Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

“Good Lord!” he said. “You really are a strange one, my boy, you’re a real killjoy. You’ve been griping about the Chinese for years, but now that things are turning your way, you’re not jumping for joy but sulking.”

That’s when I lost my temper. “So why should I be jumping for joy?” I screamed at him. “We should be weeping instead. But you won’t understand that, seeing that you’re already brain-dead!” I was really on a rampage. We were breaking off relations with the Chinese not because of their atrocities, but for the opposite reason — because they were on the point of giving them up. Whereas Albania would curl up and die if it had to give up being cruel! We’d connived with the Chinese for the sole purpose of inventing new horrors. Now they were moving in another direction, we couldn’t think of anything better to do than leave them behind! It was enough to make you tear your hair out! But then, we’d always behaved that way. We’d been friends with the Yugoslavs when they were ultra-orthodox, but we’d turned on them as soon as signs of a thaw came from Belgrade. We’d been allies of the Soviets during the worst period of Stalinist terror, but had turned our backs on them the moment they began to show a modicum of civilization. And it was the same old story with the Chinese. All other countries had ended up turning away from evil and obscurantism. But Albania remained their last bastion! We’d become the high priests of calamity and the shame of the universe. Was there any other country like ours? Accursed, O thrice-accursed land!

He was flabbergasted by what he heard, and he stared at me with wide eyes filled with hatred and horror. He tried to butt in two or three times, but his mouth had probably gone dry. Only when I got to de-claim “accursed land” did he manage to articulate: “I am going to report you!”

“Go ahead!” I responded. “But don’t forget that the shadow of my fall will affect you, too. .”

At that point, as he usually did in such circumstances, he took out a box of pills and swallowed a dose of nitroglycerin.

That was our next-to-last quarrel The last one arose over a slogan in one of the Guide’s speeches: We shall eat grass if we have to but we will never renounce the principles of Marxism-Leninism! I told my uncle I thought the statement was the height of absurdity and deeply offensive to the nation’s dignity.

“What are the principles for whose sake we are supposed to turn into cows? What use could they possibly be to us then? To glorify our shepherd?”

He went pale, and his jaw began to quiver. He didn’t know what to say.

“Well, go on, then! Give us an answer!” I pursued. “What use could we make of principles whose purpose is to turn us into cattle, like a flock of Circes?”

As I was speaking, my mind was wondering whether that was not in fact the secret wish entertained by the Guide — to bring humanity down to the level of a herd of herbivores. . meek and dumb. . all in the name of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. . Lord, what a pantomime!

“Do you have any idea of the terrible joke that’s being played on us?” I went on at the top of my lungs. “The rest of the world is moving on and making the most of life, whereas we are supposed to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of some so-called principles? What have the principles of Marxism-Leninism got to do with Albania, since, as you yourself agree, the rest of the world has given them up for good? By what right must our martyred, pauperized countrymen remain the last defenders of principles they didn’t even invent? In the name of the future of humanity? Do you mean to say that because in London and Paris and Vienna and so on people have followed the primrose path and ended up wallowing in luxury, music, and self-indulgence, we Albanians have to sacrifice ourselves and eat grass for the salvation of their souls? Really! What a farce!”

“Stop!” he finally managed to blurt out. “You are rotten to the core, and totally incapable of understanding these things! You can’t understand that it would not matter one iota if Albania were wiped off the face of the earth so long as the ideas of the Guide were assured of an eternal future!”

I was struck dumb by this argument, which I hadn’t heard before. (I later learned that it had been issued by the minister of the interior during a secret meeting of Party cadres.)

He took my silence for defeat, and interpreted it as a surrender. He looked me up and down for a moment with a triumphant glance, until I returned to the attack, from an angle that took him completely by surprise.

“What you’ve just come out with is the most heinous accusation ever made against the Guide,” I said.

“Accuse the Guide? Me?” He grinned. “Anyway, who’s talking about the Guide?”

“You are!” I replied. “The mere fact of positing an alternative between ‘Albania’ and the ‘Guide’ is the same as making a grave accusation against the latter. It comes down to saying that it has to be one or the other, that’s there’s no room for both in this world. In other words, mors tua vita mea.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t twist my words!” he shouted.

“But that is what you said!” I answered. “You said it explicitly: may Albania be wiped off the face of the earth so that the ideas of the Guide may go marching ever on!”

All of sudden, my head was a mass of confusion. Maybe that was the Guide’s true secret: to wipe this infuriating country called Albania off the face of the earth, this nation of paupers forever getting under his feet, whom he had to feed and rule over all these years! Once they’d been got rid of, turned into thin air, how clean it would be, how spotless! A country that had died, but was kept alive in the ideas and books of its Leader. How convenient, too! No awkward reality to contradict you, not a trace of evidence of the crimes that had been committed. Nothing but his books, his ideas, his lumières. .

“I never said that!” my uncle kept on screaming. “You’ve twisted my words, you’re the devil incarnate!”

Our argument was winding down and about to end with its invariable routine exchange: I’ll report you. . Go on, and the shadow will fall on you. . Then the dose of heart medicine, and so on. Except that this time, it was I who said: “I’m going to report you.” I went further. Egged on by my own excess of sarcasm (I’d noticed that sarcasm calmed me down, especially when it hit my uncle right in the eye), I added: “I’m going to report you, but it’s a damn nuisance, as the shadow will fall on me, too.”

At this point he completely lost his temper, and our fight ended in a particularly grotesque scene. Each screamed he would denounce the other, that the shadow of the other’s fall would fall on him too, then we went through the ritual of the pills — but to his surprise and to mine, I snatched the box and downed a pill myself, then ran off like a scalded cat.

Memories of these episodes must have also come into my uncle’s mind in some form or another because the amazement you could read in his eyes just kept on growing. But there was also a note of triumph in his expression: At last! Now you’re on the right road, my boy! You snorted and snarled to your heart’s content, but now you’ve come back into the fold!

“So they issued you an invitation?” he queried, patting me on my shoulder. “Congratulations! Congratulations! I’m delighted for you.”

If we’d been alone he would probably have said: “Cut the niceties. Now tell me just how. .?” But though he said nothing, his whole attitude — the way he looked at me, the pat on the shoulder copied from “New Albania” movies — got the message across maybe even more effectively.