It has to be said, however, that apart from feeling revolted by the affair, all of us (probably including Big Boss himself) felt a degree of relief. Because it meant that someone’s yearning to take the Head of Broadcasting down a peg or two (which was the sense we made of the whole maneuver) had now been satisfied. All it took were two or three well-chosen expressions, copied from the watchwords stenciled on walls (Always learn from the people! Keep things simple! and so on) to have the affair wrapped up. Self-criticism was a truly miraculous cure.
It did not occur to any of us to think we might have been wrong from start to finish. A week later, after the Party meeting where we were told that the boss and our other superiors had restated their self-criticisms, but with greater attentiveness and gravity, we got notice of a full staff meeting. Can it be about the same old business? — I can’t believe it! — Can you imagine, going over it all again, in front of everybody?
The purpose of the meeting turned out to be exactly what we had surmised. A representative of the Central Committee was in attendance, and he threw his piercing glance at everyone in the room in turn.
“I have as it were the feeling that you’ve treated this business a little too lightly, comrades. You thought a handful of superficial self-criticisms would do the trick and there was no need to dig into the causes and roots of evil. But the Party won’t be hoodwinked as easily as that!”
Big Boss’s eyes drooped with weariness. Weary, too, were the faces of us all. For it was but the start of a whole string of meetings that we would have to attend, like stations of the Cross. We would come out of it unrecognizable as our former selves, with our skin torn, our flesh bruised, and our bodies marked by it forever.
Our initial arguments about respect for the authority of the Head of Broadcasting, our fear of offending him, and so forth — how antiquated they now seemed! We were in a different climate, and our priority had to be to shelter from the hailstorm that was going to rain down on every one of us. Each new day brought utterly unexpected changes in mental composition. What was absurd, unimaginable, literally impossible on a Monday turned out to be quite all right on Tuesday, when it promptly began to eat away another, even more horrifying barrier.
The first to meet his comeuppance was the Head of Radio. He tried to defend himself by claiming that he had at least shown some anxiety about that letter from Lushnjë (which was true). Had he not said: “You must be careful with things like that, sometimes they can get you in deep shit”? But that was what sealed his fate.
“So why didn’t you raise the issue, since you were anxious about it, eh? So as not to incur your boss’s displeasure? Out of servility, hmm? Or worse? Speak up, comrade! Ask yourself! You’re much more dangerous than your scatterbrained colleagues. You see evil staring at you, and you turn a blind eye!”
After the Head of Radio had been banished, first to the countryside, then to the mines, most of us thought that, what with the scapegoat having been found, the hailstorm would abate. Nothing of the sort. Meetings continued to be called at the same grueling frequency. The most awful part was realizing we were getting used to the idea of what had seemed to be, only the day before, a somber foreboding too ghastly to seem plausible. At the bottom of each hole, another hole opened up beneath us, and we all thought: Oh, no! Not further! There has to be a limit, things are already abominable enough! But by the next day the abominable had turned into the sort of thing that nobody found surprising anymore. What was even worse was that wavering minds strove to find a justification for it.
Each day we felt the cogs and wheels of collective guilt pushing us further down. We were obliged to take a stand, make accusations, and fling mud at people — at ourselves in the first place, then at everyone else. It was a truly diabolical mechanism, because once you’ve debased yourself, it’s easy to sully everything around you. Every day, every hour that passed stripped more flesh from moral values. Minds became drunk on an unwholesome brew: the euphoria of self-debasement, of universal corruption. Sell me, brother, I won’t hold it against you, I’ve sold you so many times already. . And the noose of collective guilt carried on tightening around our necks.
At first sight, you might have said it was nothing more than a war machine set in motion by malice, ambition, and the thirst for revenge. But a closer look would have shown that things were more complex than that. Like an alloy composed of extremely varied materials, it contained utterly contradictory ingredients: cruelty as well as compassion, repentance alongside unbounded joy at not having been struck down — which itself gave way almost instantly to the superstitious fear of having to pay for such luck. The complete absence of coherence and logic only increased people’s fatalism. Thus even those who had refrained from joining in the hysteria also got hit. They aroused a bizarre kind of commiseration that had the outward form of resentment. Poor guys! But, from another point of view, it serves them right, they were too hasty in thinking they could get off lightly. . The hysterical were also taken down — those who had yelled louder than anyone else against the accused, and called for the heaviest sanctions. Their fall raised a wave of satisfaction. Serves them right! Everything has to he paid for in this life. . And the blade also fell on those who dug in their heels and refused to write a self-criticism at first; but the pit was just as deep, if not deeper, for those who’d been in a hurry to confess their sins and to testify against themselves.
It was impossible to know what was the better course — to stay in your shell or to come out fighting; to be prominent or just one of the crowd; to be a Party member or outside all parties. As it is during an earthquake, people ran about in all directions looking for shelter, but buildings that looked solid and shock-proof would suddenly collapse. Everything was shifting, nothing remained still, and this profound instability affected thoughts and behaviors. Reasoning was put out of joint, whims of resisting vanished into thin air, as did any thought of revolt. Nobody would have dared ask what was going on or why. And you didn’t feel angry in the slightest, just as you wouldn’t think of railing against thunder and lightning.
Was the plan to scatter and destroy us all so that only the state would remain standing, like an inaccessible, untouchable Fate? Or was there just some mysterious set of circumstances allowing the storm to rage ever on? The force of its gale, the way it gusted from unexpected angles, and the sheer randomness of what it knocked down certainly incited terror. What was quite noticeable, however, was that it also aroused admiration for Power.
As we went from meeting to meeting, our mangled souls and diminished beings became ever more un-hinged. A comrade of mine who worked for the courts told me that a similar kind of decline usually set in among prisoners held in solitary confinement, especially during the first phase of the investigation. We, of course, could go out into the open and mingle in noisy crowds, but we felt as isolated as if we had been incarcerated between the four walls of a cell. Maybe even more so.
By now the letter from Lushnjë had come to seem as remote and unlikely as the omen that in bygone days was believed to tell of a coming plague. Where was that letter now? On what shelf, in what archive had it been filed? In what closet now hung that only slightly overlong dress that had provoked the fatal letter?
If anyone had said a few days ago — a whole era ago — that the letter that prompted the Head of Broadcasting’s witticisms over coffee would one day cost him his job, we’d have split our sides laughing. But that day had come, and nobody found it surprising. We were all rather more inclined to feel a kind of relief. The boil had been lanced at long last! The cure would bring peace to all, and not least to the Head of Broadcasting himself. Granted, the penalty could hardly have been more humiliating for a member of the Central Committee. Big Boss was redeployed to manage municipal services in a small town called N. That’s not too bad a deal for him when all is said and done, people opined. He would still have a car. All right, only an old rattletrap. But a jalopy is still a car — and a whole lot better than being eaten away by anxiety.