The Concert by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

suddenly felt the need, or the desire, whichever you like, to set up more direct relations, outside ordinary office routine, with workers from various areas of activity. If you ask me, politicians think that kind of contact helps them keep their finger on the pulse of public opinion. Well, a few days ago he told me he’d like to meet someone from the Ministry of Construction, an ordinary worker, not a senior official — he was already up to his eyes in senior officials! In short, when he told me he wanted to find out what went on from just a humble, honest, ordinary worker. I thought straight away of you.”
    As he remembered these words, Simon felt as if his eyes were still misty with tears. He’d spent days afterwards waiting anxiously for a phone call from the vice-minister. Sometimes it seemed to him their conversation had never taken place. Other doubts followed. What if the minister had changed his mind? What if he really had said that about wanting to get to know ordinary people, but had only been speaking generally, and Simon’s friend had been mistaken in trying to invoke 
him?
At one point he decided it was all wishful thinking on the part of his friend, and foolish naivety on his own. He’d almost given up hope when his friend finally phoned. Not only had he thus kept his promise, but he also gave Simon the exact date and time of the dinner party they were to attend together. Even now, several days later, it gave Simon a pleasant glow inside to think of that phone call.
    He was alone in his office now. He could hear the sound of doors opening and shutting along the corridor, but they seemed very far away. He thought again of his colleagues in the other office, and it filled him with sardonic satisfaction to remind himself that from now on it was they who should be envying him, and not the other way round. Henceforth he could look down on their humdrum existence, with its chatting and joking and noisy laughter over their morning coffee. Up till today, when they passed him - greeting him, if they did so at all, as if he were almost beneath their notice -- they’d probably asked each other how the devil the poor wretch managed to get along, apparently devoid of any object in life. The contrast was so striking he’d often agreed with them: “They’re quite right, really — I wonder, myself, why I’m alive at all.” And he used to reflect thus quite humbly, with a resignation untinged with resentment, placidly accepting the role of unobtrusive spectator of other people’s lives. Sometimes, seeing them burst gaily in and out of one another’s offices, he’d try to imagine the relationships that existed between them. If one of them looked especially bright or tired first thing in the morning, he scented a special significance in the fact, as in the tone of his colleagues’ voices when they exchanged furtive phone calls. Sometimes his imagination ran away with him even further, and he had visions of them naked in one another’s arms, their faces buried in shadow and mystery. Then he would heave a sigh, and say to himself under his breath: “No, I can’t be cut out for that sort of life.”
    But now the situation was reversed, A single dinner party, and everything was turned upside down as if by an earthquake. And he could feel within himself not merely a combination of euphoria and scorn, but also the first stirrings of blind rage. He couldn’t have said whether his anger was directed against the others or against himself. It was a frustrated wrath, provoked by the length of time he’d been living in a kind of limbo because of his own submissiveness and lack of jealousy. And it was accompanied by the dim stirrings of a desire for revenge. But this feeling was still very faint indeed: it was alien to his nature, and found it hard to take root there.
    They’d been talking about China, he mused. He’d heard other discussions on