it — one by a group of surgeons at the osteology centre in Peking and the other by a group of barefoot doctors — together with a note from the ministry for foreign affairs. The last paper of all was a detailed report on the evidence collected concerning the murder of Lin Biao, with various theories as to who was responsible. This was the only document with whose contents Gjergj Dibra was more or less familiar, since in the course of the tedious evenings he’d spent in Peking he’d often discussed the rumours about Lin Biao’s disappearance with his friends at the embassy. During the flight home he’d been turning what was said over and over in his mind, perhaps because these comments had disturbed him, or perhaps because Lin Biao’s end had involved a plane journey. As soon as Gjergj had set foot on the steps leading up to the aircraft, he couldn’t help imagining the marshal in some secret airport, hurrying towards a plane over which the shadow of death probably hung already. He was with his wife and son, and all three looked terrified, So much so that at the last minute, just as he was about to enter the plane, Lin Biao appeared to halt, as if petrified, and had to be dragged inside …It was a strange and senseless journey, aboard a plane without a crew — was it possible that his son, a squadron leader in the Chinese Air Force, would have chosen such an aircraft, let alone one with insufficient fuel aboard? It was all very hard to believe, as was the alleged phone call from Lin Biao’s daughter, who betrayed her father by telling Zhou Enlai about his attempted escape five hours beforehand. Not to mention Mao Zedong’s words, “Let him go,” and the suggestion by one of the marshal’s fellow-conspirators that the plane should be brought down by rockets so as to remove all traces of the plot. Thee Mao again: “You’d better let him go, so people won’t be able to say we murdered him.” And then the plane crashed and caught fire in Mongolia…

Gjergj Dibra gave the briefcase a shake and scrutinized its complicated locks. Things probably hadn’t happened like that at all. This doubt had been expressed several times during his long evenings with his embassy friends. None of the foreign diplomats in Peking ever talked about anything else. Most of them inclined towards some other version of the story.

And every eight what Gjergj had heard, instead of fading from his memory, merely grew clearer before he fell asleep in his hotel room. What has it got to do with me, he would ask himself — to hell with them and their mysteries! But in spite of himself he would always lie awake revolving all kinds of theories,

In all probability Lin Biao hadn’t boarded the plane in order to flee, but simply to fly to Peking — and he’d been killed on the way. He must have quarrelled with them about something. Perhaps about the visit of the American president…And so they’d hatched a plot against him. They sent for him — said it was urgent. On the plane, seeing that the flight was lasting an unexpectedly long time, he became suspicious and asked where they were going. Through the window he could see a landscape that resembled the Mongolian desert…

Although he had made up his mind not to look out, Gjergj couldn’t help leaning towards the window. Below, through the gathering dusk, the deserts of Arabia were still visible. Not unlike Mongolia, he thought, “Well, where are we going?” Lie Biao had asked. And thee, recognizing the country below, he and his men had taken out their guns and shot themselves.

The light was fading swiftly, as if drawn down by the sands. Oe an evening such as this a few Soviet soldiers, struggling through the desert, had found the wreckage of the plane. Among the débris was the charred body of the man who had once been the second glory of China, Mao’s expected successor. The man of all those presidiums, those meetings, those appearances on colour TV, was now reduced to ashes, a blackened ghost like the image on a photographic negative. After a thorough inquiry, during which spent cartridges were found in the wreckage of the cabin, the question immediately arose: who had fired the shots, and why? The theory of attempted escape was now eliminated.

Gjergj went on fiddling with the handle of his briefcase. Perhaps the Soviets held the key to the mystery, But how could they know? Was it Lin Biao who had fired first, as soon as he realized he was being removed by force from China; and had the others fired back? Or had the others shot him when he asked where they were going? Or had both groups — if there really were two groups — opened fire at the same time? Gjergj Dibra no longer tried to extricate himself from the maelstrom of hypotheses in which he was plunged once more, as in his sleepless nights in Peking. He just let out an oath from time to time, wishing them all to the devil But he did so only mechanically — he knew this nightmare would last throughout the journey.

Well, someone had fired shots inside the aircraft. And thee the plane had crashed. Why? Because of the shots? (Perhaps some vital piece of mechanism had been hit. Or had the pilots been killed?) Anyway, the drama had taken place prematurely, unexpectedly.

But what would have happened if no shots had been fired? Where would the plane have gone to? And, most important of all, where and how would the drama have ended?

As often happens when one dreams that one is flying, Gjergj’s imagination was drawn towards the earth.

Apparently the plan was that the matter should be settled on the ground — on foreign soil, evidently, to make people think Lin Biao had been trying to escape. Otherwise, there were plenty of deserts in China where he could have been eliminated without any difficulty.

So the intention was that Lie Biao should be found on foreign soil (Soviet soil, as it happened). Aboard the plane on which he’d fled. Dead.

The plan implicit in this hypothesis was clear. The plane was to land somewhere in Mongolia. Before the Soviet frontier guards arrived, the killers would have plenty of time to shoot the marshal, either inside the plane — they could pepper the body with impunity now it had landed — or outside, on the ground.

In the latter case the marshal and the people with him would have been made to disembark, and then shot beside the aircraft. When the Soviets came on the scene they’d have been told: “This is Lin Biao, our minister. We were his guards. He was trying to escape. We are loyal to Mao. So we shot him.”

But this fine plan had been foiled by Lie Biao himself, with his question about where they were going, the shots, etc. Unless what triggered things off was the guards’ attempt to disarm him (“As soon as you cross the frontier, take away his gee!”).

Gjergj shook his head. Was it likely the meticulous Chinese would embark on so crude a plan? The perfunctoriness of it was obvious, but quite apart from that it involved enormous risks. There were two groups of armed men aboard the plane, and Lin Biao’s escort was at least as likely as not to get the upper hand. Then he would have got clean away.

No! Gjergj told himself. It couldn’t have been like that. Such an unsound plan could only have been set up by someone certain that whatever happened inside the plane — even if Lin Biao did get temporary control — the end of the story would be the same. For the simple reason that both parties would be burned to ashes.

The plane would be shot down. Someone was sure of that.

Gjergj leaned his forehead against the window, bet the vibrating of the glass only made him more agitated than ever.

There were two groups on that plane, and each group thought it knew the truth. Lin Biao’s party thought he was being flown to Peking, His potential murderers knew they were going to murder him in Mongolia. But over and above all this there was someone else, not on the plane, far away even, who really knew what was what: who knew that the plane was doomed to be burned to ashes.

H’mm, thought Gjergj. So they planned to shoot the plane down. Easy to say, but not so easy to do. If the marshal had been summoned to Peking he would have travelled either on his own plane, or on a government aircraft, or on one belonging to the general staff, Whichever it was, all such aircraft were guarded day and night: it was unlikely anybody could plant a bomb aboard them or interfere with their landing gear. Even if that were possible, it would still be difficult for the killers to get themselves aboard. Lin Biao’s escort would challenge any unknown faces and order them to be thrown off the plane without more ado.

H’mm…Not really very plausible, Even if such a plan had gone smoothly to begin with, how could the bomb be timed to go off at a precise moment, after the plane had crossed the frontier? The marshal was the second most important man in China, and in charge of his own comings and goings. He could have delayed his flight by an hour, by two hours even, if he felt like it. No, it must have happened differently. Or perhaps all the theories rejected the facts in some way, only in a different order and in pursuit of a completely different purpose.

But what does it matter anyway? thought Gjergj to himself in a last effort to get the business off his mind. There was no point in cudgelling his brains over something that was bound to remain a mystery no matter how much one tried to puzzle it out. He was already depressed enough after spending all that time surrounded by mask-like faces inhabiting a seemingly lifeless world, He’d felt his own vitality draining away as the days went by. And now he was leaving it all behind he meant to forget those empty countenances and all the stress he’d endured. To hell with them and their mysteries! Aeyway, this might be his last trip there.

He tried to imagine himself back at home among his nearest and dearest, but some obstacle seemed to stand in the way. The entrance hall of the flat, the doors into the rooms looked different. There was something strange about the familiar sound of Suva’s footsteps going from their bedroom to the bathroom. There was even a mist over Suva’s and Brikena’s faces. What was going on? he thought worriedly. The spell of Asia seemed to envelop him still.

He beckoned to the stewardess who was patrolling the narrow passageway between the seats, and ordered a cup of coffee.

“Where are we?” he asked her when she brought it.

She gave the usual automatic smile and told him. But he didn’t hear: his mind had substituted the words, “Over Mongolia.”

“Where are we going?” Lin Biao had asked on the fatal plane, as it speeded towards an unknown destination. “Oh, hell!” cried Gjergj, realizing he couldn’t tear his thoughts away from that other aircraft. He’d heard so much about it during those dreary evenings in Peking — it was going to take time to get it out of his system.

So for the moment he gave up trying. He just tried as best he could to clarify his ideas on the subject, as if drawing up a report on a press conference. He hoped this might calm him down.

Clearly there had been no attempt at fleeing the country. Nor had the plane been piloted by Lin Biao’s son. Admittedly the marshal’s wife and son had been with him (perhaps all three had been invited to Peking together), but everything had been arranged so as to make the theory of escape seem plausible. And indeed everyone would have believed it had it not been for the shots. Who had fired them, and at whom? Had the son shot his father? Had they both fired at one another? Was it conceivable that the betrayal attributed to Lin Biao’s daughter had really been committed by his son?…Not very likely.

There must have been others on that plane. But who? They must have been hostile to Lin Biao, since, whoever fired first, shots were indeed fired. So that made two opposing groups aboard, though at least one of the two parties — the one charged with killing Lin Biao — knew the other wouldn’t emerge from the journey alive. The plane took off. One hour, two hours went by. Peking, whither Lin Biao was supposed to have been summoned urgently, was still not in sight. It was then that he asked: “Where are we going?”

Up till then everything was more or less clear, but after the fateful question all became obscure. Including the shots.

But you’ve just said it was practically impossible for the presumed murderers to get on board the plane, whether it was a private or a government aircraft! Gjergj reminded himself. This is torture! Then suddenly he realized who it was that might actually ask him these questions. He even knew where the interrogation would take place: in the Riviera Café, where Gjergj often went and sat with Skënder Bermema. That’s it! thought Gjergj — it’s because of him I keep turning these thoughts over and over in my head. He knew that as soon as he got back Bermema would bombard him with questions. In particular about the murder of the marshal The two of them had talked about it several times before, Bermema probably meant to write about it.

It was not a soothing thought, and Gjergj relapsed once more into a morass of conjecture. If ever there was a gleam of light, it vanished before he could examine it… Had there been a miscalculation? Had the plan been thrown off course by the marshal’s question about where they were going? He must have looked anxiously at his watch. Recent anxieties and suspicions must have played their part. His nerves were bound to have been on edge. He must have asked himself a dozen times why he’d been summoned so urgently. And so, when there was no sign of Peking…

Or maybe none of all that happened at all: he neither looked at his watch nor asked any questions. They could have just shot him as he drowsed in his seat. “If anything unforeseen happens, kill him on the plane…” But, to be on the safe side, the killers didn’t wait for any hitch. So it was all over sooner than expected, and inside the plane all was deathly silent. The murderers were now escorting the cooling corpse of their master, little knowing that they, as well as it, would soon be burned to ashes.

But you just said…What would have happened if…All right, all right, I know what you’re going to say. It’s a very curious scenario. So many complications. The most sensible approach was put forward by a senior official who suggested simply shooting the plane down with rockets. That would have dealt with the matter nicely. But according to official spokesmen the suggestion was made by one of the marshal’s own accomplices, in order to “destroy the evidence”! Evidence of what, if you please?…Oh, that’s enough! Gjergj imagined himself saying to Skënder Bermema as they sat in the Café Riviera.

Gjergj struggled to stay there. He saw in his mind’s eye the low seats by the misty plate-glass windows, the rain on the pavement outside, the slim figure of the waitress, who’d seemed even frailer to him after he heard she was living with a wrestler. Ever since he’d met Skënder Bermema they’d gone to the Riviera every so often to have a coffee together, usually sitting in the corner overlooking the airline offices. An anonymous letter had brought about the beginning of their relationship, several years ago. Gjergj had received the letter just after he and Silva got engaged. It was the usual sort of thing: Silva was a capricious young woman, pleasant enough as a mistress, no doubt, but most unsuitable as a wife. Both the Krasniqi sisters, the unknown writer went on, were very free in their ways (it was clear that, on second thoughts, the writer had used the word “free” instead of “loose” throughout). There were all sorts of rumours — some of them might be unfounded — about them: they were supposed to swap lovers, or else be fiendishly jealous of one another, and so on, though all this was probably exaggerated. But what was true and common knowledge was that one of the sisters was having an affair with the famous writer S,B…. It was no secret that his novel, Forgetting a Woman,was dedicated to her.

There the letter ended. What perturbed Gjergj was that its author didn’t say anything precise. He’d turned the letter over in a rage to see what was written on the back, as if he expected to find some accusation about Silva there — for example that she’d had an affair with an archaeologist on the site at Pasha Liman. She’d told him about that herself. But the writer of the letter didn’t mention it, and Gjergj was more upset by what he hadn’t said than by what he’d set down in black and white. The swine, he felt like yelling why doesn’t he mention what everybody knows? The answer was clear. The writer of the letter had foreseen that if he referred to that well-known liaison, Gjergj would have read the allusion with a sigh of relief. As it was, the “well-wisher” gave the impression of scorning gossip, turning a deaf ear to some of it, thus making the contents of his own letter more plausible. Similarly, having made the allegation about lover-swapping, and spoken of the affair between Ana and Skënder Bermema, he could leave Gjergj to think: if Ana and Skënder Bermema, why not Silva and Skënder Bermema?

Gjergj had let some time go by before mentioning any of this to his fiancée. But one day he did ask her if she knew Skënder Bermema, He’d prepared himself for a painful moment in order to see her reaction. But her reply, instead of reassuring him, left him more troubled than before. “Yes, I know him,” she said. “We both do, Ana and I.” “Both of you?” There hadn’t been the slightest indication, either of guilt or of innocence, in her expression. Just something vague that was neither one nor the other. Then he showed her the anonymous letter. Silva read it calmly. Her cheeks did flush a little when she came to the part about exchanging lovers, but she didn’t flinch. She thought for a moment, then looked up at him and said: “What do you expect me to say? That it’s all just slander and tittle-tattle?” Gjergj was lost for words. “Of course it’s meant to be malicious,” she said. “Still, there is a grain of truth in it.”

Gjergj’s mouth went dry.

“But even if the letter’s right about Ana,” she continued, “do you think what it refers to is so shameful and immoral that it reiects on me…?”

“What are you saying, Silva?” he broke in. “I didn’t mean that at all! I just showed you a letter. A horrible anonymous letter.”

She told him she herself had questioned Ana about Skënder Bermema, but the answer had been so evasive she hadn’t raised the subject again. That was the only time Ana hadn’t confided in her. But it hadn’t changed Suva’s opinion about her sister in the least, she insisted. And Gjergj had replied that it wouldn’t change his either.

One evening later on — at the theatre, during the interval — Silva had introduced him to Skënder Bermema…She was with Ana …After that the two men had come across one another on several occasions. But it wasn’t until after Ana’s funeral that they had their first coffee together …It was strange, Silva had said. Her sister, with her great beauty, seemed to have been sent on earth to stir men up one against the other. But strangely enough she had had the opposite effect. As if in accordance with some mysterious pact, those who’d desired her had always avoided anything that might embitter their relations.

Gjergj tried to linger on these reminiscences, but it wasn’t long before they were swept away and replaced by the sinister affair of Lin Biao. Gjergj groaned, clutched his brow, and longed for the journey to end.

As soon as he’d landed in Tirana he would meet Skënder Bermema and unload this agitation on to him. Transferring it to someone else was the only way to get rid of it.

