Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

In fact, since her marriage she had not seen so much as a twig of the famous family tree, except for a nephew, a pasty-faced boy of ten or twelve, who had come to visit with his mother about a year ago. The boy was named Mark-Alem. He didn’t say much, and when her father-in-law Aleks, who was eager to try to explain the origin of the family’s name to the boy, had drawn a sketch of a three-arched bridge for him — a bridge located somewhere in central Albania where some kind of sacrifice had occurred in the dim and distant past — the lad just shook his head obstinately, and muttered: “I don’t want to hear those gruesome tales.”

A madhouse! the young woman thought once more, as her eyes wandered toward the staircase Marie had taken on the way up to her room. What in heaven’s name could she be doing up there on her own for hours on end?

She was not accustomed to spying on others, but after a brief inner struggle curiosity overcame her scruples, and she tiptoed silently to the top of the stairs. Once on the landing, she took a deep breath, looked around to make sure no one else was nearby, then crouched down and looked through the keyhole of Maria’s bedroom door.

What she managed to glimpse left her dumbfounded. Marie was standing stark naked in front of the dressing mirror, putting on and taking off a pair of lace-edged silk panties.

Already? How can that be? the young married woman wondered, unable to take her eyes off Marie as she shifted her marble-white body from one slinky pose to another. For a second her crotch displayed its troubling black triangle before the silk swallowed it afresh.

No, she thought, as her mouth went dry, heaven only knows why. A woman cannot make movements of that kind unless she has experienced love. But was it conceivable that such was already the case?

Apparently the young wife must have made the floorboards creak because Marie swung round suddenly and put a hand over her breasts. But she soon relaxed, probably because she saw that the door was bolted on the inside.

Her sister-in-law slowly withdrew and with muffled steps went back down the stairs as silently as she had gone up. They must have already slept together, she thought. That was also the only way of accounting for the lack of curiosity Marie had been showing recently.

She could not get that unbearably smooth white body out of her mind. The curvaceous hips that swayed at the slightest movement troubled her, and she thought to herself once again: Yes, yes, that must be it. There’s no other explanation.

She was right. Two weeks earlier, something had happened quite suddenly between Marie and her fiancé which, to her mind, should not have occurred until their wedding night.

It was true that the family, like many others who had come down from the Balkan Peninsula, was relatively easy-going, at least in comparison to Muslim families in the capital But however relaxed their behavior and however eccentric the paterfamilias, no one within that family would have dreamed that Maria had spent time alone in a bedroom with her fiancé. And they could simply not have imagined she might have prematurely lost her virginity.

The day it happened had been no ordinary day, however. The new edict plunged everyone in the house into something like an inner maelstrom. From the nearby square came the roll of drums, then the voice of the town crier, declaiming the text of the qorrfirman. Marie had been unable to take her eyes off her father’s face. It had turned quite livid.

She quietly went up to him and, as was her habit, placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, asking him sweetly: “What’s worrying you so, Father dear? There isn’t anything like that in our family, is there?”

Aleks shook his shoulders as if to cast off a cloak of weariness.

“No, of course not. . Of course there isn’t, my child.”

She looked at her father with a quizzical expression, which repeated the same question in silence. He pretended not to notice, though it’s possible that in the kind of trance he had fallen into he really didn’t register his daughter’s glance.

“And besides, the Köprülüs are distant cousins of ours, aren’t they?”

“What?” the father almost shouted. “Cousins of the Köprülüs? Yes, sure we are, but in these kinds of circumstances that is of no use whatsoever.”

Gradually his eyes narrowed, grew smaller, and at the same time his voice fell almost to a whisper. “In these kinds of circumstances it’s better to have no cousins at all!”

At that moment there was a knock at the door. In came Xheladin, Marie’s fiancé. His demeanor, unlike everyone else’s, was so placid that Aleks glanced at him sternly as if to say, “Are you living on the moon? Haven’t you heard about the qorrfirman yet?”

Very soon, even before the table had been set, they were all to learn the reason for Xheladin’s serenity, or rather, his contained satisfaction. (He wasn’t in a state of elation, of course, but set against their own quaking fear his quiet ease made him appear almost joyous.) Very soon they all heard what lay behind the future son-in-law’s state of mind. Not only was he apprised of the decree, he knew rather more about it than any of them, for the simple reason that he had been summoned by his bosses two days before, and had been told he had been appointed a member of the central commission entrusted with the implementation of the qorrfirman.

Xheladin’s words precipitated a sudden change in the domestic atmosphere. There was a sense of relief, accompanied by admiration for a son-in-law who had been given such a demanding job. But that wasn’t the main thing. The overriding emotion came from thinking — even if only vaguely for the time being — that as they now had their own man inside the citadel, at the heart of the machine, in the very lair of evil, then said evil would automatically be directed elsewhere.

Outright admiration could be read not only in the eyes of Marie but in those of her mother, her sister-in-law, and even her brother, who up till then had stayed aloof, heaven knows why, from his sister’s fiancé.

Glad to have brought about a new mood, Xheladin relaxed and warmed up. An irresistible wave of good humor swept over the dinner table. The distant roll of the crier’s drum now seemed to come from another planet.

Aleks’s face was the only one that clouded over from time to time, as if darkened by a passing shadow. He stared at Xheladin as if he were trying to make out what was going on in the depths of his being, under his skin, down in the marrow of his bones. And it was just when he had given him a stare of that kind that he put his hand on the younger man’s arm and said: “I hope that when you’re there you’ll manage to keep clean. .”

“What was that?” Xheladin said, imperceptibly drawing his hand away. “What did you mean to say?”

His face had suddenly turned icy and alert.

“Nothing, nothing,” Aleks said with a smile, patting the young man on the shoulder. “Nothing, my boy. Maybe well talk about it again some other time.”

Aleks was visibly sorry to have said what he had said, and for the remainder of the meal you could see he was trying to make up for his blunder. Merriness returned, and maybe it was precisely because people were not paying attention amid the good cheer that Marie and her fiancé, instead of going out on the verandah, where they were granted the right of whispering sweet nothings in private, quietly went up the stairs leading to the girl’s bedroom.

Had the witnesses really not noticed, or did they only pretend not to have seen? Who knows? Maybe the mother and the sister-in-law really didn’t see it, since they were busy clearing the table. The brother, who was barely able to stand, had already gone up to his bedroom. As for the father. . he had probably not seen them doing it, unless — and this was the most plausible hypothesis, after those days of anxiety, and especially because he did not want to get snapped at after the recent incident at the dinner table — unless he had turned a blind eye and pretended not to see them. In any case, weren’t they going to be husband and wife in six weeks’ time?