The Concert Read Online Free PDF Page B

country in the world. Gjergj gazed out of the window. The sun, a ruddy patch strangely resembling the wax seal on his briefcase, seemed to be struggling over the horizon. Two or three times he thought he glimpsed the earth, but he couldn’t be sure. The engines of the plane throbbed as if with great effort. Still staring out of the window, Gjergj asked himself how was one supposed to deliver a letter to a country like this? Surprised by his own question, he felt like some mythical envoy of antiquity, charged with delivering a message to an empire that was deaf. He went on trying to catch a glimpse of the earth, but in vain: he almost doubted if it still existed.
    More than a thousand metres below the belly of the plane lay the land of China, with its population of nearly a billion. Other billions lay beneath the land itself, most of them changed long ago into handfuls of mud. But that autumn morning, out of the billions of Chinese still alive, one had chosen for his own peculiar reasons to be under the earth already, hidden away in a cave. This one was Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.
    He had gone back to his underground isolation some days before. He knew very well that every time he did so the people always found out about it eventually, and that they wouldn’t rest until they found out why he was there. His enemies said it was because he was in a blue funk, as he had been when he hid here during the Cultural Revolution. That was understandable enough at the time, others argued, but why was he down there again, now that things had settled down? Perhaps in order to get used to the idea of death, suggested a third group: hadn’t he sensed its approach a long time ago? Others shrugged their shoulders:, that might be the correct explanation, but then again there might be some other reason known only to Chairman Mao himself…
    One thing was certain: for some time he had resumed this old habit: perhaps he himself didn’t quite know why. He scoured reports on the rumours circulating about it so eagerly you might have thought he’d forgotten why he’d gone down there, and felly expected to read the explanation in the reports. In fact, he’d come to believe that a head of state’s most useful actions were those which remained incomprehensible not only to others but also to himself. They lent themselves to such a vast range of different explanations. There were always people ready to suggest a meaning for some enigmatic piece of behaviour, while others sprang forward to contradict them and offer another interpretation. Then came another group who thought they were the ones who knew best. And so on and so forth
ad infinitum
. Meanwhile the action in question was kept alive precisely because it was veiled in obscurity, while hundreds of others, clearer, more logical and more useful, were consigned to oblivion.
    The reports informed Mao that many of the rumours put forward religious or mythological reasons for his retreat. One view was that as he already knew all that was said about him on earth, he wanted to find out what was whispered about him underground, where his supporters were no longer in the majority. On the whole he preferred the mythological theories to those that stuck to fact. He liked to think of himself sleeping under the earth for a while and then, like some ancient god, reawakening with the lush new grass of spring.
    To tell the truth, the half-death he seemed to experience down in that cave struck him as the state that suited him best. The strange days he spent there, divided between existence and non-existence, enjoying the advantages of the one and avoiding the traps of the other, partook of both heaven and hell. His thoughts became clear and strove to pierce to the uttermost depths of consciousness. He was surrounded by nothing but mud and stones; the only things present were the earth and himself - the leader of the biggest country in the world in