The Concert

8

AS AT EVERY CHANGE of season, the sky was now fell of flocks of birds migrating. Billions moved from one place to another within the continents, other billions crossed from one continent to another. Millions of them died, some by drowning as they flew over the ocean, some from exhaustion over the land; others had their wings frozen; others again got lost. But there wasn’t a mention of all this in any of the thousands of newspapers and magazines throughout the world, or on radio or television, or at any of the international meetings, seminars and conferences.

Perhaps it would have been otherwise if there hadn’t been so much political tension, said a couple of rather senile old professors of zoology as they drank their morning coffee in the Clock Bar in Tirana.

As it was, the air was completely saturated. Dozens of press agencies were busy transmitting the list of members of the Chinese Politbureau, as issued on the occasion of a recent state funeral. The list was as follows, in that order: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Wang Hoegwen, Ye Jiaeying, Deng Xiaoping, Zhang Chunqiao, Liu Bocheng, Jiang Qing, Xu Shiyou, Hua Guofeng, Ji Dengkui, Wu De, Wang Doegxing, Chan Yoeggui, Chen Xilian, Li Xiannian, Li Desheeg, Yao Weeyeae, Wu Guixiae, Su Zhenhua, Saifudin, Song Qingling…

Hardly had the list been sent out than it was followed by the first comment: as compared with the previous list, two names were missing. There was another change too: the positions of the member with the turban and the member with the two barrels were reversed again, so that each occupied the place he had had on the last list but one. But this was only a minor alteration compared with the complete disappearance of two names.

Phone calls, ciphers, queries and requests for verification flew in all directions. But it wasn’t an accidental omission or a mistake in decoding. Funerals provided the most reliable opportunity for checking up on the order of the hierarchy, and it so happened there had been plenty of funerals lately. So this anomaly couldn’t be merely a matter of chance. Two names were really and truly missing. The names of Wei Guoqing and Ni Zhifu.

Signals from all the major press agencies, secret services and spy satellites purred through the heavens. The search was on for two men who’d got lost. Their names echoed round the globe like those of a couple of mountaineers who had fallen down a crevasse. But there was no answer.

“Let’s leave it at that,” said an observer at a station near the North Pole, taking his headset off for a minute to rest his buzzing ears. “Why should we wear ourselves out all night looking for a couple of sharks like that?”

He’d been working at this listening post for several months by now, and perhaps his perceptions had become rather dulled. There were plenty of reasons why they might have done so: the length of time he’d spent cut off from normal life; the isolation; the mountain range of ice all round him, the hopeless sky above, the earth below — all so smooth and featureless that there was nothing for the mind to catch hold of. It was a landscape that stripped you of everything and gave you nothing in return but solitude and unfathomable distance. No wonder he often oversimplified things. He only had to look down — as it seemed to him — at the world: most countries were riddled with debt, and that was why they were always squabbling and grumbling, slandering and accusing one another. Krushchev was dead, Mao was ill, and so was Franco: the ranks of the tyrants were clearly thinning out, an-d maybe the death of these spectres would eventually make the world go round more merrily. But for the moment all that arose from below was a tissue of nonsense.

He put his headset on again. The search for the two lost names was still in full swing. As if they’d really be missed! There wouldn’t have been nearly as much fuss if they’d been a couple of innocent doves, like the ones children play with in spring! But what can you do? He was going to have to start listening to that idiotic buzzing again. Especially in a couple of hours. time, after midnight, when the diplomatic receptions were over and the ciphers started up again worse than ever.

In Paris on this evening in late November, twenty-seven diplomatic receptions were being held. It was nine o’clock. A fine rain was falling. The headlights of the last tardy guests swept over the railings in front of the various embassies concerned. In the Rue de la Faisanderie, Juan Maria Krams found a parking space just big enough for his car, slammed the door, and made a dash for the Cuban Embassy. It was clear the party was at its height. But he made his way round both the drawing rooms without finding anyone of interest to talk to. Two waiters, probably realizing he’d just arrived because of the drops of rain still sparkling in his hair, both offered him drinks and petits fours at the same time. He took a whisky, but just held the glass in his hand, without drinking. He’d wasted almost an hour at the Cambodian Embassy, where everything was very dead. There were plenty of people he knew there, but not a single conversation of any interest. All the guests had looked lethargic, and though he’d hoped things might improve in due course, they’d only got worse. It was very different here, though he was surprised not to see any familiar faces. Perhaps they’d drop in later, but he couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t want to fritter away the whole evening.

He was invited to three other embassies — the Albanian, the Romanian, and the Vietnamese — and he couldn’t afford to waste time. He looked at his watch. A quarter past nine. Without more ado he made for the door, In the hall he realized he was still holding his glass of whisky. He put it down on a table, beside a telephone, and left.

It was still raining. As he got into his car he wondered whether to go to the Albanian or the Romanian Embassy next. It was the Albanians’ national holiday, so their reception would probably go on longer than the others. The Romanians just had a kind of exhibition on, if he remembered rightly. But as the Albanian Embassy was quite close by, he decided to go there first. He had to call in on the Albanians anyway, even if it meant he wouldn’t get to the other two receptions: they were the ones most concerned with what he wanted to know.

He drove round the Etoile without thinking, and found himself in the Avenue d’Eylau. But although it wasn’t unusual to find out more about what interested you at a different embassy from the one directly concerned, Juan Maria Krams pressed on. When he reached the little Place de Mexico, he had to slow down as usual to find the turning that led to the Albanian Embassy. The narrow Rue de Longchamp was wet and empty. He was soon in the Rue de la Pompe.

The reception was very lively, but with a liveliness he didn’t care for. The guests seemed unnaturally cheerful, and couldn’t stick to any one subject, He made several attempts to talk about third-world problems to some Albanians he knew, but got the impression they didn’t want to get involved in that. If this had been due to lack of expertise he wouldn’t have minded, but in fact they seemed irritated and made little attempt to hide it. One of them, after trying unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn, said playfully:

“Comrade Krams, couldn’t we talk about something more serious? All those other problems are so boring…Typically Chinese discussions, I’d call them!”

“What!” exclaimed Juan. “Do you think discussions can be categorized according to…?”

The other smiled broadly and gave a vague wave of the hand.

“Is is really worth cudgelling one’s brains over things like that? You should take my advice and stop worrying…”

“Is that so?” said Juan coldly.

Well, that’s putting it plainly enough, he thought. His last doubts were removed. For some time he’d been noticing the signs…

He made for a quiet corner, but even there he wasn’t out of range of the hum of conversation, the flashing of jewels, the bursts of laughter. He gazed absently at the guests as they came and went, most of them brandishing a glass as if it were a candle lighting their way — the way to the abyss!

A hand on his shoulder roused him from his musings.

“Comrade Krams? Good evening.”

The speaker’s face looked even swarthier and more wizened than it really was under its mop of black curly hair.

It took Krams a few moments to remember who he was. They’d met for the first time a couple of years before at an international gathering at which the Moroccan had represented a movement involved in the Sahraoui question. Then Krams had come across him again at another conference, where he represented a completely different school of thought, which, though it still had something to do with the Sahara, advocated other views and put forward other claims.

“How’re things?” asked Krams,

“Not too good…We’ve had lots of dissension lately. We’re reforming hard now.”

In other circumstances Krams would have been interested ina conversation like this, but when, about a year before, he’d studied a sheaf of documents about the Sahraoui movement, he’d got so muddled up he’d given up hope of ever understanding anything about it. It really was difficult to discern the logic behind all the changes of policy, and Krams had come to the conclusion that to look for it was as hopeless as trying to read the traces left by the wind on the desert sands.

To stop the other going into explanations of the inexplicable, Krams asked him if he’d heard anything about the U.S. president’s projected visit to China.

“Yes,” said the Moroccan, “I have heard some rumours. But as far as Î can make out, it’s only bluff.”

“Bluff?”

The Moroccan nodded.

“Yes. You can say “bluff in French, can’t you? Anyway, a great booby-trap, just like the business of the hundred Mowers.” He laughed.

“Who told you that?”

“A friend I can trust, Mao intends to find out who’s pleased at the news and who’s going to try to take advantage…And then — bang! Like the last time. They’ll strike without mercy, obliterate, destroy. There’ll be another Cultural Revolution even more terrible than the first. And those who escaped the typhoon last time won’t be able to escape this,…”

“Really?” said Krams thoughtfully. “So there’s not going to be any visit?”

“I don’t know about that,” the Moroccan answered. “The visit may go ahead, but it won’t make any difference — the trap will work anyhow.”

For the first time Krams smiled faintly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guide laughed.

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

“That’s not the point,’ said Krams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you call that a horror?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day he saw a funeral procession in the street, and this reminded him of his friend’s reference to the Balkan mourners.

He didn’t set much store by manifestations of this kind, and if he asked his guide to take him to a funeral it was so that when he got back home he could phone his friend and say: “I went to one of those ceremonies you were talking about, and the tears were just ordinary tears, that’s all.”

But his escort said that instead of taking him to a funeral he was going to take him to a cemetery. Or rather to two — the ordinary city cemetery and the cemetery reserved for national martyrs.

Krams had visited the latter before, on his first trip, but now, compared with the city cemetery, it made a different impression on him. While the graves of the martyrs were all the same, standardized, right down to the inscriptions and even the tombstones themselves, the ordinary graves presented an infinite variety of size, shape, style, symbol and sentimental epitaph. Distinctions were at their most evident among the dead. Perhaps that’s where the great change begins, thought Krams: in the sky, where you no longer heard the sound of bells, and in death. Yes, that might well be it, though as yet he’d never heard of the “new dead”.

He could feel his thoughts getting hopelessly scrambled. This was one of his rare lapses from lucidity. He was jolted out of his preoccupation by the guide, who nodded towards a tombstone of white marble:

“My wife’s grave,” he said,

“What?”

“My wife’s grave,” said the guide again, pointing to a photograph set into the headstone.

“Oh…I’m sorry…I didn’t know…”

“No need to apologize,” said the other, his eyes fixed on a bunch of wilted roses lying on the grave. “She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”

Krams waved his hands about helplessly. He felt horribly embarrassed, and couldn’t think of anything to say. So he kept on saying, “I’m sorry."

He’d felt ill at ease ever since he came. Human beings have good memories — it’s one of the human race’s worst afflictions, Mao Zedong had said to him during their one and only interview. And when Krams asked him if he thought there might ever be a relatively simple way of explaining the complex mechanisms of the memory, Mao answered, “That’s exactly what I’ve been working on lately.”

As he often did when his ideas were undermined or challenged from without, Krams shut himself up in his hotel room earlier than usual, and sat himself down amid all the papers he’d brought with him. It was only when he was surrounded by documents that he felt completely safe. There, away from noise, perfumes, and unwelcome phone calls, he would steep himself in work until his mind settled down again. His enemies might call this world of his a verbal desert, a wilderness of empty phrases, a political Sahara — for Krams himself it was the only world worth living and fighting for. He liked to pore for hours over the notes he’d written about everything relating to it: parties, splinter groups of left or right, Trotskyites, communists, Euro-communists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists; their theories, tendencies, sub-tendencies, strategies and tactics, transfermations, conflicts, and international connections. He knew that small world as well as he knew the palm of his hand: he’d belonged to some of its movements and even to their leadership, and after taking part in endless discussions within one group after the other had ended up in “Red Humanity”, But although he was affiliated to one group, he felt linked, if only through hostility, with the whole galaxy revolving around him: the Organizing Committee for a Revolutionary Movement (the O.C.R.M.), with Trotskyite leanings, a large proportion of Spaniards on its boards, and a considerable network of foreign relations; the Movement of the 22nd of March (M 22), which had anarchist sympathies and was against democratic centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat; the Communist League (the CL), a large almost folkloric organization with Trotskyite leanings which made little distinction between Stalinists and revisionists, since it regarded the latter as Stalinists who’d changed their name to make it easier for them to betray the communist movement. Those who took part in this group’s demonstrations had had to shout “Ho-ho-ho-Ho-Chi-Minh” when Ho Chi Minh was the current idol, and “Che-che-che-Che-Guevara” when Guevara was in vogue, and now members of “Red Humanity” were expected to hail “Ma-ma-ma-Mao-Zedong”. Then there was Workers’ Straggle (W.S.), also Trotskyite, which didn’t always draw the line at almost fascist violence; the Centres of Communist Endeavour (C.C.E.), whose militants unfortunately enjoyed an authority acquired during the Second ‘ World War; the Proletarian Left (P.L.), which claimed to be Maoist and carried out acts of sabotage in order to promote unrest, in accordance with the Guevarist slogan “Provocation-Repression-RevolutionI”; not to mention the United Workers’ Front (U.W.P,), the Marxist-Revolutionary Alliance (M.R.A.), the Anarchist Groups for Revolutionary Action (A.G.R.A.), the Anarchist Federation (A.F.), the International Situ-ationists (I.S.), and so on and so forth. All these groups, together with their platforms, their lines and their positions on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Party, the state and the future, made up a seething microcosm of passions which Juan Maria Krams wouldn’t have exchanged for anything else in the world.

