Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

The noise from outside had subsided. The street must have emptied. The masses that were going to form the parade had already assembled in the starting area. But this deafening silence was just as hostile and burdensome as the earlier commotion had been. It was a constant reminder that my place was down there amid the festive pandemonium, and not up here all on my own.

  Half past eight had come and gone. I could no longer pretend that there was any chance of Suzana turning up. She had always been punctual. I almost regretted her having a quality for which I had so often been thankful, since it now destroyed my last shred of hope. To begin with, I tried to rationalize: being five minutes late is a woman’s privilege, even if Suzana had renounced it voluntarily. So I strove to find other reasons for making allowances — traffic jams are so common on celebration days — but instead of mitigating the torture of waiting, the explanations only made it worse. Then came the second set of five minutes, which was even gloomier than the first. Several times I found myself about to go out through the front door.

  I decided to wait until a quarter to nine, and then leave for the grandstand, so as not to lose out on both fronts at once. The fear of what might happen if my absence were noticed had up to that point been overshadowed by waiting for her to come, which itself would have given me the strength to wriggle my way out of trouble. (I lost my way . . . The police closed the road earlier than I expected, and so on.) If only she had come . . . Whereas now that I had lost her anyway, I had no reason to make things more difficult for myself by not showing up at the parade. Apart from which, I had a good chance of seeing her there, on the grandstand or right next to it, where the offspring of the elite were normally placed.

  That last thought finally overcame my hesitation. At five to nine I opened the front door and set off.

  3

  There was no one on the stairs, and barely any passersby on the street outside. I felt relieved, initially, perhaps because of all the open space. I looked up, as if drawn by the magnetic force of someone else’s eyes. Our neighbor was on his balcony, looking as sickly as ever, staring down at the street. I took a step to the side so as to get out of his line of sight. He was reputed to have laughed out loud on the day Stalin died, which brought his career as a brilliant young scientist to a shuddering halt. Many years had passed, of course, but if I remember rightly, a mask of supplication had remained frozen on his face ever since. He couldn’t be the only person to have chuckled or laughed among the crowds at the funeral marches that were held that day — for no reason at all, or just for a second, or because their laughter-reflex mechanism had been disturbed, as often happens in such circumstances, but all explanations of such kind were systematically rejected. Every one of them was punished without mercy. Now, many years later, they were still easily identifiable by the wistful appearance they were condemned to wear for the rest of their lives to atone for having once laughed out loud.

  You’d better spend your time thinking about the way you look! I told myself. My face was probably just as pained as my neighbor’s.

  As if fearing that my glumness might attract attention, I took the invitation card out of my pocket and pretended to be studying the verso side, which gave details of how to get into the stands.

  Some of the people still in the street must have been in possession of invitations just like mine. You could tell who they were, not only because they were dressed to the nines, but from their attitudes, their postures, and their beaming faces. These features distinguished cardholders quite clearly from other pedestrians who had come down into the street in the hope of finding a spot where they could see the parade, or who had got separated from their delegations and were wandering around looking guilty.

  Barricade Street, which runs parallel to the Grand Boulevard, was packed with people. A brass band could be heard thumping away in the distance, probably in the square where the stands had been put up. Each time I heard the beat, I walked a little faster, even though it wasn’t quite nine o’clock yet and I had no real reason to hurry.

  Cardholders were still mixed with other people in the street, but it wasn’t long before a filtering device came into view. At the top of Elbasan Road, one of the sidewalks was open to all, but the other side, the right-hand side, was reserved for invitation-card holders only. The real checkpoint was presumably farther down — this was only a preliminary screening. All the same, most of those invited were happy to be separated henceforth from other people, who looked back at them, goggle-eyed.

  I continued walking along the left-hand sidewalk, and was just speculating that Suzana would perhaps be in the CM stand, where I had my seat, when I bumped into Leka B.

  I hadn’t seen him for years. Sprightly and beaming (though his smile was distinct from the one that seemed to radiate from the little red flags of the day), he gave me a hug and a kiss on each cheek. To be honest, I couldn’t think why he was so happy to see me again. We’d been pals years before, when I was a law student and he was enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, but not so close that long absence would make either of us miss the other very much.

  “How are things?” he asked. “Do you like being a journalist? Lights, cameras, action — the cutting edge, eh?”

  “How about you?” I responded. “Still at N?”

  “Ah, let’s talk about something else!” he said in the same playful tone. “I’ve not been doing too well. Actually, it wasn’t so bad down there, but I did something stupid and got transferred to running amateur theatricals in the sticks.” “Really?”

  “Word of honor! I put on a play that turned out to contain no less than thirty-two ideological errors! Can you imagine? Well, that’s all ancient history now, and when all’s said and done I suppose I got off rather lightly.“

  My expression must have been hovering between amazement and disbelief, because he added: “You think I’m joking, but I’m telling you the plain truth, honestly.”

  And he went on in a lighthearted tone entirely devoid of self-pity or spite about his famous thirty-two ideological errors. It was as if he were delighted with the whole business and held it in secret admiration — though you couldn’t tell whether what he admired were the people who had had sufficient wisdom and patience to pick out each one of his errors, or himself, as a man who had not committed a trivial blunder or a mere peccadillo, but had engineered a disaster of such magnitude, or else both at the same time.

