Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

“I see,” he said, not taking his eyes off the bruises.

She ran her fingers over his chest.

“You seem worried,” she said in a caressing tone.

He averted his eyes.

“No, I’m all right.”

“Does your work weigh on your mind?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. I have no reason. . On the contrary.”

“What do you mean by ‘on the contrary’?”

“Stop asking me such irritating questions!”

“If that’s how you feel!” she exclaimed, clearly annoyed. She tried to turn her back to him, but he held on to the sheet she was attempting to pull over her belly. A special, almost abnormal light in her fiancé’s eye dissipated the squabble almost instantly, and she began to look at his face with great attention. His eyes were fixed on her crotch as if this was the first time he had seen it.

“In three weeks’ time we’ll be married, and we’ll be able stay like this for hours on end.”

“Yes. . Maybe I’ll be given the leave I’m due at that time.”

“Really? That would be wonderful. . We’ll get up late, and stay awake half the night. . It’ll be splendid to do it again when we’re half asleep, in the middle of the night, in the dark.”

He shuddered as if he’d just awakened from a daydream. “In the middle of the night, in the dark?” he almost shouted.

“Shh! Keep your voice down. What’s come over you?”

“In the middle of the night, in the dark. .” he said again, his voice now fading.

Slowly, she stroked his neck and his forehead. “Something is tormenting you,” she whispered as if she were talking to someone asleep. “But don’t worry. Basically, all you are doing is applying the law. Leave the remorse to the people who sowed this whirlwind… Do you hear what I’m saying? They’re the ones who should have pangs of conscience. . Now come here and do it again, my darling.”

Eventually they heard that the grand vizier had been fired. Gossips first said he’d been relieved of the top job to take up a less prominent position; then they said he’d simply been asked to resign; finally, “asked to” was replaced by “told to.” So it wasn’t a demotion or a change of position, or a discharge for slackness in implementing state decrees, among them, in particular, the qorrfirman. No, he was simply being sacked, accompanied by house arrest, on the specific and savage grounds that he was afflicted with the evil eye.

Now, all the grand vizier’s intimates and colleagues knew full well that their master had a slightly menacing cast. What surprised people was that the Sultan, whose eagle eye missed nothing, hadn’t noticed long before.

“That’s not so easy,” others objected. “We all know now that crossed eyes aren’t always evil, as long as they’re not combined with other specific features.”

“Yeah, yeah,” people retorted, “those are things you can interpret any way you like.”

Straight after the grand vizier’s fall, the original rumor arose with new vigor: “Didn’t we tell you that the ultimate purpose of the whole massacre was simply to liquidate the grand vizier?”

“Well, if that’s true,” came the response, “then tell us why, now that the purpose has been met, the campaign hasn’t been brought to an end?”

“For the very reason of camouflaging why it was organized in the first place. Anyway, just as the terror machine takes some time to start up and to get into top gear, so it takes time for the brakes to bring it to a stop.”

And just as it takes time for the dust to settle after a landslide, so it took quite a while for this shock and all the disturbance it caused to come to a final conclusion. A wave of purges, which everyone suspected would be the last, swept over the state. People had only one thing on their minds: keep clear of this rolling wave, for though it was most likely the last, it seemed well set to be the most murderous.

They were lying down together. She was entirely naked and he was half-undressed. He’d told her the truth only a few moments before. She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t sobbed, almost as if she’d been expecting the confession. She listened to what he had to say with her face as white as a sheet. Only when she nestled up to him did he feel her wet tears on his own cheek. That’s probably the way the acid will trickle down over my cheekbones, he thought, after it has burned out my eyes. If his request to be blinded by the medieval European method (that is to say, by darkness) was rejected (he hadn’t dared ask for the Romano-Carthaginian technique), then he would probably be let off with the acid. There is worse, an office colleague had remonstrated. Just think of the Byzantine, not to mention the Tibetan, which is the most awful by far.

“So when you told me you were going to ask for leave for after our wedding, you already knew?” she asked.

“Yes. That was the day they told me I was being removed from office.”

“Oh. .” she said. “But how could you stop yourself from telling me? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to depress you before it was absolutely necessary. I was still hoping against hope, since I’d been told to stay in the capital while the denunciation was being examined. But that faint hope gradually faded away. . Apparently the denunciation has been accepted.”

“But why? Why?” she repeated, stifling a scream.

She looked at his gray-clouded eyes as if she could find in them the reason for the unfurling of the whole ghastly story.

“You’re asking me why?” he said with a faint and bitter smile. “I don’t consider myself to have eyes more clairvoyant than others, I can’t see better or further into the future, and if I could I would be instantly suspect in the eyes of any tyrannical power. .”

Good God! she thought. One evening her father had come out with the same thing, almost word for word.

“So, I don’t count myself particularly clearsighted. But there’s a good reason for our sight to be extinguished. Every trace has to be destroyed.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“It’s very simple. We were witnesses to many things that have to be wiped out.”

“Who is we?”

“All of us who up to last night worked in the blinding commissions. Our eyes saw so many things they should not have. . Do you understand?”

“Things you should not have seen,” she repeated in a trailing voice. “Horrible things?”

“Of course. We were too close to the machinery, we were almost brushed by its cogs and belts.”

“My poor darling.” She sighed, and once again he felt her tears on his cheek, but the thought of the acid hurt him less acutely this time, as if his skin had already grown less sensitive to it.

“Sometimes lists were brought to us that had already been approved by higher authority,” he said.

“Investigations were only made retrospectively.”

“What an abomination! In other words, all that gossip about the settling of scores wasn’t that far off the mark?”

He nodded.

She snuggled up even closer to him. “What about the others?” she asked a moment later. “Is everyone who worked there going to meet the same fate?”

“Probably not. The first batch to be struck down are people who are suspected of being able to talk.”

“Able to talk?” she repeated. “So what have eyes got to with that? The main requirement is the mouth. .”

“The mouth’s turn may come next,” he cut in. After a pause he added: “At any rate, if putting out eyes isn’t sufficient to make a man see reason. .”

“My God!” She sighed.

“In any case, even if none of us had been suspected, some would have been sacrificed automatically.”