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 continent. 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?
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.