Agamemnon's Daughter (7 page)

The soldiers and civilians of Aulis had converged at the place where the altar had been set up. Maybe invitations had been issued, to prevent the place being overrun. Everyone in attendance must have been on the verge of asking the obvious question:
What is this sacrifice? What’s it for?
The very absence of a clear answer would have heightened anxiety and fear tenfold.

No, Calchas hadn’t given any advice at all. A prophecy from him would have seemed too dubious, too Machiavellian. But in that case, why had the idea of sacrifice sprung from Agamemnon’s mind like an illumination?

Groups of spectators drifted like ripples lapping rhythmically on the shore toward the places with the best view of the parade, or toward the central stand where the top leaders would take their seats.

I was drifting imperceptibly myself with the same end in view when I saw Suzana. She was in C-2, a little lower down than I was, together with other sons and daughters of the elite.

She was subtly pale, and her indifference could be guessed partly from her profile, and partly from the glistening comb that held up her luxuriant hair. She was staring vacantly in the direction of the band.

Why are they asking for your sacrifice, Suzana? I questioned her silently, with quiet sorrow. What storm are you supposed to appease?

For a brief moment I felt entirely empty. Gripped by the sense of void and exhausted by so many questions, I wondered: Am I not going too far with all these analogies? Isn’t it altogether simpler — a woman naturally pulling back from an affair when an official engagement is imminent? I was the victim of what was, after all, a quite ordinary change of heart. Was my mind not simply trying to give my defeat a tragic dimension that came only from its own nature?

I’d got hold of the word
sacrifice
and then used it to contrive an analogy I’d taken further than was warranted. I was no better than a novice poet who manages after much effort to spawn a metaphor, then falls for it entirely and constructs an entire poetic work on a foundation no more solid than sand.

I would never have thought that a sudden perception of a likeness between Suzana and Iphigenia — one of those random, instantaneous illuminations that flash across men’s minds thousands of times every day — could take root in my mind and grow to the dimensions it had now acquired. The identification had become so complete for me that I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if I’d heard an announcer on radio, on TV, or in the theater introduce “the daughter of Agamemnon, Suzana!” However, the equivalence was also what allowed me to see in an instant a whole new side of the ancient drama, in the light of the present situation of Suzana and her father. It made a new sense of the relations between Agamemnon and the other leaders, of their power struggles and fallback positions, their reasons of state, their use of exemplary punishments, and of terror . . .

For a while, my mind seemed intent on casting off a too heavy burden, and made a concentrated effort to de-dramatize the whole thing. But all of a sudden the well-oiled machine in my head jammed, clashed gears, and went into reverse. A massive and fearless NO took hold of my entire being.

No, it couldn’t be that simple! Sure, I was at the end of my rope, I was flailing, but all the same, I was utterly certain that things were not so simple. It wasn’t so much the word
sacrifice
or Graves’s book that had planted the seed of the analogy in my head. It was something else, something that I could not quite see for the fog surrounding it, but which I could feel quite near. It must be here, in full sight, all I had to do was to shake off a veil that was clouding my vision . . . Had not Stalin sacrificed his own son Yakov to ... in order to ... to be able to say that his own son . . . had to share the same destiny . .. the same fate ... as any Russian soldier? And what had Agamemnon been trying to say two thousand eight hundred years ago? What was Suzana’s father trying to get at now?

My thoughts were interrupted by the sight of her head, swaying between the shoulders of two others. I don’t know why, but the memory of our first meeting suddenly came back to my mind. Portrait of a young girl bleeding . . . That’s how it had crystallized in my memory . . . It was one afternoon late in the fall. After our first kiss on the couch, she looked me in the eye at leisure, then said with quiet composure: I love you. She maintained her quizzical stare, as if checking to see that I’d understood her. She needed only a sign from me to offer proof of what she’d just said, and when I responded — rather hesitantly, as I was somewhat taken aback at the prospect of such an easy triumph — “How about lying down?” she got up right away and, with the same placid manner as she had spoken, got undressed.