His visit to China had been much less upsetting. There no outside force had threatened his own universe. He was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of official phrases designed to protect him against the trivial attacks of what people usually called life. Against harmless, humane utterances like “Cooler today, isn’t it?” or “What a boring afternoon!” a great barrier had been erected of new sayings and slogans: the two just and the three unjust things, the four chief recommendations, the seven faults, the five virtues and the ten evils, etc. These all acted as patrols, keeping Krams’ world from being infected.

When the first rumours began to circulate about a cooling off in the relations between China and Albania, the first question that occurred to Krams and his comrades was whose side they should be on. Since the worsening of the situation arose from the rapprochement between China and the United States, Krams and his friends should logically have sided with Albania, who could be relied on to stand up for pure and inviolable principle, and to reject any dialogue or compromise.

But a kind of sixth sense made Krams jump the other way. China might be moving towards the West, but his own universe — what his adversaries called the “Krams-world” — would probably survive longer in China than in Albania. He hadn’t yet identified the fundamental reasons that had led him to this conclusion (history, the geo-political situation, mental outlooks, ethnic origins, perhaps even the Albanians’ racial characteristics), but he was sure his intuition wasn’t leading him astray. He never forgot his visit to the cemetery in Tirana that memorable Sunday. The Albanians have very good memories. But Mao had told him clearly: “People who remember too much are a danger to us.”

That was what Mao had told him during their one and only tête-à-tête, when they had spoken at length about the possibility of world communism.

Krams had listened fascinated as Mao said it might take ten thousand years. This, after the hare-brained Krushchev’s assertion that communism would be fully realized in the U.S.S.R. by 1980, sounded like a Titanic challenge. Everyone knew the advent of communism lay far away in the future, just as they knew that nevertheless — distant and Utopian as it might be, like any great hope — it influenced the destiny of the world. People were also aware that at the coming of the communist paradise after thousands of years of tension and hardship, the human race might grow soft and degenerate. But none of these considerations — especially the last — had ever been formulated by the communist leaders. Mao was the first to dare to do so. In his interview with Krams he had clearly intimated that communism not only was but bad to be unattainable, and so would never be realized.

“Communism is like a star,” he had said. “One of the most beautiful of stars. It looks as it does to us because it’s so far away. Have you ever thought what it would be like if a star came close to us? The collision would be a catastrophe …”

So the star had to remain inaccessible. Anything that seemed to bring it close — wellbeing, culture, emancipation — only put it in greater danger. That was why those things must be attacked without mercy, together with all who tried to bring the star nearer. They must be sacrificed in order to keep it at a distance.

“It may seem tragic,” Mao had continued, “to strike at the very people who are most — even excessively — devoted to your owe ideal Bet it has to be done. There is no other way.”

“What about the enemies of communism, then?” Krams had asked. “Were its opponents better for communism than its supporters?”

“Yes,” said Mao, “Communism has always needed enemies above all else. And it always will. So much so that…”

Then he’d smiled without finishing the sentence. But Krams knew what he meant: “So much so that if necessary it would have to create them.”

How magnificent! thought Krams, every time he recalled that forgettable conversation. He even said it aloud, especially at the time of the Cultural Revolution. It was then that he was able to verify the perfect cogency of Mao’s argument: the break-up of people’s lives, destruction, brainwashing…The star was farther away, and thus safer, than ever.

Cambodia begins in you…Yes, he thought to himself, Cambodia, and probably lots of future crimes as well.

For a moment he was filled with euphoria at the thought that he himself was also a fundamentally tragic character.

He had now emerged into the Place de la Concorde, but he was still so much absorbed ie his own mental state that he wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had whispered in his ear, “Look out! there are three kings’ heads on pikes in the middle of the square!” He’d just have steered the car around them.

He really did see himself as a tragic figure, but he accepted his fate. He knew deep down inside that he’d chosen what side he was on in this new schism. Even if the Chinese would one day disappoint him, he’d made up his mind to support them. The third world was territory where he could sow his ideas: and if they failed to take root in the towns and the country, he would take them into the desert, among the primitive tribes where it would take at least a thousand years to make people understand the meaning of “autumn sadness”. Cambodia starts in you …“But what is it that starts in you, then?” he cried angrily, narrowly avoiding a collision with a car in the next lane. The other driver put his index finger to his forehead and yelled, “Are you crazy or something?” “It’s all of you who are crazy!” Krams bawled back. “All of you without exception! Crazy and small-minded!”

