Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

  I don’t know what it was that the secretary liked about my answer. It would have been only fair of him to lean toward my partner’s version, since he’d taken the risk of baring himself, and thus to treat my story with skepticism. But the opposite happened. Without giving them time to justify themselves (“Thank goodness,” they told me later on, “that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid having to do!”), he accused my office colleagues of being dangerous chatterboxes, sinister idiots, liars, and megalomaniacs who thought they understood politics when in fact they didn’t have a clue. Incurable gossips who lacked all sense of responsibility, who transposed anything they heard about the horrible truths of bourgeois countries onto our own fine socialist way of life, and so on. Whereas I got off with one of those criticisms that sounded more like praise. In other words, I should have taken greater care to separate subjects such as those involved in the present erroneous comparison, to ward off any confusions that could give rise to conversations such as those under consideration, especially if I ever talked of such things in the hearing of brainless twits who were as politically naive as my two colleagues.

  “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul, you understand?” Those were the secretary’s last words to me. For a long time I found his behavior and the sudden conclusion of the case rather puzzling. Did it come from some cog in the machine suddenly changing direction and causing a whole string of illogicalities to ensue? Or was it that the secretary simply seized upon the introduction of an alien element like Czechoslovakia to bring the whole thing to a rapid end? Maybe it was even simpler than that. He’d had a lot of problems to deal with at the time, what with criticisms from above about the shortfall in the Economic Plan, and so on, and maybe he’d just wanted to get an awkward piece of business over and done with as quickly as possible.

  He looked on me almost with kindness, simply because I had taken this burden off his shoulders. As I left the room, I thought he was about to put his avuncular hand on my shoulder just as I’d seen done so many times in films made in the “New Albania” studios. And although his hand did not actually materialize, I spent many days wondering what people would now say about me. That was inevitable, as I was the only one of the three people caught up in this business to get off without a scratch. It was a stroke of pure luck that, before they left for the back of beyond, the other two kept on saying to all and sundry that I had nothing to do with it, that they had only themselves to blame, and that they were very glad the story stopped there, because it could have turned out much worse.

  Later on, whenever my mind wandered back to this episode, I was more and more struck by the words: “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul!” The secretary’s hurry to close the case, his gratitude toward me, and especially his inclination to treat it as mainly a matter of harebrained idiots and boastful liars, gradually clarified what had at first seemed a real puzzle. There really wasn’t any mystery, even less an illogical chain of events caused by a loose cog in the machine. And it had nothing to do with the secretary being exhausted by an overheavy workload. It was a device intended to nip the rumor in the bud. The rumor was of an especially dangerous sort that the state had every reason to stop before it started. That was why, when the sentence was made public, the real charge was not mentioned at all, and the two men were sent down officially for professional lapses of the kind anyone could be accused of at any time.

  It would have been more logical for the state to turn a blind eye and let the two men go scot-free. But who knows which cog was whizzing away on its own and still demanding a punishment at any cost . . . Unless something else was going on that I could not figure out.

  That was what was chaotically floating around in my mind as I came up to the Grand Boulevard. After a lapse of several months, I was once again worried that what had really happened would look suspicious to some people. After all, anyone who knew me would be quite right in finding my presence in the grandstand suspicious. I myself had wondered two or three times whether or not I had served as an unwitting tool to dig my colleagues’ graves a little deeper. After all, I was the person responsible for their having been accused of mistakenly confusing revisionist waywardness with the realities of socialism . . . Not to mention what they might think if they both saw me today on their television screens! They would probably think: “We believed he was getting us off the hook, but apparently he must have been digging our grave even deeper to wind up with such a lavish reward!”

  They would have done better not to give me this invitation, I reflected. Or I would have been better off not coming, as Suzana and I had agreed . . . Suddenly all the pain of her absence hit me as heavily as the lid of a tomb. Oh Lord! I sighed bitterly. Too many burdens to bear all at once!

  Where the two boulevards intersected there was another checkpoint, which was stricter than the others. But I had now stopped worrying about them. A secret hope that the cops would find something out of order on my invitation and make me turn back made my heart beat faster as I waited at each security check.

  No such luck! In some areas of life, delays, oversights, and sloppiness just don’t arise. Issuing official invitations was one of them.

  Both sidewalks of the Grand Boulevard were packed with people. That was where most of the invited guests were placed. That’s exactly how it was written on their cards: “Left or right side of grandstand.” Whereas we who had seats still had to plow our way through this seething ocean. I’d already aroused suspicion and jealous pangs by getting this far, but when people realized I was supposed to go even higher, how much more animosity would be coming my way! Anyway, the real nightmare would presumably begin only at that point. I imagined that when people realized what I was set for, they would grab my coat tails, haul me back down, and raise the alarm.

  Instinctively, I slowed my pace to deflect any suspicion I might have aroused by marching forward too eagerly. I wanted to look like someone who, in common with all the other recent arrivals, was simply bent on finding the best spot.

