Of course, you could look on the bright side. Yes, the hurricane had drifted away from the Broadcasting Service and was now battering all the other institutions of cultural life. It was said that grievous errors of liberal inspiration had spread their tentacles almost everywhere — to the Union of Writers and Artists, books and magazines, and film production. .
The brass band’s beat was now keeping time with the train of my thoughts. For a short while, I’d imagined the band had paused and then started up again even more deafeningly. Actually, there had been no interlude. It was just an impression, perhaps a consequence of taking in the music while lost in my mental reenactment of events at the Broadcasting Service. I must have incorporated the music unconsciously and allowed the furious and sinister flourishes of drums and brass to mark time to the horrors of that past madness.
The hurricane had sucked up writers, ministers, allegedly right-deviationist ideas, movies, senior civil servants, and plays. Amid the general chaos, the expression “rightist deviation in cultural affairs” often floated to the surface, and in its wake came the even more ominous phrase, “anti-Party group.”
Compared to what was going on in the capital, the circumstances of the former Head of Broadcasting in the little town of N. — which most of us had first considered utterly degrading — looked idyllic. To be responsible only for house painters, toilet repairers, and swimming pool maintenance workers! That was an oasis of peace compared to areas in the eye of the storm, as Ideology and Art now were. Some people must surely have envied him in secret. .
The peace didn’t last long, however. One day a delegate turned up at N. to attend a grassroots Party meeting for the locality that now provided the entire horizon of the former Head of Broadcasting’s political landscape.
“In the light of recent events, what do you now have to say to the Party?”
The meeting at which he lost everything he still had — his membership of the Central Committee, his Party card, his job as manager of municipal services, and his official car — was not a long one. Next morning he turned up for work as a municipal laborer wearing an old pair of dungarees and a paper hat of the sort house painters wear to protect their hair from splashes of whitewash, and maybe he thought he had touched bottom then. No one can say what he really felt, however, because from that day on nobody ever spoke to him. He worked alternate weeks as a house painter and as a tile layer in apartment bathrooms, a silent and nameless being under a paint-splotched cap.
In the end, if somewhat late in the day, peace, or the soggy kind of calm that buckets of whitewash, white ceramic tiles, and especially mute anonymity seem to induce, would probably have come to him. So he must have been truly shaken by the knocking on the door in the wee hours when they came to arrest him one day. He was destined to know the fear of falling one more time, just when he thought he’d got to the bottom of the abyss and was safe from any further descent.
The question “why?”— the accursed question that had nagged at him ever since he had begun to fall, right down to the day when they put on the handcuffs — was finally about to get an answer.
But answer there was none. Indeed, during the investigation, as he lay all alone in his prison cell, he found it harder and harder to imagine what it might be. So it went on until the day he was charged and heard the heavy prison sentence pronounced: fifteen years.
After all that, he must surely have felt relief. The relief was certain now, nothing could threaten it anymore, and it tasted almost like bliss. . because he could not possibly have known of that dark, deep, and nameless pit in the chrome ore mines. And when in the half-light some unknown hand shoved him into it, he hardly had a moment to think about anything at all. The fall was so brief it left no time for questions, dilemmas, or regrets. Maybe he left this world screaming, but it could only have been by instinct, like the futile attempts we all make to stop ourselves from falling by grasping at the sides of the well. But his desperate arm-flapping, that vague, instinctive reminiscence of bygone ages when birdmen still flew, remained unseen by any human eye. Maybe the very absence of witnesses was what gave his fall its unreal dimension, and made it like an echo of the ancient tale about falling to the netherworld.
But where could you find eagles to bring you back up? And supposing you did find a bird to carry you, all that would ever be seen of you again would be dry bones.
The band went on pounding out merry tunes. Squads of miners, whose plastic helmets made them look like dwarves, were now marching past the stands. Maybe they come from the chrome ore mines, I thought. I’d so often tried to wipe that story from my mind, but it kept coming back, like an obsession. I was certainly not the only person to have wondered hundreds, maybe thousands, of times if that notorious letter really had come from Lushnjë, or whether it had been penned somewhere else and then discreetly planted in one of the letter boxes you could find at street corners almost anywhere.
The purge of the army, which came soon after Culture had been dealt with, began in the same kind of way. It was generally thought that it had started with a tank maneuver carried out directly across from the offices of a neighborhood Party committee. The purification campaign in the industrial sector, on the other hand, was set off by a handful of ore — ore with a suspicious gleam that betrayed an attempt at sabotage. Someone eventually managed to trace the lump of ore, which like the presenter’s dress and the design of the military exercise had led to a procession of coffins, right back to the Central Committee.
“Stop that!” I ordered myself, again and again. I did not want any more recollections, I wanted only to commune with my sorrow. But the same old thoughts kept buzzing around in my head. The dress, the exercise, the suspicious nugget. . But what could have been glinting in it, if not a beam from the Beyond?
What had happened in our meeting room was rehearsed in the most varied walks of life and on a far grander scale, right across the nation. Soldiers who had treated the rout of the artists as a joke and rubbed their hands gleefully as they watched it unfold (Serves those liberal guys right! They’ve had it too good for too long! It’s their turn to take the rap!) shook like reeds when they saw the storm rushing toward them. Later on, people in industry, who’d crowed about the military’s foolish self-assurance, met the same fate. From then on, workers in other sectors kept their sarcastic comments to themselves as they waited anxiously for their turn to come.
Like successive bouts of the same disease, the now familiar attitudes recurred: people lost their tempers, then collapsed, then tried to justify why they had been lacking in courage, then they submitted and turned their backs on the victims. No smoke without fire! Why else would they have been punished so harshly? It got to the point where you couldn’t find any Valium at the pharmacy (just asking for box of tabs became a suspicious act). Couples split up, people had depressions and mental breakdowns.