Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

The precise nature of what base act G. Z. had committed was never disclosed.

In the netherworld. Bald Man obtained a supply of meat before climbing on the eagle’s back, and so the flight back to the upper world began. Now and again in the course of flight the eagle asked to be fed, and so Bald Man cut him a piece of the meat he had brought.

G. Z. had been banned from publishing his own work, but he was still a member of the National Theater. He’d already told people close to him that his case would soon be resolved. In two or three weeks, on the outside four or five, his own prospects would be irrevocably disconnected from his cousin’s plight. Especially as he wasn’t a first cousin anyway. . But the matter was not resolved within two to three weeks, or in four or five.

The eagle’s flight to the upper world was taking much longer than Bald Man had expected. All the meat had disappeared down the bird’s gullet. Bald Man looked on the sinister abyss with fear in his soul as the eagle kept flying around and around. The pit beneath seemed bottomless.

“Kroa, kroa!” said the eagle, for it was his way of asking for food. Bald Man shivered with horror. What could he give him now? For the old man had warned him: if the beast doesn’t get his ration of meat when he asks for it, then you’re in for a very great fall.

“Kroa!” the eagle cawed once more. On the spur of the moment. Bald Man dug the knife into his forearm and cut out a piece of his own flesh.

We never learned exactly what G. Z. did in the week when they finally put him to the test. All we heard about, to begin with, was that he’d set a trap at a Party meeting for a fashionable young playwright: he’d sent some of the latter’s poems about the Guide (obtained with the help of a bodyguard who was a friend of his) to the Guide’s own children, with a letter complaining that for well-known reasons publication of the poems had been forbidden. And then came the main thing: the arrest of a young scriptwriter on the basis of an analysis (more surely, of the denunciation) that G. Z. had made of the man’s script.

I rubbed my forehead to ease my migraine. No, the story of Bald Man feeding the infernal eagle with his own flesh could no longer be made to fit the story of G. Z. at this point. That man would have been quite incapable of feeding an eagle with flesh he’d not cut from someone else. Bald Man’s self-mutilation gave the folktale a tragic turn and a funereal grandeur that were completely inapplicable to G. Z. and his ilk. Not one of them would give up a single hair on his head to save anyone else. Whereas Bald Man. .

“Kroa, kroa!” the eagle cawed again after a while, and his passenger had to stick the blade into his thigh to cut out another piece of flesh. He carried on, looking glumly down into the inky blackness of the pit. Then he gazed in turn at all the different parts of his body that he would have to part with when the eagle asked for more. Lord, every morsel would be just as painful as any other!

The eagle flew on endlessly through the ice-cold dark. Now and again he cawed, and Bald Man took a slice out of this or that part or place in his body. It seemed the journey would never end. Sometimes he thought he could see a faint glimmer of light in the distance, but it was only a hallucination invented by his weary eyes.

“Kroa, kroa. .” He had to start cutting pieces off his chest as the rest of his body was now almost down to the bone. Once again he thought he saw daylight in the far distance. .

It’s not known if Bald Man was still alive when the eagle came out into the upper world. People say that locals who happened to be around at the time couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw a huge black bird carrying a human skeleton on its back. “Hey! Come quick, there’s something incredible to see!” they called out to each other. “An eagle has brought up a dead man’s bones. .”

I had lost sight of G. Z. and didn’t want to think about him anymore. He wasn’t the only one who had torn out living flesh so as not to fall to the bottom of a pit, with no means of climbing back up. There were others. . Maybe I was one of them. We’d taken a path not really knowing where it would lead, not knowing how long it was, and while still on our way, realizing we had taken the wrong road but that it was too late to turn back, every one of us, so as not to be swallowed up by the dark, had started slicing off pieces of our own flesh.

I continued to massage my forehead. The noise of the crowd all around me had merged entirely with the sound of the band. Meanwhile I was far, far away, in a dark and bottomless shaft, where we all sat astride our eagles, circling whichever way the wind cared to push us. .

“Well, well! Fancy seeing you here! But you look as though you have your head in the clouds. . Anyway, Happy First of May, all the same!”

It was my uncle. Though delighted to see me, he couldn’t mask his surprise. His eyebrows stayed raised and his eyes expressed unabated astonishment all the time he was speaking to me, as if he really could not come to terms with the fact that I really was there.

“He’s a nephew of mine, he works in the broadcasting service,” he said, with no small pride, to a knot of acquaintances.

I did not like my uncle. Each time we had met these past many years, we got into an argument, since we held opposing views on every subject: on the incompetence of managers, on shortages, on Stalin, television programming, the Kosovo question, and so on. I don’t recall our ever having agreed about anything. Even the weather, which usually helps bring the most unwilling opponents onto common ground, gave rise to clashes between us. He liked hot climates and I preferred cool ones. He never failed to draw ideological conclusions from this difference of taste:

“It’s obvious that you prefer the climate of Europe, since it’s your model in every respect!”

“So what model should I have?” I used to retort. “Bangladesh? The Far East? Skanderbeg fought for a quarter of a century to snatch Albania out of Asia and to bring it into the European fold. What have you and your friends been doing? You’ve never stopped trying to push Albania back again!”

That’s when we usually got into another spat about the Chinese, and then things would really heat up. He would call me a liberal and a revisionist, and would foam at the mouth when he saw these epithets no longer awed me. He would try to come up with other, nastier epithets, but as he couldn’t find any (in his eyes, those were already the worst he could think of), he just kept repeating them.

“Unreconstructible revisionist! Hopeless liberal!. .”

For my part, I just called him a China-lover and observed how lucky we were that countries could not be mounted on wheels, otherwise we would already have moved to somewhere near the Gobi Desert or Tibet. “Down there you’d feel safe, I’m sure!” I added. “Or wouldn’t that be far enough from accursed Europe for you?”

We’d fought about the Chinese when our country’s diplomatic love affair with Beijing was at its peak, but we argued even more when the affair was broken off. When news first went around that trouble was brewing, he dropped in at our place, looking fraught, with furrowed brow. “On a number of points, my boy, I think you were not entirely wrong; those Chinese weren’t all they claimed to be. .” However, on the day that obviously should have been the occasion of our reconciliation, our most violent dispute arose. That was when I first called him brain-dead, and he threatened to denounce me.

To be honest, I had jumped at the opportunity of renewing hostilities as soon as he said he was surprised that I — champion Sinophobe that I was — hadn’t seemed happier on hearing the announcement that relations with Beijing were being broken off.