The two Albanians flying overhead from province to province were unaware of all this. Only once, late in the evening, when their plane was coming in to land over some nameless town, Skënder Bermema, looking casually out through the window, thought he glimpsed something tragic through the moonlight glittering over the rice-fields. There must be writers there somewhere, he thought drowsily. He stared at the muddy waters as if looking for traces of human souls.
Peace be upon them, O Lord, he found himself murmuring. He was surprised at these words from his distant past. He was still more amazed to realize that his hand, slowly and clumsily, as if weighed down by the clay of the graveyard, had just made the sign of the cross.
As soon as he opened his eyes Skënder thought it must be Sunday. It seemed to be written on the silk curtains of his hotel room. Unable to pursue his thoughts further, he turned over and went to sleep again, muttering, “It’s Sunday.” He woke again, and went to sleep again, a little later, rejoicing in the fact. They’d been in China for three weeks and this was their first day of rest.
He was exhausted. At one point during the night it had seemed to him, for some reason, that this build-up of fatigue was due to the chain of Byzantium, the great rusty chain that had been lying on the bed of the Bosphorus since 1449, when it was put there to protect the city from the Turkish fleet. There it still lay, lonely and overgrown, unseen by human eye. The idea struck Skënder as so unbearable he heard himself groan in his sleep.
He woke and slept, woke and slept again. Time was like a mass of wool, not only because of the peaceful white light that filtered in through the curtains, but also because minutes and seconds tangled with one another to produce a vague sensation now of rest and now of weariness.
The alternation of sleep and waking grew faster: he felt a profound uneasiness. Fragments of dreams first crystallized, then faded…
He was at a meeting of the Writers’ Union. It was unbearably hot, and someone had proposed that authors’ royalties should be abolished. That didn’t bother him — to hell with royalties, but if the? were abolished the temperature would go up…He woke up. smiled, fell asleep again still smiling. After some other, incoherent dreams, he found himself back at the meeting, with someone else suggesting something else should be done away with. He asked the people on either side of him what was going on. Why were they there? What were they going to abolish now? But no one would say. Finally he made it out: they were going to forbid author’s names to be put on their works, C— V— was addressing the meeting. “Comrades,” he exhorted them all, “let us follow the example of the Chinese and stop putting our names on the covers of our books. The glory belongs to the masses rather than to us…” “Yes,” said someone. “With a lousy name like yours you’ve got everything to gain! The sooner the better!” Uproar followed. Those with Muslim patronymics shouted the loudest.
When Skënder woke again, all he remembered was the room where the meetings were held. He hadn’t been in Tirana when those famous proposals were put forward, but he’d heard so much about it he felt as if he’d attended all the meetings. They’d gone on for days, with the heat made even worse by the noisy breaks spent drinking bottles of orangeade. Not to mention the bright red hair of the Tirana Party secretary, well known for his pro-Chinese sympathies.
“I should like to inform the meeting that I have renounced the royalties of four thousand new leks due to me for my latest novel…”
This was greeted by shouts and interjections all over the room. It was hard to tell whether they were expressions of approval or disapproval, or merely sarcastic laughter, C— V— was in the seventh heaven. He was speaking for the third time running. They were still discussing the removal of author’s names from literary works. Q—, the playwright, had just pronounced against it.
“I don’t see what you can put in its place,” he said. “A book is the work of someone, isn’t it? What are you going to put on it? -the name of the place where he was born? the members of his executive committee? perhaps the local farm cooperative!”
Amidst the laughter, C— V— glared at the previous speaker and took the rostrum:
“I don’t at all approve of the way the previous comrade approaches the problem. Nor of the laughter with which he was received. All that is the result of an unwholesome intellectualism which we ought to have thrown off by now. Some people think it’s wrong to suppress authors’ names - they’re quite scandalized at the idea. But I’d like to ask those comrades: don’t you think it’s even more scandalous that thousands and thousand of ordinary people toil away on all the fronts of socialism without asking for their names to be advertised, without seeking any vain notoriety? Have those comrades ever reflected on the fact that our heroic miners, our worthy milkmaids, our noble cooperative farmers have never asked to have their names on coal trucks or milk churns or sacks of wheat? Why do they think it would be so terrible if their names no longer appeared on their books?”
The party secretary nodded his agreement. The Minister of Education and Culture, also at the meetings did the same. But when a voice from the back of the room piped up, “What shall we put instead of the author’s name? The name of a cornfield or of an irrigation canal?” it was greeted with more hoots of laughter. The secretary lowered his large head menacingly, and said loudly to C— V—, “Go on, comrade, even if what you say isn’t to everyone’s taste.”
Skënder closed his eyes for one last doze, then lay for a while trying to make up his mind which was more disagreeable, returning to the world of sleep or plunging into the world of consciousness.
When he woke up for good his head felt heavy. Sunday still seemed to be written all over the curtains, but less clearly than before. The void inside him was so tangible it was as if there were another person beside him. What’s the matter with me, he thought, thrashing about in the bed. But the void wouldn’t go away. He lay still for a few minutes looking up at the chalky white ceiling and depressively projecting concentric circles on to it. He suddenly realized that the strange body inside him was none other than his own unborn novel.
He lay on motionless between the white sheets. For several days now he’d felt the book stirring, groaning, slowly asphyxiating. And now, this Sunday dawn, his novel had started to give up the ghost.
What could he do to keep it alive? Where could he go? To whom could he protest? He could feel the book growing cold inside him, like a corpse. I should never have agreed to come on this trip, he told himself. Wandering around in the midst of this dehumanised society had killed his novel. For days he’d been feeling it leave him, evaporating, drying up as if in the desert.
Well, it wasn’t surprising. He should have expected it. Still lying there, he remembered what Gjergj Dibra had said about the aridity of human contacts in China, He’d laughed at the time, not suspecting he’d be experiencing it himself one day.
The death of human relationships, that was the cause of everything. Human relationships are at the root of everything, and here they’d managed to annihilate them. They’d stifled and dehydrated them until they turned into thorny cacti. “What wouldn’t I have given for an ordinary conversation,” Gjergj had told him. “A conversation between thieves sharing out the swag would have done, so long as it was the real thing!”
He rubbed his temples. Chance alone couldn’t explain what had happened. It had all been orchestrated in accordance with some diabolical plan. In order to do away with literature and the arts, you have to start by atrophying human speech. For three thousand years it had been cultivated. Without this marvel, life would be mere primitive stammerings. And now Mao Zedong had come to strangle it.
Is such a thing conceivable? he wondered. He contemplated the white ceiling. No, it couldn’t be true! He remembered the titles of some Chinese poems he’d read: Conversation by Moonlight, Conversation with My Friend Van on Mount Tian Kun in Late Autumn, Conversation with Lu Fu on the Day of the First Snow…
Carried away by the memory, he threw off the bedclothes and stood
up. When he looked in the mirror on the wall his face looked rather pale, and if they hadn’t been his own eyes he’d have said they were cold as ice. Sleep with a blind man and you wake up cross-eyed. Where had he heard that saying?
He looked at the wall between his room and C— V—’s. We may be in the same hotel, thought Skënder, but I’m as far away from him as ever. And leagues away, light-years away from this Chinese Milky Way. So you may think, said a voice inside him. But your novel’s dead, just the same.
He began pacing frantically round the room, not only his expressions and gestures but everything about him reflecting his exasperation. He felt as if the death of his novel had completely destroyed his equilibrium. People talked about lack of vitamins and shortage of red or white corpuscles, but how did you feel when a work you’d been carrying for months in your body and mind was removed?
He was still flinging about when there was a knock at the door. It was C— V—.
“So you’re up, are you?” he asked, poking his head into the room. “Coming down to breakfast?”
Skënder looked at him as if he were a murderer.
“I don’t want any breakfast,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” said C— V—, shutting the door.
Skënder growled. The room felt too small for his pacings. This trip, he thought. Before they’d left, the secretary of the Writers’ Union had said, “There may be some friction between you, but I’m sure all that will be forgotten. I hope the trip will bring you together.”
Skënder growled again. This cursed trip.
Every day the relations between the two of them grew colder. The offer of a cigarette or a lighter, some word exchanged in the car, might seem to ease things for a bit, but by the evening, when they went to their separate rooms, the tension would be worse than ever.
I should never have come, he told himself again. Or at least not with him. He’d thought he’d be able to put up with him. For years he’d despised him, but that was all. ln China his feelings had started to intensify. He’d thought that despite their different views about things, the fact of being thrown together into that great ocean of Chinamen would bring them together. But precisely the opposite had happened.
It had become obvious with Skënder’s first attempts to talk to C— V— about the silly things they came up against everywhere they went. He’d known C— V— had a soft spot for anything Chinese, but he’d never have thought his admiration was such that he wouldn’t listen to a joke about the crass stupidities even the Chinese themselves must be ashamed of. That was Skënder’s last attempt to get closer to his travelling companion. It’s ridiculous! he grumbled, going back to his room at nine in the evening when he’d have liked to talk with someone till dawn in this strange hotel thousands of miles from home. He couldn’t forgive C— V— for being so unapproachable. It would be easier to communicate with an ape! Then he calmed down, reflecting that it was only natural. Given that C— V— was so fascinated by everything Chinese, he was bound to be against any kind of dialogue. And perhaps after all it was better so. Heaven only knew what construction he might have put on what Skënder said to him, and he might well send in a report about it to the Party committee when they got back to Albania, Skënder thought of the day when he’d glanced through the open door of C— V—’s room and seen a lot of papers on his desk. “What are you writing?” he’d asked. “The same as you,” C—V— had answered spitefully.
The same as me, thought Skënder now, standing by his own desk, It too was strewn with papers. Well, one thing is certain, he told himself - we’re definitely not writing the same thing!
He picked up one of the pages, read a couple of lines, thee put it down and looked at another. He hadn’t re-read any of this since he’d started writing it: it was a kind of travel journal, or rather “nocturnal”, since it was during the night that he’d jotted down these impressions, reflections and notes of ideas for future works.
Perhaps this was what had made him abandon his novel? What a depressing thought! He shoved the papers aside. His eye lighted on his suitcase, standing in a corner. He went over to it, slowly and cautiously, as if afraid to break some spell. The draft of his novel was inside the case, right at the bottom.
Good Lord, even the handwriting looked wrong! It seemed to have grown dull and shrivelled from being shut up like that,
He leafed clumsily through the exercise book to which he’d consigned his work. There were all kinds of notes and sketches: parts of chapters, descriptions of characters, different versions of the same scene. Every so often there were scraps of verse, accounts of dreams, chapter headings, odd episodes that might or might nor be incorporated into the novel: such as one passage, for example, called The Soliloquy of the Sphinx, Other scraps: “Three in the afternoon, the time of day he always dreaded…” “Men’s beauty contest, Doomed Heights 1927.”
The bits of poetry were so ethereal they looked as if the slightest breath might harm them, turn them solid, The psychological notes were incredibly subtle, with streaks of unorthodoxy that made them all the more compelling.
“Snow in Tirana, 18 January 1967, the morning after the inauguration of the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg. The prince waking up under the snow. His cloak and his horse all white. Inhabitants of the capital crowding round. A voice says: ‘The snow’s a good sign, a good omen…’”
He skipped a few pages.
“The beach at Dürres in the 30s. The fashions in bathing costumes. Loulou the courtesan’s sunshade. The king’s afternoon coffee time. The whole history of the monarchy is there: alliances, factions, rivalries, sexual perversions. And the sand, the sand…”
Some pages further on there were observations about winter, “Hail falling outside. The windowpanes rattle, the shutters bang against the walls. Bet harsh and stinging as it may be, hail has something feminine about it that seems to pervade the rest of the day. The morsels of ice come down as if there were furious women up in the sky, tearing the beads from their pretty necks and hurling them to the ground. And if one listened properly one would hear their angry voices saying, through the rattling windowpanes, ‘I’ll never take you back again - never!’“
Streets and parks were described turning white. It might have been only a dream, but the page on which it was written had a date: 17 March, Under the date was a hasty note: “I1.30, urgent meeting at the vice-minister’s.”
Skënder went on leafing through the notebook. The handwriting seemed to get more and more careless.
He tended to pause at the poetry, perhaps because it was comparatively rare. “How often have I ignored your tears …” “I loved you and knew it not…”
One morning when I woke
The world without you seemed empty.
I realized what I’d lost,
And knew what I had gained.
My sorrow shone like an emerald,
My joy glowed like a sunset.
Which was the brighter of the two
My heart could not decide.
To whom were those lines addressed? He couldn’t remember. He’d never told anyone about this phenomenon in case it was seen as the affectation of a philanderer, though he cared as little about that sort of criticism as about the more facile kinds of praise. As a matter of fact, in most cases he genuinely had forgotten the origins of his poems. Even when one seemed to refer to a real-life episode, the nature and dimensions of that episode would somehow change, would merge with other episodes. And the same applied to the person originally invoked: his or her own eyes might well, in Skënder’s verses, come to shed the tears of another. As time went by these modifications, these individual landslips, built up into something like a shoal of shifting sands, and Skënder, coming upon a set of initials in the title of a poem, would pause in surprise, having remembered the lines as dedicated to someone else.
“Happiness and to spare. Viola…”
He smiled.
Had she really been called Viola, or had that name stayed in his memory because s
he was studying the violin? He could remember quite clearly the night of their chance meeting, one May; the hours they’d spent dancing together; then her hair spread out on the pillow. As he gazed at those tresses — and looking at the hair of a sleeping woman always seemed to him like watching a projection of his dreams — he tried to understand why she was toying so lightly with her own happiness, heedlessly drawing him with her to the brink of hell. She was beautiful, and he’d thought to himself she had happiness and to spare, like a pond brimming over in spring. Perhaps her happiness too needed to be drained, to avoid some fatal excess…
As he read on, first his fingers and then his whole body grew deathly cold.
“…The sound of music wafted in through the north-facing windows; from those facing south came the strains of another song…”
“…Inside his studio, all was golden silence. His wife, still beautiful, but pale from her recent abortion, sat on the couch reading a magazine. It seemed to him the walls of the room had pulled back to contain these treasures, garnered not from gain but from loss …He reached out and touched her pale cheek…”
“…Evenings at the Strazimirs’. I used to enjoy these gatherings. There was always something more than met the eye — a hidden sweetness that even shone out of the stones in the women’s rings. Sometimes it seemed to me these jewels lit up before the eyes of their owners’ did. While the women themselves still held back, their diamonds and rubies would sparkle at each other in anticipation…”
Enough! Skënder pushed the book aside. He was well aware that, next time he opened it, these loops and scrawls would have finally disintegrated there in their coffin; would probably be quite illegible. As often happens in such circumstances, the colder, harder side of his nature now got the upper hand.