Agamemnon's Daughter

by Ismail Kadare

  So what Suzana portended was the clean blade. Worn out by the rampage of the bloody blade, the country was now going to suffer a different kind of terror.

  My God, spare this country from dehumanization! I screamed silently. Protect it from yet another ruination! For it is about to inflict on itself what the sweaty haze and desert dust of the East has failed to achieve!

  The placards of the now weary activists could be seen swaying as they moved off in all directions. Revolutionize Life Ever More! Learning, Labor, and Military Training!

  But I’ve been staring at it throughout the parade! I thought. Those were the watchwords that had been repeated over and over these past few years. Those were the values that were supposed to replace lovers’ sighs at sunset, melancholy moments on the verandah, jewels, and dance bands. Productive labor, military training, studying the works of the Guide . . . But as they’d not yet stamped out all normal life, a new campaign was being set in motion.

  Let us work, live and think revolution . . . Let us revolutionize everything . . . How many years of such a drought would it take to reduce life to a stony waste? And why? Only because when life is withered and stunted, it is also easier to control.

  I had a pounding headache and remained incapable of controlling my train of thought. How the hell can you revolutionize a woman’s sex? That’s where you’d have to start if you were going to tackle the basics — you had to start with the source of life. You would have to correct its appearance, the black triangle above it, and the glistening line of the labia . . . Reeducate it by abolishing all trace of its past: all memory of orgasm, all recollection of thousands of years of pleasure . . .

  I would have burst out laughing if I hadn’t felt so dismayed.

  The revolutionary triad: learning, productive labor, and military training . . . And what would become of the dark delta of a woman’s sex? A parched, desiccated estuary dotted about with puny blades of yellowing desert grass.

  I’d never seen such a dense accumulation of placards. Ah, here’s the notorious one about grass: We shall eat grass if we have to hut we will never renounce the principles of Marxism-Leninism!

  “You blind fool!” I said to myself. “The truth was right there, in front of your eyes, but you tried to find clues by going back three thousand years! You combed through books and racked your brains to find something that needed no research at all.”

  “So what?” I responded to my self-accusation. “Was I wrong? The signal that Suzana gave me was clear and precise, and that was the main thing. Whereas murdered Iphigenia wasn’t around to testify for the defense. On the contrary.”

  Everything was happening as it had happened before, but in a perhaps even crueler way. Greek ships are leaving the coast of Aulis for Troy. One by one they haul up their anchors, spilling clumps of mud and stones into the choppy waters. The mooring lines are being cut, like last hopes.

  The Trojan War has begun.

  Nothing now stands in the way of the final shriveling of our lives.

  Tirana, 1985

  Footnote

  * The lines are from Sergey Esenin’s “Ballad of the Twenty-Six,” written in 1924 to commemorate the execution of twenty-six Soviet commissars by a British firing squad in 1918. In Russian:

  The Blinding Order

  1

  By the last week of September it became obvious that the sequence of events could not have been just a string of coincidences. No sooner had he sung his first call to prayers — and done so admirably, in the view of all who were lucky enough to hear him — our new young hodja Ibrahim fell down the minaret stair. Next, we learned that the crown prince had been taken ill, likewise after a public appearance. Two or three more unusual things then happened in a row before the end of a week, which had a real twist in its tail. As he was making his way to the imperial palace, where he was widely expected to make the long-awaited announcement of his government’s agreement to a substantial loan, the British ambassador was involved in an accident, and his carriage overturned.

  Bystanders chased down the alleys in pursuit of someone — a woman, or perhaps a man wearing a veil — who had stared at the landau as it crossed Blue Mosque Bridge a few moments before toppling over, but in vain, which is why the culprit was never found. But everyone agreed about one thing: the ambassador’s accident, the young hodja’s fall, and the sickness of the crown prince, as well as other facts of a similar kind, must have had a single, common cause. It was the evil eye.

  This was obviously not the first time the eye had exercised its maleficent power. Collective memory, not to mention the archives and annals of the state, were full of similar occurrences, which tended to prove that from time to time, when aroused, the eye could spread misfortunes and calamities on an epidemic scale, if not worse. So there was no reason to be surprised that since time immemorial people had often had recourse to the saying: “He’s been struck by the evil eye!”

  Maybe because of the cold wet weather that autumn, or because of the economic crisis, the harmful actions of the carriers of the evil eye were doing more damage than ever. That made people all the more tense and angry, just as it provided unusually detailed material for the report that, people said, had already been submitted to the sovereign.

  The sultan’s response had been expected for days. If it was not to be a decree (some people were convinced it would take that form), then at least there would be a decision, or a proclamation, or perhaps a secret circular.

  By Tuesday evening, no edict had been issued by the imperial chancery. And as always in such circumstances, initial speculation about the expected measures were embroidered by yet more badly muddled tongue-wagging.

