He’d thought he’d only said the words to himself.
“That’s what she said,” Mark answered,
“Why haven’t you told me before? What does it mean?”
He tried to explain, but the harder he tried the harder it got.
“What she said applied to the situation in general: she thought I wanted to see her people stripped of power after the break with the Soviet Union; but she thought it wouldn’t happen like that; she thought that by having an affair with me she’d…”
“… she thought she’d lowered herself?”
“Something like that, I believe…She was very proud by nature, the daughter of a veteran communist who was also a vice-minister…To her, it was sinking pretty low…”
“Tell me what else she said.”
She brought her moist, imploring eyes closer. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her about all that, he thought. But the next moment it seemed to him his earlier affair probably made him more interesting to her.
After a while, when their breathing had slowed down somewhat, they could hear the old clock ticking, then the hum of the visitors' conversation in the next room.
“Muttering away just the same as before!” he said.
“Just the same as before,” she murmured to herself.
He imagined the older people sitting in the same old row on the sofa, like waxworks in a museum.
“All life long the same eternal whisperings!” he exclaimed. “Don’t they ever get tired of it?”
“Ssh! I’d like to hear what they’re saying. I’ve never heard what the old guard say to each other before, when they’re alone.”
“Haven’t you?” he smiled. “Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity now! It’ll be coming out of your ears!”
“Be quiet!”
She strained to listen, then pulled a face because she couldn’t hear properly.
“Put your ear to the wall,” Mark suggested.
She got up from the couch and followed his advice. After a few moments she beckoned him to join her.
“Listen!” she breathed, looking surprised and a little bit scared.
He put his ear to the wall. A couple of seconds later:
“Good grief!” he whispered. “They’re speaking Chinese!…This time they really are losing their marbles!”
Silva had made the necessary preparations for the next day’s lunch and was curled up wearily on the living-room sofa when the doorbell rang. She got up with some annoyance, thinking it must be some unwelcome visitor. But when she saw it was her sister-in-law her face lit up,
“Sonia! I’m so glad to see you! Come in!”
As Sonia was taking off her coat, Silva noticed she’d had her hair done very becomingly. She was just going to tease her about making herself beautiful now her husband was back. But, hair-do apart, Sonia looked rather down.
“What’s the matter, Sonia? You look upset.”
Sonia chewed her lip, but didn’t contradict.
“Well, I must say!” exclaimed Silva. “Aren’t you two ever satisfied? Instead of being happy that things turned out all right, you still go around with faces like fiddles!”
“Don’t you think I’ve told Arian so?” Sonia retorted, “Bet I might as well talk to a brick wall!”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. But he spends all day moping. I hardly know him.”
“Perhaps he’s worrying about being expelled from the Party? But I expect they’ll reinstate him, don’t you?”
“That’s what people say.”
“But that doesn’t cheer him up?”
Sonia shook her head.
“There’s something more serious bothering him.”
A surge of pity made Silva forget her momentary annoyance.
“I suppose it’s understandable. You do your job properly and all of a sudden there’s a bolt from the blue and you find yourself chucked out of the Party and into prison. It’s horribly unfair -disgusting. But there’s no point in letting it get you down…”
Sonia sighed.
“That’s what I keep saying, but it doesn’t stop him being depressed…And that isn’t all. There’s something else…and it frightens me…”
“What do you mean?” cried Silva, going cold.
“I’m half dead with fear,” said Sonia. “One day, when he let himself go for once, he said something terrible …. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“What did he say?”
“We were just sitting talking, and for the umpteenth time I’d said more or less what you just said, and he interrupted me. ‘Do you think I’m like this because of what happened to me? Well, it’s something quite different that’s bothering me! What I can’t accept is that both sides, ours and theirs, come out of the business unscathed…’“
“What did he mean?” cried Silva.
“Let me finish telling you. ‘One side or the other must be declared guilty/ he went on, ‘otherwise it’s all a lie and the world has been turned upside down.’“
“I don’t understand, What other side was he talking about?”
“The people who had them arrested.”
“Oh,” said Silva, going pale. “But they say it was the minister himself who gave the order for their arrest…”
“That’s who he means,” answered Sonia, “And that’s why I’m afraid.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“You’re right,” said Silva. “It’s enough to make your hair go white.”
“If he goes around saying things like that he’ll be back in jail before he knows where he is. And next time…”
“Shall I try to talk to him?” asked Silva. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to say, I doubt if it’ll be any use. But you can always try…”
Silva remembered Arian’s almost untouched, plate at Brikena’s birthday party. It all seemed to have happened in another age. Bet now, as then, she felt a pang of anguish.
Minister D— put his name to the fourth document, thee stared at his signature. It looked strange. What was happening to him? He picked the paper up and held it closer to his eyes, but it made no difference — his writing was smaller and more cramped, and his surname tailed away pitifully.
How can this be? he wondered. He’d thought a person’s signature was always the same - witness the evidence of handwriting experts in court, and the model signatures kept in Swiss banks…Perhaps there was something wrong with his sight?
He reached out for the other documents he’d just signed. All the signatures looked alike - shrunken, as if withered by the cold. He remembered that he’d had cramp in his arm yesterday evening. His fingers were still numb. That must be the explanation.
He put the paper down and decided to think no more about the matter. But after a moment he found himself looking at the documents again. Could there be something wrong with his pen? Yes, of course, he admonished himself, shaking his head reprovingly. And he’d almost believed it was that wretched affair that was at the root of everything, altering his voice, his breathing, his taste and finally his signature!
He pressed a bell for his secretary.
“What use are these pens supposed to be? The nibs are as fine as needles — absolutely no use for signing things! Please get me some that are broader — twice as broad, as broad as possible!”
“Very well,” said the secretary. He came back soon afterwards with a handful of other pens. “Try these,” he said, putting them down carefully on the desk. “They should be all right."
The minister tried one of them on a scrap of paper, then signed his name several times with some of the others, examining each signature closely and trying to persuade himself it was the same as usual
“What are you still here for?” he asked his secretary rudely, when he noticed him watching placidly. “That’ll do — I don’t need you any more!”
When he was alone again he put his head in his hands. It wasn’t the signature. Something else wa
s wrong. He knew very well why he was anxious, but he refused to think about it. Every morning he hoped the new day would deliver him from his anguish, but it wouldn’t let him go. He tried everything. But no matter how many meetings he called, how loudly he pounded on the table and upset the flowers, how fierce the threats he uttered or how severe the punishments he handed out, it made no odds. Every word and gesture seemed somehow muted, the people he chastised seemed to be trying not to laugh. The sound he made when he banged the desk sounded so dull he’d looked under the red plush cover to see if the wood had changed into some other substance.
Was he or was he not still a minister? If other people were asking the question, they had only to dismiss him as soon as possible and put a stop to the whole affair. But who really had the power to do this? Those who were against him were his inferiors — some of them had never sacked anyone in their lives, not even a protocol clerk or a porter. So how could they get rid of him? Nevertheless he felt they’d cast a spell on him.
He vaguely remembered colleagues in other parts of the world not in Lade America, where a mere handful of colonels could conspire to terrorize a government, but in more serious countries, where ministers of defence were held in respect, not to say fear. Whereas he, far from inspiring fear in anyone else, was scared of everyone, not only people he knew but also the humble civil servant whose name he couldn’t recall and the crowds in the streets who were all the more terrifying because they were anonymous.
How had it all come about? Those manoeuvres, those tanks, had been enough to loosen the mysterious screw on which his whole life depended. What secret, irreversible mechanism had thus been set off ? Hadn’t Enver Hoxha spoken of a formidable popular mechanism that started up of its owe accord? Was the cause of his own harassment real or subjective?
The tank officers had been released, but that hadn’t helped either. On the contrary, his anxiety had only increased. He’d expected they’d write to him, and even calculated how long their letters would take to write and then to reach him, allowing a margin of error. But there was no sign of any letters. Perhaps they’d seen the error of their ways? Again, instead of soothing his fears, his ingenuity only increased them. Why on earth didn’t they write?
At this point, as if reading his thoughts, his aides suggested his going on a tour of inspection that had been put off because of the problems with China, He greeted the suggestion with open arms. For the first days he was almost happy, sitting there in the back of his limousine whizzing along the roads, escorted by his staff-cars and bodyguards. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
He hurried from one regiment or depot to another as if afraid to slow down, one day visiting a fort on the coast, another dropping in on a tank brigade, the next on a military airfield. Looking back through the rear window at barracks, hangars and anti-aircraft batteries disappearing on the horizon, he told himself he must have been out of his mind to think other people had doubts about him. He felt like laughing at the very idea now. How could anyone throw the least suspicion on him, when he had all these guns and tanks and planes at his disposal — a Latin-American colonel could over. throw any number of governments with only a tenth of them! He himself had never used them except for manoeuvres, for a mere game. Could he have set people against him just for that?
He almost choked with resentment. Instead of looking askance at him they ought to be grateful! Anyone else in his position would have been aggrieved. Like anyone falsely accused and tempted to get his own back by committing the very crime that had been wrongly attributed to him, he was almost ready to organize a putsch! They were almost forcing him into it, instead of thanking him for abstaining.
He gazed out at the bare winter landscape, ruminating. If he came to a decision, would he be capable of translating his ideas into reality? He didn’t have to think twice about that!
But on the fourth day of his tour, he felt his confidence wane once more. He remembered the speech about a popular mechanism that triggered itself off like the system for restoring the current when the electricity breaks down. Again he found himself wondering where, in which offices, the levers of command were to be found.
By the roadside, at the crossroads, outside railway stations and at the entrance to almost every village, his eyes met with slogans: Party-People-Unity…No power on earth can break the unity between Party and people … Some were handwritten on walls, others on metal hoardings, but a few were picked out in stones, or cut out on the grass, on hillsides. He had the impression there were more of them now. Sometimes it occurred to him that invisible hands had put them there the day before, especially for him. Where did their orders come from…?