But for the moment he had to cope with it alone.

His nervous tension seemed to have given him a temperature, which was made worse by the sound of the engines…One of the marshal’s accomplices had suggested shooting the plane down with missiles…God, it’s started up again! he whispered. But there was no resisting it. So…One of the marshal’s accomplices, as yet unidentified, had suggested shooting the plane down. To do away with the evidence, the Chinese spokesmen had said. But that didn’t make sense! What evidence did the accomplice mean, the one who had remained on the ground? Whether the marshal managed to escape or got shot down, his plot would be exposed. And in either case the conspirators would be unmasked. The marshal’s supporters would be arrested one after the other, and those interrogating them would only have to tug on one thread for the whole skein to unravel. No one could save anyone else. So the idea of shooting the plane down, and for the reason alleged, was nonsensical if attributed to one of the marshal’s accomplices.

But it would all — including the phrase “destroy the evidence” — make perfect sense if it had been suggested by others, and for a completely different purpose. While the fateful plane was still in the sky, the secret telephone network used by those following the escape must have echoed and re-echoed with the words: “We must shoot it down — otherwise how are we going to destroy the evidence?” Getting rid of the evidence — a perfectly natural preoccupation after such a murder. In this case, “evidence” meant details of the trap: the summoning of the marshal to Peking, the sabotaging of the plane, not to mention the disposing of the witnesses. During those feverish hours the phrase “destroy the evidence” must have been used over and over again: and something had to be done to explain such a compromising expression. So they attributed it to a conspirator who had been unmasked. Then it was all right. All those who had heard it occurring again and again during the incident could stop worrying: it had indeed been uttered, but by a traitor.

But in fact, as everyone knew, the suggestion was rejected, Mao wouldn’t agree to having the plane shot down. Why? The answer went without saying: he didn’t share the anxiety of the others, for the simple reason that he knew something they didn’t know. Then another question arose: what did the others know? And what didn’t they know? Were those who suggested shooting the plane down so ill-informed as to think such a solution was possible? Didn’t they know that the plane of the marshal supposedly invited to Peking was doomed never to land? You’d have to be very naive to believe they were ignorant. No, they were all perfectly well-informed: after all, it was they who’d prepared the trap in all its details — the take-off, the re-routing towards the Mongolian frontier, the bomb placed on board or the sabotage of the landing gear, designed to cause a fire. They knew all this. But still they suggested shooting the plane down.

Every so often Gjergj was consoled by the thought that he wasn’t the first person to rack his brains over this affair. Hundreds of people must have followed that flight. To make the theory of attempted escape more plausible, all the airports in China had been put on alert. But just as on the plane itself those who were leaving or thought they were leaving all had different notions about what was really happening, so too did those who were still on the ground. Most of them — officers in charge of military airfields or rocket launchers, pilots ready for take-off, radar experts and so on — had been informed about the marshal’s attempt to escape. But one thing they couldn’t make out: why had there been no order from Peking to pursue his plane or even shoot it down? Even when the plane appeared on the radar screen the order didn’t come. The pilots had difficulty holding themselves back — they longed to fall on their prey and tear it to pieces, and were afraid other pilots from another base might be given the chance instead. But soon, through some channel or another, the explanation came: Chairman Mao hadn’t allowed the plane to be shot down. Apparently he’d said: “Let him go if he wants to!” This information filled some people with admiration (the great Mao dealt with a traitor as calmly as he might have brushed off a fly), and others with amazement (this was no joking matter, and the marshal, far from being a fly, knew all the state secrets…).

But a much smaller circle was in possession of quite a different set of facts: the summons to Peking, the attempted escape to Mongolia, and above all — yes, above all — the setting fire to the plane by means of a bomb or the sabotaging of the landing gear. They’d also had wind of the possibility that the marshal might be executed in the air. “If anything unforeseen happens, kill him on the plane!”

As soon as they heard the plane had taken off they heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness the whole business would soon be over now. That’s what they thought at first. But soon, as the flight continued, they began to be assailed by doubts: wouldn’t it be more efficient to bring the plane down with rockets? What if the time-bomb didn’t go off, or the pilot managed to land the plane safely despite the sabotaged landing gear? (Hadn’t there been many such cases?) How could they bear to let their prey slip through their fingers?

They probably went and told Mao about their anxiety. One of them added: “Even if Lin Biao were already dealt with — should the witnesses be allowed to survive?”

Mao heard them out patiently, but showed no sign of going back on his decision. Finally he answered curtly: “As I said before, let him go. If he’s lucky enough get away in spite of the bomb and the sabotage, it means fate has decreed that he should live!”

They exchanged glances. This was his new style. They weren’t used to it yet. It must be due to his spells down in the cave — they joked about these sometimes.

But their anxiety only increased. Mao had assured them the plane had been doubly sabotaged, by the planting of the bomb and the damaging of the landing gear, but they couldn’t suppress their doubts. It wasn’t that easy to sabotage a plane Lin Biao was travelling in!

Mao himself was perfectly at ease. For the simple reason that he knew another secret. Never mind the bomb and the damage to the undercarriage — Lin Biao was dead already. Killed not in mid-air, as their feeble brains might imagine, nor in the Mongolian desert, but on Chinese soil.

As they dithered around him trying to tell him their worries, Mao looked them over sardonically. They always forgot he came from a peasant background — and a peasant always trusts terra firma better than the sky. Could he possibly have been so reckless as to let Lin Biao fly around before he was killed? He couldn’t afford such a luxury. That was why he’d said “Let him go!” so placidly, He’d known he was talking about a corpse.

