Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

Muted laughter swept across the stands.

Meanwhile, as the placards that had prompted the departure of the Eastern bloc representatives came level with our stand, my eyes were riveted in stupefaction on the other watchwords: Live as in a State of Siege! Discipline, Military Preparedness, and Productive Labor!

From the corner of my eye I was watching the guests standing around me. Which one of them would have to leave the stand next? For it had surely already been worked out on which day, at which hour, each one of them would be ejected from the cohort of celebrants. .

I turned toward stand D to try to catch a last glimpse of Th. D., as I reasoned that was where he must be. Had his hour now come? Or had it already passed without him noticing?

And what about you? I asked myself. You’re playing at guessing when others might fall, but do you know how much time you have left?

A gleam from the comb in Suzana’s hairdo drew my thoughts toward her once more. No, it definitely could not have been just a wish to maintain her image, or a passing bout of modesty in the run-up to the engagement, or a piece of advice that the Supreme Guide might have dropped in her father’s ear. A little more discretion would be advisable, if only for a while. There’s been too much gossip of late about what our youngsters are up to. No, I could see more clearly than a Cassandra the coffins and the executioner’s bloody ax hovering over the altar.

Stalin’s portrait was making its way toward us now, swaying gently in time to the synchronized march of the placard bearers. Those eyes with their creases standing in for a silent smile filled the horizon. What about your son Yakov? Why did you sacrifice him. .?

I could not take my eyes off the huge painted banner bulging in the breeze. Your son Yakov, I kept on muttering, may he rest in peace. .

I was surprised by the resurgence of that obsolete expression, for it had been completely expunged from the language taught to people of my generation. Dozens of similarly gentle and compassionate set phrases that reminded you of the precariousness of the human condition had likewise been erased from daily life. Just like belfries, prayers, and candles; and alongside them, pity and repentance. . Lord, they have eradicated everything so completely — so that nothing should be left standing to bar the way of crime!

Why, why did you make an offering of your son Yakov? May he rest in peace. . Every day your field marshals tried to make you reverse the decision. There was nothing unusual about swapping prisoners of war. It would be even more straightforward in the case of your son. For one thing, it would be good for your own peace of mind. In the current circumstances, the fate of us all hangs on that. But you dug in your heels. No, and no again! What was in your mind, O Spinx, when you said that?

Suzana’s father’s portrait was in something like tenth position, not far from Stalin’s. You’ll never understand the reason for the change in Suzana, he seemed to be saying to me. You may be able to get inside her vagina, even inside her heart, but you’ll never know what she herself is unaware of.

The serried ranks of the procession stretched out into the far distance. The only thing missing was a portrait of Agamemnon. Of Comrade Agamemnon MacAtreus, member of the Politburo, grand master of all sacrifices after him. As the founder and classic example of his kind, he presumably knew better than anyone else how the springs and levers of this affair had been set.

The parade seemed to be about to come to a close. As tradition required, the tail of the procession was made up of representatives of our cultural institutions: the opera, the national ballet, the Kinestudio, and Tirana University. I hid my face as best I could when my colleagues from Broadcasting Services came level with the stand. Then behind them came the technical controllers, the makeup people, and the evening news presenters in long dresses, like vestal virgins. .

It was all over in just a few minutes. As the last squads of activists yelled their last chorus of applause and moved off briskly toward Skanderbeg Square, the stands emptied faster than you would have thought possible. Invited guests climbed down from their seats with a slightly flummoxed look on their faces, as if they were coming away from a dinner party for which they’d had excessive expectations, or from a trial, or from a sexual encounter. I glimpsed Suzana a couple of times but then lost sight of her again.

Little by little I ended up back on the Grand Boulevard, in a slow-moving crowd, under a sun that now felt scorching. Cardboard wreaths and silk flowers were scattered over the pavement. Burst and trampled balloons lay in the dust. The giant effigies, which no one was now bothering to hold up straight, were leaning against walls and fences, staring at a slant, and sometimes upside down. There was a palpable sense of sweaty fatigue, of winding down, letting go.

Two thousand eight hundred years before, Greek soldiers had probably left the scene of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in a similar state. Their faces had blanched at the sight of blood on the altar, and in their hearts they felt a gaping hole they didn’t think would ever leave them. They said not a word, and in any case they had hardly anything to say, except for the same few thoughts that kept on going around in their heads. Private Teukr, for instance, who up to then had planned on deserting at the first opportunity, now felt as if that idea belonged to a vanished epoch. Idomene, his comrade in arms, who’d been determined to answer back if his commander should dare speak to him roughly, now found that idea quite foreign as well. Same thing for Astyanax, who’d been planning on sneaking off to see his fiancée, an idea that up to then had seemed easier and easier as his longing for her grew greater. Anything light or happy or likely to lessen the tension of war — joking, slacking off, going wild with loose women — was now dangerously close to being extinguished for good. If the supreme leader Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, that meant that there would be no pity for anyone else either. The ax’s blade was already smeared with blood. .

I suddenly thought I could see the answer. The sensation of breakthrough was so strong that I stood still and closed my eyes, as if the sight of the external world might cloud what was at last coming clear. . Yakov, may he rest in peace, had not been sacrificed so as to suffer the same fate as any other Russian soldier, as the dictator had claimed, but to give Stalin the right to demand the life of anyone else. Just as Iphigenia had given Agamemnon the right to unleash the hounds of war. .

It had nothing to do with the belief that the sacrifice would calm the winds that were keeping the fleet in port, nothing to do with a moral principle declaring that all Russian young men were equal before death. No, it was nothing but a tyrant’s cynical ploy.

I know what you’re after, too, what you’re trying to use Suzana for. . You probably won’t sully your blade with warm blood, but though you may keep it bright and clean, it won’t be any the less harsh or brutal.

Perhaps I had sensed it long before, and had been approaching the truth step by step ever since Suzana told me of her decision. What her father had requested looked pretty insignificant, but it was much more than it seemed. Though hidden from the general gaze, it was a sacrifice to be counted among the crudest ever invented. The letter from Lushnje, the suspicious lump of ore, or that fatal military map, had led to lines of coffins, but Suzana’s sacrifice would certainly have consequences even bleaker than those horrors. . Should untold thousands of canceled evenings out count for less than a heap of corpses? Or poisoned Novembers, evening conversations choked as by an odorless gas, and the snows and smells of winter all sullied and soured? Blue benches around the swimming pool turned into useless accessories, student parties gone as flat as stale beer, tangos without a beat, bronze clocks striking midnight in empty hallways, hair brushed in front of the mirror, and jewels, and furs, and makeup gone all streaky and worn. .