Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

That’s what I muttered to myself, but, who knows why, I felt that nothing would ever wipe the snigger off their faces. However, I suddenly thought I had found the key to the mystery: the first person to entertain suspicion wins the match. The suspected person, despite probably being innocent, is always on the defensive simply from having been slow off the mark.

What a crazy idea! I protested inwardly. As a last resort, I tried to recall what I had read about collective guilt and so on. But nothing came back to me.

The beribboned girls ahead of me had started demanding something in twittering voices. The father dealt with them patiently, sugaring his answer with affectionate nicknames for each of his daughters.

An ideal paterfamilias, holding his daughters by the hand, on a sunny socialist First of May. A pretty picture, I said to myself. But tell me — who’s paying for this idyllic tableau? Who did you put away to get your place in the sun?

I was the first person to be surprised by my own outburst of anger. But surprise didn’t stop me from looking around with hatred streaming from my eyes. I’d turned into a terrorist, driven to ecstasy by the sight of blood, who starts to fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Since that was the way things were, I preferred to shoot first, and take my punishment later.

He who lingers is lost.

Soon thereafter, I felt my forehead glazing over with cold sweat. I’d lost sight of the two guys in raincoats and of the model family in blue and red ribbons. I was moving forward among strangers whom I had shamelessly attacked, at whom I had flung whole handfuls of mud without thinking for a moment that nothing stopped them from doing the same to me.

The Grand Boulevard was not far off now. Haven’t you got anything on your own conscience? I asked myself. Six months previously, as I came out of a local Party inquiry where we’d heard the charges against us, I’d asked myself that question for the first time. Now I shook my head again, as I had then. No, there was no stain of that kind on my conscience! Although I had been the unwitting cause of two colleagues in a neighboring office being sentenced to relegation to some godforsaken hole, I was not guilty. Quite the opposite: you could say that their stupidity had very nearly caused my own ruination. “You are at a meeting of a committee of the Party, and you should know that at meetings of Party committees, lying is forbidden!” the secretary shouted as he looked straight into our eyes. “You there!” he said, pointing at me. “Where was it that you heard the perfidious insinuation that gossip and tittle-tattle about the fall of such and such a leader, far from emanating from the petit-bourgeois element in our society and from there seeping into the minds of the people, had been manufactured by the state itself — that is to say, according to your story, by a secret bureau set up for the specific purpose of paving the way for the actual fall of said leader?”

I had never in all my life felt so uncomfortable. My office partner, who was gaping open-mouthed on the other side of the room, had indeed told me the story, but what I did not know then was that he had already confessed everything. I replied point-blank, with a strange confidence, which I allowed to take over for the seconds and minutes it lasted, that I had indeed read such a theory in a book about Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion. The secretary’s eyes looked right through me, but as I spoke I managed to convince myself that I really had read something like that in a book. What helped me make such a show of sincerity was that I genuinely had just finished skimming through a book about Czechoslovakia.

I don’t know what it was that the secretary liked about my answer. It would have been only fair of him to lean toward my partner’s version, since he’d taken the risk of baring himself, and thus to treat my story with skepticism. But the opposite happened. Without giving them time to justify themselves (“Thank goodness,” they told me later on, “that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid having to do!”), he accused my office colleagues of being dangerous chatterboxes, sinister idiots, liars, and megalomaniacs who thought they understood politics when in fact they didn’t have a clue. Incurable gossips who lacked all sense of responsibility, who transposed anything they heard about the horrible truths of bourgeois countries onto our own fine socialist way of life, and so on. Whereas I got off with one of those criticisms that sounded more like praise. In other words, I should have taken greater care to separate subjects such as those involved in the present erroneous comparison, to ward off any confusions that could give rise to conversations such as those under consideration, especially if I ever talked of such things in the hearing of brainless twits who were as politically naive as my two colleagues.

“Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul, you understand?” Those were the secretary’s last words to me. For a long time I found his behavior and the sudden conclusion of the case rather puzzling. Did it come from some cog in the machine suddenly changing direction and causing a whole string of illogicalities to ensue? Or was it that the secretary simply seized upon the introduction of an alien element like Czechoslovakia to bring the whole thing to a rapid end? Maybe it was even simpler than that. He’d had a lot of problems to deal with at the time, what with criticisms from above about the shortfall in the Economic Plan, and so on, and maybe he’d just wanted to get an awkward piece of business over and done with as quickly as possible.

He looked on me almost with kindness, simply because I had taken this burden off his shoulders. As I left the room, I thought he was about to put his avuncular hand on my shoulder just as I’d seen done so many times in films made in the “New Albania” studios. And although his hand did not actually materialize, I spent many days wondering what people would now say about me. That was inevitable, as I was the only one of the three people caught up in this business to get off without a scratch. It was a stroke of pure luck that, before they left for the back of beyond, the other two kept on saying to all and sundry that I had nothing to do with it, that they had only themselves to blame, and that they were very glad the story stopped there, because it could have turned out much worse.

Later on, whenever my mind wandered back to this episode, I was more and more struck by the words: “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul!” The secretary’s hurry to close the case, his gratitude toward me, and especially his inclination to treat it as mainly a matter of harebrained idiots and boastful liars, gradually clarified what had at first seemed a real puzzle. There really wasn’t any mystery, even less an illogical chain of events caused by a loose cog in the machine. And it had nothing to do with the secretary being exhausted by an overheavy workload. It was a device intended to nip the rumor in the bud. The rumor was of an especially dangerous sort that the state had every reason to stop before it started. That was why, when the sentence was made public, the real charge was not mentioned at all, and the two men were sent down officially for professional lapses of the kind anyone could be accused of at any time.

It would have been more logical for the state to turn a blind eye and let the two men go scot-free. But who knows which cog was whizzing away on its own and still demanding a punishment at any cost. . Unless something else was going on that I could not figure out.

That was what was chaotically floating around in my mind as I came up to the Grand Boulevard. After a lapse of several months, I was once again worried that what had really happened would look suspicious to some people. After all, anyone who knew me would be quite right in finding my presence in the grandstand suspicious. I myself had wondered two or three times whether or not I had served as an unwitting tool to dig my colleagues’ graves a little deeper. After all, I was the person responsible for their having been accused of mistakenly confusing revisionist waywardness with the realities of socialism. . Not to mention what they might think if they both saw me today on their television screens! They would probably think: “We believed he was getting us off the hook, but apparently he must have been digging our grave even deeper to wind up with such a lavish reward!”