Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

  Also by Ismail Kadare

  The Successor

  The Palace of Dreams

  The Pyramid

  The Three-Arched Bridge

  The File on H.

  The Concert

  Elegy for Kosovo

  Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

  Agamemnon’s Daughter copyright © 2003, 2011 by Librairie Artheme Fayard

  “The Blinding Order” and “The Great Wall” copyright © 1993, 2011 by Librairie

  Artheme Fayard

  English-language translations copyright © 2006, 2011 by David Bellos

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Agamemnon’s Daughter was first published in Albanian as Vajza e Agamemnonit by Shtepia Botuese “55.” “The Blinding Order” was first published as “Qorrfirmani” in the journal Zeri i Rinise. “The Great Wall” was first published in Albanian as “Muri i madh” in volume 1 of Vepra (Kadare’s complete works) by Librairie Artheme Fayard.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-188-7

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Note

  About Agamemnon’s Daughter

  Agamemnon’s Daughter

  The Blinding Order

  The Great Wall

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  This volume contains three stories written at different times, set in different historical periods, but linked to one another and to many other works of Ismail Kadare by recurrent characters, anecdotes, obsessions, and principles.

  Agamemnon’s Daughter was written in Tirana around the time of the death, of Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania for forty years. The action is placed in the real Tirana of the early 1980s, but its narrative takes us back to the classical roots of Western civilization — and of tyranny. Its sequel, The Successor, written many years later, brings the same characters back to life.

  “The Blinding Order” was written in 1984 and is set in the Tanzimat, or “reform” period of the Ottoman Empire, in the nineteenth century. It speculates on the uses of terror in a context that is only superficially remote from modern authoritarian regimes. Mark-Alem, the central character of Kadare’s Palace of Dreams, makes a fleeting appearance; the main protagonists belong to a branch of the Köprülü clan, whose long history is chronicled throughout Kadare’s work.

  “The Great Wall” was written in 1993, shortly after Kadare settled in Paris, The bridge built by the Ura family, whose story is told in The Three-Arched Bridge, here gives a key to the meaning of the Great Wall of China. We also encounter the horrifying Timur the Lame (Tamerlane), who gives such a stunning conclusion to The Pyramid, Kadare’s fable of ancient Egypt.

  The first of these stories was translated from the French of Tedi Papavrami; the two others, from the French of Jusuf Vrioni. Some amendments have been made to the texts in consultation with the author, particularly with regards to Albanian names and spellings.

  D.B.

  Princeton, N J., 2006

  ABOUT AGAMEMNO’S DAUGHTER

  Adapted from the publisher’s preface to the French edition

  In 1986, during one of his infrequent visits to Paris, Ismail Kadare told me that he wanted to leave the manuscripts of two short novels, a story, and some poems in France, as they could not be published in Albania at that time.

  He had part of the material with him. “Exfiltration” of literary manuscripts was strictly forbidden under Albanian law, so Kadare camouflaged his text to make it look like an Albanian translation of a work written in the West. He had substituted German and Austrian names and places for Albanian ones, and attributed the works to the West German novelist Siegfried Lenz. Lenz was not unknown in Albania, but not to the extent that people could be sure whether he had written a novel called The Three Ks, as Kadare then entitled the novel subsequently known as L’Ombre (The Shadow).

  Later on, Kadare managed to smuggle more of his manuscripts out of Albania, but because exfiltration remained extremely perilous, he limited his risks by bringing only a few pages on each trip. To get the remainder of the material out of the country, we agreed that the best way was for me to go to Tirana myself. Over two separate trips, I managed to bring all the remaining sheets back to Paris so as to have complete texts of The Shadow, Agamemnon’s Daughter, L’ Envol du Migrateur (A Bird Flying South), and the poems.

  The manuscripts were deposited in a safe at the Banque de la Cité in Paris. With the bank’s approval, Kadare entrusted me with the key to the safe and gave me authority to open it if and when I thought it necessary.

  At that time Ismail Kadare had no greater inkling than anyone else that Albanian Communism would collapse. The deposit of these “dangerous” manuscripts was intended to allow Kadare’s publisher, in the event of the writer’s natural or “accidental” death, to declare that a previously unknown portion of his work would be published quickly. The revelation of the tone and content of the unpublished works would make it much harder for the Communist propaganda machine to bend Kadare’s work and posthumous image to its own ends.

  The three prose texts and the poems put into the bank’s safe express directly and unambiguously what Kadare thought of the Albanian regime. Previously, he had touched on the matter only indirectly and by allusion, in works like The Palace of Dreams, La Niche de la honte (The Nook of Shame), and The Concert.

  The first of these hidden works to appear in France was The Shadow, in 1994. It was rewritten to erase its German camouflage, especially noticeable in the earlier part of the novel Editorial improvements were made to fill gaps that had been left quite intentionally when the work’s primary aim had been to get a message across — in the literal sense, across the border separating Albania from the rest of the world.

  A Bird Flying South was published later. In Albania, it was published simultaneously in two versions — the original text as smuggled out of Albania and a corrected and edited version, the form in which Kadare wished it to return to Albania.

  Agamemnon’s Daughter, the third of the manuscripts put into safekeeping, was published in France in 2003 in a translation by Tedi Papavrami from the text written in 1984-1986 without any later changes or revisions. Agamemnon’s Daughter is the first part of a diptych of which the longer tale, The Successor, was written in Paris in 2002. Taken together these two short novels constitute one of the finest and most accomplished of all Ismail Kadare’s works to date.

  CLAUDE DURAND

  PARIS

  Agamemnon’s Daughter

  1

  From outside came sounds of holiday music, bustling crowds and shuffling feet — the special medley of a mass of people on their way to the start of a parade.

  For perhaps the tenth time in a row, I cautiously pulled the curtain aside. There had been no change in what was to be seen in the street: a s
low-moving eddy in the human flood streaming toward the center of town. Borne on its waves were placards, bouquets of flowers, and portraits of members of the Politburo, just like the ones we saw last year. The politicians’ faces looked even more stilted than usual as they jiggled along above the thronging mass of heads and arms. A slip of a placard-bearer’s hand sometimes made the painted portraits seem to cast oblique and threatening glances. But even when they came face-to-face, not one of them gave a sign of recognizing any other.

  I let go of the curtain and realized that I still had the invitation gripped tightly in my hand. It was the first time I had been entitled to sit in the grandstand at the May Day parade, and I still could not quite believe that it really was my own name written on the card. When I first received it, the Party secretary seemed as stunned as I was. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the only emotion in his eyes was that of envy: there was also stupefaction. To some extent, that was perfectly justifiable. I wasn’t the kind of person who was usually seen at presidium meetings or invited to sit in the stands at public celebrations. Even if (as I later learned) the vice-secretary himself had put my name forward when requested by the local Party committee to suggest people beyond those who came up every year, he was still astonished by the result. Although he had proposed my name, he probably never expected his new list would be approved. “They always ask us for new names,” he must have thought, “but it’s always the same ones who get invited in the end.”

  “Congratulations, congratulations,” he hissed as he gave me the card, but at the very moment he handed it over, his eyes seemed to me to express something beyond envy and surprise. It hovered within the smile that gave it life, yet it was something separate and different. The right word for it might have been connivance. In short, it was an intense, interrogative, and rather sly smile, but sly in that particular wellmeaning manner that arises between people who share some secret involvement. His smile seemed to be saying: “This invitation didn’t fall off a tree, did it, pal? What job did you do to earn the reward? But who cares anyway! Congratulations, my boy!”

  It was so crass I felt myself blush. All the way home, I could not throw off a guilty feeling, as I wondered over and over again: he must be right, but what did I do to earn this invitation?

  Isolated from the hubbub on the street, the apartment seemed even more silent than usual Silent and empty. Everyone had left for the starting point of the parade, and my own steps, far from filling the space of the apartment, only emphasized how silent and empty it was. Even the silence and the emptiness had a peculiar quality, as did everything else on a day of that kind.

  I was waiting for Suzana. However, the feeling that had burrowed into my chest was not remotely like the anxiety customarily associated with waiting for a woman. It was much more crushing, and no doubt heightened by the music and the unending, exhausting commotion rising from the street. I almost thought that one of the portraits would end up detaching itself from its bearer, then float up to my window, and look inside with its painted frozen stare, and say: “And what are you doing up here? Aha! So that’s the reason! You’ve relinquished your place down there on the reviewing stand to wait for a woman, haven’t you?”

  “If I’m not there by half past eight, don’t wait for me,” Suzana had said.

  Each time those words came into my mind my eyes glided inexorably toward the couch where our last conversation had taken place. It had been infinitely sad. She’d been half-undressed, and her words had come out the same way — in shreds, with only half their meaning. It was getting harder and harder for her to see me, she said. Papa’s career was on the rise . . . Their family was more than ever in the limelight . . . Two weeks before, at the last plenum of the Central Committee, Papa had gone up another rung . . . So it was obvious she would have to make changes to her way of life, to her wardrobe, to the people she saw. Otherwise she might hurt his career.

  “Was it he who asked you for that” — I still didn’t know what to call that — “or did you decide for yourself?”

  She looked me in the eyes. “He did,” she answered after a pause “But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “When he explained it all to me, I saw his point of view.”

  “Really?”