  Shortly after, I realized that the sidewalk had been transformed into a promenade. Since the best seats for watching the parade had long been staked out, everyone not yet ensconced was sauntering up and down, running into old acquaintances, greeting them with guffaws, and so on. Here and there you could make out a glinting medal. On rare occasions it was a star of the Order of Heroes of Socialist Labor. Seen from outside or by the goggle-eyed people who’d just been watching us make our way to the platform, the place must have looked like a corner of paradise. A contingent of the Socialist elite in glorious May Day sunshine, right next to the heavenly choir . . .

  Well, I thought to myself, even if none of that is true, even if there’s not a sliver of paradise here, maybe it’s not exactly the total opposite either, not the hell on earth I had imagined it would be . . . Things were probably much simpler, and my fevered mind was making everything seem blacker than it was.

  Slightly reassured, I looked at my watch. It was almost half past nine. Maybe it was time to go up into the grandstand. Out of the human mass on the street, a line had formed and was making its way in orderly fashion in that direction, and to my great surprise no one betrayed any sign of guilt, shame, or hesitation. On the contrary, most people were holding their invitation cards in plain sight, with a touch of pride, and stopped to look at them close up or at arm’s length as they pretended to be checking where their seats were (as if they hadn’t already done that at home a dozen times over!) and then, with serious faces, moved straight ahead.

  I was about to join the line without any further self-doubts. After all, they had been coming here for years, and I was discovering it all for the first time. For the last time too, in all probability . . .

  “Keep moving! Keep moving!” a voice bawled from the nearby loudspeaker, as if to bolster my resolve. I thought that a smile was about to break out on my face, but it never got that far. For on my right, in a group of quit
e young fellows most of whom I knew (some were employees of Zeri i popullit, the daily newspaper, and others worked at the Central Committee), I saw G. Z.

  I can’t imagine what else in that crowd could have brought me back so sharply to the very worst that the world has to offer, to its most deathly and abominable manifestation. A somber chasm, then a great fall, then a desperate jerk to try to escape at any cost from the chaos . . . But wasn’t that the ancient tale of Bald Man Falling?

  One night as he was walking in the dark, Bald Man fell into a hole and kept on falling and falling right down to the netherworld . . .

  5

  I had known G. Z. since the time he was employed at our TV station, and I’d never thought very much of him. His complexion was gray, but more sickly than pale, probably a symptom of his lack of personal hygiene which, combined with his unwashed shirts and self-proclaimed taste for plain dressing (which was more likely just miserliness) and with his constant harping on his orphan status at meetings (Comrades, I never had a father or a mother. No! The Party is my only family.), which itself provided an inexhaustible supply of emotion for delegates but never failed to exasperate one of our colleagues no end (What unadulterated bull-shit! he would grumble. It’s only his mother who’s dead, his father’s alive and as fit as a fiddle. Given the circumstances, why doesn’t he say the Party is his substitute mommy?), his whole personality and history corresponded in sum to what in relatively polite language is called a pile of shit.

  But that was presumably where the roots of his career were planted. Because a career, as one of my friends often liked to say, is built not just on enthusiasm and energy, but on some special gift that has to be such an integral part of the individual in question as to be barely distinguishable from his genes. That gift, which in others may take the outward appearance of a heart of stone, natural perversity, infinite servility, or God knows what else, manifested itself in dull-witted G. Z. in his ostensible orphan identity, which for reasons unknown persuaded our leaders that there was nothing he was not prepared to trample in the mud if he one day should be asked to do so.

  Indeed he had already covered quite a lot of ground. At the Broadcasting Service to begin with, then at the National Theater, where, people said, he was highly valued. You could see right away that he had an inextinguishable hankering for the higher slopes . . . But one night, one of his relatives was arrested.

  One night, Bald Man fell all the way down to the netherworld . . .

  It had never occurred to me that a nonentity like G. Z. could be the pretext for likening an old folktale to what was, ultimately, an ordinary event in the lives we led. But as our office boss was wont to ask, isn’t it true that repulsive insects bring to mind, more often than you might expect, fine and lofty thoughts?

  After his fall, Bald Man strove with all his might to find the way and the means to clamber back to the upper world. He wore himself out searching every corner, until an old man whispered the solution in his ear. There was an eagle that could fly all the way up by the sheer strength of his wings — but on one condition. Throughout the flight, the raptor would need to consume raw meat. Bald Man didn’t think that would be a problem.

  (What had they asked G. Z. to supply in return for his place in the upper world? Whose flesh had he given?)

  G. Z. was in a state of utter turmoil for days and nights on end. He spent his time going from one office to another poor-mouthing his cousin, repudiating him, swearing he would wring his neck with his own two hands, if only the Party would put him to the test! People who knew him better than I said that the man’s agitation was not just for show. By their account, it sounded more like proof of integrity, which to some extent justified his attitude. But when I heard about it, I thought it a perfect example of the baseness of human nature.

  He traipsed all over the place and wore himself out hunting for a solution: his servility and eagerness to crawl were like a drug. The inexhaustible supply of devotion to the Party that such a person found himself able to summon up may have come as more of a surprise to himself than to anyone else. He raced from corridor to corridor, from office to office, until someone finally showed him how to climb out of the hole he was in. That someone knew someone who ... on one condition . . . G. Z. didn’t think that would be a problem.

