Agamemnon's Daughter Page 11

  Meanwhile, amid all the efforts to clothe the campaign in festive garb, the hunt for evil eyes went on, openly or in secret. People who had up to then escaped the crowd’s scrutiny were being denounced. Others who had been unmasked and gone underground were being ferreted out. Some who had heard or imagined they had been denounced had also gone into hiding, but because they were tormented by persecution mania their own behavior aroused suspicions that soon led them to ruin.

  The next Tuesday, the town criers were out again, summoning carriers of the evil eye to report directly to the nearest qorroffice, seeing that they could only benefit from taking the initiative. “The Prophet declared that being born with an evil eye is not a sin in itself!” they bawled. “Guilty is only he who hides that power!”

  Newspaper columnists began writing stories about events connected with misophthalmia. A man by the name of Selim had been caught in the act in a thicket of bushes, staring with his evil eye at a bridge under construction and trying to make its arch collapse. The bricklayers enlisted passersby to help deal with the man. They’d chained him up and blinded him on the spot. The paper didn’t state which technique had been used, but it was supposed that it was one of the three methods henceforth classified as the “harshest,” unless of course the bricklayers themselves had thought up something entirely different and even more atrocious.

  Stories about the qorrfirman in the papers were sporadic, but in the qorroffices there was never the slightest letup. Volunteer messengers came and went bearing notes, new orders, and instructions, and scarcely did they get to their destinations than they were off again, their faces beaming, or else gravely composed in order to express the full dignity of their function.

  The hunt for the evil eye was now at its peak. Qorroffices competed against each other for results. When things were not going too well in a bureau of that kind, glum-faced workers, slaving away late at night by the light of oil lamps, would suddenly panic and pass each other names of people who lived on their block or street and who maybe had eyes of that kind, but who’d escaped notice up till then.

  Sometimes lights in the qorroffices were on late into the night, and people who lived nearby, unable to get to sleep until the lights went out, muttered to one another: What the hell are they doing so late in the night? What new miseries are they cooking up now? May God make them stark, raving mad!

  Meanwhile, threats against people who spoke ill of the glorious qorrfirman continued to be made — which didn’t stop anyone from cursing it with ever greater vigor. People threw insults at it, and twisted its name this way and that, calling it the Dark Decree, or the Sinister Sentence, or the Fateful Firman. The same thing happened as far as gossip was concerned. Efforts to put a stop to rumors only made more of them flourish. They got weirder by the day, and some of them made your blood run cold. Just recently, for instance, a rumor about the grand vizier had made the rounds. Suspicion of the evil eye was said to have fallen on him, despite his being the sovereign’s right hand. An anonymous letter writer had had the audacity to name his name. People could not stop talking about that piece of news, with a terror whose special flavor came from a combination of fear, curiosity, and a kind of relief and contentment. So there you are! Higher-ups can get in just the same mess as little folk! But how could people question the grand vizier himself? . . . Why are you so surprised? As if this was the first time that kind of thing had happened . . . There’s more to it, you know. It’s said that the whole hullabaloo over the evil eye is really aimed solely at getting rid of the grand vizier! Look, I’m sorry, but what you’ve just said is completely illogical; if that really had been what the sovereign was after, if he’d wanted to topple the grand vizier, who in the world could have stopped him? There’s no shortage of grand viziers who’ve gone to sleep one night with their heads on their shoulders, and found them cut off in the morning . . . Sure, sure, things used to be done that way, but times have changed. Nowadays they don’t only use knives to deal with matters of state. It also takes a bit of skill. And besides, you’re forgetting that the grand vizier was appointed with the heavy backing of the Köprölü clan. I guess you know you can’t joke with that crew. To bring one of their men down, you’d have to lay the ground carefully, inside and outside the empire. Because people are talking about this overseas as well, you know . . .

  Thus did gossip spread. But these particular rumors were not the only ones that were considered punishable. Attempts were made to root out things considered just as harmful, such as inappropriate witticisms, ironic remarks and anecdotes, alongside a number of puns and riddles.

  One Saturday afternoon, the famous poet Tahsin Kurtoglu was summoned to one of the qorroffices in the center of town. In front of a large crowd, and after it was first explained that a favor was being done to him, as a great poet, by having him summoned to a qorroffice and not to a court of law, he was asked to explain some lines of poetry he had published a couple of weeks before, as well as remarks he was said to have made here and there among his circle of friends.