I followed her orderly gestures. Her lace lingerie appeared when she took off her dress, and when she pulled down her tights her smooth white legs came into view. I got up from the couch and kissed her as cautiously as if she were sleepwalking, and pressed a bunch of her hair to my right cheek.
I like expensive women
... I mumbled, without knowing then or since whether “expensive” referred to her Western underwear, to the valuable comb that embellished her hair, or to the ease and simplicity with which she offered herself.

On the couch she put up no resistance. She’d taken off the last of her underwear, and everything would have happened as perfectly as in a painted dreamscape if an abrupt, subterranean tremor hadn’t suddenly shaken us apart. Her earlier eagerness gave way to opposite emotions of awkwardness and tension, which she tried but failed to hide.

“What’s the matter, Suzana?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath.

She didn’t answer. But I guessed that a kind of safety catch had clicked on somewhere right inside her and locked her up, and then I thought I understood. But I was greatly surprised nonetheless when she blurted out, point-blank: “I’m a virgin.”

We lay for a long while on the couch without speaking. Then, with a smile that was more like a brightening above her cheekbones, she said to me: “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

I didn’t know what to say, but she went on: “That’s why I preferred not to tell you beforehand.”

I felt unable to react, perhaps because happiness had shown itself in its most certain form, surrounded by a halo of sadness. The triumph, which a short while before had seemed to come so easily, now felt like a feat of arms.
I beg you, Suzana, don’t be my downfall!
was my unspoken prayer.

The band suddenly stopped playing, the loudspeakers roared with a storm of applause, and all heads turned toward the central stand. The leaders were coming out onto the platform. From where I was sitting I could make out only some of them. I couldn’t manage to see the Guide, or Suzana’s father, who was maybe standing at his side. From the C-1 stand, only four of the leaders’ heads were visible. Were they really oversized? Maybe it was just the effect of the nickname that one of our colleagues in the music department was alleged to have given them — “the bigwigs.” He’d been sentenced to hard labor in the mines for having asked why, after forty years of socialism, most of the members of the Politburo still had to come from the least educated layer of society. That’s what he was supposed to have said at a dinner party. But some people claimed he’d gone even further and declared that the government of the nineteenth-century League of Prizren had been better educated than the one we had now! Well, that’s what he was supposed to have said, but it wasn’t even mentioned at the meeting where we voted to fire him. The same thing happened in my own case, presumably because it was thought too dangerous to say it out loud, even as incriminating evidence. So, again like the case I was involved in, he was found guilty of professional lapses, of having sloppy ideas about Western music, and of making sarcastic remarks about productive labor . . .

The New Man is the Party’s greatest triumph
. . .
our most famous victory
. . .
the happiest land on earth
. . .
no debt, no taxes
. . .
the one and only Socialist nation!

I hardly listened to the dire and deadly opening speech. Those hopeless, irremediable clichés that we’d all heard a thousand times went in one ear and out the other, as such things usually did. Some of the current watchwords, like shadows cast by the hand of a master puppeteer, summoned up the shapes of the people they’d helped to bring down. You only had to open your eyes and look around to find slogans, symbols, and portraits that had served directly to bring some people to ruin. For instance, the Constitution forbade any borrowing from foreign sources, any reference to the availability (that is to say, to our shortage) of butcher meat, and any allusions to the decadent Jean-Paul Sartre or to the shape of Mao Zedong’s eyes.