  In times gone by, any suspected sabotage by an “evil eye” was punished by harsh measures of the same order as those meted out to heretics: the guilty were thrown into a pit of quicklime, flayed alive, or stoned to death. People in the capital still remembered the flaying of Shanisha, an old woman who with a single stare had managed to transmit the haul mat to the daughter of Sultan Aziz’s predecessor, which caused, first of all, untold sadness, then the latter’s long illness, and finally his deposition, itself followed by far-reaching disturbances from which the state took years to recover.

  That was how carriers of the evil eye used to be dealt with. But in the modernized, reformed state of today, this kind of punishment looked barbaric and out of date.

  So what was the right thing to do? Should carriers of the evil eye be treated kindly, and allowed to indulge their practices to their hearts’ content, until they bring down not just men, but the very walls of our houses? People opposed to clemency for carriers of destructive glances, and those who stood more generally against any relaxation of the laws of the state, were asking these questions. As a matter of fact, do you know of a single case, they would ask, where evil has been stamped out without a firm hand? Were you thinking of obliging the carriers of the evil eye to put on those glass things invented in the land of the giaours,* those diabolical lenses they called spectacles? Or would you rather cover their eyes with a black scarf to make them look like pirates?

  No, such measures would be pointless, they said. The evil eye projects its poison just as — or maybe even more — effectively through a blindfold, and obviously more powerfully through those accursed glass things, even if you blacken them with soot, as fashionable young men in the capital had recently started doing.

  Such were the comments of the people who were trying to determine what measures lay in store, up to the very day — a Friday — when, at long last, the decree was issued.

  Like all great edicts, its title was very short: qorrfirman, meaning, literally, blind decree. However, it was neither as harsh nor as merciful as might have been expected. It was a decision that cut both ways, leaving the opposing parties equally unsatisfied, but in a muted way, which allowed their veneration of the state and its sovereign to assert itself nonetheless — especially with respect to the sultan, who showed himself once again able to rise and to r
emain above the mere turmoil of human passions.

  With astonishing speed — within a week of promulgation — various details emerged about the cabinet debate that had given birth to the order. As was its wont, the Köprülü clan, which stood against the faction of Sheikh ul-Islam, had come out in favor of greater clemency in the treatment of carriers of the evil eye. The Köprülüs proposed to expel them from all state-sponsored activities, or else put them under house arrest, or, for the most heinous cases, deport them and concentrate them in isolated locations, as if they were lepers. On the other side, Sheikh us-lslam and his followers supported traditional sanctions. The sultan listened to each faction and then decided not to favor either; or rather, he took both sides at once. The qorrfirman was such a canny concession to both clans that it channeled resentment of the opponents of barbaric sentences against Sheikh ul-Islam, just as it directed the fanatics’ feeling of disappointment toward the Köprülü clan. The sultan had kept himself above the squabble, and he had not just earned the admiration of both sides but also provoked a special emotion tinged with sorrow at seeing him obliged to intervene in the interminable quarreling of the clans, despite his more pressing preoccupations.

  News of the order’s main provisions spread among certain circles in the city even before the text had been read out by public criers or printed in newspapers. The main thrust of the qorrfirman was as follows:

  Cases of affliction by the evil eye having recently increased, and with the risk of misophthalmia (the original term, sykeqoja,* was dug out of some ancient dictionary) turning into a real scourge, the state, acting in its own interests and those of its citizens, has felt obliged to take a number of measures.

  Carriers of the evil eye would no longer be sentenced to death, as they were in the past; they would only be prevented from perpetrating any more of their wicked deeds. That aim would be achieved by depriving them of the tool of their crimes — that is to say, of their evil eyes.

  So the qorrfirman stated that anyone convicted of possessing maleficent ocular powers would forfeit his or her eyes.

  People affected by this measure would receive compensation from the state, with a higher sum going to afflicted individuals who turned themselves in to the authorities. Disoculation (the first time the term had been used in an official document), that is to say, the forcible putting out of eyes, would be inflicted without compensation upon all persons who opposed the Blinding Order by whatever means, or tried to hide from it or to escape its application.

  The call went out to all subjects of the age-old Empire to denounce either openly or anonymously any individual who possessed the power. They should put at the foot of their letters the full name and exact address or place of work of the accused. Denunciations could be made of persons of all kinds, be they ordinary citizens or civil servants, whatever their rank in the hierarchy of the state. That last sentence left many people gazing dreamily into space, as if they’d just been staring at an invisible speck on the far horizon.

  2

  Shortly after the introduction of newspapers, it became readily apparent that some kinds of government announcements were more effectively disseminated by the traditional channels of communication, namely town criers, whereas others had much more impact through the medium of print. This variation was of course related to the nature of the announcement and whether its audience was to be found primarily among the illiterate masses or among the elite.

  Whether spread by ear or by eye, however, the qorrfirman aroused instant horror. But it could only be grasped fully if ear and eye worked together to transmit its meaning to the brain. Perhaps that was the reason why people who first heard it proclaimed by a town crier rushed to buy the newspaper in order to read it, while people who first learned of it in the press left their papers on cafe tables or public benches to hasten to the nearest square to await the crier’s arrival.

