The day’s work was nearly ended. He went over to the window and stood for a while looking out at the comings and goings in the square. The air felt damp, bet the weather looked too bright for rain.
He heard a key being turned in the lock of a nearby office. Footsteps echoed along the corridor. He looked at his watch and took his owe keys out of his pocket. And a few minutes later he was walking across Government Square as usual, another anonymous pedestrian amidst the crowd of clerks hurrying home.
4
ALTHOUGH THE RAINS WERE LATE, it was already autumn. Every morning, clouds would appear on the horizon and fill the sky with pointless peals of thunder, only to vanish at the end of the afternoon without having shed a drop of moisture. After this had gone on for a whole week, people reconciled themselves to the idea that it was going to be a dry autumn. Meanwhile all the other seasonal changes took place as usuaclass="underline" the leaves turned colour, the temperature dropped, the birds migrated. As usual too, painters flocked to the headquarters of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union to get their annual permits to concentrate on autumnal themes.
But even before anyone noticed the first fallen leaf or the growing scarcity of birds, most people had started to be aware of something else: an obvious fall in the level of seniority among the delegates attending Sino-Albanian meetings. The change might well have begun earlier, but as the national days of both China and Albania fell in the autumn, it was thee that it became unmistakably evident.
No doubt about it, the Chinese delegations were not what they had been. Almost all of them were led by lesser officials than usuaclass="underline" vice-ministers instead of ministers, seconds-in-command instead of generals, assistant directors instead of heads of technology, and so on. And of course these lesser Chinese delegates were met at Tirana airport by members of the Albanian Party who had never appeared before at any official ceremony. As if this were not enough, the composition of the delegations themselves became more and more peculiar, not to say outlandish. Thus a delegation of popular orchestras from South-East China, led by the assistant editor of agricultural broadcasting, was succeeded by a ceramics delegation led by an assistant director, and this in turn was followed by another described merely as a delegation of peasants.
Since it was difficult anyway to find Albanian institutions corresponding to those to which the Chinese delegations belonged, the relatively lowly officials sent to meet them tended to be from bodies that were almost irrelevant. A team of workers from a collective producing Mao Zedong badges had to be welcomed by the assistant head of a ferro-nickel factory, much to the annoyance of the Chinese, who lost no time in pointing out that workshops which turned out badges bearing portraits of Chairman Mao had nothing whatever in common with ordinary factories. Thereupon the organizers tried to find someone else to preside over the official dinner at least, and came up with the assistant head of the Mint.
Another problem was presented by the toasts which had to be proposed at banquets and receptions. Not only had it become necessary to modify their form, but it grew more and more difficult to match the wording of the guests” own toasts. Adjectives were weakened, adverbs strengthened, among many other adjustments. All the guests were constantly on the alert — especially the interpreters, fearful of getting some nuance wrong. Things were even more complicated when it came to reporting these occasions in the newspapers. Whenever a banquet was held in honour of a Chinese delegation, the official in charge of press coverage had to stay on in his office till late at night waiting for the copy to be phoned in. He happened to be on a strict diet, and his colleagues joked that these parties were just as bad for his liver as if he’d actually attended them.
The Chinese were the first to modify the formula used to round off accounts of receptions and banquets given in honour of the delegations. Such occasions had previously been said to have “taken place in a very warm and friendly atmosphere,” At first the Chinese omitted “very”, then they left out “warm”, and finally they replaced the closing words of the communiqués altogether with the phrase, “those present were observed to exchange smiles in the course of the evening.”
The Albanian press stuck to the old formula, except that “warm and friendly” was replaced by the one word, “cordial”.
None of this was lost on the reading public, though some people predicted that this period of coolness would eventually wear off as others had done a few years earlier. Just as trees lost their leaves in winter but flowered again in spring, so the delegations would eventually flourish anew.
Yet at the same time everyone talked of how work had slowed down on many big construction sites, especially those building hydro-electric plants in the north. This was because of hold-ups in supplies of equipment from China. Freighters now took an unconscionably long time to reach their destination, and when they did arrive they might be carrying the wrong cargo. On two occasions ships had turned back without even entering Durrës harbour. All this was said to be part of China’s famous “turn of the screw”. Cafés in Tirana were full of stories about this tactic: no one realized that one day the whole country would be its victim.
The Chinese press made no mention of the subject. For weeks their newspapers and airwaves concentrated on accounts of the Spartan life-styles of two of their country’s own leaders. One hadn’t worn any new clothes since the liberation of China; the other, to save the people unnecessary expense, had no furniture except a couple of barrels, one used as a bed and the other containing his only food — chick-peas. It seemed that the first of the two, easily recognizable from the towel he wore round his head in magazine photos, was engaged in some sort of argument with his opposite number, though exactly what it was about no one quite knew. Some rumours had it that their rivalry, comical as it might appear, was really nothing to do with the two men themselves, who in fact merely symbolized two important factions engaged in a power struggle. Incredible as it might seem, some people were prepared to take all this quite seriously, and to debate it at length. During one television account of the arrival of a Chinese delegation in Mexico, led by the turban-wearing member of the Politbureau, the camera, as if trying to solve the enigma, dwelt for several seconds on the arrangement of the towel round his head.
Such things had apparently so little to do with the late arrival of the freighters that the Albanian ministers concerned about these delays just shook their heads in bewilderment. Meanwhile, foreign press agencies announced that Mao Zedong was seriously ill, if not as dead as a doornail, and that the man who’d been seen at public receptions recently was merely one of his doubles. Some people even said Mao had been dead for ages, and everything that had been going on in China since then was the result of quarrels between two of his doubles, each claiming to be the great man himself.
Some saw a connection between reports of Mao’s illness and the recent deterioration in Sino-Albanian relations, and hoped that when he, or one or both of the doubles, got better or died, the situation would be cleared up, things would go back to normal as they’d always done before, and this period would be no more than a disagreeable memory. And so that autumn, the delegations, though diminished, went on coming and going; for the first time in years, an invitation even went out to a delegation of writers. But any lingering optimism was roughly extinguished by a rumour to the effect that the Chinese ambassador had asked for an audience with the Albanian foreign secretary on the subject of an X-ray: if the matter at issue wasn’t actually a brawl, it was said to be the bruising of a Chinese foot by an Albanian one.