“Who is it?” said the voice from inside the room again.
Skënder felt like answering, “It’s shame!”
How shameful it would have been. Everyone would have known they’d gone for one another like two fighting cocks while on an official visit to China. A visit that coincided with the Day of the Birds!
Skënder turned away from the door and began to wander up and down the still-empty corridor. He glanced both ways: not a soul. He concluded that no one could have heard them: the scene he’d imagined was still so clear in his mind that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone rush up to see what the noise was all about. He hesitated for a moment at his own door, uncertain whether to go in or not. At the end of the corridor, sitting in a little glass box, there ought to be an attendant, a combination of guard and floor-waiter, who saw everything. He’d certainly have noticed Skënder’s comings and goings, Skënder tiptoed towards the glass cage. Yes, the man was there. Skënder thought he should make sure he was wearing the necessary smile, but when he caught sight of his reflection in the glass of the cage he saw that his expression, such as it was, would do: after all the man was a Chinese, and Skënder didn’t know him from Adam, The man looked back at him vacantly: he obviously hadn’t noticed anything,
Skënder nodded affably. Unusually, the man didn’t return his smile.
“Ho,” said Skënder, using the only word of Chinese he knew, “Everything all right?”
“Ho,” replied the other, still not smiling.
Hell! thought Skënder. He must have noticed something.
“Quiet, isn’t it?” he said.
The Chinese leaned nearer to the glass, and spoke. He was probably saying, “What?”
Skënder tried scraps of all the languages he knew in order to try to communicate, bot it was no good. Then he remembered that these attendants had to pretend they didn’t know any foreign languages, even if it wasn’t true. He waved to the man by way of goodnight, thee turned and began to walk away. He was amazed to hear a voice behind him call out in English:
“Comrade!”
The Chinese had stepped out of his cage and was obviously trying to tell him something. He’s seen my comings and goings in the corridor, thought Bermema, and the scoundrel means to concoct some slanderous report about me. He started to go towards him: after all, if the man was prepared to talk to him, perhaps he wasn’t going to write a report, merely give him a friendly warning.
“Eh?” said Skënder. Then, in English: “Do you speak English?”
The Chinese nodded, rather guiltily. Skënder smiled, and told himself to keep cool.
“Can’t you sleep?” said the Chinese. “I can’t, either.”
Skënder’s jaw dropped. A Chinaman talking about sleep like an ordinary human being? Their usual way of referring to the subject of repose was: “Imperialists and revisionists sleep with one eye open,” or “Revolutionaries mustn’t rest on their laurels.”
“Why not?” asked Skënder, though it was rather a ridiculous question: the man was on duty — he was supposed to stay awake.
“The Chairman in dying,” said the Chinaman.
Skënder leaned nearer. His breath misted the glass of the cage and made a sort of screen between him and the other.
“Mao dying?” he repeated. It was hard to believe a Chinese could bring himself to say such a thing.
The man nodded. His eyes were red and mournful.
“I’m sorry,” said Skënder, nonplussed.
Through the mist on the glass the man looked grief-stricken.
Skënder muttered some words of sympathy, and found he couldn’t just walk away. As the Chinaman’s almond eyes looked blankly back at him, it struck Skënder that these people’s slanting orbs were made to express suffering. Why hadn’t he noticed it before?
He’d have liked to offer the man some consolation, to show sincere fellow-feeling. It seemed barbaric just to leave him alone in his cage with his sorrow.
What’s happening to me? Skënder wondered. Why was he feeling so overcome with pity when he least expected it? Was it just a passing reaction, due to the fact that the word “dying” evoked for him the phrase “giving up the ghost”, and thence an image of the soul? Or was it some other association, deriving from the thought of that placid round face, which seemed a million miles away from hatred; of his words, now those of a rather senile old man — “I am only a wandering monk with holes in my umbrella;” of the children he had lost, the wife who had died too, and the poem he’d written for her — “Perhaps we’ll meet again amongst the stars;” and of how he now lived in a cave like a kind of deranged hermit. But the important thing was that whether you liked it or not, he was the creator of the new China…
But think of all his misdeeds too! Skënder reminded himself. It’s true that he made modern China, but then, after that, his disturbed mind led him to create a frightful chaos, unprecedented in the annals of mankind. He mowed down the intelligentsia ruthlessly; he had the fate of Cambodia on his conscience …No, how could one feel any sorrow for him? It was other people who ought to be pitied!
Still, when a billion human beings grieved, you couldn’t help being affected, just as on a damp autumn evening you feel something of the chill of the sea.
Yet what was strange about it was not so much the thing itself as the process by which it came about — the mysterious paths along which the contagion of pity moved. Pity, and repentance, and remorse.
But all this was unimportant compared with what he was about to witness: probably the greatest grief there had ever been.
The man in the cage was sobbing now. Apparently the consternation he’d seen on the foreigner’s face had unleashed his tears. Skënder tapped on the glass to wish him goodnight. But the man stood up and came out into the corridor.
"My sincere condolences,” said Skënder, holding out his hand.
The other stretched out both of his, bending forward stiffly like someone unused to demonstrations of feeling.
Skëeder, embracing him, felt his tears on his owe cheek.
“May he rest in peace!” he murmured. It seemed to him this venerable expression was the phrase best suited to the occasion, existing as it did on a plane above truth and untruth, above all human passions.
He walked slowly back to his room. Before going to bed he went over to the window again and looked out at the ideograms shining here and there in the darkness. “The Chairman is dying,” he repeated. There were no doubt plenty of signs out there that meant “chairman”, but probably none that meant “death”. Bet tomorrow, he thought, or the next day, or in a week at the latest, it will be there.
He put his hand to his face, where there must still have been traces of the Chinaman’s tears. How strange: he hadn’t embraced any Chinese when it would have been natural to do so; but he had embraced one now, unexpectedly and at the moment of parting. Was it an omen? If so, of what?
He paced up and down for a while as if to clear his head of his swirling thoughts before trying to sleep. It was the moment of parting from evil, certainly. The omens foretold a farewell to suffering. The pain which history had inflicted on Albania at the end of the present millennium was about to end.
He felt like shouting for joy.
“Let the bells ring out!” he cried aloud. “There has been a sign from heaven, and we have come to the parting of the ways!”
He looked in the mirror at his cheek, at the place where Asia had bestowed a final kiss.
Outside, the unintelligible ideograms hung in the sky like words in a dream. He turned away from them and went to bed, bet before he fell asleep they crept back into his mind, a vast galaxy in which, somewhere, an invisible hand prepared to switch on another, paler light: the ideogram of death.