Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

  Had the witnesses really not noticed, or did they only pretend not to have seen? Who knows? Maybe the mother and the sister-in-law really didn’t see it, since they were busy clearing the table. The brother, who was barely able to stand, had already gone up to his bedroom. As for the father. . . he had probably not seen them doing it, unless — and this was the most plausible hypothesis, after those days of anxiety, and especially because he did not want to get snapped at after the recent incident at the dinner table — unless he had turned a blind eye and pretended not to see them. In any case, weren’t they going to be husband and wife in six weeks’ time?

  The town crier’s drum kept on rolling in the distance, giving as it were a new note to all life’s ups and downs . . . Against this background noise, Marie put up no resistance to her fiancé’s kisses, then she let him undress her and take possession of her as lord and master of the palpitating center of her being. It all happened in complete silence, when in a brief instant pain and searing pleasure fought for ascendancy, each yielding to the other in turn. But unlike what her sister-in-law had told her, she didn’t find the pain unbearable. Whereas the pleasure seemed to her without bounds.

  A week later, when it all happened again (they had agreed he would come in without attracting attention, taking advantage of the fact that her parents had to go to a funeral), there was no pain at all, and the pleasure reached an intensity beyond words.

  That was how Marie had come to believe she had nothing more to learn from her sister-in-law about the secrets of married life. She waited with feverish impatience for her fiancé to come, but this last week the only two times he had been able to visit (his work for that terrible commission was taking up all his time), they had not had an opportunity to be alone. So she waited for Sunday, when he would come for lunch as was his custom now, knowing intuitively that the miracle would occur once again. She and her sister-in-law had dealt with the morning housework, but whereas the latter expected they would then sit back in a corner and chat for a while, Marie, who wanted to take refuge in her bedroom to prepare herself for impending joy, said she had some kind of a migraine and went upstairs on her own.

  She walked up and down for a while, then stood to look at the street along which her fiancé would presumably come, then her eyes lighted on the chest containing her wedding trousseau. In it, among scores of pieces of clothing, bed linen, and embroidery that had been collected over the years, lay a dozen pieces of underwear made of silk as ethereal as smoke trapped in a glass . . . Good heavens, why had she not thought before of giving him that surprise?

  Previously, the sight of her sister-in-law’s undergarments hanging out to dry over the stove had stirred awkward feelings and made her eyes cloud over. It had happened for the first time when she discovered the elementary secrets of married life. Such flimsy, delicate lingerie — the closest witnesses to the act of love and the fiery embrace of two bodies — seemed to her to be laden with mystery. They seemed especially charged in comparison to her own cold and lifeless undergarments, all neatly folded at the bottom of the trunk, as if entombed, still waiting to be brought to life . . .

  She walked slowly toward the trunk, opened it, gazed at its contents, and began to go through the perfectly ordered and pristine pieces. There they lay, virginal and cold . . . Yes, she was going to try on every one of these diaphanous garments, each in turn, and she would baptize them, sanctify them, impregnate them with the warmth and the smell and the stains and the juices and the groans of love.

  She quickly disrobed and, flushed with excitement, began trying them on in front of the mirror. She wanted to choose the very finest for that day. The sky-blue pair? No, that other off-white one would be better. She had broad thighs, and when she made a slightly awkward movement her pudenda showed through. Marie sat on the kilim in front of the mirror with her legs slightly apart. Under the silk the lips of her vulva were half-revealed and she swallowed the saliva that raging desire brought to her mouth. Disconnected thoughts that seemed to come from outside raced through her mind. So that was the way into her body ... Its porch ought to be pretty. She would decorate it with almond-flower lace, just as people decorated their thresholds with pots of flowering plants .. . Had her sister-in-law not told her that she had heard that women’s sexual organs were as different from each other as their faces? Marie was sure hers was beautiful, and if it was, then why should he refrain from looking at it?

  She got up; she took off one pair of panties to try on another, and then she heard a creak. She turned around in terror, but the door was well bolted, and she immediately calmed down.

  She tried on most of her underwear, but came back in the end to the off-white pair. She put them on, then slipped on her dress, and then sat down on the shaggy blanket on the divan, lost in thought. Each time she moved, the silk transmitted a soft, rustling reminder of its presence.

  She did her best to banish the thought that was uppermost in her mind, but she realized that it was beyond her. She was henceforth entirely conscious of the fact that if she did not find a way of coming upstairs with her fiancé after lunch, the torture would be unbearable.

  5

  On Sundays lunch was served at the big oval table in the main room of the house. Xheladin arrived a few minutes after twelve dressed in a Western suit — a fashion that a good number of young men in the capital had recently taken up.

  “How’s it going?” Aleks Ura inquired when everyone had sat down at table.

  The son-in-law replied with an inscrutable smile.

  “Fine . . . really fine.”

  They exchanged disjointed remarks about this and that. It took quite a while for them to get down to the issue they had all been waiting impatiently to hear about for the whole past week, that is to say, the qorrfir-man.

  “Are you getting a lot of denunciations?” Aleks’s son Gjon asked.

  Gjon was as fair as his sister, but when he got angry the color of his hair seemed to darken.

  Xheladin spread his hands wide in a gesture of explanation.

  “How should I say . . . Yes, quite a few.”

  “And by what means is it to be established whether so-and-so really does have eyes possessing that power?” Gjon pursued.

  Xheladin smiled. “Well manage, one way or another.”

  “I have to admit that I think that will prove very difficult, if not impossible.”

  “It all depends,” his brother-in-law replied. “For instance ...”

  “For instance,” Gjon cut in, “somebody, for entirely personal reasons, may find another’s eyes to be evil, whereas someone else sees them differently. How are you going to deal with cases of that kind?”

  Xheladin kept on smiling as he listened to his brother-in-law, but his semi-scowl now seemed to be coming loose from his face, like a mask.

  “You’re right,” he said. “However, to cope with such an eventuality, the central commission and all its dependent branches will abide by instructions laid out in an internal circular that defines in detail all the characteristics an evil eye must have to be counted as such. And contrary to what some people claim, external appearance is not the only criterion to be taken into account.”

  He gave a loud laugh and then went on: “I myself, for example, have fair eyes. According to those people, I ought to be a suspect and not even go near the doors of the central commission. And certainly not have a seat on it!”

  Most of those at the table nodded. Since the day the qorrfirman had been issued, everyone had examined, directly or indirectly, the tiniest details of the particular characteristics of the eyes of the people they knew, and none among them needed to raise their heads from their plates to verify that their son-in-law did indeed have fair eyes speckled with gray, which not only made them more charming, but gave his gaze a firm, cold, and masculine air.

  “No, external appearance is not the only thing. Such details have to be matched with others . . . I’m sorry, I know I am among my own kin at this table, but in the work that we do th
ere are some secrets we are strictly forbidden to mention . . . What I can say, in short, is that before declaring that this or that person has the evil eye, we have to study and check every aspect of the case very carefully, and, when necessary, we go so far as to put the suspect under discreet surveillance for a time.”

  “Discreet surveillance? Well, well, that’s something new,” the brother said.

  “Really?” Aleks’s wife blurted out.

  Xheladin nodded.

  “All the same,” Gjon continued, “I can’t bring myself to believe that there really is a reliable, or, properly speaking, a scientific way of determining misophthalmia.”

  Xheladin said nothing. An angel passed, and clicking of knives on bone china made the silence seem even more frozen. Aleks Ura shot a look of disapproval at his son, to no effect.

  “I think that is precisely where the real power of the qorrfirman resides,” Gjon went on.

  “Where exactly is that?” his brother-in-law asked.

  Gjon did not reply right away. Perhaps in order to escape his father’s glance, he cast his eyes up, over the heads of the seated guests, toward the French windows that looked onto the verandah.

  “There’s not the slightest doubt that the qorrfir-man has given our people a seismic shock, and that it’s disturbed them more than any other decree ever issued in our state,” he said at last. “To come back to what I was saying, I think its fearsome power comes directly from the fact it’s so vague. The Blinding Order makes each of us suspect our neighbor. Nobody is exempt from worry, we all feel more or less guilty. The power of the order derives exclusively from the all-pervading anxiety it induces.”

  “For my part, I think the power of any major edict derives solely from the sense of justice with which it is imbued,” Xheladin said, sounding not irritated, but on the contrary, rather conciliatory.

  At the end of this exchange, everyone felt relieved and breathed a little more easily.

  “Is it true anonymous letters have been sent and that suspicion even hovers about the person of Grand Vizier Muhta Pasha?” Gjon’s wife cut in, maybe only to move the conversation onto a different terrain.

  Xheladin shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. “That may be just gossip.”

  “Last year, there was another rumor of that kind. about Vizier Basri,” Gjon said. “At first it was discounted as mere gossip, but then it turned out to be true, and the vizier ended up with a rope around his neck.”

  “Such things happen,” Aleks Ura declared, determined to ensure that this time no hasty or ill-judged comments would be made at his table.

  He had always been in favor of a less rigid adherence to rules, and sneered at people who did not allow women to join in the conversation; more generally, he did not hide his hostility toward the fanatical customs of the Asiatics; but even so, there had to be limits. Gjon’s provocations had started it off, but now his wife was trying to pick a fight with their future son-in-law!

  Xheladin’s answers grew ever sterner, and he would probably have begun to show annoyance if he hadn’t felt Marie’s soothing glance on him from time to time.

  Aleks hadn’t missed the gleam of desire in his daughter’s eyes. They glinted in a different way than in the earliest days of her engagement, when she hadn’t even tried to hide the attraction she felt for her betrothed. It was also different from the look she had in the following period, when her glance was, so to speak, denser. But now it was something else altogether. There was something so evanescent, fragile, and vulnerable in her eyes that Aleks chose to avoid them altogether, for fear that an encounter might result in a painful clash.