  As far as his poems were concerned (the issue revolved mainly around one of them, “We were struck by the bow not by the arrow”), the writer defended himself energetically, maintaining that it was but a simple love poem addressed to a woman graced with fine eyebrows, and the fact that he had declared the lady’s brows (the bow) to be more fearsome than her glance (the arrows) in his lines of verse had absolutely nothing to with any kind of subversion of the glorious Blinding Order.

  His listeners, visibly skeptical, then quoted back to the poet some of his double entendres, which he denied ever having uttered. Then someone in the crowd took a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and took it upon himself to read its contents aloud:

  On the seventh day of this month, during a dinner with friends, you declared that this great blinding would only deepen the darkness of the world. On the twelfth, in a cafe, you claimed there was a balance between light and dark, between the visible and the invisible, and that this balance between the two sides would now be broken, to the disadvantage of the light and the visible. And you also claimed — and this is the most heinous claim it is possible to make — that the sum of the eyes of all human beings on earth, about a thousand million, make up what you called the eye of whole humanity, and that it grows weaker when a large number of individuals go blind, especially when — and now you all listen to this! — especially when those blinded are the most clear-sighted of all!

  After each of the sentences spoken by the qorroffice employee, Tahsin Kurtoglu shook his head, and when his accuser had finished, exclaimed: “Those are nothing but calumnies and fabrications bruited about by my rivals!”

  These words, far from calming the crowd that had gathered, only served to excite it, and things began to get noisy and rough. People were even heard to shout: “You’ve let him have his say, now give him what he deserves, the Tibetan method!” “We want the Tibetan! We want the Tibetan!” others began to chant, but one of the officials, after signaling to the crowd to stop shouting, made a short speech in which he stressed the clemency of the state, which, on this occasion, would only reprimand Kortoglu. “But the main thing,” he said, wagging his finger at the poet, “is that this is your last warning!”

  Everybody could now see clearly that the tide of denunciations and poison-pen letters had gone over the top, and when people caught sight of the mail-wagon going down the street, they would stop to gaze at it in horror, as they knew that at least half its load consisted of just such kinds of missives.

  It was on one of those gloomy days that Marie closed her bedroom door behind her, went to the window, and watched her fiancé go out into the street. He’d seemed altered, and rather sterner than usual During lunch, despite her father’s efforts to liven things up, the conversation had hardly got off the ground.

  It was because of him, she could see it now! She watched him saunter down the street until he vanished behind the shade trees on the sidewalk, and the same thought occurred to her: he must be wo
rried about something.

  She ran through a list of possible reasons. Overwork, office intrigues, pangs of conscience . . . but in the end she began to wonder whether she had only imagined it. Didn’t everyone sometimes wake up in a bad mood, which only gets worse when someone else remarks, “You don’t seem your usual self today.” That must be it. No doubt about it.

  Only half-dressed, she went to the mirror and looked at herself, bending first one knee, then the other. There, at the top of her right thigh, she saw two bluish bruises, the trace of the preceding Sunday afternoons. Whereas the latest bruises would not become visible for two or three days . . . She looked for a moment at her smooth belly and the low black tufts that covered her crotch, then she sat on the carpet with legs half-crossed, and studied her sexual organ.

  “It’s all quiet now,” she thought, “as if nothing had ever happened.”

  She could not take her eyes off the slightly curved line separating the pink lips of her vulva. They looked like lips that would never speak . . . And yet, just a few moments before, they had been almost crazily talkative, dribbling . . .

  “Unbelievable,” she said inwardly. It then occurred to her that a woman’s sex was without any doubt the most inexplicable and enigmatic thing in the world. Those silent labia would never tell anyone what had gone on inside and around them.

  Feeling suddenly grateful, she stroked her belly, her crotch, then the lips themselves. But she soon felt a shiver of cold, and got up to put on some clothes.

  There’s no doubt about it, something is worrying him, she thought as she pinned up her hair.

  7

  The anti-misophthalmic campaign was now at its peak. It rose higher every day like a rain-swollen stream, sucking countless human lives into its headlong rush.

  Evil eyes were not the only ones to be ceaselessly hunted down. The same energy was devoted simultaneously to rooting out declared or supposed defenders of the evil eye, as well as individuals considered to be covert opponents of the implementation of the qorrfirman and the close and distant relatives and retainers of owners of the evil eye. Other people were charged with lacking clear sight, with indifference, or with insufficient zeal. Sometimes, these latter folk were able to make the same charges against their accusers.

