Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

  “That one looks after our newspapers,” he told his daughter with a smile, “and he’s our foreign minister.” He could have been showing her new toys.

  At any rate, that’s the impression it made on me. Everything he said was imbued with the kind of ease that comes only from elevation — from the great height whence a man who already knows he is immortal can look down and comment upon the temporal affairs of this world.

  “Who’s higher up, the foreign minister or the minister of the interior?” the little girl asked as the pair of them moved farther away from me.

  I tried to catch up, to hear the answer.

  “Well, now . . . how can I put it? Interior affairs are unmistakably the most important.”

  “But foreign ones are much more attractive!” the little girl protested.

  He laughed.

  “Do you mean dresses?” he asked. “You’re right!”

  We were now almost underneath the grandstand. A security check far more stringent than the last awaited us.

  I took my invitation card out of my pocket again and went up to the barrier. I don’t know why, but I thought I could hear a buzzing in my inner ear.

  “ID!”

  “Oh, of course. Sorry.”

  A few yards farther on came the start of another zone, with an entirely different atmosphere. It was full of diplomats looking for their seats, delegations from abroad, and TV camera crews.

  I strode easily across the few yards that separated me from it. I felt as if my whole appearance betrayed distraction, particularly the expression on my face, or, to be more precise, the smile that must have been on it. I was shown the access route to the C-1 stand, which I instantly forgot, until someone else showed it to me again. My left and right shoulders were constantly being bumped by other guests.

  By what means did they get that far up? For an instant I thought that question was in every glance cast upon me, then the next instant I thought it was only in my own head. Everything was smothered in collective joviality, as if a generous helping of sauce had been poured over it all so as to even out the taste. From here on it’s just us. What we did to get here doesn’t matter anymore. When all is said and done, we all took the same path. The path that leads here. To the feet of Power, Heavenly Light, and Olympus!

  A pair of watery eyes cast what I took to be a sour glance at me. Maybe my presence was an impediment to their enjoying the happiness they were about to savor. What’s this mere mortal doing in a place set aside for the elect? So he filed a report, okay. So he denounced someone, all right. But it’s far too soon to call him up here! If it weren’t, then half the population of Albania . . .

  But the nausea set off by those weepy eyes was soon dispelled. The brass band opposite the platform carried on, thumping out its rousing marches. The flags began to flutter a little more vigorously in the breeze, as if they knew it was nearly ten o’clock. I caught sight of Th. D. one more time, then lost him from sight. Maybe he was going on even farther. Perhaps up to stand B, or even to stand A .. .

  8

  The strange sensation of bewilderment persisted in my brain. It was probably euphoria induced by being so close to power. Flags and marching bands had a purpose, after all. They played their part.

  My intoxication would surely have been complete if it hadn’t been for the taste of a funeral in the back of my throat. Suzana’s funeral. I had lost Suzana at the same time as I gained access to this stand. The flowers and the music and the august scarlet drapes would have been just as fitting to mark her passing. Her sacrifice . . .

  O Father, hear me! she implored

  Young and innocent though she felt

  Her sobs and cries could not melt

  The stony hearts of men set on war

  What I’d been reading in recent days about the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter would not go out of my mind. The festive hubbub, the brass band, and the watchwords written on the red banners didn’t take my mind off the subject, they actually brought it back with greater intensity. Two thousand eight hundred years ago, a large crowd — just like this one, moving toward the grandstand — converged on an altar that was probably similarly draped in red.

  Why are you all in such a hurry? —What’s going on? — Didn’t you know? — They say Agamemnon’s daughter is going to be sacrificed —

  A rumor to that effect had been going around troop-infested Aulis for some days. It was true that the wind hadn’t stopped blowing, and the sea was still foaming around the ships anchored close to shore. But despite the weather, most people were puzzled when they heard the alleged reasons for the delay in setting out for Troy. Was it just the high wind, or was there something else? We had our fill of wind coming over here, more than enough of it. If the leaders are at loggerheads over something, like I’ve heard said once or twice, why don’t they come out and admit it?