So Lin Biao and his wife and son had died, like the vast majority of human beings, on earth. On a landing strip or in a hangar in some remote airfield. Or else they were liquidated even more coldbloodedly inside the marshal’s official residence, as they were taking a stroll round the garden after breakfast. They were shot with a machine-gun through the iron railings, and their bodies were put in a van and driven to the little military air-base. There the bloody corpses were lashed to their seats in the waiting plane.

If Mao was so calm it was because he knew all that. Bet he had never confided in anyone except Zhou Enlal. The reason for his silence was simple: he was protecting his owe prestige. He felt that the planting of a bomb on a plane and the sabotage of its landing gear were strategems which might have damaged his reputation, whereas a ground operation was something quite different. He hadn’t even spoken about it to Jiang Qing. Zhou was seriously ill and hadn’t got long to live, so the secret was safe with him. As for the killers, they would soon follow their victims to a place where they could tell no tales.

Meanwhile the little army plane was flying over northern China. Deep silence reigned on board. No questions were to be heard, no gunshots — only the monotonous purr of the engines. The bullets which were soon to put the whole world in a turmoil were already in the bodies. Every so often the corpses, now beginning to cool, would slip down off the seats. One of the killers had probably thought it enough to fasten them into their seat belts.

Gjergj felt a tremor go through the giant plane, and leaned towards the window. The lights had gone on asking passengers to fasten their seat belts. They were apparently about to land. Night was falling; the tiny purple-glinting windows far below seemed to belong to another planet. The plane was bumping more often now. Gjergj ‘s ears were hurting. The ground was coming closer and closer, and he found himself glancing towards the place beneath the wings where the landing gear would soon emerge, with a faint jolt that would run right through the fuselage.

What a relief! This torture would soon be over. He was sure that as soon as the plane had touched down he would be free of all these chaotic obsessions. But the landing was taking a very long time. The mauve lights of the airport building vanished to the right, as if they’d fallen into an abyss. Was he still going to have to keep churning up the same old jumble of thoughts in his skull, when after all the whole affair could be reduced to the story of a dead body being thrown over the Chinese frontier?

Yes, that’s it, he thought, his temples throbbing as the air in the cabin was depressurized. The story of a dead body being dumped. In the old days, bandits used to leave the bodies of their victims at their enemies’ door. Mao dumped them at the door of the nearest super-power. Tossing corpses into forts and citadels in order to terrorize the defenders was a custom as old as time. He remembered, too, how the ashes of the false Dmitri of Russia were shot over the Polish border in a cannonball. All quite typical of such countries. And hadn’t Mao threatened them in exactly those terms when he said, “I'll scatter your corpses in the air?”

The body of the plane creaked loudly as it descended through the semi-darkness. Gjergj was still holding his briefcase on his lap. The metal buckles gleamed faintly. The Soviets had been just as mysterious over Beria. He’d vanished more than twenty years ago, and his disappearance was still an enigma. People said there wasn’t even any trial or firing squad — he was just killed at a meeting of the Politbureau. One version said somebody had strangled him with his bare hands. Then the body was hastily buried. Whereas he, the amazing Mao, airily tossed corpses from one country to another as if with a catapult.

Why can’t I get these images out of my mind, thought Gjergj. Again he peered out of the window, but all he could see was the damp impenetrable darkness. Where had the earth gone? How much longer were they going to have to wander around in space? He leaned his head against the cool glass, feeling the plane’s vibration run right through him. Then suddenly, a long way in front of him, he saw a multitude of little lights, not only mauve but also red and green and blue, winking and flickering in the darkness. He felt his heart grow warmer, he was filled with a delightful languor. The plane’s wing blotted out the lights on the ground for a moment, but he sat on with his forehead pressed to the glass as if he could still see them. His thoughts had drifted home again to his loved ones. Their faces, wreathed in smiles, succeeded one another in his memory until for some reason or other it came to a halt on ae episode he hadn’t remembered for a long time. What he recalled was his first moment of real closeness to Silva, in an avenue strewn with dead leaves — he still didn’t know its name. It lay between the main boulevard and Elbasan Street, and they’d just come away from an evening party — they hardly knew one another as yet. Under the streetlights the yellow leaves stretched out like a sumptuous expanse of gilding glowing with the patina of time. They noticed a scrap of paper amongst the leaves — a piece from a musical score, with the notes still legible. He pointed at it. “Look, some Mozart!” he said. She laughed. He glanced at the dark buildings bordering the avenue: “I think this is quite near the hostel for music students.”

The memory of this interlude was almost painful. Gjergj thought of the moment just before they made love, when her eyes were about to cast off sight just as her body was about to strip itself of clothes. Then came the moment when he was bending over her white belly and that which was waiting, unbearably intense, below…

The heavy fuselage jolted when the plane touched down on the landing strip. The engines shrieked as the pilot throttled back. Multicoloured lights quivered frenziedly on either side. “How wonderful to be going back!” he exclaimed. In three days’ time he would be in Tirana. The plane slowed down, panting heavily. What airport was this, then? He looked around in the hope of seeing some name among the lights, but they still jigged about drunkenly and were dumb. Anyhow, what did it matter? The main thing was that he would soon have left ail this behind. Then he remembered that he hadn’t even sent his family a telegram. How could he have forgotten? But never mind, it still wasn’t too late. He peered out of the window again in search of a name. The stewardesses had just announced something…But how did one write a wire in these parts — in Latin characters or Arabic?