  An old feeling, which people had perhaps forgotten about in recent years, suddenly began to seep back into the atmosphere. The feeling was fear. But this time it was no ordinary fear, like being afraid of sickness, robbery, ghosts, or death. No, what had returned was an ice-cold, impersonal, and baffling emotion called fear of the state. Bearing as it were a great emptiness in its heart, the fear of the state found its way into every recess of the mind. In the course of a few hours, days at most, hundreds of thousands of people would be caught up in its cogs and wheels. Something similar had happened six years previously, when there had been a campaign against forbidden sects (the latter had nonetheless managed to reemerge since then). An even earlier precedent came from fifteen years before, when they’d unraveled a huge plot, which at first appeared to involve only a narrow circle of high officials but which came by stages to wreak its horror on many thousands of households.

  People’s natural inclination to erase collective misfortunes from memory made them forget — or believe they had forgotten — the peculiar atmosphere that arises just prior to a major outbreak of terror. Between the first hint of the threat and the first blow struck, in the time when the hope that the horror will not truly come, that evil might be thwarted and the nightmare extinguished, people are suspended in a state of paralysis, deafness, and blankness that, far from placating terror, only serves to aggravate it.

  They thought they had forgotten, but as soon as the drums rolled and the criers bawled out the first words of the Blinding Order, they realized they hadn’t forgotten a thing, that it had stayed inside them all the while, carefully hidden like poison in the hollowed-out cavity of a ring. As in times past, before their minds had quite caught up with what was really going on, their mouths went dry and gave them a foretaste of what was to come.

  It was clear from the start that what was now being put into place would be even more abominable than the campaign against forbidden sects and all previous episodes of the sort. That was because the new campaign’s target was something so abstract it could never be quite pinned down. All the same, everyone grasped the impact it was bound to have. Even when the ax had been supposed to fall only on specific circles, as in the case of the campaign against the sects, or on isolated officials, as in the affair of the anti-state conspiracy, everyone, and all their relatives too, had felt its effect. This time, though, given that the issue related to something as manifestly indefinable as the maleficent or beneficent quality of a person’s glance, and insofar as said quality pertained to something as universal as eyes (everybody had eyes, nobody could claim exemption on grounds of not being concerned), this time people were sure that the new campaign would be of unprecedented scope and violence. It was obvious that the vicious whirlwind would flush out every single suspect and whisk every last one of them off, without mercy, to their fatal punishment.

  In homes, offices, and cafes, people spoke of nothing else from early Saturday morning. But just the way things had happened during previous campaigns, this time, too, people talked about the Blinding Order in a manner completely at odds with the dark foreboding that it aroused in their souls. They treated it in an offhand, almost entertaining way. Apparently, people thought that as far as their personal relations were concerned, lightheartedness was the best way to ward off the least suspicion that might have lurked in their own hearts or in others’ that the order might be directed against them as individuals in any way whatsoever. All the same, in the midst of conversations and laughter, a moment would come when eyes would meet and glances freeze into razor-sharp shards of ice. It was the fatal moment when each speaker tried to fathom his interlocutor’s mind: Does he really think I have that kind of eyes?

  These tense interludes would last barely two or three seconds. One speaker or the other would relax his stare, and then laughter and chatter would resume with even greater jollity. The discussions mostly focused on the same issue, an issue most people pretended not to take to heart on their own account. Just what were evil eyes? Was there a reliable way of identifying them?

  There was a wide variety of opinion on the matter. People referred to the
traditional view that the evil eye was to be found typically among light-colored irises and rather less among darker hues, but everyone was also aware that eye color was not itself a sufficient means of diagnosing misophthalmia, especially as the problem arose in a multinational empire where some ethnic groups had eyes — as well as hair and skin — that were more or less dark than others. No, hue was certainly not an adequate criterion, it was just one factor among many others, like squints, or the unusually large or small size of the eyeballs, which could similarly not be considered determining factors. There could be no doubt about it: no single trait, nor any particular combination of them in an individual pair of eyes, offered definite proof of the presence of misophthalmia. No, it was something else, something different . . . A peculiar combination of the intrinsic nature of the eye and of the trace its glance left in surrounding space . . . Of course, it was rather hard to detect, especially because the order mentioned no specific sign that might be of use in the matter. But if the order itself did not stoop to such minutiae, the special commissions that had been set up in more or less every locality must obviously have been given instructions and precise directions in order to identify this maleficent force and to ward off erroneous interpretations and possible abuses.

  At that point in the conversation, people usually stifled an anxious sigh and turned back to lively, light-hearted topics.

  That’s how it was in office chatter, in cafes infested with informers, or even in homes when visitors were present. But when people found themselves alone, they would rush to wherever they could find a mirror and stand there for minutes on end. People with dark eyes tried to convince themselves that their pupils were sufficiently dark to clear them of all suspicion. People with light-colored eyes tried to convince themselves of the opposite. But the people who stared longest at the mirror were those with squints, or eyes reddened by an allergy, or by high blood pressure, or by some other ocular irritation, as well as people with eyes bleary from jaundice, bloated from toothache or drink, down to people who suffered from a cataract.