The Concert (12 page)

He felt the only way he could keep the memory safe was to disappear. That was what he must do. He wouldn't phone Linda; he would set their moment apart from reality, let it be sublimated by oblivion. Even if he happened to meet her by chance in the street, he'd pretend not to remember anything, perhaps not even to know her.

As he walked to the bus stop he thought now of the events of the previous afternoon, now about the reason for his being summoned to the factory. The man at the gate gave him a cheerful wink.

“Back again, are you, lad? Good!”

“I don't know about that, Jani It depends what they tell me in personnel.”

“Go ahead,” said the old man. “There aren't any Chinks in the corridors. They're all on the factory floor.”

Victor smiled sadly. How had things got to the point where he had to enter his workplace almost surreptitiously? In his last days at the factory, before he was suspended, his friends had kidded him about what had happened, suggesting he should come to the factory in a theatrical wig and a false moustache so that the Chinese wouldn't recognize him.

When he came out of the personnel office, Victor couldn't decide whether he ought to lament or rejoice. They'd told him he was to Seave straight away for a new job at the steelworks in Elbasae. “In other words, I've got to leave Tirana just to please that swine?” he'd exclaimed, surprising even himself by his sudden rage. “Watch what you say, comrade,” the head of personnel had answered sternly. “Hundreds of comrades and Party members consider it an honour to work at Elbasan, And don't forget you're in the wrong. The Party told us not to react to any provocation on their part, and you had to go and…”

“What a fool I am,” Victor thought then. “I ought just to be glad the matter's being wound up without more ado…You're right, comrade,” he told the head of personnel, who was still scowling at him disapprovingly.

But, once out in the corridor, he felt suddenly empty. He was going to have to leave here for good. No matter how much he told himself it mightn't really be for ever, that the Chinese might eventually go themselves and he be able to come back — you never knew — it didn't make him feel any better. He walked across the yard not bothering to avoid attracting the Chinamen's attention. His case was settled now; he had no reason to skulk. He'd even have liked to meet them and say right to their faces: “Well, I'm going. Satisfied?”

He stopped at the refreshment stall for a coffee. Everyone said, “Oh, so you're back at last, are you?” But he just shook his head.

Before he left he made one last round of the huge factory where ‘he'd spent part of his life. Everywhere voices called out, “Back again, engineer?” But he either shook his head or merely smiled. Pain at having to leave this place was like a growing weight inside him. The wall newspapers, to which until now he'd paid little attention, the graphs recording socialist endeavour, the photographs of outstanding workers., even the mere announcements dotted about the noticeboards - “Union meeting tomorrow at 4 o'clock,” “Choir practice today” - all seemed different now.

As he prowled around he could feel people looking at him. “There are all sorts of stories being told about you,” said an electrical engineer who kept him company for a while. “You're a real legend! More than a legend! There's talk of demonstrations against you in Tienanmen Square, protests at the U.N., and I don't know what! Are people letting their imagination rue away with them, or can it all be true?”

Victor smiled as he listened. As a matter of fact, the business of the X-ray wasn't all that different from such fabrications. As he passed through the workshops the female workers on either side gazed at him admiringly. Every so often he would remember Linda's embrace, and he would feel as if he were weightless, borne along on some invisible wave. Then ordinary consciousness returned, and he could feel the ground under his feet again.

At last he came to the place where he had stood on the Chinaman's foot. He shook-his head as if to drive away the idea of those cloth shoes, more like slippers, so symbolic of the Chinaman's stealthy approach. The softness of those shoes contrasted with the cynicism which had made their wearer call for a stoppage ie two of the workshops and almost bring the whole factory to a standstill. For a moment Victor had felt as if all the hypocrisy in the world were concentrated in that pair of cloth slippers. Moved not only by anger but also by the desire to tear away the mask of deceit, he'd gone up to the man and trodden on his foot as if by accident.

“Yes, a real legend — you're the hero of the hour,” the other engineer went on. “Do you know what Aunt Nasta says? She says it's a shame to lose a good man just because of one of those short-assed Chinks!”

He guffawed as he spoke, but Victor found it hard to join in.

An hour later he left the factory and walked towards the bus stop, gazing blankly in front of him and still deep in thought. He looked back one last time at the chimneys, belching black smoke. He'd recently dreamed, of seeing others like them, only they were all upside down. Perhaps, with his transfer, his life would get back on the right lines. As the proverb said, every cloud has a silver lining. He went on musing as he looked back at the chimneys, thinking of the engineer's jokes but still not finding them funny. The way the smoke rose into the sky struck him as somehow alien to and supremely scornful of the human race. Not for nothing did interpreters of dreams regard smoke as a bad omen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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