One rainy day an elderly customs official who’d been suffering for some time from high blood pressure looked out and saw a kind of black cloud hovering over the landing strip. Now the official had seen the Chinese prime minister arrive here and appear in the doorway of his plane no fewer than four times. And since the cloud was hovering at about that level; and perhaps because the customs man had heard about the Chinese prime minister’s ashes being scattered from a plane; and perhaps also because he’d been having dizzy spells lately — well, for some or all of these reasons, he thought the wandering black cloud was the tormented spirit of Zhou Enlai.
It was a boundless ocean, a galaxy of plots, secret machinations and bloody putsches. It was full of the names of monosyllabic victims, whose heads plunged down into the depths and then bobbed up again in a slow dance of death. Some were still red from the burning breath of the present, some dull, cold and covered by the dust of oblivion. They came and went as in a spiritualist séance, scarcely knowing themselves whether they sought revenge, victims or a return to the void.
Enver Hoxha turned the pages of his political journal one by one. He’d been keeping it for years, and it contained thousands of pages about China. A few hours ago he’d had it brought to the house on the coast where he was speeding the weekend. He pushed the small globe away to make room on his desk for the journal. Through the window he could see the deserted coast, with its sand hardened by the winter. His glance came to rest now on one page, now on another, now on a date, now on a heading: Tuesday, 6 October 1964 — bad signs; Thursday, 10 November 1966 — explanations of Kan Cheng…
He’d known some of the people mentioned in these pages personally. Others, long swept away by the changes and chances of the age, were represented by words, intrigues or thoughts that had reached him through reports or radio messages. All this ought to be made available to the world at large, he thought.
His fingers went on turning the pages: Wednesday, 17 February 1971 — Chen Potah sentenced to death for treason; Monday, 15 November 1971 — Reflections on China; Dürres, Saturday, 28 July 1972 — The Lin Biao “plot”.
He paused at this entry. He’d devoted several pages to the various versions of the marshal’s death, and the doubts he’d had about it at the time…The plane had crashed…Caught fire…That’s all anyone knew. According to an Ottawa paper, Kissinger had told the Canadian prime minister that ballistics experts had found bullet marks in the wreckage of the plane…Why should shots have been fired inside the cabin? Who had done it, and why?
He shook his head. An endless series of infamies, that was the only way to describe it.
He looked for his pen among the scattered pages, then underlined the words “Reflections on China”. That was what he’d call his book. It was right that the world should have access to this testimony — it could only be of use to it. He underlined “Reflections on China. again: it would be hard, he thought, to find another country and another people who’d known China as closely as his own country and his own people.
From the corner of the table the small globe cast its shadow over the papers. Sometimes he’d harboured dark thoughts about that globe. Such terrible thoughts they might almost have made it fall out of its trajectory. But this hadn’t happened.
Zhou Enlai,… Tcheng…Tchang…They kept appearing and reappearing, as to the summons of a gong echoing through time.
He looked up from his desk and gazed out again at the deserted coast. A telephone rang somewhere in the depths of the villa. When, after a short while, someone knocked at the door and told him the blast furnace at the steel complex had been unblocked by means of an explosion, he could still hear the echo of the telephone ringing in his ears. The messenger was hovering in the doorway,
“Anything else?”
The man’s expression foreshadowed his answer.
“One man was killed in the explosion. Another was blinded. There were some other casualties.”
Enver Hoxha sat motionless. The explosion had left one person dead and several injured. He looked at the journal as if the incident were already written there. He had a fleeting vision of war casual-ties, old comrades of his who had probably died of their wounds. They’d met their deaths during a period he’d described as “The Age of the Party”, whereas the victims of the blast furnace, forty years later, were probably young, the same age as the earlier victims’ sons. Their injuries would be different too — wounds caused not by bullets or shells, but by molten metal, the raw material of death…But it all came to the same thing in the end…
Yes, in taking up the torch, they all took upon their vulnerable shoulders the burden of sacrifice.
He looked out at the beach again to rid himself of the negative part of the news he’d just heard. The millennium was approaching its end, and his country was going to have to settle its accounts with a world it had never loved. He had done all he could to ensure that Albania should embark on the third millennium in the form he had imparted to it. Bet he still had to see to it that this form lasted for ever, that no one else ever altered it.
He looked back at his papers again, so fixedly that some of the Chinese names seemed to merge with some of the Albanian ones he’d just been thinking about.
Jest as at the time of the break with the Soviets, many people would see the rupture with China as a farewell to communism — or to the East, as it was called in some parts of the world. These same people would expect to see the churches reopened and ordinary life liberalized — a general “opening up”.
But they would rub their hands too soon, as before. And as before he would strike them down without mercy.
He reached for his pen to write these thoughts down. He thought them over for a while, in order to phrase them with suitable solemnity. When he’d set them down in black and white, he smiled.
Twenty-four hours before the unblocking of the furnace, at about two in the morning, a telegram arrived on the desk of the duty officer at Central Committee headquarters. It reported the discovery of oil in the area where test-drilling had been in progress for some months. But even before the good news had been transmitted by phone to all the government offices in Tirana, it had already been brought to the capital by the passengers on the early-morning train, who, looking out of the windows as they rolled across the plain, saw flames from the burning oil-well leaping up into the dawn sky. The engine-driver had tooted the whistle several times, and the passengers stood glued to the icy windows gazing spellbound at the column of fire on the horizon.
Ex-minister D—, handcuffed in his cell in Tirana, awaiting trial, heard those whistle blasts as a series of howls. O God, he sighed. What was the source of all his troubles? The examining magistrate had mentioned the “agitation” he’d felt during the famous telephone call that ill-fated evening — an agitation which he’d never mentioned to anyone, and which he was sure no one had suspected at the time. Apparently that was what it all started from …God, why hadn’t he thought of it before? It was staring him in the face now…It must have been that visitor who never turned up, that minor civil servant whose name he couldn’t even remember — he must be the one who told! Did he come back and lurk around his house like a ghost?. Judas! he groaned. Why didn’t you choose someone else? Why did you have to pick on me?
Another whistle, longer this time, died away in the distance.
That same morning, at about a quarter past six, on a stretch of waste ground in the north-west suburbs of Tirana, not far from the railway line, where a week before the former factory owner, Lucas Alarupi, had been found hanging from an old telegraph pole (with newspaper cuttings, pages of statistics and all sorts of other papers scattered around over a radius of about twenty yards) — at this exact spot some municipal workers unloaded several crates from a van. On the crates, beneath some big Chinese characters, was written the word, “Fireworks”,