Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

On the couch she put up no resistance. She’d taken off the last of her underwear, and everything would have happened as perfectly as in a painted dreamscape if an abrupt, subterranean tremor hadn’t suddenly shaken us apart. Her earlier eagerness gave way to opposite emotions of awkwardness and tension, which she tried but failed to hide.

“What’s the matter, Suzana?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath.

She didn’t answer. But I guessed that a kind of safety catch had clicked on somewhere right inside her and locked her up, and then I thought I understood. But I was greatly surprised nonetheless when she blurted out, point-blank: “I’m a virgin.”

We lay for a long while on the couch without speaking. Then, with a smile that was more like a brightening above her cheekbones, she said to me: “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

I didn’t know what to say, but she went on: “That’s why I preferred not to tell you beforehand.”

I felt unable to react, perhaps because happiness had shown itself in its most certain form, surrounded by a halo of sadness. The triumph, which a short while before had seemed to come so easily, now felt like a feat of arms. I beg you, Suzana, don’t be my downfall! was my unspoken prayer.

The band suddenly stopped playing, the loudspeakers roared with a storm of applause, and all heads turned toward the central stand. The leaders were coming out onto the platform. From where I was sitting I could make out only some of them. I couldn’t manage to see the Guide, or Suzana’s father, who was maybe standing at his side. From the C-1 stand, only four of the leaders’ heads were visible. Were they really oversized? Maybe it was just the effect of the nickname that one of our colleagues in the music department was alleged to have given them — “the bigwigs.” He’d been sentenced to hard labor in the mines for having asked why, after forty years of socialism, most of the members of the Politburo still had to come from the least educated layer of society. That’s what he was supposed to have said at a dinner party. But some people claimed he’d gone even further and declared that the government of the nineteenth-century League of Prizren had been better educated than the one we had now! Well, that’s what he was supposed to have said, but it wasn’t even mentioned at the meeting where we voted to fire him. The same thing happened in my own case, presumably because it was thought too dangerous to say it out loud, even as incriminating evidence. So, again like the case I was involved in, he was found guilty of professional lapses, of having sloppy ideas about Western music, and of making sarcastic remarks about productive labor. .

The New Man is the Party’s greatest triumph . . our most famous victory . . the happiest land on earth . . no debt, no taxes . . the one and only Socialist nation!

I hardly listened to the dire and deadly opening speech. Those hopeless, irremediable clichés that we’d all heard a thousand times went in one ear and out the other, as such things usually did. Some of the current watchwords, like shadows cast by the hand of a master puppeteer, summoned up the shapes of the people they’d helped to bring down. You only had to open your eyes and look around to find slogans, symbols, and portraits that had served directly to bring some people to ruin. For instance, the Constitution forbade any borrowing from foreign sources, any reference to the availability (that is to say, to our shortage) of butcher meat, and any allusions to the decadent Jean-Paul Sartre or to the shape of Mao Zedong’s eyes.

Our colleague in the music department had been luckier than one of the technical controllers, howeven. That young man had taken a swipe at the privileges enjoyed by the elite and their offspring, such as villas and foreign travel. Once again, he wasn’t openly blamed for what he’d said, but for different things, like his notions about free love (which were just about enough to get him thrown out of work). In the meantime, he was caught talking to a foreign tourist, and that really did him in. During his trial, and despite the plight he was in already, he stuck to his guns (so people said), denouncing “The Royal Court” as before, but laying it on thicker than ever, accusing the leadership of transferring gold and diamonds to foreign banks as if we were still living in the days of King Zog, of committing secret assassinations, and other equally sinister deeds. He hadn’t spared a soul, not even the Guide, but he’d been specially harsh about his wife, whom he’d described as the true inspiration for her husband’s crimes, a real Lady Macbeth — Lady Macbeth of the Backwater, he’d said, the Qiang Qing of Albania, and so forth. He was sent down for fifteen years, but he never served a quarter of his sentence. In the chrome ore mines, people said, there were deep pits, in whose vicinity common criminals frequently bumped into politicals, by accident. That’s how it all ended: a gradual fall from grace, from season to season, from year to year, cruelly summarized in a headlong rush lasting a few seconds.

The privileges of the leadership and especially of their children was one of the regular topics of argument with my uncle. However, unlike all the other subjects we argued over, this particular argument did not send him into a frenzy. Though he would never admit it, he probably felt ill at ease with the privileges himself. My polemics with him on this subject stopped the day I met Suzana. She amazed me. Were the rumors about the children of the top rung just idle gossip, or was she different from the others? I quickly came to understand that the latter hypothesis was correct, Suzana was indeed different in every way.

That’s why you’ve been singled out for sacrifice, I said to myself.

But in the moment of thinking that, another thought hit me unexpectedly, like a giant wave: what if the sacrifice was only a show? What if Suzana’s simplicity and modesty were only for appearance, whereas in reality, over there behind the high walls of official residences, villas, and private beaches, she was having a riot at all-night parties with unlimited booze and sex on tap?

A pang of jealousy cut me to the quick. Hadn’t I read page after page on the possibility of Iphigenia’s sacrifice also being a sham? On her having been replaced on the altar by a fawn at the last moment? and so on. A classic show designed to impress the populace. Typical leadership solution. My Suzana at shore-side villas all winter long, dancing till she dropped, then stripping naked and offering herself on a couch, groaning with lust. . No, no! Rather she were dead and done with!

One afternoon I’d recorded her sighs and groans on tape, and late at night, when everyone else was asleep, I would shut myself in the kitchen of the apartment to listen to them. Hearing her voice dissociated both from the act and from the sight of it made a strange impression. The voice was even but porous, full of breathing sounds and blanks. Street sounds — a policeman’s whistle, a distant car horn — added a cosmic dimension, like shooting stars on a summer’s night streaking unpredictably at the edges of the boundless sky.

However many times I rewound the tape and played it over again, the sensation of cosmic void did not diminish but grew stronger. I felt I was far away, out of touch with hen. At some moments, it was as if she were buried in the ground and I was listening to her complaining from the grave; at other times I was the one who was buried, but could still hear her moans through the clay soil and over the racket made by the upper world.

On one occasion I turned the volume up as high as it would go, as if I’d wanted her heavy breathing to fill the universe, and then I caught myself thinking that apart from her black pubic area I’d never had a decent look at her sexual organ, the true source of the raging storm.