“This very evening!” shrieked the inner voice. “Appear as him this evening, and you will triumph!”
Back home again, he had wandered around the rooms aimlessly until he realized what it was he was looking for. A mirror. He stood for a long time gazing at his own reflection. He couldn’t send for a hairdresser or a make-up man from the theatre — no one must be let into the secret. Everyone had been suspicious and on the alert lately. He’d manage by himself.
As if afraid of being overheard, he tiptoed over to a cupboard and got out a comb and a pair of scissors. Why were his hands shaking? Other people had used poison or a dagger…
That thought calmed him a little. But when the first tuft of hair fell down beside the mirror, he was almost surprised it wasn’t spattered with blood, it was past five when he started on his task: at seven o’clock he still hadn’t finished. As he plied comb and scissors alternately, his thoughts wandered to the still empty theatre, the envelope containing Zhou Enlai’s will, and other more trivial things, His hands went on shaking. Sometimes he thought the resemblance was increasing, sometimes it seemed to have disappeared altogether. Once he suddenly turned and looked at the portrait of Mao up on the walclass="underline" he appeared to be looking back at him sardonically. The scissors in Hua’s hand flashed as if with menace.
At a quarter past seven there was a knock at the door. It must be one of his bodyguards. The time has come, he thought, and tiptoed back to the cupboard, put the comb and scissors back in their drawer and covered them up with a towel. Then he walked towards the door. But just as he was reaching out for the door-knob, he remembered in time and went back to the mirror and the tufts of hair still lying around it. He gathered them up in his handkerchief; rubbed the top of the dressing-table to make sure there was no trace left behind; then he went over and opened the door.
* * *
The car taking Skënder Bermema and C–V— to the concert drew up outside the theatre. As they alighted they saw other groups of guest, Chinese and foreign, making for the lighted entrance as their limousines glided quietly away like empty shells.
As he entered the auditorium, Skënder was dazzled by the bright red velvet. The stalls were starting to fill up, but there was practically no one in the boxes yet.
Skënder and C–V— followed their guide as he located the seats assigned to them. They settled down. The theatre was quieter than Skënder had expected, but when he looked around he saw that the stalls were now almost full, except for a few latecomers picking their way to their places. The boxes too were filling up, and Skënder noticed that the people round him were looking at them as he was, but without actually turning their heads. It was twenty-five past seven. Skënder, like all the rest, went on watching the highest dignitaries arrive. He saw the Albanian ambassador and almost waved to him; but of course the other wouldn’t have noticed. Thee he spotted the Politbureau member with the turban: he was in the same box as “Double-Barrel”, whom he recognized from seeing him on television. But this wasn’t the moment for laughter.
At seven-twenty-eight Jiang Qing and Wang Hongwen took their places in their boxes. There were only two boxes vacant now. At first glance it was as if the whole power of the state was embodied in those present, and the two empty boxes didn’t count. But a few seconds later, by some mysterious process, the opposite came to be true: for the thought of those who were absent sent a chill down everyone’s spine. They might make their appearance at any moment, with their pallid faces and the mocking smiles that seemed to say, “You rejoiced too soon at our not being here!”
There wasn’t a murmur. On the contrary, the silence deepened, and only a mute kind of stir ran through the theatre when Hua Guofeng appeared in one of the last two empty boxes. “What’s this? What’s this?” hundreds of people silently chorused. Skënder watched their guide’s profile: his pale face had gone red, as if it were bathed in a sulphurous light; he wore an expression of mingled terror and hope, like someone pleading for mercy, “Hua Guofeng’s face!” Skënder exclaimed inwardly, “What’s happened to it?” But he didn’t expect to get an answer here, in this place inhabited by ghosts. His own mind, that mechanism so apt to produce the strangest associations of ideas, soon supplied him with a number of possibilities. Hua Guofeng’s face was the spitting image of Mao’s. He might have taken the skin off Mao’s face and stuck it on his own. Many others must have been revolving the same horrible thoughts as Skënder, for the whole theatre seemed to have suffered an electric shock.
It was exactly seven-thirty when the house-lights began to fade. And it was at that precise moment, between the house-lights going out and the foot-lights coming on, that Zhou Enlai appeared in the one remaining empty box.
So now the boxes are full, thought Skënder Bermema.
Zhou Enlai seemed to hover between being a human being and a phantom. The curtain slowly rose. “God!” exclaimed Berraema, astonished to find himself using a word that had been obsolete for so long.
The concert had been going on for an hour, and it was evident there wasn’t going to be an interval Hundreds of motionless heads gazed at what was going on on the stage. Although everything seemed so cold and stiff, one was instinctively conscious of something, some thrill of apprehension, passing from the stage to the auditorium and vice versa. When the second woman dancer, rustling her lilac-coloured skirts, went over and almost brushed against the yellow stork, the whole audience held its breath, Pooh, thought Skënder, what has it got to do with me? But try as he might he couldn’t help sharing in the general feeling of dread.
The second woman dancer twirled more and more slowly near the stork. The audience was mesmerized. Suddenly, as if by mistake, a red spotlight swept briefly over the boxes, so that their velvet walls seemed to be streaming with blood. Skënder thought he saw a pair of eyes rolling in ecstasy. What face was this that he thought he recognized? He’d seen it somewhere before, in a book or perhaps in a newspaper article about Cambodia, Again- he told himself all this was nothing to do with him, but the more he said it the more involved he became, as the music went on throbbing through the theatre. He thought he was going to faint. Once or twice he almost stood up and shouted: “Stop these celebrations! I’ve got a novel that’s dying!”