  “So that’s how it was,” he concluded. “Twenty-six they were, twenty-six; sand will never cover o’er their graves . . .”

  I’ve never known what those lines from Esenin were doing there.*

  Meanwhile, we had arrived at the crossroads where cardholders were to be finally segregated from commoners. In other circumstances, I would have done anything to avoid flashing my invitation in sight of a comrade still under sentence, but this time I had no option. It had to happen at the precise moment when he asked “And how are things with you?” As a result, smiling guiltily, and feeling more than a little embarrassed, I took the card from my pocket and blurted out: “As you can see, I’ve got an invitation to . . . I mean . . .”

  I didn’t know how to finish my sentence: humorously, or plainly, or by adopting an ironical stance prompted by — well, I don’t quite know what. It could have been me, or him, or the whims of fate. But he solved my dilemma by exclaiming brightly: “You’ve got an invitation! Bravo! Now that’s really good news. But shouldn’t you hurry up? Aren’t you late?”

  There wasn’t the slightest trace of mockery or repressed envy in his voice or on his face, and I felt sorry for having spent the last twenty-five yards worrying solely about how to get rid of the man.

  When I got to the other side of the crossroads, and just before reaching the first line of plainclothes police, I turned around one last time and saw him waving good-bye, still watching me with his sparkling eyes.

  I was upset by how nice he had been. However, the suspicion that his behavior was simply a sign of the implosion of a personality which, for reasons that are
hard to explain, takes pleasure in its own downfall (in other circumstances, such a suspicion would have left an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach) was swept away by his goodhearted and happy gesture, which made me all the more relaxed for my encounter with the first line of police.

  “ID!”

  From the corner of my eye, I watched the inspector’s glance going back and forth from my passport photograph to my face, as I tried (for reasons I cannot fathom) to detect in it some sign of disbelief, or ill will, or, on the contrary, respect. A few seconds later, as I left him behind me, I thought I must already be in an advanced state of mental degeneration to worry at all about the impression my face, my name, or my invitation card might make on an insignificant plainclothes policeman I would probably never see again in my life.

  Boulevard Marcel Cachin, which connects El-basan Road to the Grand Boulevard, was packed and at a standstill The only people who could get through, along the side, were people with invitations, moving individually, as I was, or in small groups. Some of the latter included children carrying toy flags or paper flowers. Others were wearing medals, which cast a yellow gleam on their faces. I was just behind a short, squat man striding boldly forward and holding a little girl by each hand. Both wore ribbons in their hair — one blue, one red — and their charming faces looked as though they had come straight out of a documentary film about official festivities.

  The second checkpoint wasn’t far from the first. I was expecting it to be stricter, but the procedure was in fact identical, which must have been a disappointment to first-time invitees who were looking forward to a rigorous identity check whose stringency would establish the true value of their invitation. That was completely borne out by the man with the two girls in front of me, who displayed a kind of frustration when, having informed the policemen that the girls were his daughters and that he had their birth certificates with him to prove it, got by way of answer from one of the two cops just a casual “On you go!”

  The man was dumbstruck and shook his head as if to say: “You call that a security check?” It was so visible that I almost wanted to get involved and tell him: “Don’t worry, there’ll be more checks before you get to the grandstand, and they’ll be much tighter!”

  Boulevard Marcel Cachin is not only particularly wide at this point, it is also curved, so you could look around and get a good view of the various groups of invited guests. They moved forward in line with stilted eagerness, and what with the spring sun above them and the medals and flags they bore, not to mention the nearing sound of the brass band, a warm glow of solidarity arose among people who were otherwise unknown to one another. It wasn’t difficult to see why. They had all been singled out by the same hand (the index finger of the state) to participate in the same solemn celebration, and that sealed them in a golden union and made them want to talk to each other, or at least to smirk discreetly. After all, hadn’t other people, ordinary people, people not invited, been kept behind the security cordon so as not to bother us any longer with their stunned, overinsistent, and interrogative eyes, asking: “So why did they invite you, in particular?”

  I felt ashamed to be part of this idyllic and peaceful holiday tableau and was suddenly overcome with a strong desire to see Leka B. again, in whose presence I had at first felt uneasy but who had shown such tact and nobility. Not only had he not allowed the fateful question to emerge, he had demonstrated real warmth, despite having himself been banished for years from all public celebrations.

  At the third checkpoint, I came across a Party activist from our own neighborhood. (Only then did I realize that the plainclothesmen were complemented by all sorts of Interior Ministry employees, as well as by volunteers from various neighborhoods, who were surely also “shadow workers.”) In other circumstances, I would have given him a look of scorn, but here, in the radiance of reconciliation emanating from this high mass of togetherness, I was more inclined to favor him with a smile. But he didn’t return my greeting; what’s more, he pretended not to recognize me. He flicked through my passport looking bored, as if he didn’t know me from Adam, although I had bumped into him only the day before at the dairy store. Then, without even looking up, he blurted out: “On you go!”

