Agamemnon's Daughter (10 page)

I suddenly thought I could see the answer. The sensation of breakthrough was so strong that I stood still and closed my eyes, as if the sight of the external world might cloud what was at last coming clear . . . Yakov, may he rest in peace, had not been sacrificed so as to suffer the same fate as any other Russian soldier, as the dictator had claimed, but to give Stalin the right to demand the life of anyone else. Just as Iphigenia had given Agamemnon the right to unleash the hounds of war . . .

It had nothing to do with the belief that the sacrifice would calm the winds that were keeping the fleet in port, nothing to do with a moral principle declaring that all Russian young men were equal before death. No, it was nothing but a tyrant’s cynical ploy.

I know what you’re after, too, what you’re trying to use Suzana for . . . You probably won’t sully your blade with warm blood, but though you may keep it bright and clean, it won’t be any the less harsh or brutal.

Perhaps I had sensed it long before, and had been approaching the truth step by step ever since Suzana told me of her decision. What her father had requested looked pretty insignificant, but it was much more than it seemed. Though hidden from the general gaze, it was a sacrifice to be counted among the crudest ever invented. The letter from Lushnje, the suspicious lump of ore, or that fatal military map, had led to lines of coffins, but Suzana’s sacrifice would certainly have consequences even bleaker than those horrors . . . Should untold thousands of canceled evenings out count for less than a heap of corpses? Or poisoned Novembers, evening conversations choked as by an odorless gas, and the snows and smells of winter all sullied and soured? Blue benches around the swimming pool turned into useless accessories, student parties gone as flat as stale beer, tangos without a beat, bronze clocks striking midnight in empty hallways, hair brushed in front of the mirror, and jewels, and furs, and makeup gone all streaky and worn . . .

Yes, Suzana was the harbinger of an irreversible impoverishment of ordinary life. A life that like a cactus in an arid desert had barely managed to accumulate a few last drops of human vitality.

You were nothing but a poison and the specter of the scourge! I exclaimed in my mind. Your change of heart was really the continuation of the campaigns sparked off by the letter from Lushnjë, the ore, and the map. There was no Calchas whispering advice; no, Suzana’s father probably didn’t even know why he was acting as he did. Someone else, the Supreme Guide, who was in process of appointing him as his official successor, must have asked him to do it. “Papa’s as tenderhearted as they come,” Suzana had confided, “he’s completely incapable of scolding me.”

Maybe the Guide had also grasped the man’s real character and found a way of saying: Choose one of the two ax blades. If you aren’t up to using the bloodstained one, use the clean one instead. But while I’m still alive, show me what you can do, and show me now! Strike! If you know how to use it properly, the clean blade can be the more fearsome of the two.

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

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 remain 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: