Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

Meanwhile, Xheladin hadn’t batted an eyelash.

The drums started beating again before dawn on Friday, this time to signal that the Blinding Order was about to be put into effect.

From behind their closed shutters and barred windows, with their hair still uncombed and their eyes puffy from having been suddenly dragged from sleep, people strained to make out the town crier’s words. What’s he saying? What’s he saying? people whispered to each other. Keep quiet so I can hear! I think he’s reading out names, lots of names. .

By next day the full roster of names of the first cohort of volunteers was made known. Directly beneath banner headlines reporting the start of the implementation of the qorrfirman, newspapers listed the last names of those who had initially volunteered for the qorroffices, together with the details of the cash bonus and annuity that had been granted each of them.

Several papers published the words of a certain Abdurrahim, a palace servant from the capital, who had declared: “I’m sacrificing my eyes very gladly. Apart from the satisfaction I feel at being able to do something that is useful to the state, I am grateful to the qorrfirman for having freed me from the awful pangs of conscience I felt at the thought that my eyes might be a cause of further misfortune.”

Apart from the list of the original volunteers, the media provided scarcely any information about the overall number of people concerned, their whereabouts, or the manner of their disoculation (this new term having entirely displaced the word blinding in journalists’ prose in the space of a few days).

Some said there were hundreds of victims, others upped the stakes by claiming there were thousands, and that they were being kept in huge camps.

Meanwhile, amid all the efforts to clothe the campaign in festive garb, the hunt for evil eyes went on, openly or in secret. People who had up to then escaped the crowd’s scrutiny were being denounced. Others who had been unmasked and gone underground were being ferreted out. Some who had heard or imagined they had been denounced had also gone into hiding, but because they were tormented by persecution mania their own behavior aroused suspicions that soon led them to ruin.

The next Tuesday, the town criers were out again, summoning carriers of the evil eye to report directly to the nearest qorroffice, seeing that they could only benefit from taking the initiative. “The Prophet declared that being born with an evil eye is not a sin in itself!” they bawled. “Guilty is only he who hides that power!”

Newspaper columnists began writing stories about events connected with misophthalmia. A man by the name of Selim had been caught in the act in a thicket of bushes, staring with his evil eye at a bridge under construction and trying to make its arch collapse. The bricklayers enlisted passersby to help deal with the man. They’d chained him up and blinded him on the spot. The paper didn’t state which technique had been used, but it was supposed that it was one of the three methods henceforth classified as the “harshest,” unless of course the bricklayers themselves had thought up something entirely different and even more atrocious.

Stories about the qorrfirman in the papers were sporadic, but in the qorroffices there was never the slightest letup. Volunteer messengers came and went bearing notes, new orders, and instructions, and scarcely did they get to their destinations than they were off again, their faces beaming, or else gravely composed in order to express the full dignity of their function.

The hunt for the evil eye was now at its peak. Qorroffices competed against each other for results. When things were not going too well in a bureau of that kind, glum-faced workers, slaving away late at night by the light of oil lamps, would suddenly panic and pass each other names of people who lived on their block or street and who maybe had eyes of that kind, but who’d escaped notice up till then.

Sometimes lights in the qorroffices were on late into the night, and people who lived nearby, unable to get to sleep until the lights went out, muttered to one another: What the hell are they doing so late in the night? What new miseries are they cooking up now? May God make them stark, raving mad!

Meanwhile, threats against people who spoke ill of the glorious qorrfirman continued to be made — which didn’t stop anyone from cursing it with ever greater vigor. People threw insults at it, and twisted its name this way and that, calling it the Dark Decree, or the Sinister Sentence, or the Fateful Firman. The same thing happened as far as gossip was concerned. Efforts to put a stop to rumors only made more of them flourish. They got weirder by the day, and some of them made your blood run cold. Just recently, for instance, a rumor about the grand vizier had made the rounds. Suspicion of the evil eye was said to have fallen on him, despite his being the sovereign’s right hand. An anonymous letter writer had had the audacity to name his name. People could not stop talking about that piece of news, with a terror whose special flavor came from a combination of fear, curiosity, and a kind of relief and contentment. So there you are! Higher-ups can get in just the same mess as little folk! But how could people question the grand vizier himself?. . Why are you so surprised? As if this was the first time that kind of thing had happened. . There’s more to it, you know. It’s said that the whole hullabaloo over the evil eye is really aimed solely at getting rid of the grand vizier! Look, I’m sorry, but what you’ve just said is completely illogical; if that really had been what the sovereign was after, if he’d wanted to topple the grand vizier, who in the world could have stopped him? There’s no shortage of grand viziers who’ve gone to sleep one night with their heads on their shoulders, and found them cut off in the morning. . Sure, sure, things used to be done that way, but times have changed. Nowadays they don’t only use knives to deal with matters of state. It also takes a bit of skill. And besides, you’re forgetting that the grand vizier was appointed with the heavy backing of the Köprölü clan. I guess you know you can’t joke with that crew. To bring one of their men down, you’d have to lay the ground carefully, inside and outside the empire. Because people are talking about this overseas as well, you know. .

Thus did gossip spread. But these particular rumors were not the only ones that were considered punishable. Attempts were made to root out things considered just as harmful, such as inappropriate witticisms, ironic remarks and anecdotes, alongside a number of puns and riddles.

One Saturday afternoon, the famous poet Tahsin Kurtoglu was summoned to one of the qorroffices in the center of town. In front of a large crowd, and after it was first explained that a favor was being done to him, as a great poet, by having him summoned to a qorroffice and not to a court of law, he was asked to explain some lines of poetry he had published a couple of weeks before, as well as remarks he was said to have made here and there among his circle of friends.

As far as his poems were concerned (the issue revolved mainly around one of them, “We were struck by the bow not by the arrow”), the writer defended himself energetically, maintaining that it was but a simple love poem addressed to a woman graced with fine eyebrows, and the fact that he had declared the lady’s brows (the bow) to be more fearsome than her glance (the arrows) in his lines of verse had absolutely nothing to with any kind of subversion of the glorious Blinding Order.