  “Excuse me, Comrade, do you have the right time?”

  I was so lost in my own thoughts that if the man who asked me the time had touched my elbow, as people sometimes do, I would surely have jumped like a jack-in-the-box. And that would have prompted God knows what suspicions!

  I was aware that someone was smiling at me, and I thought: Now you’re really going out of your mind, you’ve forgotten who people are! Then I realized that the person in question was smiling at someone else, with a face as worn and as lined as a dried fig. I don’t know what drew my attention to the person, whose skin was creased into a shape that could have been a smile expressing disbelief or irony or some other meaning unknown to mere mortals. It’s Suzana’s father’s top adviser! I realized. When he was at a meeting we televised a year before, one of my colleagues had whispered into my ear: That’s Comrade X’s right-hand man.

  I studied him with as much concentrated hostility as I could muster. Had he or had he not known in advance of Suzana’s impending change of heart? He must have known, seeing as he was her father’s closest confidant. Maybe it was even worse . . . Maybe he was the instigator of her sacrifice! Like Calchas . . .

  My imagination flew off once again to the ancient seaport of Aulis. The rumbling swell and the ceaseless comings and goings of soldiers dotted all along the shore made the atmosphere of suspended activity almost palpable. Most of them were dreaming of giving up war and going back home to their wives or sweethearts. A rumor that the campaign was about to be canceled gave them hope of just such a turn — but suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, came quite different news. In order to calm the winds, Agamemnon, the commander in chief, was going to sacrifice his own daughter!

  Most of them didn’t believe their ears. Supporters of the commander of the fleet didn’t believe it because it saddened them too much. Was such a sacrifice really necessary? Agamemnon’s opponents didn’t believe it — they were reluctant to admit that the chief was capable of such self-denial. And people who were hoping for the straightforward cancellation of the campaign didn’t want to believe it, either.

  No, something like that just wasn’t possible. It was utter madness; it was uncalled for. As for the wind, old seadogs confirmed that it wasn’t so bad it required such a tragic step. Anyway, who could be sure it would make the wind abate? After all, it was that soothsayer Calchas who’d come up with the idea — and everyone knew how unreliable he was.

  I scanned the crowd to find Suzana’s father’s adviser again, but I’d lost him. If I had managed to locate him, in the crazy mood I was in I might have been capable of approaching him and asking out loud: “So it was you, wasn’t it, who gave Suzana’s father that piece of perverse advice? But why did you do it? Go on, tell me why!”

  Robert Graves’s book dealt at length with the issue of Calchas. According to the oldest sources, his personality was as puzzling as could be. It was known that he was a Trojan, sent over by Priam with the specific task of sabotaging the Greeks’ campaign. Eventually, though, he’d gone over to the other side, become a turncoat. So you couldn’t avoid wondering whether he was a genuine renegade, or whether his new all
egiance was just a strategic cover. It was equally possible, as often happens in circumstances of this kind, that after facing numerous dilemmas in the course of a war whose end was nowhere in sight, Calchas had ended up a double agent.

  His proposal to sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter couldn’t have been a key step in his career. (Let’s not forget that his prophecies, like those of any turncoat, were treated with skepticism.) If he were still secretly in Priam’s service, then obviously he would ask for the sacrifice of the commander’s daughter, to foment further discord and resentment among the increasingly fractious Greeks. But if he’d genuinely gone over to the Greek side, the question would then arise whether he truly believed that the sacrifice would placate the winds (or whatever else: passions, disagreements), and thus permit the fleet to set out.

  Whatever he was, a true or sham renegade, an agent provocateur or a double agent, his advice was just too wild, not to say lunatic. A soothsayer, especially in times such as these, must have had many enemies just waiting to use the tiniest of his blunders against him. So if he had made the suggestion to Agamemnon, he would have been sure to lose out in the end.

