Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

She stared at him with the awkward look of someone who has simply not understood what has been said.

“That’s almost certainly one of the main reasons,” he continued. “We’re being sentenced so that a part of the horror of what happened gets attributed to us. Do you see what I mean? Everyone would like to put the blame for his own misfortune on us and our so-called mistakes. .”

In the silence that followed each could hear the other breathing.

“As soon as they began to talk of the commission’s mistakes,” she said, “I felt my heart sinking, but then I tried to put the thought out of my head.”

“Well, when those first rumors surfaced, my partner in the office said: ‘It’s our turn now.”’

Silence ensued once more, and nothing could be heard except the rustling of their bodies as they tried to find another position in which to hold each other tight.

“Was it just a coincidence, or was that why you asked me the other day about the Köprülüs?”

“No, it wasn’t coincidental at all. I could pretty much guess what you were going to say. I knew all too well that the Köprülüs have their own troubles to worry about. But a drowning man tries to pull himself out of the water by his own hair, if that’s all there is to grab!”

“Now I understand why my mentioning making love in the dark made you go on and on, like a man in a fever, saying, ‘In the middle of the night, in the dark. .’”

“Yes. I’d already begun to feel I belonged to the world of the night.”

She stroked him for a long while. “As long as I’m here you’ll belong to this world, the world of light.”

The gray shadow in his eyes was imbued with boundless suffering.

“Do you think there’s no hope at all?” she inquired. “Isn’t there any way to plead your case?”

He shook his head.

“Where do they do the investigations? Where are such decisions made? In your case, for example.”

“Nowhere, in all likelihood. The decision may have been made on day one, as soon as the poison-pen letter about me came in. .”

“Of course. . All trace has to be erased…”

She thought better of asking any more pointless questions and went back to cuddling him. He barely responded to her comforting caresses. But his eyes remained alert, with a kind of morbid gleam. He gazed hungrily at her breasts, at the blue marks on her upper thigh, at her belly, then still lower, between her legs, which she spread open so he could more easily see her sex.

He’s looking at me like that so he can memorize it completely, she thought.

“I shall live with your image engraved in my mind,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.

“I’ll wait for you,” she replied in a flattened voice. “Do you understand? I’ll wait for you to come back from that place. . Ill live only for you. If you don’t keep me engraved in your memory as I am today, I think I’d die… I would fade away like a shadow… I would lose all life and shape… I remain the same as you remember me. Only if you consciously blot me out of your mind will I truly disappear, like a drawing rubbed out by an eraser. .”

He didn’t reply but only went on slowly stroking the part of her body he had been gazing at so insistently a few minutes before. She noticed that as he moved his hand over her he kept his eyes shut. He’s imagining what it will be like to caress me when he’s not able to see, she thought.

She was on the point of bursting into tears and screaming like a madwoman, not only at the thought of the misfortune about to descend upon her, but also, and above all, for a reason she couldn’t even admit to herself but which surged up in confusion from the depths of her being: the fear of not being able to keep the promise she had just made Xheladin.

“What if I put out my eyes at the same time?” she asked suddenly, as if she’d been struck by a burst of fever. “On a bright morning, on the verandah, it couldn’t be easier. . That way we would both belong to the same side of the world. . Then even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to leave you. .”

Her words were then smothered in tears, and he couldn’t make out what she said at the end.

“Don’t be so stupid!” he said kindly. “You said such sensible things a moment ago. What’s made you talk so crazy now?”

They hugged again, and then he said: “We can be together as night and day. I will be your night, and you will be my day. . All right?”

She sobbed so hard she couldn’t answer. She tried to hold back her tears, but instead burst into heart-rending hiccups of the sort that go with weeping over an irreparable loss.

By all visible evidence, the campaign was winding down. Admittedly, town criers hadn’t come back to the squares to proclaim a return to normal, but everyone was convinced the scourge had passed. Here and there, it could still strike someone down, like the last streak of lightning at the end of a storm, but its flashes were now enfeebled and far away.

The last days of fall were slowly turning into ordinary days, the way they had been before the qorrfirman. One by one, the blinding offices had been closed, and to many people it seemed as if they had never existed. Cafes were full of customers once more, and their faces glowed with the joy of having escaped blind fate. Ghastly words like misophthalmia, qorrof fice, Tibetan , which, when first heard long before seemed destined to mark out life’s path to all eternity, were now dropped and forgotten.

The marks on Marie’s white legs also gradually disappeared. She thought that was probably how her own image would fade in her fiancé’s mind.

God knew what he was doing, with his hands and feet tied in some dark dungeon. They tied them up like that, so people said, as they did with men condemned to death, to stop them tearing off their blindfolds.

One of their acquaintances had spoken to them about what it was like to live in a dungeon. Prisoners spent daylight hours half-reclining, lying side by side in long rows. Some prayed nonstop, others wept, some silently, some sobbing out loud. Some talked to themselves for hours on end. Others revolted, yelled out like men possessed, swore at the accursed decree, and ended up calming down and asking for forgiveness, beseeching mercy, and begging Allah to grant long life to the emperor. And then there were those who went into a religious trance and looked forward to the day of their blinding so they would be freed, in their own words, from the sight of this sublunar world.

Some became delirious, and in a kind of ecstasy made speeches lasting hours on end. The world, they would say, looked more beautiful now that they could no longer see it, and far from suffering from the dark, they could feel their heads fill to the brim with light. They claimed they at last understood that eyes do not allow light to enter human minds, but on the contrary, like faucets installed back-to-front, let inner light leak out and thus impoverished the mind.

That’s what one kind of prisoner said, but most of them remained silent, as if they had been struck dumb. Now and then, they would wave their bound arms about incomprehensibly, as if they were clearing a cobweb away from in front of their blindfolded eyes.

God alone knew what Xheladin was doing! Had he kept her image intact in his memory? Or had that shape already begun to grow faint?

Marie instinctively put her hand to her cheek and her lips, as if the decomposition of her image could affect her physically. Then she stared at her body, where the blue marks had been, but had now almost vanished, and was overcome by gloomy thoughts on the ephemeral nature of all things.

She had told him she would wait, but she knew that was not entirely true. To be sure, she would wait for him in her thoughts, she would never forget him, but that was not the same thing at all. The first Sunday without him, when the family at table fell into a funereal silence, they all came to the conclusion that he was now in that place whence no man returns: she also convinced herself that it was all over between them.