He had never acted out of base self-interest! Even when, during his visit to China, the small community of resident Europeans had bristled with rumours, half amused and half sarcastic, that Mao Zedong was going to make him his pao pe or godson. The rumours weren’t entirely without foundation, but even so Krams hadn’t indulged in dreams of power or hoped for any other vulgar advantages. True, he had sometimes imagined or even hoped he might one day become a leader — but no ordinary leader. He agreed with those who thought a real leader shouldn’t have any power: but he went further still. Marx, Christ, Buddha and Che Guevara hadn’t wielded any power, yet they had ruled, in a way, through their books, their ideas or their words. Krams thought a leader should be without even those adjuncts: he should be a kind of demiurge of the international workers’ movement, half committed but half anonymous, without books or ideas of his own, and if possible without a name. But this was all a long way off still …For the present he was just the militant leftist Juan Maria Krams, an ascetic according to some, for others the Don Quixote of the movement. Some people called him Huan Mao Maria, or Marihuana for short, since his trip to China and the first accounts of Mao’s plan to subvert Europe through drugs. The nickname had been pinned on him out of malice, but all in all he didn’t really mind.

He was now driving towards the grands boulevards. He hadn’t yet decided whether to go to the Café de Madrid, where the Latin American militants usually met, or to the bar frequented by the Portuguese, But finding himself near the latter, he parked the car and went in. The place was fairly empty, and as he looked around for a familiar face he suddenly froze. It must be telepathy! he thought, going over. The other man looked up, seemed equally surprised, and came forward to greet him.

“Great minds think alike!” exclaimed Krams, holding out his hand. “Fancy finding you here! …I was just remembering some of our earlier meetings.”

“How are you?” asked the other. “Well? I expected to see you at the reception tonight”

“I did drop in,” said Krams.

“Really?”

“I only stayed for a minute. We must have missed one another.”

“Probably.”

“Well, I’m very glad to see you, comrade Struga,” said Krams. “Have you been in Paris long?”

“Just a few days. How about you? Sit down for a while if you’re not in too much of a hurry. These people are members of the reconstructed Portuguese Communist Party, Perhaps you know some of them?…This is comrade Juan Krams,” he said, turning towards the Portuguese. “I acted as interpreter for him when he was in Albania.”

Krams now looked at the others for the first time. He had met two of them before. The others were strangers to him.

“We came here straight from the Rue de la Pompe,” explained Besnik Struga.

“A pity I didn’t see you there, but it’s a stroke of luck finding you like this,” said Krams.

The others made room for him at their table.

“Sure I’m not disturbing you?” he said before sitting down.

“Not at all,” one of the Portuguese reassured him. “On the contrary.”

“We were talking about the third world,” said another.

“Very interesting!”

As soon as he sat down, Krams realized this was the table he’d been looking for in vain the whole evening. The discussion soon turned into an argument, chiefly between Krams and Besnik Straga. The Portuguese only put in a word here and there, until finally the other two held the field alone.

“Well, it’s as I expected,” said Krams, after a pause. “All the rumours about China and Albania disagreeing on a whole lot of fundamental questions are true.”

“Apparently,” answered Struga, He gazed at his coffee cup, picked it up, put it down again in the saucer, then went on, with a sidelong glance at Krams: “And i suppose the rumours about you taking China’s side in ail this are true too!”

“Apparently,” said Krams, smiling.

The argument then flared up again, but the courtesy which had restrained their debates the year before was now abandoned.

Krams insisted that it was crazy and unforgivable to deny the existence of the third world. Struga maintained that the division of the world into three was a myth which flew in the face of scientific objectivity.

As Krams listened to Struga he felt a twinge of jealousy. This man was present at the Moscow Conference, he thought. He’d have liked to forget that this lent Struga a certain superiority, bet there was no denying it. What wouldn’t he himself give to have been there! Would there be other meetings like it in the future? In other words, meetings where everything was smashed to bits and then rebuilt as if after some apocalyptic catastrophe in which the fault line ran through the whole cosmos.

The discussion moved from the third world to the Sino-American rapprochement and back again. Krams tried hard to keep calm. He could bear anything except people denying there was such a thing as the third world. Again the exchanges grew heated.

“That’s what your Mao Zedong says!” Struga interrupted at one point.

Krams looked at him in surprise.

“Our Mao Zedong?” he said with a bitter smile, “You mean he’s not yours any more, if I heard you correctly?”

“You heard right,” said Besnik. “Yours.”

Krams shook his head.

“How strange,” he said. “I’d never have thought it could come to this.”