  Far more plausible, therefore, was that Calchas never said anything of the kind, and that the idea of sacrifice had been invented by Agamemnon, for reasons known only to himself. He must have seen how easy it would be to implicate Calchas after the event, to justify his crime in the eyes of enlightened people and to mask its real motive. It was even quite possible that raging winds and so on hadn’t even been mentioned as the fleet was preparing to depart, and that the sacrifice had been performed without a word of explanation . . .

  The soldiers and civilians of Aulis had converged at the place where the altar had been set up. Maybe invitations had been issued, to prevent the place being overrun. Everyone in attendance must have been on the verge of asking the obvious question: What is this sacrifice? What’s it for? The very absence of a clear answer would have heightened anxiety and fear tenfold.

  No, Calchas hadn’t given any advice at all. A prophecy from him would have seemed too dubious, too Machiavellian. But in that case, why had the idea of sacrifice sprung from Agamemnon’s mind like an illumination?

  Groups of spectators drifted like ripples lapping rhythmically on the shore toward the places with the best view of the parade, or toward the central stand where the top leaders would take their seats.

  I was drifting imperceptibly myself with the same end in view when I saw Suzana. She was in C-2, a little lower down than I was, together with other sons and daughters of the elite.

  She was subtly pale, and her indifference could be guessed partly from her profile, and partly from the glistening comb that held up her luxuriant hair. She was staring vacantly in the direction of the band.

  Why are they asking for your sacrifice, Suzana? I questioned her silently, with quiet sorrow. What storm are you supposed to appease?

  For a brief moment I felt entirely empty. Gripped by the sense of void and exhausted by so many questions, I wondered: Am I not going too far with all these analogies? Isn’t it altogether simpler — a woman naturally pulling back from an affair when an official engagement is imminent? I was the victim of what was, after all, a quite ordinary change of heart. Was my mind not simply trying to give my defeat a tragic dimension that came only from its own nature?

  I’d got hold of the word sacrifice and then used it to contrive an analogy I’d taken further than was warranted. I was no better than a novice poet who manages after much effort to spawn a metaphor, then falls for it entirely and constructs an entire poetic work on a foundation no more solid than sand.

  I would never have thought that a sudden perception of a likeness between Suzana and Iphigenia — one of those random, instantaneous illuminations that flash across men’s minds thousands of times every day — could take root in my mind and grow to the dimensions it had now acquired. The identification had become so complete for me that I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if I’d heard an announcer on radio, on TV, or in the theater introduce “the daughter of Agamemnon, Suzana!” However, the equivalence was also what allowed me to see in an instant a whole new side of the ancient drama, in the light of the present situation of Suzana and her father. It made a new sense of the relations between Agamemnon and the other leaders, of their power struggles and fallback positions, their reasons of state, their use of exemplary punishments, and of terror . . .

  For a while, my mind seemed intent on casting off a too heavy burden, and made a concentrated effort to de-dramatize the whole thing. But all of a sudden the well-oiled machine in my head jammed, clashed gears, and went into reverse. A massive and fearless NO took hold of my entire being.

  No, it couldn’t be that simple! Sure, I was at the end of my rope, I was flailing, but all the same, I was utterly certain that things were not so simple. It wasn’t so much the word sacrifice or Graves’s book that had planted the seed of the analogy in my head. It was something else, something that I could not quite see for the fog surrounding it, but which I could feel quite near. It must be here, in full sight, all I had to do was to shake off a veil that was clouding my vision . . . Had not Stalin sacrificed his own son Yakov to ... in order to ... to be able to say that his own son . . . had to share the same destiny . .. the same fate ... as any Russian soldier? And what had Agamemnon been trying to say two thousand eight hundred years ago? What was Suzana’s father trying to get at now?

