Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

The days drag along as wearily as if they had suddenly been broken by old age. We haven’t yet managed to recuperate from the shock we had suffered at the end of this week.

Ever since his chariot halted at our tower and he said, “I am from Number 22 Department of Music,” I have felt a foreboding of evil, or something very much like it. When I asked him what the role of his department was and whether he really meant to put on concerts or operatic pieces for the soldiers and workers on the Wall rebuilding project, he laughed out long and loud. “Our Department hasn’t been involved in that sort of thing for ages!” What he then explained to us was so astounding that at one point my deputy interrupted him with a plaintive query: “Is all that really true, or is this a joke?”

We had of course heard that, over the years, some departments and sections of the celestial hierarchy, while retaining their traditional names, had seen their functions entirely transformed — but to learn that things had gone so far as to make supplying the emperor with sexual performance-enhancing drugs the main job of the navy’s top brass, while the management of the fleet was now in the hands of the palace’s head eunuch, well, nobody could easily have got their mind around that. But that’s not the whole story, he said. “Do you know who’s now in charge of the copper mines and the foundries? Or who’s the brains behind foreign policy these days? Or the man in charge of public works?”

Our jaws dropped as, with smug satisfaction at his listeners’ bewilderment, he answered his own questions, as if he were throwing old bones to hungry dogs, Lowering his voice, he confided that the institution now responsible for castrating eunuchs and for running the secret service was the National Library. Leaving us no time at all to catch our breath, he went on to reveal that in recent times the clan of the eunuchs at the imperial palace had seized an untold amount of power. In his view they might soon be in complete control of government, and then China might no longer be called the Celestial Empire, or the Middle Empire, but could easily come to be known as the Empire of Celestial Castration. .

He guffawed for a while, then his face darkened. “You may well laugh,” he said, “but you don’t realize what horrors that would bring in its wake.” Far from smiling, let alone laughing, our expressions had turned as black as pitch. Despite which, he went on prefacing all his remarks with “You may well laugh, but. .” In his mind, we were laughing without realizing the calamity that would come of it. Because we did not know that emasculation multiplies a man’s thirst for power tenfold, and so on.

As the evening wore on, and as he drank ever more copiously, especially toward the end, the pleasure of lording it over us and his pride in coming from the capital pushed him to reveal ever more frightful secrets. He probably said too much, but even so none of his words was without weight, for you could sense that they gave a faithful representation of reality. When we broached the threat from the north, he snorted with laughter as thunderously as ever before. “War with the nomads? How can you be so naÏve, my poor dear civil servants, as to believe in such nonsense? The Wall rebuilding project? It’s got nothing to do with the prospect of battle! On the contrary, it’s the first article of the secret pact with the Barbarians. Why are you looking at me with the glassy stare of a boiled cod? Yes, that’s right, the repair work was one of the Barbarians’ demands.”

“Oh, no!” my deputy groaned, as he put his head between his hands.

Our visitor went on in more measured manner. To be sure, China had raised the Wall to protect itself from the nomadic hordes, but so much time had passed since then that things had undergone a profound change.

“Yes,” he said, “things have changed a lot. It’s true China was afraid of the Barbarians for many a long year, and at some future time she may well have reason to fear them again. But there have also been periods when the Barbarians were afraid of China. We’re in one such period right now. The Barbarians are afraid of China. And that’s why they asked, quite firmly, for the Wall to be rebuilt.”

“But that’s crazy!” my deputy said. “To be afraid of a state and at the same time ask it to strengthen its defenses makes no sense at all!”

“Heavens above!” our visitor exclaimed. “Why are you so impatient? Let me finish my explanation. . You stare at me with your big eyes, you interrupt me like a flock of geese, all because you don’t know what’s at the bottom of it. The key to the puzzle is called: fear. Or to be more precise, it is the nature of that fear. . Now, listen carefully, and get it into your heads: China’s fear and the Barbarians’ fear, though they are both called fear in Chinese, are not the same thing at all. China fears the destructive power of the Barbarians; the Barbarians fear the softening effects of China. Its palaces, its women, its silk. All of that in their eyes spells death, just as the lances and dust of the nomads spell the end for China. That’s how this strange Wall, which rises up as an obstacle between them, has sometimes served the interests of one side, and sometimes the other. Right now it’s the nomads’ turn.”

The thought of insulting him to his face or calling him an impostor, a clown, and a bullshitter, left my mind for good. Like everything else he’d said so far, this had to be true. I had a vague memory of Genghis Khan’s conquest of China. He overthrew our emperors and put his own men in their place, then turned on those same men because they had apparently gone soft. Had Yan Jey, one of our ministers, not been convicted a few years back for having asserted, one evening after dinner, that the last four generations of the Ming dynasty, if not its entire ascendance as well, were basically Mongol?

So the repairs to the Wall had been requested by the Barbarians. Timur, with more foresight than his predecessors, had decided that invading China was not only pointless but impossible. What China loses by the sword it retakes by silk. So Timur had chosen to have the border closed, instead of attacking. This is what explains the calm that settled over both sides of the Wall as soon as the delegation came over. What the rest of us had ascribed so unthinkingly to an enigma, to frivolousness, even to a hallucination engendered by penis-enlarging mirrors, was actually the straightforward outcome of a bilateral accord.

That night a swarm of thoughts buzzed in my head. States are always either wiser or more foolish than we think they are. Snatches of conversation with officials who had been posted on the other side came back to me, but I now saw them in a different light. The ghost of Genghis Khan has weakened, I used to hear from people who’d carried out espionage in the northlands. But we heard them without paying much attention, telling ourselves: These are just tales of the Barbarians. They’ve gone softer, then become hardened again, and taking that sort of thing seriously is like trying to interpret the shapes made by flights of storks in the sky. But that was not right at all. Something really was going on out there on the gray steppe, and the more I thought about it the more important it seemed. A great change was taking hold of the world. Nomadism was on its last legs, and Timur, the man whom the heavens had had the whimsy to make lame, was there to establish a new balance of power. He had brought a whole multitude of peoples to follow a single religion, Islam, and now he was trying to settle them in a territory that could be made into a state. The numerous incursions of these different nations, which had previously seemed incomprehensible, would now probably come to a halt on the surface of the earth, though it was not at all clear whether that was a good thing or bad, since you can never be sure whether a Barbarian contained is more dangerous than one let loose. . I imagined Timur standing like a pikestaff at the very heart of Asia and all around him nomadic peoples barely responding to his exhortations to stop their wild forays. .