“Here in N—,” he said wearily, “there aren’t any students or foreign embassies. That makes our task easier. As for the only Albanian delegation that ever set foot here as far as I know, I believe we sent the tapes recording their conversations to Peking for decoding, because we didn’t have anyone who knew the language?”
“That’s right,” said his aide.
“Regarding their contacts with people here, I think we have some reports on the subject. Is there anything in them that’s relevant to what this order asks? Some provocative phrase or other?”
“No,” answered his aide, but not very convincingly.
Tchan thought he looked rather uncertain too.
“What?” he said. “It looks to me as if certain things went on that I wasn’t told about.”
“No, no,” said the aide nervously. “There isn’t anything in the reports. I was thinking of something else.”
Tchan looked him straight in the eye. He squirmed.
“What were you thinking of, exactly?”
The aide gave up.
“Perhaps you remember that two years ago we lost a mike,” he stammered, “One of those special mini-mikes…”
“What’s that got to do with the present question?”
“There is a connection. Perhaps you also remember that the man whose clothes it was attached to was killed. Van Mey, his name was …”
“Van Mey,” Tchan murmured.
Yes, he did remember. That had been the only mike they lost, and Van Mey’s name had been mentioned…Yes, it was all coming back to him. They worried themselves sick about that lost qietingqi. The instructions about looking after them had been very strict, especially for the mini-mikes, and they’d had great trouble hushing the matter up.
“So what, then?” said Tchan. “What’s it got to do with this?” - pointing to the order.
His aide swallowed.
“The only person to act as guide to the Albanian delegation and exchange a few words with them was Van Mey,” he said, “If that mike hadn’t disappeared we’d have a tape of what he and the Albanians said to one another.”
“Really?” said Tchan.
Even after two years he could still remember their agitation about the loss, but he couldn’t remember the details. Had they written a report? he asked.
“Of course,” said the other. “Shall I go and get it?”
Tchan nodded.
When the aide came back and started to read out the report, Tchan remembered quite clearly the day he’d been told one of the independent mikes was missing because the person wearing it had been killed a fortnight ago. They hadn’t been able to recover the device from his anorak, for the simple reason that the anorak had disappeared. After searching the victim’s flat and finding out he’d had neither family nor close friends in N—, they tried the crematorium. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been functioning at the time of Van Mey’s death because of a fuel shortage: they’d had to bury the body in the old town cemetery, “To hell with him and his mike!” Tchan had cried, “Write a report and bring it to me to sign!”…And so the case had been closed.
“It was my fault,” he admitted now. “Bet how was I to know that our relations with Albania would sink so low, and that that cursed mike…”
“Of course,” said one of his assistants, “How could you have known?”
“What’s done is done,’ said another. “No point in talking about it now.”
“Wrong!” roared Tchan, “I’ll raise that mike from the dead if I have to!”
And he gave the gruesome order.
12
That very evening two lorries stopped outside the old cemetery, now used only for bodies that couldn’t be dealt with by the crematorium because of fuel shortages. Tchan and his two assistants got out of one truck, and a few municipal workers out of the other. The sexton was waiting for them at the gate, a lantern in his hand and his face dark with terror.
“Lead the way!” commanded Tchan.
They set off in silence along a path, the man with the lantern leading and the others occasionally shining their torches.
“Here it is,” said the sexton, pointing to a mound of earth.
The torches gathered round and then were switched off, leaving only the faint light of the lantern on the grave.
“Switch on the headlights of the lorries,’ ordered Tchan, drawing back a pace or two. “Then get cracking!”
They proceeded almost in silence. The headlamps came on quite suddenly., casting a white light tinged with mauve. The workmen spread a tarpaulin by the side of the grave.
Tchan watched the picks and shovels at work, while the sexton leaned over from time to time, presumably to tell the workers when to stop piling the earth at the side of the grave and start putting it on the tarpaulin. They’d decided to sift the earth that might contain, among the dead man’s bones and what remained of his clothes, the lost mike.
