* * *
Meeting followed meeting. What had been written or thought during the night was said there, sometimes so changed that, as he sat down, the person who’d read it out was amazed and told himself: “Good heavens, I thought I’d said something quite different!” Minister D—’s autocritique was due to be heard at a meeting at the ministry of defence. The tank officers, whose case was now the talk of the town, were also asked to be there.
“I suppose you’re going to speak,” said an officer —’ his badges showed him to be a sapper — who was sitting next to Arian Krasniqi He seemed to have recognized Arian, and was gazing at him with admiration. “Dash it all, if anyone ought to speak, it’s you. Don’t miss the chance of making these scoundrels shake in their shoes! I only wish I were you!”
Arian smiled mechanically. And what would you do if you were me? he asked the other inwardly. Wave a flag and win another stripe?
Other people had indirectly given him the same advice. They were openly disappointed to find him so reserved. They were no doubt saying to themselves, “What a drip! He’s not up to the situation!”
These others were in a state of permanent euphoria. They were firmly expecting to take the places of those about to be ousted, and could scarcely conceal their delight when they saw that the latter included some enemy with whom they had a score to settle, whether because of personal rivalry, or a grudge, or — this was very frequent — some trouble over a woman.
Despite their efforts to mask it with slogans or other empty phrases, their hostility was so obvious that at one meeting the person delivering his autocritique, taken aback by his interrogator’s spite and well aware of the real reason for it, ignored his questions and shouted wildly: “It wasn’t my fault at all! It was hers, Margarita’s, because she told me she loved me!”
“What do you mean — Margarita?” the other yelled back. “We’re talking about matters of importance here, matters of principle! And you go picking petals off a daisy!..”
“Could I help it if she wouldn’t marry you?…”
The chairman of the meeting then intervened to say that either the man in the dock had gone out of his mind, or else, as people in his position often did, he was pretending to have done so to try to avoid receiving his just deserts.
Sometimes at other meetings, still more embarrassing and unanswerable questions were asked, such as, “Why did you trample underfoot the blood of the martyrs?”
Arian found all this utterly pathetic. Once or twice he felt like playing the hero, but he easily resisted the temptation. “You don’t look in a very good temper,” someone said to him one day. “Have you got something on your mind?” “Do you think Î like what’s going on?” he answered. “What do you mean: the exposing of all these dirty tricks?” “That and all the rest.” “It all depends on the way you look at things.”
This was on the day Arian found out that Ana’s name had been mentioned at one of the meetings. He could have borne any accusation against himself better than an aspersion on his dead sister. He was almost blind with fury. But his anger was followed by bitterness. Would these people stop at nothing, digging up that name,bringing it back from the void to scatter it over the pages of their sordid confessions?
The mere thought of it filled him with disgust. Those responsible were probably here in this very room, perhaps they’d just delivered their autocritiques, perhaps they were going to take the stand again. If he’d wanted to, he could quite easily have found out their names, but he refused to do so. He knew that if he did, and then came up against one of them, it would be difficult to remain impartial And at a meeting like this, where people’s fates were at stake, and heads were in danger of rolling, he simply must remain unprejudiced.
The silence in the room grew deeper and deeper as minister D—’s autocritique proceeded. By the time it was over, his voice had almost faded away, and his eyes seemed to have sunk right into his head.
“Any questions?” asked the army officer who was chairing the meeting.
A lot of hands shot up. The minister answered their queries wearily. After about a quarter of an hour, someone mentioned “the affair of the tanks”. Arian’s neighbour clutched at his arm.
The minister was saying, “Of course, it was a bad mistake …The more you examine it the worse…”
“Are any of the tank officers here?” asked the chairman. “Many of us would like to hear from one of them,”
People started to crane their necks and whisper.
“Stand up,” whispered Arian’s neighbour. “What are you waiting for?”
“Is Arian Krasniqi here?” asked the chairman.
Someone said he was.
“Stand up, kid, and throw a scare into them!” his neighbour hissed in his ear.
Arian was in a daze. Afterwards, looking back, he couldn’t remember how he got from his seat to the rostrum. He sometimes thought he must have floated there in a trance.
“Well, Kraseiqi,” said the chairman, “tell us something about this affair of the tanks. You were there when the order arrived, weren’t you?”
Arian nodded, and suddenly, more clearly than ever before, the famous afternoon came back to him — the afternoon when his whole life almost snapped in two: the tanks lined up on the plain, their turrets glistening in the rain, the muzzles of the guns like blind eyes. It all came back so vividly he wouldn’t have been surprised to feel the rain falling on his shoulders. He started to speak, not focusing his eyes on anything inparticular as if he was afraid any distraction might make him lose that inner vision on which the truth, and his honour, depended.
Four days after Suva’s return, the rest of the team from the ministry came back to Tirana.
In Suva’s office, she and Linda swapped news for more than half an hour with the boss and Arian, who had come in that day with his sister. The weather was dull, so they’d switched the lights on, and this, together with their lively conversation, created a cheerful atmosphere.
The recent arrivals had had new stories to tell about the Chinese. Silva asked what was happening about the blast furnace, and was told that in two or three days’ time it was going to be unblocked by means of an explosion — that was the only solution.
“I believe the person in charge is a friend of yours, isn’t he?” said the boss, turning to Silva.
Silva thought she saw Linda avert her eyes on hearing this veiled reference to Besnik Strega’s younger brother, as she had when Silva first told her about the projected explosion, (She had even blushed a little,) After a week’s absence, Silva had noticed a change. Desks, filing cabinets, curtains, telephone — all were just as before. But even though it wasn’t visible, the difference was unmistakably there. For a moment it seemed to Silva that she caught a glimpse of it in Lindaus eyes, which were more beautiful now, even though they wouldn’t meet her own.
“And what about here?’ asked the boss. “Anything new here? We heard there was something, but it was all very vague…”
The other two relayed what people were saying about expulsions from the Party and the sacking of ministers. Every time a name was mentioned, the boss tut-tutted and said, “Dear me! Jolly good!” Then, as if to himself: “Well I never, all these plenums! What a turn-up for the book, eh?”
Scarcely twelve hours after the end of the plenum of the Central Committee, the names of those who had been expelled were announced. For the first time the words “putsch” and “putschist” were used as well as “sabotage” and “saboteur”. The people concerned were said to have been put under house arrest. Some rumours had it that three or four had even been arrested as they came out of the last session, and that when they collected their overcoats from the cloakroom their epaulettes and stripes had already been ripped off.