“What’s so surprising?” asked one of the Portuguese. “Everyone has to make his own choice…”

“Of course, of course,” said Krams placatingly. “And I choose Mao. With pleasure!”

Then he picked up his cup, and drank down his now cold coffee in three gulps.

“What ravings!” exclaimed the observer on duty at the station near the North Pole, taking off his headset for a moment. “My God, what ravings!” He rubbed his ears as if to get rid of the painful buzzing, then put his earphones on again. It was the busiest part of the day and he couldn’t take more than a few seconds rest without the risk of missing an important signal.

The diplomatic receptions being held in the various European capitals had jest ended, and most of the radio messages reported the comments the guests had exchanged in the midst of the hubbub, between whiskies. Such circumstances naturally enhanced the stupidity of their remarks, though these would have been stupid enough anyway. The radio officer laughed whenever he came upon the same conversation reported differently by two different embassies. The whole hotchpotch seemed to belong not to a number of different receptions but rather to a single long one which had been going on from time immemorial and would continue until the end of the world…Don’t you think there’ll be great upheavals in Yugoslavia when Tito dies?…As many as there will be in Spain after Franco…But Tito’s different! …Of course, of course!..Have you seen who’s on the Chinese committee for the funeral? …Romania…Romania’s foreign policy…“Hell, I missed that bit!” said the radio officer. But he wasn’t too worried — he knew he’d hear the same phrase again, probably so many times he’d get sick of it…Hey, here were our two lost pigeons again…Then came something, apparently not very important, about Portugal. The European parliament… N.A.T.O. interests in the Mediterranean…Spain doesn’t intend …If the price of oil goes on rising. My God, how often must they go on repeating the same thing?

The observer’s job was to record only messages relating to the communist world; all the rest were of no interest. But he was supposed to monitor everything. And apart from the fact that the communist world had poked its nose into all the problems of the human race, it sometimes happened that an apparently harmless conversation — about religious violence in Ireland, for instance — had some sort of relevance to Soviet missile bases in the Arctic. No message was negligible — that was the essence of the monitor’s instructions. “Don’t go telling yourself that a message missed by you will be picked up by one of your colleagues. Act as if you were the one and only monitor in the world…” And another thing. Uncoded messages were often as interesting as those sent in cipher. Some countries, especially the smaller ones, afraid their codes might be deciphered by their larger neighbours, sent highly important messages in clear in the hope that they might thus escape notice.

In the Middle East…Soviet interests, of course, but. So apparently Albania was never a satellite of China…A rapproche. meet with Moscow couldn’t be excluded…N.A.T.O. in Greece…Now that the bases in Greenland…Have you seen who’s on the Chinese committee for the funeral? Naturally, old boy — the make-up of those committees is always frightfully significant…And what do you think’s going to happen in the Persian Gulf?…And the Dead Sea?

Tell yourself you’re the only person listening in the whole world …He shook his head to try to keep himself awake. One of these days I’ll go out of my mind! he thought. Hearing your neighbour’s blatherings through the bathroom wall was enough to drive you barmy — if you had to listen to those of the whole world! The “world’s murmuring”…He vaguely remembered reading somewhere, or perhaps he’d heard it in a conversation that some authors had tried to write the total book, which would contain all the truth in the world in a condensed form. Sometimes people cited examples, in which the author had almost succeeded, as in a novel called Finnegans Wake,which the radio officer hadn’t read.

He started to giggle. How could anyone write the Book of the World in a two-roomed fiat? He was the only one who could write it, or even write a single chapter of it, up in the solitude of this icy waste where there was still hardly any difference between night and day, as in the time of Chaos, And its title ought to be the Ravings of the World, the “World’s Delirium”!

The signals went endlessly on, sometimes interspersed with bits of popular radio programmes…Germany will fulfil its responsibilities towards Europe …If the Russian tanks…The Balkans, troubled as ever…Non, je ne regrette rien … Talking of the Dead Sea…

They can’t get away from the Dead Sea this evening, can they, he thought, lifting his hand to take off his headset… But just as he did so…

“That’s what your Mao Zedong says,” said the Albanian communist. And this took the European leftist leader aback. “Does that mean he’s not your Mao any more?…”

That’ll do for now, growled the monitor, writing all this down on his notepad. Still on about the cooling-off in relations between Albania and China…He took off his earphones, and imagined what his head must look like without his headset. Small and insignificant…

From outside came the howling of the wind over the snow. It sounded like a primitive cry. He sat for a moment gazing at his headset almost in surprise, then slowly donned his magic ears again and went on listening.