...of severance

The journalists’ questions were as usual hair-raising and verging on the cynical. He said nothing to them about the coldness of the locals, nor about the sombreness of their songs, nor about the incomprehension with which they kept meeting. But he did not spare them a description of other difficulties they ran up against: the rugged terrain, the biting winters in the mountains, the drainage canals which, in Communist countries, as everyone surely knows, are excessively large, the previous year’s earthquake which had ravaged some of the graveyards.
As he touched upon this lst item, silence descended on the hall for the first time, a silence so deep that, for a moment, he had the impression that a complete severance had come between himself and his audience - they were no longer listening to each other.
He had already had this impression of deafness in the Albanian archives, when he had come across the description of the earthquake. As if dealing a final blow, it had shaken up the dead a year before he had landed in Albania himself. It was as though he had shaken them in their sleep to warn them of his arrival.

[The General of the Dead Army, Kadare, I.]