  The precise nature of what base act G. Z. had committed was never disclosed.

  In the netherworld. Bald Man obtained a supply of meat before climbing on the eagle’s back, and so the flight back to the upper world began. Now and again in the course of flight the eagle asked to be fed, and so Bald Man cut him a piece of the meat he had brought.

  G. Z. had been banned from publishing his own work, but he was still a member of the National Theater. He’d already told people close to him that his case would soon be resolved. In two or three weeks, on the outside four or five, his own prospects would be irrevocably disconnected from his cousin’s plight. Especially as he wasn’t a first cousin anyway . . . But the matter was not resolved within two to three weeks, or in four or five.

  The eagle’s flight to the upper world was taking much longer than Bald Man had expected. All the meat had disappeared down the bird’s gullet. Bald Man looked on the sinister abyss with fear in his soul as the eagle kept flying around and around. The pit beneath seemed bottomless.

  “Kroa, kroa!” said the eagle, for it was his way of asking for food. Bald Man shivered with horror. What could he give him now? For the old man had warned him: if the beast doesn’t get his ration of meat when he asks for it, then you’re in for a very great fall.

  “Kroa!” the eagle cawed once more. On the spur of the moment. Bald Man dug the knife into his forearm and cut out a piece of his own flesh.

  We never learned exactly what G. Z. did in the week when they finally put him to the test. All we heard about, to begin with, was that he’d set a trap at a Party meeting for a fashionable young playwright: he’d sent some of the latter’s poems about the Guide (obtained with the help of a bodyguard who was a friend of his) to the Guide’s own children, with a letter complaining that for well-known reasons publication of the poems had been forbidden. And then came the main thing: the arrest of a young scriptwriter on the basis of an analysis (more surely, of the denunciation) that G. Z. had made of the man’s script.

  I rubbed my forehead to ease my migraine. No, the story of Bald Man feeding the infernal eagle with his own flesh could no longer be made to fit the story of G. Z. at this point. That man would have been quite incapable of feeding an eagle with flesh he’d not cut from someone else. Bald Man’s self-mutilation gave the folktale a tragic turn and a funereal grandeur that were completely inapplicable to G. Z. and his ilk. Not one of them would give up a single hair on his head to save anyone else. Whereas Bald Man . . .

  “Kroa, kroa!” the eagle cawed again after a while, and his passenger had to stick the blade into his thigh to cut out another piece of flesh. He carried on, looking glumly down into the inky blackness of the pit. Then he gazed in turn at all the different parts of his body that he would have to part with when the eagle asked for more. Lord, every morsel would be just as painful as any other!

  The eagle flew on endlessly through the ice-cold dark. Now and again he cawed, and Bald Man took a slice out of this or that part or place in his body. It seemed the journey would never end. Sometimes he thought he could see a faint glimmer of light in the distance, but it was only a hallucination invented by his weary eyes.

  “Kroa, kroa . . .” He had to start cutting pieces off his chest as the rest of his body was now almost down to the bone. Once again he thought he saw daylight in the far distance . . .

  It’s not known if Bald Man was still alive when the eagle came out into the upper world. People say that locals who happened to be around at the time couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw a huge black bird carrying a human skeleton on its back. “Hey! Come quick, there’s something incredible to see!” they called out to each other. “An eagle has brought up a dead man’s bone
s . . .”

  6

  I had lost sight of G. Z. and didn’t want to think about him anymore. He wasn’t the only one who had torn out living flesh so as not to fall to the bottom of a pit, with no means of climbing back up. There were others . . . Maybe I was one of them. We’d taken a path not really knowing where it would lead, not knowing how long it was, and while still on our way, realizing we had taken the wrong road but that it was too late to turn back, every one of us, so as not to be swallowed up by the dark, had started slicing off pieces of our own flesh.

  I continued to massage my forehead. The noise of the crowd all around me had merged entirely with the sound of the band. Meanwhile I was far, far away, in a dark and bottomless shaft, where we all sat astride our eagles, circling whichever way the wind cared to push us. . .

  “Well, well! Fancy seeing you here! But you look as though you have your head in the clouds . . . Anyway, Happy First of May, all the same!”

  It was my uncle. Though delighted to see me, he couldn’t mask his surprise. His eyebrows stayed raised and his eyes expressed unabated astonishment all the time he was speaking to me, as if he really could not come to terms with the fact that I really was there.

  “He’s a nephew of mine, he works in the broadcasting service,” he said, with no small pride, to a knot of acquaintances.

  I did not like my uncle. Each time we had met these past many years, we got into an argument, since we held opposing views on every subject: on the incompetence of managers, on shortages, on Stalin, television programming, the Kosovo question, and so on. I don’t recall our ever having agreed about anything. Even the weather, which usually helps bring the most unwilling opponents onto common ground, gave rise to clashes between us. He liked hot climates and I preferred cool ones. He never failed to draw ideological conclusions from this difference of taste: