Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

“Yes, of course,” the Frenchman replied.

“In spite of its ghastly and untranslatable name, and even in spite of the notorious horror it has caused, the Blinding Order has contributed to a new flowering of oral poetry, which, as I myself noticed, has been in sharp decline in this country in recent years.”

“Do you really think so?” the Frenchman replied, looking at his colleague in astonishment. Then he recalled that his colleague had once told him he was engaged in research on oral poetry, which made his remark seemed less cynical than bizarre.

“Just look at this crowd, if you want to see the evidence,” the Austrian added.

“I guess so,” the French consul muttered, as he gazed into the Great Hall where the cacophony of the blind was rising to its peak.

Tirana, 1984

Footnote

*Christians.

*Eye trouble.

Barbarians always go back over in the end. My deputy sighed as he spoke those words. I guess he was staring into the far distance, where their horses could just be seen.

For my part, I was reflecting on the fact that nowhere in the vast expanse of China, not in its small towns, nor its large cities, nor in the capital — although people there do know more than provincials — nowhere can you find a single soul who fails to comment, when nomads go over the Wall (even nomads that go over as part of an official delegation), Barbarians always go back over in the end, while releasing a sigh of the sort usually given in response to events you imagine you’ll eventually look back on with fond sadness.

It’s been as quiet as the grave around here for decades. That does not stop our imperial subjects from imagining an unending brutal conflict, with the Wall on one side and the northern nomads on the other, both forever hurling spears and hot pitch at each other and tearing out eyes, masonry, and hair.

But that no longer surprises me very much, when you think that people don’t just bedeck the Wall with false laurels of valor, but envision all the rest of it — its structure, even its height — quite differently from the way it really is. They can’t bring themselves to see that though there are places where the Wall is quite high — indeed, sometimes so high that if you look down from the top, as we could do right now from where we’re standing, you become quite dizzy — along most of its length the Wall’s dismal state of repair is a pity to behold. Because it has been so long abandoned, because its stones have been filched by local people, the Wall has shrunk: it barely tops a horse and rider now, and in one sector it’s a wall only in name, just lumps of masonry scattered around like the remains of a project that got dropped for God knows what reason. It’s in this kind of shape, like a snake you can hardly make out as it slithers through the mud, that the Wall reaches the edge of the Gobi Desert — which promptly swallows it up.

My deputy’s eyes were blank, like the eyes of someone required to stare into the far distance.

“We’re now awaiting an order,” I said, before he could ask me first what we ought to do next. It was obvious that the result of the negotiations with the official delegation of nomads would determine what that order would be — if any decision of the kind were ever made at all

We waited for the order all summer long, then until the end of the summer-house season, when the emperor and his ministers were supposed to be back in the capital The fall winds came, then the snow-flecked drizzle of winter, but still no decision reached us.

As always happens in cases of this kind, the order, or rather its reverberation, arrived just when everybody had stopped thinking about it. I call it a reverberation because long before the imperial mail reached us we learned of the government’s decision from the people living in the villages and camps strung out along the line of fortifications. They deserted their homes and resettled in the caves in the nearby hills, as they did every time news reached them, by means entirely mysterious, even before we were informed of impending repair work on the Great Wall.

It was probably a wise move on their part, since by making off to the hills, they would spare themselves the officials’ whip, at the very least, not to mention many other punishments of every kind. I’d never understood why they constantly take masonry from the Wall to build their hovels and yards, knowing full well that they would have to bring it back to rebuild the Wall.

The process, they tell me, has been going on for hundreds of years. Like the skein of wool used to make a scarf — which is then unpicked to knit a sweater, which is then undone to knit another scarf, and so on — the Wall’s great stones have made the return trip many times from peasant hovel to Wall and back again. In some places, you can still see streaks of soot, which predictably fire the fantasies of tourists and foreign plenipotentiaries, who can’t imagine that the marks are not the trace of some heroic clash but only smoke stains from hearths where, for many a long year, some nameless yokel cooked his thin and tasteless gruel.

So when we heard this afternoon that the peasants had abandoned their dwellings, we guessed that the whole of China had already heard news of the call to rebuild the Wall.

Although it was a symptom of heightened tension, the repair work did not yet add up to war. Unlike armed conflict, rebuilding was such a frequent occurrence that the Great Wall’s middle name could have easily been: Rebuilt. Generally speaking, it was less a wall in any proper sense than an infinite succession of patches. People went so far as to pretend that it was in just such a manner the Wall had come into being in the first place — as a repair job on an older wall, which was itself the remaking of another, even older, wall, and so on. The suggestion was even made that at the very beginning the original wall stood at the center of the state; but from one repair to another, it had gradually moved ever closer to the border, where, like a tree that’s finally been replanted in the right soil, it grew to such a monstrous size it terrified the rest of the world. Even people who could not imagine the Wall without the nomads sometimes wondered whether it was their presence that had led to the building of the Wall, or whether it was the Wall rising up all along the border that had conjured up the nomads.

If we had not seen the coming of the Barbarian delegation with our own eyes, and then seen it going again, we might have been among the few who would have attributed this rise in tension (like most previous events of this kind) to the disagreements that frequently flare up inside the country, even at the very center of the state. Smugly content to know a truth lost in an ocean of lies, we would have spent long evenings constructing all kinds of hypotheses about what would happen next and about the plots that could have been hatched in the palace, plots with such secret and intricate workings that even their instigators would have had a hard time explaining them, or emanating from jealousies so powerful that people said they could shatter ladies’ mirrors at dusk, and so on and so forth.

But it had all happened under our noses: the nomads had come and gone beneath our very feet. We could still recall the polychrome borders of their tunics and the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves — not forgetting the expression “Barbarians always go back over in the end” uttered by my deputy, along with his sighs and his blank stare.

In any other circumstance we could have felt, or at least feigned, a degree of doubt, but this time we realized there were no grounds for such an attitude. However tiresome winter evenings may be, we could find better ways of filling them than fabricating alternative reasons for the state’s anxiety apart from the coming of the Barbarians.