  Two weeks earlier, after lunch, at the same hour as now, he thought he’d heard them going upstairs to his daughter’s bedroom. He was stunned for a moment, but then refrained from turning to look, like a man trying not to see a ghost. . . The wedding day was not far off, and the marriage seemed to him more and more like a really good idea. At times of worry, he felt an increasing desire to huddle with his nearest and dearest around the hearth, inside his own four walls, safe from the winds of anguish howling outside. What’s more, his son-in-law’s new position gave them a precious source of news from the very heart of the mystery, just at the time when, as people grew more and more curious, it was becoming increasingly dangerous to say anything . . . His son and his rather scatterbrained young wife weren’t able to appreciate this advantage; all they did was irritate their guest. But he, Aleks, was going to bring some discipline back to his too liberal table. He was going to bring it back right now, by taking sole charge of the conversation.

  “Will the Order be implemented soon?”

  He could not believe his own ears. How could he have spoken such words? He’d been working himself up to say something quite different, to move on to some entertaining irrelevance, so as to clear the atmosphere once and for all, and now his own mouth had gone and uttered other words, against his own will. You’re getting senile, he thought. you’ve lost control of your tongue. Worse than a woman!

  “Implementation?” Xheladin repeated. “Yes, I believe it will happen quite soon. Even very soon,” he added after a pause. “It might even start this week.”

  “Really?” two or three voices squeaked.

  “Is it true that distinctions will be made between the people singled out, as far as the means of putting out their eyes is concerned?” Gjon’s wife asked. “Apparently things will be done differently, depending on whether the person belongs to the upper classes or not.”

  “That would be only proper, in this respect as in all others.”

  “I’ve heard talk of ways of blinding by exposure to sunlight. It’s the first time I’ve heard of anything like that. Must be a new technique, right?”

  Aleks Ura was about to butt in, but to his surprise his future son-in-law began to laugh out loud.

  “No, the technique isn’t new at all On the contrary, it’s perhaps the oldest of them all!”

  So he began to describe empty beaches and villages and luxurious seaside hotels where those sentenced would quietly drag out as long as possible their last days of sight. One morning, when the sky was even clearer than usual, they’d be put in seats facing the sun, and there, in a matter of a few minutes . . .

  “Neat work, you can’t deny it,” Gjon said. “No blood, no branding iron, none of those barbaric devices . . .”

  “Well, I think it’s the cruelest way of doing it,” Gjon’s wife said. “To be basking in the light of the sky and the sea, and then to be suddenly deprived of both!”

  “Would you prefer the opposite means, being blindfolded and locked in a cell for three months?” Gjon asked.

  “I think it might be less painful overall,” she replied. “It would give you time to get used to darkness.”

  “I don’t agree!” Gjon protested. “It must be dreadful torture. It must feel like your head is bursting apart with all the thoughts going around in it.”

  “For heaven’s sake, could you please put a stop this nonsense!” the mistress of the house broke in. “Can’t you talk about something happier?”

  She put the cake tray in the middle of the table and gestured to all to serve themselves.

  “People say all sorts of things,” Gjon said pensively. “Some people say that this whole story about the evil eye is just balderdash and that the people who cooked it up don’t even believe in it themselves.”

  “What was that, young man? Are you sure you have all your wits about you?” Aleks interjected.

  “I’m not saying that, Father,” Gjon replied. “It’s just what I’ve heard other people say. In their view, this whole thing is a setup designed to keep people’s minds off our economic problems.”

  “Enough of that!” Aleks cut him off. “I will not allow you to say such things!”

  “But Father, I’m not saying that, it’s only . ..”

  “Listening to such opinions is itself a guilty act!” Aleks shouted, his voice shaking with emotion.

  Mea
nwhile, Xheladin hadn’t batted an eyelash.

  6

  The drums started beating again before dawn on Friday, this time to signal that the Blinding Order was about to be put into effect.

  From behind their closed shutters and barred windows, with their hair still uncombed and their eyes puffy from having been suddenly dragged from sleep, people strained to make out the town crier’s words. What’s he saying? What’s he saying? people whispered to each other. Keep quiet so I can hear! I think he’s reading out names, lots of names . . .

  By next day the full roster of names of the first cohort of volunteers was made known. Directly beneath banner headlines reporting the start of the implementation of the qorrfirman, newspapers listed the last names of those who had initially volunteered for the qorroffices, together with the details of the cash bonus and annuity that had been granted each of them.

  Several papers published the words of a certain Abdurrahim, a palace servant from the capital, who had declared: “I’m sacrificing my eyes very gladly. Apart from the satisfaction I feel at being able to do something that is useful to the state, I am grateful to the qorrfirman for having freed me from the awful pangs of conscience I felt at the thought that my eyes might be a cause of further misfortune.”

  Apart from the list of the original volunteers, the media provided scarcely any information about the overall number of people concerned, their whereabouts, or the manner of their disoculation (this new term having entirely displaced the word blinding in journalists’ prose in the space of a few days).

  Some said there were hundreds of victims, others upped the stakes by claiming there were thousands, and that they were being kept in huge camps.