  I felt the blood rising in my cheeks from the humiliation, but it did not take long for the man’s display of indifference to become the source of an unspecifiable pleasure. The episode proved that even if I was one of the elect on that day, and putting aside the fact that in some insidious and barely perceptible way I was just a little proud of it (despite also feeling a degree of shame for the same reason), I had not become an indistinguishable part of the elite or, to be more precise, of the upper circle’s dark side. That’s why our neighborhood activist had looked me over with his evil eye and had probably muttered under his breath: “What’s this guy doing here? Who the hell selected such a nonentity to sit in the grandstand?”

  That’s all it took to make me begin to watch out for signs of hostility. And the nearer I got to the Grand Boulevard, the more I noticed them. But I hadn’t seen anything yet. Just when I was least expecting it, when I had come to believe that I could now be pricked only by hauteur (people who were accustomed to getting invited every year would naturally take exception to newcomers), and that I had nothing to fear apart from a single enemy called jealousy, since the other, nagging, questioning foe (“So what did you do to earn the invitation, eh?”) had been cordoned off by our common condition on that score, since we were all more or less in the same boat, it was precisely at that point that the snake reared its ugly head higher than ever. Two youngish men in raincoats, with the kind of faces that made you think you’ve seen them before somewhere, but who knows where, looked me up and down from the side as they crossed my path. I got the impression that their glances had a touch of sarcasm about them. I turned around to make sure they weren’t focusing on me, that I was simply a trifle paranoid, but I saw to my alarm that it really was me they were glaring at. Not only did they carry on ogling me, they were also whispering in each other’s ears while the smiles on their lips twisted into something close to a sneer.

  I went red in the face. The automatic reflex of hurrying on past suddenly went into reverse, and I almost stopped to shout at them: “What’s making you cluck like a pair of hens? What makes you think I don’t have my own suspicions about you two as well!”

  I didn’t do anything of the sort, of course, but kept on going and tried to forget about them, to no avail I calmed down slightly when we got separated by a good-humored group, in the middle of which I could make out the squat father with his redand blue-beribboned girls.

  I was still carrying on under my breath my argument with the two young men. What gives you a monopoly on the right to suspect people? When all is said and done, what makes you any more qualified than I am in that domain?

  That’s what I muttered to myself, but, who knows why, I felt that nothing would ever wipe the snigger off their faces. However, I suddenly thought I had found the key to the mystery: the first person to entertain suspicion wins the match. The suspected person, despite probably being innocent, is always on the defensive simply from having been slow off the mark.

  What a crazy idea! I protested inwardly. As a last resort, I tried to recall what I had read about collective guilt and so on. But nothing came back to me.

  The beribboned girls ahead of me had started demanding something in twittering voices. The father dealt with them patiently, sugaring his answer with affectionate nicknames for each of his daughters.

  An ideal paterfamilias, holding his daughters by the hand, on a sunny socialist First of May. A pretty picture, I said to myself. But tell me — who’s paying for this idyllic tableau? Who did you put away to get your place in the sun?

  I was the first person to be surprised by my own outburst of anger. But surprise didn’t stop me from looking around with hatred streaming from my eyes. I’d turned into a terrorist, driven to ecstasy by the sight of blood, who starts to fire indiscri
minately into the crowd. Since that was the way things were, I preferred to shoot first, and take my punishment later.

  He who lingers is lost.

  4

  Soon thereafter, I felt my forehead glazing over with cold sweat. I’d lost sight of the two guys in raincoats and of the model family in blue and red ribbons. I was moving forward among strangers whom I had shamelessly attacked, at whom I had flung whole handfuls of mud without thinking for a moment that nothing stopped them from doing the same to me.

  The Grand Boulevard was not far off now. Haven’t you got anything on your own conscience? I asked myself. Six months previously, as I came out of a local Party inquiry where we’d heard the charges against us, I’d asked myself that question for the first time. Now I shook my head again, as I had then. No, there was no stain of that kind on my conscience! Although I had been the unwitting cause of two colleagues in a neighboring office being sentenced to relegation to some godforsaken hole, I was not guilty. Quite the opposite: you could say that their stupidity had very nearly caused my own ruination. “You are at a meeting of a committee of the Party, and you should know that at meetings of Party committees, lying is forbidden!” the secretary shouted as he looked straight into our eyes. “You there!” he said, pointing at me. “Where was it that you heard the perfidious insinuation that gossip and tittle-tattle about the fall of such and such a leader, far from emanating from the petit-bourgeois element in our society and from there seeping into the minds of the people, had been manufactured by the state itself — that is to say, according to your story, by a secret bureau set up for the specific purpose of paving the way for the actual fall of said leader?”

  I had never in all my life felt so uncomfortable. My office partner, who was gaping open-mouthed on the other side of the room, had indeed told me the story, but what I did not know then was that he had already confessed everything. I replied point-blank, with a strange confidence, which I allowed to take over for the seconds and minutes it lasted, that I had indeed read such a theory in a book about Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion. The secretary’s eyes looked right through me, but as I spoke I managed to convince myself that I really had read something like that in a book. What helped me make such a show of sincerity was that I genuinely had just finished skimming through a book about Czechoslovakia.