The plane came to a stop at last, and the passengers got ready to disembark.

Gjergj smiled to himself as he stood up. He was going to send that telegram anyhow, even if it had to be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Silva got the telegram the next day. It was growing dark and she was tidying up the refrigerator when there was a ring at the door. Then she heard Brikena calling from the hall:

“A telegram, Mother! I think it’s from Father…”

After a moment’s surprise she straightened up and ran out into the hall. Brikena had already opened the envelope and they both pored over the wire, reading it out almost in unison: “Arrive Thursday German plane. Fondest fondest love.”

“How lovely!” cried Brikena, clapping her hands.

At first they could think only of the message, reading it over and over and scrutinizing the date-stamps which said when it had been dispatched and when received. Then they rushed to consult Brikena’s atlas to find the town it had been sent from.

“He’s still miles away!” said Brikena when they’d located it.

A few moments later their apartment, which had been so quiet lately, suddenly came to life again. The lights were on in all the rooms. Silva went from refrigerator to stove and then to the cupboard in which she kept the crockery, where she promptly forgot what she’d come for. “What sort of cake shall we make?” Brikena asked. Of course, that was what Silva had gone to the cupboard for! But it was still too soon — he wouldn’t be home for another couple of days. They had plenty of time for everything. But if Brikena wanted to they could make the cake today. Silva was so happy she didn’t know what to do with herself. At one point she found herself wandering aimlessly around the apartment. Then, rather than starting on something that needed to be done and then putting it down again unfinished, she just picked up the telegram and went through it again slowly, as if to trying to read something between the lines. Her smile froze when she came to the words, “Fondest fondest love”, wondering why they made her feel vaguely anxious. What does it mean? she thought — and found herself crying out to something deep inside herself: “What’s the matter with me?” Nothing, replied the gulf within, But the uneasiness remained, distant, vague. Anyhow, that fit of sentiment wasn’t a good sign.

In the end, the gulf within delivered its answer. Silva hadn’t been able to repress the memory of a very distressing funeral. The man being buried had died in a plane crash on the way back from China, and the man’s wife had said to Silva: “I don’t know — his last letter was so emotional I was quite disturbed …”

Nonsense, Silva told herself — the post-office people often duplicate words in a telegram. She knew this wasn’t really true — they only repeated dates or figures. But why was she letting herself get upset like this?

“What’s the matter, Mother?” asked Brikena.

Silva took herself in hand.

“Nothing, dear. I was just trying to think of something special we could cook for your father."

And she started bustling around the apartment again.

On Thursday morning Silva asked her boss to let her leave the office at eleven, though the plane wasn’t due until three in the afternoon. In any case, she couldn’t concentrate on any work. Linda kept glancing at her with a curious look in her eyes.

“Have you missed him very much?” she asked, the first time the boss left the room.

“Yes, very much,” answered Silva, without looking up from her desk.

But she could tell Linda was still looking at her. It felt stiflingly hot in the office: had they turned the heating up too high, or was it just her imagination?

“What do you feel like when he comes back from abroad?” her young friend asked, hesitantly. “Are you very happy?”

“Of course,” said Silva, glancing at her.

Linda’s cheeks were slightly flushed, though she was pale around the eyes.

“Of course,” said Silva again, feeling her own cheeks going pink.

Does Linda really not understand? she thought. But that was probable enough. Marriage altered everything — especially what people felt after a separation.

There was a knock at the door. Illyrian. He’d heard Gjergj was arriving that day, Silva felt rather self-conscious. She had the feeling everyone was trying to imagine what she and her husband would be doing that afternoon and evening. As a matter of fact she kept thinking about it herself. Sometimes she thought about what underclothes she’d wear; sometimes she thought about the moment when she’d slowly take them off. He liked watching her do that.

She began to wonder if it wasn’t she herself, with these thoughts of hers, who was making the others imagine her consumed with desire. She almost believed that if she stopped thinking about it the awkwardness between her and them would disappear. But no. The others were meeting her more than halfway. When she’d asked the boss if she might leave early, he’d laughed roguishly and said, “Oh yes! — today’s the day, isn’t it?”

Illyrian didn’t take any such liberties. Dressed as elegantly as ever, but more serious than usual — almost solemn, in fact — he’d come to ask if she’d heard about the change in the plane’s time of arrival. And she, though she had in. fact been informed, thanked him without telling him she knew already.

There goes someone, at least, who knows how to behave, she thought as he shut the door.

At a dance nearly a year before, just after he’d been taken on at the ministry, Illyrian had paid her some very meaningful compliments. Silva was used to masculine admiration and paid no attention, but when, a little later, he returned to the charge more iesisteet!y, she responded so tartly she surprised even herself. What had made her iy out was the thought that his boldness might be due to some image about her, and especially about her sister Ana, that he’d acquired from somewhere else. After that incident she’d expected him to bear her a grudge, but apparently he’d concluded it was his owe fault, and had swallowed her snub with surprising dignity.

At eleven o’clock, as she was going down the stairs, she met Simon Dersha. He was still wearing his navy-blue suit, and his face was as drawn as before. One of these days this chap’s going to go off his rocker, she thought as she greeted him. The registry clerk in the planning department, who saw and heard everything, claimed that Simon had been invited to dinner one evening by minister D—, and that ever since thee he’d been wearing his only smart suit in the hope of being invited again.