Tchan was so obsessed his head was splitting, though he had high hopes of getting his hands on the precious device. He’d show the Zhongnanhai what he was made of! Maybe Mao himself would come to hear about it. Tchan looked up from time to time: he hoped it wasn’t going to rain! Spadefuls of earth were starting to fall on the tarpaulin. Any one of them might hold the treasure. The sexton couldn’t remember Van Mey’s funeral now, but he did tell them that when someone died instantly in an accident and didn’t go into hospital (the bulldozer had practically cut Van Mey in two), they were usually buried in the clothes they were wearing at the time.
“Careful,” someone called. “You’ve reached the skeleton.”
The heap of earth on the tarpaulin went on growing. They were going to sift as much soil as possible to be on the safe side. Heaven knows how long this would have gone on if Tchan hadn’t suddenly called a halt.
“That’ll do,” he said. “No point in digging up the whole cemetery.”
The first drops of rain began to fall, and they hurried to remove the tarpaulin before it got any heavier. As it was it took six of them to lift it on to the lorry.
“Lucky we got away before the storm!” said Tchan as the lorries drew away.
It was raining hard by the time they got back to headquarters. There were lights in the windows of the lab, and the lab assistants were waiting in silence, wearing sinister long rubber gloves. Again it took six men to carry the load upstairs. Then they set about crumbling up the soil.
Tchan stood watching with folded arms. Bits of skeleton and stone were put on one side to be looked at again later if nothing was found in the earth. The skull seemed to be grinding its teeth at them. “Gnash away as much as you like,” Tchan muttered. “You won’t stop me finding your Yoke!”
Every so often a chill ran down his spine, either with unnamed apprehension or because it had been so cold and damp in the cemetery.
It wasn’t yet midnight when one of the lab assistants came on a button belonging to the anorak. That lifted their spirits. Twenty minutes later they found the mike itself. Only then did they notice that they and everything around them, including the floor and the tables, were covered with mud.
13
Was it really on the same night, or did people’s memories run the two horrifying and unforgettable events together and make them coincide? But even if the second spiritualist séance did take place a few days before or a few days after the finding pf the mike, it wasn’t surprising if people thought of the two things as happening together.
Be that as it may, Van Mey’s two friends, together with the medium, had met for another séance to commemorate Van’s death and summon up his spirit. The meeting they’d all planned, at which they were to have invoked Qan Shee, had of course not taken place.
They’d been sitting round the table for some time. The candle flames flickered more lugubriously than ever, and the medium’s face looked more pallid. He’d been in a trance for a long while, but his painful breathing, broken by occasional rattles^ suggested that something was preventing him from making contact
with the dead man.
According to later evidence it must have been at exactly this moment that, in the lab not far away at Public Safety headquarters, Tchan and his assistants had started to play the tape taken from Vae Mey’s qietingqi. Their faces were ashen as they listened to the voice from -beyond the grave. It sounded slow and hoilow, like a disc being played at the wrong speed. And like a ghost.
“The tape must be damp,’ said Tchan, bending o?er the machine.
“Not surprising after being in the ground all that time,” said one of his aides.
The voice-was scarcely audible, and interspersed with dull thuds. Tchan wound the tape backwards and forwards to eliminate the blanks. Suddenly they all started. In the midst of the other noises there arose a shriek, abruptly cut off.
“The accident,” said Tchan.
He must have been right, for the sinister cry was followed by a hubbub that might well have been made by a crowd gathering round the dead man. Further on in the tape, thought Tchan, there must be a recording of the corpse being taken from the crematorium to the cemetery — perhaps even of the burial He wound the tape forward, and thought he heard the sound of spadefuls of earth falling on the body. After that there was an ever-deepening hush. My God, thought Tchan: that’s what they mean by silent as the grave …
He listened transfixed until the end of the tape. He must be the first person in the world to possess a sample of the silence of death. Now he could say he had gone down among the shades.
He was roused from his reverie by the click as the machine switched itself off. He wound the tape back again to find Van Mey’s voice, slimy-sounding and decayed after spending so long in the earth. It must have been after midnight now - according to later evidence, the same time as that at which, in a cold room a few hundred yards away, the medium, trying in vain to bring the voice of the dead man back to his two friends, gasped out, “I can’t, he doesn’t want to come - something’s preventing him…” Skinder Bermema stared at the last few lines as if he’d have liked them to go on of their own accord, It seemed to him this last part was written rather carelessly and didn’t fully exploit the possibilities of the subject.
It took him some time to remember what had happened next in that town in central China.
After he’d heard the evidence, Tchan had no difficulty finding out about the séances and the names of the people who’d attended them. Nothing was known about their arrest, but it probably took place without delay. It wasn’t certain whether Tchan had had them nabbed without more ado, or if he’d waited to catch them in the act during a séance. If the latter, he probably did make the macabre speech often attributed to him: after the door was smashed in and the conspirators were captured as they sat around the candles waiting in vain to communicate with the dead, Tchan is supposed to have said mockingly, “Were you waiting for his voice?” Then he burst out laughing. “Well, I’m afraid he’s stood you up, gentlemen! I’ve got both his voice and his soul — in here!” And he showed them the little bugging device.
It was the Albanian ambassador in Peking, an old acquaintance of his, who first told Skënder about the dreaded Zhongnanhai. And when he heard about the business of the microphones he was sure the General Bureau must have been mixed up in it. The same day he asked an embassy official who spoke the language what the ultra-secret mini-mikes were called in Chinese. “Qietingqi” was the word, he was told - pronounced “tchietintchi”.
“Are you going to write something about it?” the ambassador asked Bermema when he spoke to him about the séance. “China is still haunted by ghosts and spirits, despite all the denunciations of the old days.”
Skënder sat down on the bed and. gazed at the white curtains as he revolved all these memories. Various other incidents were now coming back to him …He lay down …A lunch near Tirana with some friends, after a rehearsal of one of his plays, and the maunderings of someone at a nearby table who’d had too much to drink: “In the third millennium, Albania will become Christian again, and if you want to survive you’d better change your name from Skënder to Alexander”, Going into hospital a year ago, the syringe in the nurse’s hand, and his own sudden doubt about it — a doubt that was somehow like the confusion he’d recently felt going into the Hotel Helmhaes in Zurich, because in Albanian the word “helm” meant “fish” …The women he’d loved, a tune, a balcony overlooking the sea, manuscripts and more manuscripts…An ashtray in a café, full of cigarette stubs of which only one had lipstick on it, symbolizing the disproportion between the emotion felt by the unknown man and that felt by the unknown woman…
He thought he must have drowsed off for a moment. And it was in a state between sleeping and waking that he imagined Ana lying in her grave. Or rather not her but a gold necklace which he’d given her once, and of which he’d caught a sudden glimpse as they closed the coffin.
He moved his head on the pillow to drive away the thought. But on the other, cooler part of the pillow Lin Biao’s question, ‘“Where are we going?”, seemed to be waiting for him, together with Lin Biao’s plot to kill Mao - strangely like Mao’s plot to kill Lin Biao.
Bet Skënder had had enough of these ruminations. His thoughts turned to the children’s skis in the hall of the apartment at home, and how his wife did her hair, sitting at the dressing-table, and a letter from a woman reader who was a bit cracked…And, for some reason or other, a poem he’d written long ago:
Like a Jewess exchanging her old religion for a new one,
There was a sudden shower of hail
Every time winter taps on the windowpanes
You will be back, even if you’re not here.
Even if you were changed into music, or mourning, or a cross
I would recognize you and fly to you.
And like someone extracting a pearl from its shell,
I would pluck you from music, the cross or death,
Alexander Bermema, he said to himself, trying out the new name the man in the restaurant had suggested. And again there went through his mind, like beads on a string, the coming of the third millennium, the ringing of bells, Ana’s tears, and the Place Vendôme in Paris on an afternoon so cold it intensified the shiver the prices of the diamonds in the shop-windows sent down his spine…
That was how Skënder spent the rest of the morning, sometimes lying down and sometimes pacing back and forth in his room. Every time he thought of his dead novel his hand went instinctively to his ribs, for it seemed to him something had been removed from his side.
At midday C— V— came and knocked at the door to tell him it was time for lunch. They went down together to the almost empty dining room, and hardly spoke to one another at all throughout the meal.
Back in his room, Skënder felt this Sunday would never end. For want of anything better to do he rang the bell, and when the Chinese floor waiter pet his head round the door he ordered a beer.
At three in the afternoon there was another knock, and this time it wasn’t C— V—. But before Skënder identified his visitor he noticed he was holding out a card with red ideograms inscribed on it: clearly an invitation, Skënder wasn’t sure whether it was by chance that he’d concentrated exclusively on the card, or if the messenger had trained himself to disappear as if by magic behind the proffered invitation.
As Skënder held out his hand for it he raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“A concert,’ the man told him, smiling.
Skënder scrutinized the card. The Chinese characters made no sense to him, but he managed to pick out the figures 19,30, which was presumably the time the concert started.
Well, a concert would be a welcome distraction amid this sea of boredom. It wasn’t four o’clock yet, but he was so glad to have something to do he opened the wardrobe and started looking for a suitable shirt.
13
IN ANOTHER HOUR (by which time Skënder Bermema had shaved again and chosen a shirt and tie, while in a nearby room C— V—, with whom he hadn’t been in touch, had done the same), all e
leven hundred invitations to the official concert had been delivered to various addresses in Peking, and most of the recipients were in their rooms getting ready for the evening.
Some of them - mostly women — were still lying luxuriously in the bath, the shapes of their bodies blurred by the warm water, while in the distance their husbands were on the phone, asking other diplomats what they knew about this impromptu concert to which everyone was invited at scarcely three hours’ notice. Was it just the way the Chinese did these things, or did it have some special significance? It was very odd…Was it a concert being brought forward from a later date, and if so why? It had been rumoured for some time that Mao was ill…Or was it Zhou Enlai? Who could say? Anyhow, the concert was not to be missed. It would provide all kinds of hints as to what was going on: what you had to watch out for was the order in which the Chinese leaders arrived, who was seated with whom in the boxes, whether Jiang Qing was there or not…
Skënder looked in the mirror and put the finishing touch to his tie, thee felt the little cut he’d made on his right cheek while shaving. At that moment each of the eleven hundred guests was doing something connected with the concert: putting something on or taking something off, adjusting a collar or combing his hair. Ambassadors kept hurrying from their mirrors to their phones, which rang more and more often, while their wives got out of their baths at last, the gurgle of the water going down the drain - half a sob and half a cry of pleasure — carrying with it a hundred little mysteries the ladies couldn’t have explained even if they’d wanted to. Warm and naked still, they selected their jewels for the evening, while out in the hall their husbands were still on the phone, discussing the same theories as before: “Do you think it’s something to do with Mao? Or with Zhoe Enlai? It’s not impossible, now we know that he’s ill too…”
Unusually for him, Zhou Enlai was also looking at himself in the glass. His swarthy face looked greenish and chill. He tried to imagine what he’d look like when he appeared in his box. The men who for years had been hoping to take his place, men like Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Hua Guofeng, would probably heave a sigh of relief. All things come to him who waits. Zhou Enlai smiled bitterly. He couldn’t do anything now to deprive them of their satisfaction: as soon as he appeared in public everyone would think the same thing — he was attending his last concert. And it was true.