Our colleague in the music department had been luckier than one of the technical controllers, howeven. That young man had taken a swipe at the privileges enjoyed by the elite and their offspring, such as villas and foreign travel. Once again, he wasn’t openly blamed for what he’d said, but for different things, like his notions about free love (which were just about enough to get him thrown out of work). In the meantime, he was caught talking to a foreign tourist, and that really did him in. During his trial, and despite the plight he was in already, he stuck to his guns (so people said), denouncing “The Royal Court” as before, but laying it on thicker than ever, accusing the leadership of transferring gold and diamonds to foreign banks as if we were still living in the days of King Zog, of committing secret assassinations, and other equally sinister deeds. He hadn’t spared a soul, not even the Guide, but he’d been specially harsh about his wife, whom he’d described as the true inspiration for her husband’s crimes, a real Lady Macbeth — Lady Macbeth of the Backwater, he’d said, the Qiang Qing of Albania, and so forth. He was sent down for fifteen years, but he never served a quarter of his sentence. In the chrome ore mines, people said, there were deep pits, in whose vicinity common criminals frequently bumped into politicals, by accident. That’s how it all ended: a gradual fall from grace, from season to season, from year to year, cruelly summarized in a headlong rush lasting a few seconds.

The privileges of the leadership and especially of their children was one of the regular topics of argument with my uncle. However, unlike all the other subjects we argued over, this particular argument did not send him into a frenzy. Though he would never admit it, he probably felt ill at ease with the privileges himself. My polemics with him on this subject stopped the day I met Suzana. She amazed me. Were the rumors about the children of the top rung just idle gossip, or was she different from the others? I quickly came to understand that the latter hypothesis was correct, Suzana was indeed different in every way.

That’s why you’ve been singled out for sacrifice, I said to myself.

But in the moment of thinking that, another thought hit me unexpectedly, like a giant wave: what if the sacrifice was only a show? What if Suzana’s simplicity and modesty were only for appearance, whereas in reality, over there behind the high walls of official residences, villas, and private beaches, she was having a riot at all-night parties with unlimited booze and sex on tap?

A pang of jealousy cut me to the quick. Hadn’t I read page after page on the possibility of Iphigenia’s sacrifice also being a sham? On her having been replaced on the altar by a fawn at the last moment? and so on. A classic show designed to impress the populace. Typical leadership solution. My Suzana at shore-side villas all winter long, dancing till she dropped, then stripping naked and offering herself on a couch, groaning with lust. . . No, no! Rather she were dead and done with!

One afternoon I’d recorded her sighs and groans on tape, and late at night, when everyone else was asleep, I would shut myself in the kitchen of the apartment to listen to them. Hearing her voice dissociated both from the act and from the sight of it made a strange impression. The voice was even but porous, full of breathing sounds and blanks. Street sounds — a policeman’s whistle, a distant car horn — added a cosmic dimension, like shooting stars on a summer’s night streaking unpredictably at the edges of the boundless sky.

However many times I rewound the tape and played it over again, the sensation of cosmic void did not diminish but grew stronger. I felt I was far away, out of touch with hen. At some moments, it was as if she were buried in the ground and I was listening to her complaining from the grave; at other times I was the one who was buried, but could still hear her moans through the clay soil and over the racket made by the upper world.

On one occasion I turned the volume up as high as it would go, as if I’d wanted her heavy breathing to fill the universe, and then I caught myself thinking that apart from her black pubic area I’d never had a decent look at her sexual organ, the true source of the raging storm.

When we next met, with the seriousness that was hers in all matters relating to love, she took up a position such that beneath her pubic hair I could see the pale pink lips of her sex. I studied them for several seconds, and I guess my eyes must have expressed the surprise of a man who hears something growling fiercely in the bushes and then suddenly sees through the foliage not a fearsome monster, but an inoffensive pet.

Suzana’s sex looked utterly simple compared to its sophisticated function. In spite of myself I compared it to what my previous girlfriend’s looked like. Her organ could have been called imposing and almost baroque, like a pleasure factory. But maybe it had not always been so, maybe it had become that way from use . . . So many ejaculations had gone down it! And not only mine. She — my other girlfriend — had had relations with two other men before me, and maybe that unspoken truth was what exaggerated the proportions in my eyes. But Suzana was only a beginner. Maybe later on, after all the pretenses to come, her sex would also become more complex. Later on, when I would have lost my rights . . .

A sudden burst of brass and drums made me jump. It was the start of the parade.