As soon as she was outside the ministry, Silva breathed in a gulp of fresh air and felt much better. It was a dreary, drizzling day, but Skanderbeg Square suited her cheerful mood. You could stroll along the pavement in front of the ministry, and facing you was a garden laid out in the form of an amphitheatre. The road overlooking the garden was wet, and shrouded in a seasonable veil of mist. But she had no time to waste. At half-past one, two o’clock at the latest, she and Brikena must leave for the airport, and she still had a few things to do. But nothing very important. Perhaps she should buy two or three bottles of wine and some cakes to be on the safe side. as a few friends might very well drop in in the course of the evening. But everything else had been ready since the day before.

As she went by the local greengrocer’s shop she noticed some very fine apples on display outside, and went in. As usual the green. grocer, a great beanpole with a voice like disc jockey, was holding forth to the customers as he served them. There were eight or so of them, men and women, awaiting their turn. The greengrocer was tipping some apples into a string bag held out by a man who was rather carefully turned-out.

“How’s the Chinese coming on?” asked the greengrocer, rummaging in the cash register for the man’s change.

“I beg your pardon?” said the other.

“I asked how the Chinese was coming on,” the greengrocer said again.

“Well!” exclaimed the man, pursing his lips indignantly at the other’s lack of discretion.

“I don’t reckon all the trouble he’s taken learning Chinese will do him a bit of good,” said the greengrocer when the man had left the shop. “He lives near here — one of those ex-bourgeois types who’ve changed their tune,” he explained as he weighed out apples for one of the women. “He used to be a translator from Russian — he’d learned it in prison. But after the break with Moscow he abandoned Russian for Chinese, and managed to learn it in two years! But what’s the point? It doesn’t look as if Chinese is going to be much use to him now!”

“Those bourgeois devils could learn to talk in stomach rumblings if it suited them,” croaked an old man.

“Still, poor chap,” said the greengrocer, “Imagine toiling away for years to learn a language, and then practically overnight it turns out to be no use any more! He must be seething with rage!”

“That’s what you get for trying to be clever,” grunted the old man, “Why did he want to go and learn Chinese?”

“He must have thought there’d be plenty of translation going,’ said a young man.

“Well, he thought wrong!” crowed the ancient.

Several of the bystanders laughed.

Silva bought some apples and left. As she did so she could hear the old man saying something else, and the others laughing again.

How strange, she thought. The people in that shop hardly knew each other, but they talked about China more or less openly. She walked on faster, In the last few days, preoccupied with Gjergj’s return, she hadn’t paid attention to what was being said about relations with China. So the conversation in the greengrocer’s had in a way taken her by surprise. Such comments would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the break with the Soviets, And now everything’s so quiet, she thought, shifting the heavy string bag from one hand to the other. Well, so much the better, I suppose. And she started thinking about Gjergj’s return again.

At home Brikena was waiting impatiently. Silva asked her to stay by the telephone while she herself had a bath. As she lay in the water she couldn’t help remembering her boss’s arch remark and Linda’s pink cheeks and questions about her feelings. These recollections mingled with an acute sense of imminent happiness.

At the airport there was a small crowd, but they were almost all foreigners.

“Mother, did you see all those Chinese?” Brikena exclaimed in surprise as their taxi drew up outside the customs building.

The taxi driver smiled.

“The place has been full of them, the last few days,” he said. “They seem to take it in turns.”

“What do you mean?” asked Silva, handing him a 50-lek note.

“The usual thing — the first lot go and the next lot take their place,” said the man, feeling in his pocket for change.

Silva thanked him and got out. The concourse was crowded with Chinese too.

“We’re early,” she murmured. “We’re going to have quite a long wait.”

“Never mind, Mother — I like it here.”

They managed to find a free table and sat down. But between then and the moment when a female voice announced over the public-address system that the Berlin — Budapest-Tirana plane would be arriving in a few minutes, the time passed more quickly than they expected. Standing at the windows overlooking the airfield, they watched the plane land, the steps being wheeled up, and the first passengers begin to appear.

“There he is!” cried Brikena, the first to spot her father among the small group of passengers, most of them Chinese. Gjergj started to walk in their direction: his bearing was as usual — upright. deliberate, his briefcase in his hand. He hadn’t noticed them yet, probably because of the reflections on the glass. It wasn’t until he was quite close that he saw them, and waved.

“Did you have a good trip?” Silva asked while he was still hugging them both.

“Yes, thanks. How’ve you two been getting on?”

“Fine. Except that we were worried about you.”

“Why?’’

“Well…” Silva pointed to the apparently endless crowd of Chinese.

He laughed.

“You look tired,” she said when they were in the taxi.

He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.

“Well…I must admit the journey was exhausting. And then there’s the time difference…Did you get my wire?”

“Yes.”

He smiled to himself, as if remembering something.

“Everybody’s talking here about the difficulties with China,” Silva said.

“Are they?! rather expected they would be.”

“It’s the only topic of conversation!”

“Where do you live?” the driver asked as they were reaching Tirana.

Silva was going to tell him the address, but Gjergj spoke first.

“I’d like to stop at the foreign ministry first, please, just for a minute.”

He smiled and pointed to his briefcase, Silva leaned her head on his shoulder.