  I thought my eyes must have gone bloodshot, as if someone had thrown sand in my face. Guiltily, she laid her head on my shoulder. She ruffled the hair on the nape of my neck with cold fingers that felt as jagged as broken test tubes.

  But why? I wanted to protest. Why just you? The children of the others make the most of it, and lead freer lives, with cars and parties at their villas by the shore ... I surely would have remonstrated with her along those lines if she hadn’t brought up the issue herself. The others usually let their children enjoy more freedom, but her father... he really was a different kind of person. Who could tell what was going through his mind? Or was he, on the contrary, completely consistent, and was that not a principle to which he could not allow himself to make an exception? Anyway, if he was standing to the right of the Guide at the First of May parade, it would be all over between us.

  I said nothing, and she thought I hadn’t quite understood. “Please understand,” she sobbed. Given the state of public opinion, her father could not comprehend her having an affair with a young man who was practically engaged to somebody else. Word would leak out, eventually. Especially now, don’t you see? It could not fail to.

  I didn’t know what to reply, but my eyes wandered toward her legs.

  “Even for you, it’s not wise,” she added a minute later.

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  “Well, you can say that now, but you’ll be sorry later on. Especially as you’re in the running for the Vienna scholarship.”

  I carried on staring at the naked parts of her body. To be honest, I wasn’t at all sure I was inclined to swap the smooth, white body of this half-girl, half-woman for anything else in the world, including Vienna. The Champs-Elysées of her thighs led all the way to her Arc de Triomphe with its immortal flame ... I had never before met a woman like Suzana, who kept on smiling with ecstasy during lovemaking, as if she were in the midst of a blissful dream. Her bliss then spread to her cheekbones and spilled onto the white pillow, which even when it was abandoned, after her departure, seemed to keep on glowing faintly in the dark, the way a television screen appears to emit light for a few seconds after you’ve switched it off. Everything about her betrayed a passionate, serious, and fervent attention to the matter of love.

  2

  I continued to stare at the empty couch while the distant sounds of celebration echoed in my ears. Snatches of our conversations kept coming back to me, but in heightened form, as if intensified by the feeling of loss, like jewels enhanced by a display case. If on the First of May . . . But you mustn’t take it to heart. . . It won’t he any easier for me, you know . . . I know what you’re going to say . . . But I simply have to make the sacrifice . . . I’ll never stop thinking of you . . .

  “The sacrifice,” I repeated to myself. “So that’s what it’s called.“

  I trusted everything she said, because she always took things seriously and was not in the habit of using words lightly, of dissimulating or putting on airs. If she was convinced that this . . . sacrifice . . . had to be made, there was no point trying to make her change her mind.

  In fact, I made no attempt to do so. When she’d gone, I spent hours pacing the floor and ended up in front of the bookcase. Half dreaming, I took out a book I had just read, and flicked through the pages again. It was The Greek Myths by Robert Graves.

  I wasn’t able then, and have never since been able, to work out by what mysterious path the mechanisms of my mind stripped the word sacrifice of its ordinary meaning (Comrades! The age in which we live demands sacrifices for the sake of oil. . . The sacrifices of our cattle breeders . . . and so on) and took it far, far back, to its grandiose and blood-soaked beginnings.

  This flight into the remotest past was un
doubtedly a major turning point for me. From then on, I needed to take only a modest step to see in the sacrifice that Suzana had been talking about something similar to the fate of Iphigenia.

  Why had the parallel occurred to me? Because Suzana had used the same word? Because her father, like Iphigenia’s, was a high dignitary of the state? Or simply because Graves’s book had kept me buried in the world of myth for several days?

  As I said, I couldn’t fathom the reason why. But I was so feverishly impatient that I didn’t even bother to sit down to reread all the pages about the legendary sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, from the various more or less plausible hypotheses about what had really prompted the leader of the Greeks to perform that mortal act, down to the speculations about a sham sacrifice, which is to say a show put on for the benefit of the army (with the girl being replaced at the last minute by a fawn), and so on.

  What’s the point of rereading all that stuff? I wondered. What use can it be? Nonetheless I carried on, avidly plowing through the heavy tome.

  To launch the ancient Trojan Wars

  They offered up Iphigenia

  For the sake of our great cause

  I’ll carry my darling to the pyre

  Had I invented this verse while wandering like a lost soul around the apartment after I’d put the book back in its place on the shelf, or had I fished it out from a long-sunken memory of something I’d read years before? True sadness often makes me feel sluggish and slow. And that’s how I felt then — drowsy, and unable to make things out. For instance, I was quite incapable of putting a name to the author of the poem. Nor was I up to deciding whether it was I or Suzana’s father who was performing the sacrifice. Sometimes it seemed to be me and sometimes him; more likely, it was the two of us in tandem.