Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

The town crier’s drum kept on rolling in the distance, giving as it were a new note to all life’s ups and downs. . Against this background noise, Marie put up no resistance to her fiancé’s kisses, then she let him undress her and take possession of her as lord and master of the palpitating center of her being. It all happened in complete silence, when in a brief instant pain and searing pleasure fought for ascendancy, each yielding to the other in turn. But unlike what her sister-in-law had told her, she didn’t find the pain unbearable. Whereas the pleasure seemed to her without bounds.

A week later, when it all happened again (they had agreed he would come in without attracting attention, taking advantage of the fact that her parents had to go to a funeral), there was no pain at all, and the pleasure reached an intensity beyond words.

That was how Marie had come to believe she had nothing more to learn from her sister-in-law about the secrets of married life. She waited with feverish impatience for her fiancé to come, but this last week the only two times he had been able to visit (his work for that terrible commission was taking up all his time), they had not had an opportunity to be alone. So she waited for Sunday, when he would come for lunch as was his custom now, knowing intuitively that the miracle would occur once again. She and her sister-in-law had dealt with the morning housework, but whereas the latter expected they would then sit back in a corner and chat for a while, Marie, who wanted to take refuge in her bedroom to prepare herself for impending joy, said she had some kind of a migraine and went upstairs on her own.

She walked up and down for a while, then stood to look at the street along which her fiancé would presumably come, then her eyes lighted on the chest containing her wedding trousseau. In it, among scores of pieces of clothing, bed linen, and embroidery that had been collected over the years, lay a dozen pieces of underwear made of silk as ethereal as smoke trapped in a glass. . Good heavens, why had she not thought before of giving him that surprise?

Previously, the sight of her sister-in-law’s undergarments hanging out to dry over the stove had stirred awkward feelings and made her eyes cloud over. It had happened for the first time when she discovered the elementary secrets of married life. Such flimsy, delicate lingerie — the closest witnesses to the act of love and the fiery embrace of two bodies — seemed to her to be laden with mystery. They seemed especially charged in comparison to her own cold and lifeless undergarments, all neatly folded at the bottom of the trunk, as if entombed, still waiting to be brought to life. .

She walked slowly toward the trunk, opened it, gazed at its contents, and began to go through the perfectly ordered and pristine pieces. There they lay, virginal and cold. . Yes, she was going to try on every one of these diaphanous garments, each in turn, and she would baptize them, sanctify them, impregnate them with the warmth and the smell and the stains and the juices and the groans of love.

She quickly disrobed and, flushed with excitement, began trying them on in front of the mirror. She wanted to choose the very finest for that day. The sky-blue pair? No, that other off-white one would be better. She had broad thighs, and when she made a slightly awkward movement her pudenda showed through. Marie sat on the kilim in front of the mirror with her legs slightly apart. Under the silk the lips of her vulva were half-revealed and she swallowed the saliva that raging desire brought to her mouth. Disconnected thoughts that seemed to come from outside raced through her mind. So that was the way into her body… Its porch ought to be pretty. She would decorate it with almond-flower lace, just as people decorated their thresholds with pots of flowering plants.. Had her sister-in-law not told her that she had heard that women’s sexual organs were as different from each other as their faces? Marie was sure hers was beautiful, and if it was, then why should he refrain from looking at it?

She got up; she took off one pair of panties to try on another, and then she heard a creak. She turned around in terror, but the door was well bolted, and she immediately calmed down.

She tried on most of her underwear, but came back in the end to the off-white pair. She put them on, then slipped on her dress, and then sat down on the shaggy blanket on the divan, lost in thought. Each time she moved, the silk transmitted a soft, rustling reminder of its presence.

She did her best to banish the thought that was uppermost in her mind, but she realized that it was beyond her. She was henceforth entirely conscious of the fact that if she did not find a way of coming upstairs with her fiancé after lunch, the torture would be unbearable.

On Sundays lunch was served at the big oval table in the main room of the house. Xheladin arrived a few minutes after twelve dressed in a Western suit — a fashion that a good number of young men in the capital had recently taken up.

“How’s it going?” Aleks Ura inquired when everyone had sat down at table.

The son-in-law replied with an inscrutable smile.

“Fine. . really fine.”

They exchanged disjointed remarks about this and that. It took quite a while for them to get down to the issue they had all been waiting impatiently to hear about for the whole past week, that is to say, the qorrfir-man.

“Are you getting a lot of denunciations?” Aleks’s son Gjon asked.

Gjon was as fair as his sister, but when he got angry the color of his hair seemed to darken.

Xheladin spread his hands wide in a gesture of explanation.

“How should I say. . Yes, quite a few.”

“And by what means is it to be established whether so-and-so really does have eyes possessing that power?” Gjon pursued.

Xheladin smiled. “Well manage, one way or another.”

“I have to admit that I think that will prove very difficult, if not impossible.”

“It all depends,” his brother-in-law replied. “For instance…”

“For instance,” Gjon cut in, “somebody, for entirely personal reasons, may find another’s eyes to be evil, whereas someone else sees them differently. How are you going to deal with cases of that kind?”

Xheladin kept on smiling as he listened to his brother-in-law, but his semi-scowl now seemed to be coming loose from his face, like a mask.

“You’re right,” he said. “However, to cope with such an eventuality, the central commission and all its dependent branches will abide by instructions laid out in an internal circular that defines in detail all the characteristics an evil eye must have to be counted as such. And contrary to what some people claim, external appearance is not the only criterion to be taken into account.”

He gave a loud laugh and then went on: “I myself, for example, have fair eyes. According to those people, I ought to be a suspect and not even go near the doors of the central commission. And certainly not have a seat on it!”

Most of those at the table nodded. Since the day the qorrfirman had been issued, everyone had examined, directly or indirectly, the tiniest details of the particular characteristics of the eyes of the people they knew, and none among them needed to raise their heads from their plates to verify that their son-in-law did indeed have fair eyes speckled with gray, which not only made them more charming, but gave his gaze a firm, cold, and masculine air.

“No, external appearance is not the only thing. Such details have to be matched with others. . I’m sorry, I know I am among my own kin at this table, but in the work that we do there are some secrets we are strictly forbidden to mention. . What I can say, in short, is that before declaring that this or that person has the evil eye, we have to study and check every aspect of the case very carefully, and, when necessary, we go so far as to put the suspect under discreet surveillance for a time.”