Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

His listeners, visibly skeptical, then quoted back to the poet some of his double entendres, which he denied ever having uttered. Then someone in the crowd took a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and took it upon himself to read its contents aloud:

On the seventh day of this month, during a dinner with friends, you declared that this great blinding would only deepen the darkness of the world. On the twelfth, in a cafe, you claimed there was a balance between light and dark, between the visible and the invisible, and that this balance between the two sides would now be broken, to the disadvantage of the light and the visible. And you also claimed — and this is the most heinous claim it is possible to make — that the sum of the eyes of all human beings on earth, about a thousand million, make up what you called the eye of whole humanity, and that it grows weaker when a large number of individuals go blind, especially when — and now you all listen to this! — especially when those blinded are the most clear-sighted of all!

After each of the sentences spoken by the qorroffice employee, Tahsin Kurtoglu shook his head, and when his accuser had finished, exclaimed: “Those are nothing but calumnies and fabrications bruited about by my rivals!”

These words, far from calming the crowd that had gathered, only served to excite it, and things began to get noisy and rough. People were even heard to shout: “You’ve let him have his say, now give him what he deserves, the Tibetan method!” “We want the Tibetan! We want the Tibetan!” others began to chant, but one of the officials, after signaling to the crowd to stop shouting, made a short speech in which he stressed the clemency of the state, which, on this occasion, would only reprimand Kortoglu. “But the main thing,” he said, wagging his finger at the poet, “is that this is your last warning!”

Everybody could now see clearly that the tide of denunciations and poison-pen letters had gone over the top, and when people caught sight of the mail-wagon going down the street, they would stop to gaze at it in horror, as they knew that at least half its load consisted of just such kinds of missives.

It was on one of those gloomy days that Marie closed her bedroom door behind her, went to the window, and watched her fiancé go out into the street. He’d seemed altered, and rather sterner than usual During lunch, despite her father’s efforts to liven things up, the conversation had hardly got off the ground.

It was because of him, she could see it now! She watched him saunter down the street until he vanished behind the shade trees on the sidewalk, and the same thought occurred to her: he must be worried about something.

She ran through a list of possible reasons. Overwork, office intrigues, pangs of conscience. . but in the end she began to wonder whether she had only imagined it. Didn’t everyone sometimes wake up in a bad mood, which only gets worse when someone else remarks, “You don’t seem your usual self today.” That must be it. No doubt about it.

Only half-dressed, she went to the mirror and looked at herself, bending first one knee, then the other. There, at the top of her right thigh, she saw two bluish bruises, the trace of the preceding Sunday afternoons. Whereas the latest bruises would not become visible for two or three days. . She looked for a moment at her smooth belly and the low black tufts that covered her crotch, then she sat on the carpet with legs half-crossed, and studied her sexual organ.

“It’s all quiet now,” she thought, “as if nothing had ever happened.”

She could not take her eyes off the slightly curved line separating the pink lips of her vulva. They looked like lips that would never speak. . And yet, just a few moments before, they had been almost crazily talkative, dribbling. .

“Unbelievable,” she said inwardly. It then occurred to her that a woman’s sex was without any doubt the most inexplicable and enigmatic thing in the world. Those silent labia would never tell anyone what had gone on inside and around them.

Feeling suddenly grateful, she stroked her belly, her crotch, then the lips themselves. But she soon felt a shiver of cold, and got up to put on some clothes.

There’s no doubt about it, something is worrying him, she thought as she pinned up her hair.

The anti-misophthalmic campaign was now at its peak. It rose higher every day like a rain-swollen stream, sucking countless human lives into its headlong rush.

Evil eyes were not the only ones to be ceaselessly hunted down. The same energy was devoted simultaneously to rooting out declared or supposed defenders of the evil eye, as well as individuals considered to be covert opponents of the implementation of the qorrfirman and the close and distant relatives and retainers of owners of the evil eye. Other people were charged with lacking clear sight, with indifference, or with insufficient zeal. Sometimes, these latter folk were able to make the same charges against their accusers.

An unprecedented disorder struck the vast state like a hurricane. People now talked openly about settling scores and power struggles between political factions. Other voices proclaimed sentences against the very people who seemed best shielded from the storm — the functionaries whose job it was to put the qorrfirman into effect. The “bad-eyes,” as they called them, had managed to infiltrate the qorroffices and even the central commission, and once inside, had exploited their positions to spread havoc.

“ Aha ,” you could hear people muttering, “so that’s why we thought, and on occasions even allowed ourselves to remark, that there is something strange about all this! Yes, it’s an incontrovertible fact that only the sovereign is just. If you serve him devotedly, then you get your proper reward; but if you stray into error, if you commit a fault, however brilliant you may have been in your career of service up to that point, you will be punished like anyone else.”

“You are right. We’re so lucky to have him, may Allah grant him long life! Without him life would be a snakepit. Did you hear what went on yesterday in front of Tabir Sarrail?”

And that is how, despite all the turmoil and havoc, the most incredible stories managed to circulate. Now and then, like a straw borne on the crest of a wave, you got just a glimpse of that rumor about the grand vizier.

Everyone in the house must have noticed he’d grown slimmer, but she was the only one to mention it to him.

“You’ve lost weight,” she said, after they’d bolted the bedroom door behind them. “Why? Is it from all the work you have to do?”

“Yes, I do have lots of work.” After a pause, he repeated, “Lots.”

“Come, you’re going to forget all about it. .”

She had now lost all modesty. She lay on the bed and first put her arms round him, and then her long, slim legs, of a white so pure that they gleamed in the half-light. She let out a faint, steady moan, which only at particular moments rose to a scream close to sobbing.

Moments later, when they were lying in peace, he cast his eye on the bluish marks on her naked thigh, where they looked like official seals. She expected him to make some comment about them, but to her great surprise the question he asked was of an entirely different nature.

“Have you ever approached the Köprülüs to ask them for help?”

She shook her shoulders in a gesture of surprise. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason… I just noticed that in your household you hardly ever talk about them.”

“That’s true. They really are cousins of ours, but only very distant ones. And anyway, my father, with his funny character. .”