The thought of that mechanism terrified him more every day. He imagined it in various different forms, bet finally saw it as a mass of telephone wires, weather gauges, snares, hidden microphones and rusty old fox-traps, the whole lot stowed away on some distant stretch of wasteland. Perhaps its dilapidated appearance was only a camouflage…And it was all controlled from some unimaginable place — he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the orders came from underground, from the kingdom of the dead. And so he couldn’t consider it as a source of salvation.
Whoever attacks the Party devours himself! He looked back to check whether the slogan had been real or only an illusion. But the plain was shrouded in fog and he couldn’t see anything, I’m seeing things, he thought. The slogan hadn’t been in the usual style. He turned round again, rubbed his eyes, but the fog hid everything. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised to find he was having hallucinations. He felt like shouting, Stop writing messages to me on the hills! Can’t you see I can’t do anything about them?
On the fourth afternoon of his tour he felt his voice going different again. And he noticed again a certain slackness in the soldiers’ salutes, a certain lack of polish on their helmets and even on the barrels of heavy artillery pieces and anti-aircraft gens. He had a feeling that if he’d given the latter the order to fire, they’d only have produced silent flashes and blank projectiles, the sort you sometimes see in dreams.
What if it was all a nightmare? Anyhow, he couldn’t give orders to the army now. He pleaded indisposition and interrupted the tour.
And there on his desk in the office there lay the long-awaited letter with its dozens of signatures. He sat and looked at them for a long while, as if to say, Now what am I going to do with you?
11
A FEW BIRDS CROSSED the vast north-west frontier. Some others took off from the jungle, accompanied by millions of insects, to over-fly the southern borders. Nothing and no one could cross the Himalayas, and the seaboard turned back any birds setting off from that direction. So the plane carrying Skënder Bermema and C— V—, his colleague, was one of the relatively rare winged objects to enter Chinese air-space that winter morning. The thought of their delegation being invited on the occasion of the Day of the Birds had given rise to all the inevitable pleasantries. But most of these had been exhausted before they left Albania, the last of them on the way to the airport, and now all that was left of the joke was a half-hearted smile or two. The great day was today or the day after, but they weren’t likely, thought Skënder Bermema, to see any actual birds. His thoughts, already numbed by sleeplessness arid the fatigues of the journey, were assaulted by the immense space that seemed to rise at him from below.
That’s China down there, he kept telling himself, to drive home what was happening to him. But apart from the sight of three or four birds crossing the Mongolian frontier, his mind was a blank,
C—V— drowsed beside him, his head leaning on the back of his seat. His open mouth and heavy though not loud breathing made him look rather vulnerable, but didn’t evoke any pity. Perhaps you’re dreaming of a world without writers, thought Skënder. Well, you’ve got a country like that underneath you, the first in the history of the human race.
Almost before he’d completed the thought, Skënder himself fell asleep. The plane drilled on into the great contine
nt. Below, half China was in the grip of winter. Men, animals and plants all struggled against the cold. Vast, dark, unexplored caves in the bowels of the earth, the kind that engender earthquakes, contained only silence. Another metastasis silently formed in the Chinese prime minister’s right side. But this was only one of billions of phenomena to occur that winter’s day.
The Hsinhua press agency didn’t announce the delegation’s arrival until forty-eight hours later. A brief communiqué ended with the words: “Our Albanian guests were met at Peking airport by the official in charge Cheng.” Next day there was another terse bulletin about the dinner held for the guests at the Peking Hotel, hosted by the same official in charge Chung.
“What’s his job then, ‘official in charge Chung’?” asked Skënder Bermema, examining the communiqué, “What’s he in charge of? I’ve never seen anything so vague.”
C— V— shrugged,
“The Writers’ Union has been dissolved - someone had to meet us and invite us to dinner.”
“That strikes you as normal, does it?” asked Skënder gloomily.
C— V— looked evasive and shrugged again, as if trying to avoid an argument.
“It’s their business,” he muttered.
The next day their programme took them off to south-east China. Every provincial paper gave its own muddled account of the event. One connected the visit with the Day of the Birds, another linked it to a campaign to exterminate sparrows, while a third talked of the inauguration of a large incubator. But if the provincial press was vague, that was nothing compared with the nebuiousness of the reception the two writers received from their erstwhile Chinese colleagues, now squelching about in the paddy-fields. These unfortunates, far from thinking of writing anything about the visitors, were terrified of birds and anything else that might evoke their now despised art. They’d been under the impression that writers had been wiped off the face of the earth for ever, and now here were two of them roving all over China! Their reaction was a mixture of excitement, terror, confusion and curiosity (why had they come?). The total effect was one of aversion from themselves and anything that reminded them of what they used to be. They were particularly uneasy at night, perhaps because they then sensed the presence of the visitors somewhere up in the sky. They tossed and turned on their pallets, groaning in their sleep. Why had they done it?