The Concert (56 page)

D

So there
was
an invitation. But not to Peking. Merely to dinner.

And the words “Where are we going?”
were
uttered, bet not by the marshal, and not in his car. They were spoken first in a small van, then on a plane, by someone whose name remained unknown. But that was later.

Meanwhile the bullet-proof car drove on in silence towards Mao's house. Night was falling, It was still only early autumn, but the turning leaves had already lost some of their brightness. In a way that made the landscape more beautiful.

The marshal looked out at it as they went along. This part of the outskirts of the capital was particularly appealing at this time of year. Probably that was why Mao had invited him out here, rather than, as he usually did, to his house in Peking.

The lamps by the entrance to the villa came into view, it wasn't quite dark yet, and the light they shed looked chilly.

E

Ten hours later, at dawn, the plane comes into the story.

Where from? Was it a hoax, a figment of the imagination?

That was what people thought at first when they heard the truth, i.e. the current version of the marshal's death. When it was given out that he had been struck down on the ground, in his car, at kilometre 19 on the road to Mao's house, it followed automatically that the story about his — or his corpse's — attempted escape by air, together with the details about his being in a hurry, the shots, the suggestion that the plane be brought down by means of a rocket, the words “Let him go,” the charred corpses in Mongolia, and so on, were only inventions designed to camouflage the truth.

But if that was the first reaction, the voice of reason whispered, “But a plane really did crash in Mongolia! Here, inside China, we can dress things up in any way we like, but when they happen on the other side of the frontier they're beyond our control.”

So a plane really did go up in flames. Shot down on Mongolian territory. With Chinese corpses on board. Was it a mere coincidence, exploited to make people think this was the plane on which Lin Biao had tried to flee? This didn't seem very likely, as even the most inexperienced investigator would have had no difficulty in seeing that the charred bodies weren't those of the marshal and his wife.

So the business of the plane couldn't have been accidental It really did have something to do with Lin Biao, whether in reality or in some fictional account of it. Was the plane necessary as the only way of proving that Lin Biao had tried to escape to the Soviet Union? That would have been rather expensive. A more plausible explanation was that the plane journey was part of some previous plot that for some reason was abandoned. But rather than waste it — after all, this was in the middle of an economy drive, when every-thing possible was being recycled — the people concerned pressed it into service as a smokescreen.

The discarded scenario was probably also the source of the rocket, the invitation, and Mao's “Let him go.” But such details were modified to fit into the new plan: the urgent invitation to Peking became an invitation to dinner, and the rocket was fired at a car instead of a plane. As for the words, “Let him go,” they seem really to have been spoken, bet in different circumstances. Something like this? One of Mao's personal bodyguards suggested, “Let me kill him after dinner, in the hall,” but Mao said, “Let him go, knowing there was a nice big rocket waiting for him at kilometre 19."

Thus the rocket and the words “Let him go” figured together both in the reality and in the rumour, though in a different order.

And the plane still had its place in the story. Whether as an empty shell or a delusion, it was still too early to say. For a good billion Chinese it carried Lin Biao, still alive bet pale with terror, on his attempted escape. For the inner circle around Mao, it carried only his corpse,

“It was Zhou who saw to the details of this business,” Mao had said the following morning, drinking tea while the plane was still
m
Chinese airspace. “We shall all be called on some time to say what happened, but I don't think there's any cause for alarm., I have good reason to believe he is dead by now.”

The others didn't dare ask questions, especially as Mao told them bluntly he himself didn't know the ins and outs. They just sipped their tea, imagining what had happened. They all saw it differently except for one thing: a bloody corpse in a seat on a plane, with someone trying to fasten the seat-belt to keep it from slipping about.

But was that what really happened?

Silence. As they went on drinking tea, each one in his mind's eye went up the aluminium steps to the plane, stepped inside, and then drew back…

F

In the First Rumour about the death of Lin Biao there was always a reference to a drawing back. The marshal felt a sudden chill run down his spine before he stepped into the plane, and then drew back.

It was never explained. Some said Lin Biao was so frightened he scarcely had the strength to climb up to the door of the plane and had to be practically dragged inside. Later, when it was suggested that the murderers might already have been on board, Lin Biao's drawing back was explained as a recoil from the sight of those unknown faces. In any case, it was too late. The plane door closed upon him.

When, in due course, the theory that the killers were already on board the plane collapsed, like so many others, the idea that Lin Biao drew back became absurd. Even so, people still referred to it, whether as some kind of clue or as a sign that the marshal had a mysterious presentiment.

But the whole thing was incongruous, and those who studied the question could easily guess that it wasn't the victim who had shrunk back, but the people concerned with his fate, who projected their own reaction on to him. First, thinking he had been alive when on the plane, they'd been shocked at the image of his corpse. Then they'd received a second shock on contemplating the body itself. And then they attributed their recoil to Lin Biao himself, lending him their eyes and making him look at his own image and draw back from that.

As in all eightmares, these imaginings involved inversions in time and space, and other unnatural concatenations.

So Lin Biao hurries over to the plane on which he is to escape (in accordance with his own plans, or someone else's, or merely in somebody's dream?). Once on board he finds his own bloody corpse sitting there. He recoils in terror; turns away in the hope that it's only a hallucination; and thee sees his own corpse again, in a different form…

G

To understand what really happened you have to go back to kilometre 19 on the main road, jest after the car was hit by the rocket.

A voice went on calling “Quick! Quick!” and it didn't take the soldiers long to realize that these were no empty words. But they weren't being asked to mend the road. Nor to repair the kilometre-marker, which had been so battered and singed that the “I9” was hardly legible any more. The soldiers weren't being exhorted to clear away the débris, either, No, it was the charred bodies they were to do something about. Someone pointed first at the corpses,then at a small van that had driven up unobserved.