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sight of her head, swaying between the shoulders of two others. I don’t know why, but the memory of our first meeting suddenly came back to my mind. Portrait of a young girl bleeding . . . That’s how it had crystallized in my memory . . . It was one afternoon late in the fall. After our first kiss on the couch, she looked me in the eye at leisure, then said with quiet composure: I love you. She maintained her quizzical stare, as if checking to see that I’d understood her. She needed only a sign from me to offer proof of what she’d just said, and when I responded — rather hesitantly, as I was somewhat taken aback at the prospect of such an easy triumph — “How about lying down?” she got up right away and, with the same placid manner as she had spoken, got undressed.

  I followed her orderly gestures. Her lace lingerie appeared when she took off her dress, and when she pulled down her tights her smooth white legs came into view. I got up from the couch and kissed her as cautiously as if she were sleepwalking, and pressed a bunch of her hair to my right cheek. I like expensive women ... I mumbled, without knowing then or since whether “expensive” referred to her Western underwear, to the valuable comb that embellished her hair, or to the ease and simplicity with which she offered herself.

  On the couch she put up no resistance. She’d taken off the last of her underwear, and everything would have happened as perfectly as in a painted dreamscape if an abrupt, subterranean tremor hadn’t suddenly shaken us apart. Her earlier eagerness gave way to opposite emotions of awkwardness and tension, which she tried but failed to hide.

  “What’s the matter, Suzana?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath.

  She didn’t answer. But I guessed that a kind of safety catch had clicked on somewhere right inside her and locked her up, and then I thought I understood. But I was greatly surprised nonetheless when she blurted out, point-blank: “I’m a virgin.”

  We lay for a long while on the couch without speaking. Then, with a smile that was more like a brightening above her cheekbones, she said to me: “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

  I didn’t know what to say, but she went on: “That’s why I preferred not to tell you beforehand.”

  I felt unable to react, perhaps because happiness had shown itself in its most certain form, surrounded by a halo of sadness. The triumph, which a short while before had seemed to come so easily, now felt like a feat of arms. I beg you, Suzana, don’t be my downfall! was my unspoken prayer.

  9

  The band suddenly stopped playing, the loudspeakers roared with a storm of appla
use, and all heads turned toward the central stand. The leaders were coming out onto the platform. From where I was sitting I could make out only some of them. I couldn’t manage to see the Guide, or Suzana’s father, who was maybe standing at his side. From the C-1 stand, only four of the leaders’ heads were visible. Were they really oversized? Maybe it was just the effect of the nickname that one of our colleagues in the music department was alleged to have given them — “the bigwigs.” He’d been sentenced to hard labor in the mines for having asked why, after forty years of socialism, most of the members of the Politburo still had to come from the least educated layer of society. That’s what he was supposed to have said at a dinner party. But some people claimed he’d gone even further and declared that the government of the nineteenth-century League of Prizren had been better educated than the one we had now! Well, that’s what he was supposed to have said, but it wasn’t even mentioned at the meeting where we voted to fire him. The same thing happened in my own case, presumably because it was thought too dangerous to say it out loud, even as incriminating evidence. So, again like the case I was involved in, he was found guilty of professional lapses, of having sloppy ideas about Western music, and of making sarcastic remarks about productive labor . . .

  The New Man is the Party’s greatest triumph . . . our most famous victory . . . the happiest land on earth . . . no debt, no taxes . . . the one and only Socialist nation!

  I hardly listened to the dire and deadly opening speech. Those hopeless, irremediable clichés that we’d all heard a thousand times went in one ear and out the other, as such things usually did. Some of the current watchwords, like shadows cast by the hand of a master puppeteer, summoned up the shapes of the people they’d helped to bring down. You only had to open your eyes and look around to find slogans, symbols, and portraits that had served directly to bring some people to ruin. For instance, the Constitution forbade any borrowing from foreign sources, any reference to the availability (that is to say, to our shortage) of butcher meat, and any allusions to the decadent Jean-Paul Sartre or to the shape of Mao Zedong’s eyes.