Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

“Discreet surveillance? Well, well, that’s something new,” the brother said.

“Really?” Aleks’s wife blurted out.

Xheladin nodded.

“All the same,” Gjon continued, “I can’t bring myself to believe that there really is a reliable, or, properly speaking, a scientific way of determining misophthalmia.”

Xheladin said nothing. An angel passed, and clicking of knives on bone china made the silence seem even more frozen. Aleks Ura shot a look of disapproval at his son, to no effect.

“I think that is precisely where the real power of the qorrfirman resides,” Gjon went on.

“Where exactly is that?” his brother-in-law asked.

Gjon did not reply right away. Perhaps in order to escape his father’s glance, he cast his eyes up, over the heads of the seated guests, toward the French windows that looked onto the verandah.

“There’s not the slightest doubt that the qorrfir-man has given our people a seismic shock, and that it’s disturbed them more than any other decree ever issued in our state,” he said at last. “To come back to what I was saying, I think its fearsome power comes directly from the fact it’s so vague. The Blinding Order makes each of us suspect our neighbor. Nobody is exempt from worry, we all feel more or less guilty. The power of the order derives exclusively from the all-pervading anxiety it induces.”

“For my part, I think the power of any major edict derives solely from the sense of justice with which it is imbued,” Xheladin said, sounding not irritated, but on the contrary, rather conciliatory.

At the end of this exchange, everyone felt relieved and breathed a little more easily.

“Is it true anonymous letters have been sent and that suspicion even hovers about the person of Grand Vizier Muhta Pasha?” Gjon’s wife cut in, maybe only to move the conversation onto a different terrain.

Xheladin shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. “That may be just gossip.”

“Last year, there was another rumor of that kind. about Vizier Basri,” Gjon said. “At first it was discounted as mere gossip, but then it turned out to be true, and the vizier ended up with a rope around his neck.”

“Such things happen,” Aleks Ura declared, determined to ensure that this time no hasty or ill-judged comments would be made at his table.

He had always been in favor of a less rigid adherence to rules, and sneered at people who did not allow women to join in the conversation; more generally, he did not hide his hostility toward the fanatical customs of the Asiatics; but even so, there had to be limits. Gjon’s provocations had started it off, but now his wife was trying to pick a fight with their future son-in-law!

Xheladin’s answers grew ever sterner, and he would probably have begun to show annoyance if he hadn’t felt Marie’s soothing glance on him from time to time.

Aleks hadn’t missed the gleam of desire in his daughter’s eyes. They glinted in a different way than in the earliest days of her engagement, when she hadn’t even tried to hide the attraction she felt for her betrothed. It was also different from the look she had in the following period, when her glance was, so to speak, denser. But now it was something else altogether. There was something so evanescent, fragile, and vulnerable in her eyes that Aleks chose to avoid them altogether, for fear that an encounter might result in a painful clash.

Two weeks earlier, after lunch, at the same hour as now, he thought he’d heard them going upstairs to his daughter’s bedroom. He was stunned for a moment, but then refrained from turning to look, like a man trying not to see a ghost. . The wedding day was not far off, and the marriage seemed to him more and more like a really good idea. At times of worry, he felt an increasing desire to huddle with his nearest and dearest around the hearth, inside his own four walls, safe from the winds of anguish howling outside. What’s more, his son-in-law’s new position gave them a precious source of news from the very heart of the mystery, just at the time when, as people grew more and more curious, it was becoming increasingly dangerous to say anything. . His son and his rather scatterbrained young wife weren’t able to appreciate this advantage; all they did was irritate their guest. But he, Aleks, was going to bring some discipline back to his too liberal table. He was going to bring it back right now, by taking sole charge of the conversation.

“Will the Order be implemented soon?”

He could not believe his own ears. How could he have spoken such words? He’d been working himself up to say something quite different, to move on to some entertaining irrelevance, so as to clear the atmosphere once and for all, and now his own mouth had gone and uttered other words, against his own will. You’re getting senile, he thought. you’ve lost control of your tongue. Worse than a woman!

“Implementation?” Xheladin repeated. “Yes, I believe it will happen quite soon. Even very soon,” he added after a pause. “It might even start this week.”

“Really?” two or three voices squeaked.

“Is it true that distinctions will be made between the people singled out, as far as the means of putting out their eyes is concerned?” Gjon’s wife asked. “Apparently things will be done differently, depending on whether the person belongs to the upper classes or not.”

“That would be only proper, in this respect as in all others.”

“I’ve heard talk of ways of blinding by exposure to sunlight. It’s the first time I’ve heard of anything like that. Must be a new technique, right?”

Aleks Ura was about to butt in, but to his surprise his future son-in-law began to laugh out loud.

“No, the technique isn’t new at all On the contrary, it’s perhaps the oldest of them all!”

So he began to describe empty beaches and villages and luxurious seaside hotels where those sentenced would quietly drag out as long as possible their last days of sight. One morning, when the sky was even clearer than usual, they’d be put in seats facing the sun, and there, in a matter of a few minutes. .

“Neat work, you can’t deny it,” Gjon said. “No blood, no branding iron, none of those barbaric devices. .”

“Well, I think it’s the cruelest way of doing it,” Gjon’s wife said. “To be basking in the light of the sky and the sea, and then to be suddenly deprived of both!”

“Would you prefer the opposite means, being blindfolded and locked in a cell for three months?” Gjon asked.

“I think it might be less painful overall,” she replied. “It would give you time to get used to darkness.”

“I don’t agree!” Gjon protested. “It must be dreadful torture. It must feel like your head is bursting apart with all the thoughts going around in it.”

“For heaven’s sake, could you please put a stop this nonsense!” the mistress of the house broke in. “Can’t you talk about something happier?”

She put the cake tray in the middle of the table and gestured to all to serve themselves.

“People say all sorts of things,” Gjon said pensively. “Some people say that this whole story about the evil eye is just balderdash and that the people who cooked it up don’t even believe in it themselves.”

“What was that, young man? Are you sure you have all your wits about you?” Aleks interjected.

“I’m not saying that, Father,” Gjon replied. “It’s just what I’ve heard other people say. In their view, this whole thing is a setup designed to keep people’s minds off our economic problems.”

“Enough of that!” Aleks cut him off. “I will not allow you to say such things!”

“But Father, I’m not saying that, it’s only..”

“Listening to such opinions is itself a guilty act!” Aleks shouted, his voice shaking with emotion.