He left them outside at the ministry, but they didn’t have to wait long, and a few minutes later they were home. Gjergj wandered around the apartment while Silva and Brikena laid the table.

“Good gracious, the lemon tree’s flowered!” they heard him exclaim when he came to the French window.

“Do you like it?” asked Silva,

“It’s lovely.”

When Silva came out of the kitchen a little while later to say the meal was ready, she found him standing in their bedroom gazing absentmindedly at the curtains.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

He nodded towards the windows.

“I was looking at the curtains,” he said. “I can’t get over it. Out there they don’t have any.”

“Really?”

“Strange how much one missed them! It was as if the windows were blind. Or dead…But that isn’t all One day a Chinaman told me, The reason why we’ve abolished curtains is that that’s where the trouble begins — the desire to keep private life secret.“

Silva kissed him.

“Stop thinking about it,” she said tenderly, leading him out of the room. “Come along, the meal’s ready.”

“You’re right,” he said, following her, “I must get it all out of my head as soon as I can.”

By the time they’d finished eating it was getting dark. One of those dusks in which day and night merge in perfect harmony.

Silva glanced at her husband.

“Would you like a little rest?” she asked.

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“You go and have a lie-down too, Brikena.”

“But I’m not tired!”

“Have a rest anyway…”

“All right.”

Brikena stood up, went over and kissed her father on the cheek, and disappeared.

Silva and Gjergj looked into one another’s eyes, exchanging smiles as misty and mysterious as the approaching evening. Then, one after the other, without a word, they stood up and walked through the corridor — now quite dark — into their bedroom.

In the distance, as if from another world, the telephone rang and rang. “What can that be?” asked Silva plaintively. If Brikena didn’t answer, she must have gone to sleep, she thought…Finally she got up and went to the phone, not stopping to put on a dressing gown.

“Who was it?” asked Gjergj when she came back.

“Your sisters. They wanted to know how you were. They’re coming round this evening.”

The phone rang again.

“Leave it — they’ll get tired and hang up,” he grumbled.

She was tempted to let it ring, but, as if under some compulsion, got up again. It was her other sister-in-law. As she spoke into the phone she stammered a little: it had just occurred to her that Gjergj might have made her pregnant. A girl friend had once said it always happened at times like this.

“Why didn’t you disconnect it?” he asked when she came back again.

“It wouldn’t be polite,” said Silva, shivering and cuddling up against his chest — it had been cold out in the hall “People want to welcome you back.”

He didn’t answer.

The phone rang several times more, and in the end they both got up. Silva put the coffee on. Brikena, who’d fallen asleep in her room, woke up too. The smell of coffee made the warmth of the apartment more delightful still.

“How I’ve missed it all,” Gjergj said, looking round.

When they’d had their coffee Silva started on the washing up from lunch, which she’d left in the sink. On the stroke of six, two of Gjergj’s sisters arrived. They were followed by other visitors, relations mostly. But fortunately, after a while, they all said, “Now we’ll leave you — Gjergj must be worn out after that long journey.”

By about ten O’clock the three of them were alone again. After dinner Brikena put some discs on the record player, every so often asking her father if he liked what she was playing or if he’d rather listen to something else. Meanwhile, Gjergj looked from one object to another with a strange expression on his face, as if he was seeing them all for the first time.

“It feels so strange to be home again,” he kept saying, in a tone that made Silva and Brikena exchange surreptitious glances.

After midnight, Brikena retired to bed and Silva and Gjergj went to their own room. The voices of late passers-by wafted up from the street.

“I have missed you!” he whispered, stroking her hips.

They lay for a long while in one another’s arms. In the silence, punctuated by their breathing, she thought again about the possibility of his having made her pregnant, but she soon dismissed the idea. Anyhow, it wouldn’t be so tragic. A dreamy procession of those who had phoned or dropped in passed through her mind, Her brother Arian hadn’t shown any sign of life. He was gradually drifting away from those he used to know, as people usually did when they were expelled from the Party. This thought caused her a pang. She sighed, and hesitated for a moment. Should she talk to Gjergj about it? It was two o’clock in the morning. The pillow where their hair lay intermingled was inviting. She brushed his cheek lightly as if to check whether his eyes were still open,

“Gjergj,” she whispered in a low voice that was more like a strangled sigh. “I didn’t mean to mention it this evening, but I can’t help it. A week ago Arian was expelled from the Party.”

“What!”

She repeated what she’d said. He lay still for a moment, staring up at the darkness.

“But why?”

“I don’t know. He hasn’t said.”

“Very odd,” he said. “I suppose it couldn’t be anything to do with the Chinese?”

“The Chinese? You must be joking!”

“Not at all”

He moved his arm from around her so as to turn and look at her.

“It may sound ridiculous, but things like that can happen when there’s a crisis. You know what I mean…It happened before, with the Soviets…Some people weren’t very keen on making a break… Though in this case, of course, it would be crazy to suppose…”

“You mean he might have sided with the Chinese?” Silva exclaimed. “Never — you can be sure of that! The idea never even crossed my mind. I’m sure it must be something else — probably nothing whatsoever to do with the Chinese.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Gjergj — I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, especially this evening. But I’ve been so worried …for days and days …”

“No, no,” he interrupted. “You were quite right to tell me.”

A clock they’d never heard before chimed somewhere nearby. All those clocks, in apartments full of human memories, thought Gjergj.

After a moment he said:

“No, I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the Chinese.”