“Quick, quick — remove the bodies!”

Zhou Enlai and the chief bodyguard stood at a distance, watching what was going on.

The soldiers approached the blackened heap, which was still giving off a smell of ashes and burning rubber. A couple of headlights lit up the scene. The remains of the car were all tangled up with bits of the missile and with the arms and legs of the dead. Some of the metal was charred, some — perhaps parts of the rocket - was still shiny. At first sight the heap of débris could have been the remains of a traffic accident or of a plane crash.

The soldiers extricated the corpses and carried them over to the van. The smell, combined with that of the burnt tyres, was revolting.

“And now get in the van yourselves!”

Inside the van the smell was even worse.

“Where are we going?” asked one of the soldiers.

No one answered. At their feet lay two formless black masses. Who were these unfortunate wretches?

The van drove on and on until it came to a lonely landing strip. Dawn was jest breaking. In the distance you could just make out the shape of an aircraft.

“Quick! Quick!” said a voice again.

The soldiers dragged the bodies - they left black trails behind them — on to the landing strip. Then on to the plane. Not into the hold. Into the cabin, where they were placed on a couple of seats.

“Now get on yourselves.”

The two soldiers climbed on board. The door closed.

“Where are we going?” one of them asked as the plane rose above the clouds.

As before, there was no answer.

The soldiers, who had been up all night, occasionally drowsed off. Their hands and faces bore black traces from where they had handled the corpses^ but they were so worried they didn't notice.

“Where are we?”

Down below there was a flat expanse that looked like the Mongolian desert.

… The plane was found soon after it crashed^ about midday. The Soviet frontier guards examined the débris and the charred bodies with interest. No one, however expert, could have told the difference between one and another. Except for two of them. They had been burned to a cinder twice.

H

The likeness between the remains of the car destroyed the previous day and those of the crashed plane was probably the source of the subsequent duplication.

The plane appeared to have come into being during the night, after everyone had gone to bed. One might say that
Mao
, Zhou and the burned-out car all created it in their sleep.

It was as if, after the group of watchers had melted away in the silence of the night near kilometre 19, the blackened mass of metal, rising ep like a Balkan ghost from the grave, re-assembled itself in a shape that suggested an aircraft.

Perhaps that is how the story will be told two hundred years from now, three hundred, a thousand. If it's remembered at all.

After the nightmare, then, the débris awakened. Silent and black as ever, but now thousands of kilometres away.

That was how the dream mechanism worked, with all its discontinuities, illogicalities and inversions of time and space.

Much later on, simplified by time, the sad story of the marshal will probably be told as follows: Lin Biao was invited by the Chairman to a dinner at which he was murdered. That night his corpse rose up and went away, far away to the Mongolian desert.

I

But what about the bullets in the charred body? And the firing of shots in the plane?

Oh well, it's impossible to get to the whole truth in this business.

You'd have to be inside the heads of each of the two protagonists, Mao and the marshal — preferably both at once — to find out what really happened. And even then…

MACBETH'S LAST WINTER. SYNOPSIS FOR ANOTHER VERSION OF THE TRAGEDY

It's not true that I killed Duncan for his throne. The murder I'm accused of is a typical case of an act the law condones as being committed in self-defence.

Unfortunately people have got the story all wrong. I don't deny that those (if there still are any) who think Duncan was killed by his own guards are completely mistaken. Bet anyone who thinks I myself killed the king because I was greedy for power are even farther from the mark.

Fifteen years have gone by since it happened. And rumour about Duncan's death has grown more and more rife all the time, until this winter it has reached epidemic proportions.

I myself am responsible for the confusion. It would probably have been better if I'd explained at the outset exactly how it happened, instead of kidding myself I could conceal at least half of the truth. No doubt I should have said from the very beginning that Duncan dug his own grave (tyrants often do), and I merely toppled him in.

As a matter of fact, having known the ins and outs of the horrible business all along, I was sure I was telling the truth when I said Duncan had been killed by himself - in other words, by his own servants.

But my own certainty wasn't enough to exonerate me. Not that common talk and gossip in streets and taverns were to blame for that, still less the ham actor, Billy Hampston, who wrote a play based on such rumours (and had his manuscript confiscated by my secret police for his pains).

No, it was someone else's fault, and that someone was, surprising as it may seem, none other than Duncan himself.

This is how it happened.

For a long time he had looked on me with suspicion. This was the result of the mania which most rulers suffer from, and which makes them doubt anyone on the basis of mere slander or calumny. Or perhaps he cultivated the suspicion himself, in order to justify his hatred of me and the hostile schemes that followed from it. It's not unusual for people to hide from themselves, as too shameful, their real reason for disliking-someone, and to try to justify their aversion by explanations even they themselves don't really believe in.

I had observed some time before how jealous Duncan was of me, though in fact it was my wife who had noticed it first. To begin with she'd detected it not in him but in
his
wife. “I can see something malevolent in her eye,” she would say, as we were coming home from some court reception. I used to contradict her: “I don't get that impression at all! The queen seems very friendly to both of us…” But she persisted, and in the end she convinced me. This didn't in the least affect my esteem for Duncan himself. Too bad if the queen's like that, I thought. What matters is what he thinks himself.

But my wife, my beautiful and intelligent lady, would listen angrily and say, “If a wife is jealous, sooner or later the husband will be jealous too.”

And that's what happened. Duncan's looks grew cold, and thee grew colder. Gradually other people began to notice it. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of days of anxiety. I did all I could, regardless of expense, to win over some member of the king's entourage, so as not to be taken unawares.