  An unprecedented disorder struck the vast state like a hurricane. People now talked openly about settling scores and power struggles between political factions. Other voices proclaimed sentences against the very people who seemed best shielded from the storm — the functionaries whose job it was to put the qorrfirman into effect. The “bad-eyes,” as they called them, had managed to infiltrate the qorroffices and even the central commission, and once inside, had exploited their positions to spread havoc.

  “Aha,” you could hear people muttering, “so that’s why we thought, and on occasions even allowed ourselves to remark, that there is something strange about all this! Yes, it’s an incontrovertible fact that only the sovereign is just. If you serve him devotedly, then you get your proper reward; but if you stray into error, if you commit a fault, however brilliant you may have been in your career of service up to that point, you will be punished like anyone else.”

  “You are right. We’re so lucky to have him, may Allah grant him long life! Without him life would be a snakepit. Did you hear what went on yesterday in front of Tabir Sarrail?”

  And that is how, despite all the turmoil and havoc, the most incredible stories managed to circulate. Now and then, like a straw borne on the crest of a wave, you got just a glimpse of that rumor about the grand vizier.

  8

  Everyone in the house must have noticed he’d grown slimmer, but she was the only one to mention it to him.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said, after they’d bolted the bedroom door behind them. “Why? Is it from all the work you have to do?”

  “Yes, I do have lots of work.” After a pause, he repeated, “Lots.”

  “Come, you’re going to forget all about it . . .”

  She had now lost all modesty. She lay on the bed and first put her arms round him, and then her long, slim legs, of a white so pure that they gleamed in the half-light. She let out a faint, steady moan, which only at particular moments rose to a scream close to sobbing.

  Moments later, when they were lying in peace, he cast his eye on the bluish marks on her naked thigh, where they looked like official seals. She expected him to make some comment about them, but to her great surprise the question he asked was of an entirely different nature.

  “Have you ever approached the Köprülüs to ask them for help?”

  She shook her shoulders in a gesture of surprise. “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason ... I just noticed that in your household you hardly ever talk about them.”

  “That’s true. They really are cousins of ours, but only very distant ones. And anyway, my father, with his funny character . . .”

  “I see,” he said, not taking his eyes off the bruises.

  She ran her fingers over his chest.

  “You seem worried,” she said in a caressing tone.

  He averted his eyes.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “Does your work weigh on your mind?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. I have no reason . . . On the contrary.”

  “What do you mean by ‘on the contrary’?”

  “Stop asking me such irritating questions!”

  “If that’s how you feel!” she exclaimed, clearly annoyed. She tried to turn her back to him, but he held on to the sheet she was attempting to pull over her belly. A special, almost abnormal light in her fiancé’s eye dissipated the squabble almost instantly, and she began to look at his face with great attention. His eyes were fixed on her crotch as if this was the first time he had seen it.

  “In three weeks’ time we’ll be married, and we’ll be able stay like this for hours on end.”

  “Yes . . . Maybe I’ll be given the leave I’m due at that time.”

  “Really? That would be wonderful. . . We’ll get up late, and stay awake half the night . . . It’ll be splendid to do it again when we’re half asleep, in the middle of the night, in the dark.”

  He shuddered as if he’d just awakened from a daydream. “In the middle of the night, in the dark?” he almost shouted.

  “Shh! Keep your voice down. What’s come over you?”

  “In the middle of the night, in the dark . . .” he said again, his voice now fading.

  Slowly, she stroked his neck and his forehead. “Something is tormenting you,” she whispered as if she were talking to someone asleep. “But don’t worry. Basically, all you are doing is applying the law. Leave the remorse to the people who sowed this whirlwind ... Do you hear what I’m saying? They’re the ones who should have pangs of conscience . . . Now come here and do it again, my darling.”

  9

  Eventually they heard that the grand vizier had been fired. Gossips first said he’d been relieved of the top job to take up a less prominent position; then they said he’d simply been asked to resign; finally, “asked to” was replaced by “told to.” So it wasn’t a demotion or a change of position, or a discharge for slackness in implementing state decrees, among them, in particular, the qorrfirman. No, he was simply being sacked, accompanied by house arrest, on the specific and savage grounds that he was afflicted with the evil eye.

  Now, all the grand vizier’s intimates and colleagues knew full well that their master had a slightly menacing cast. What surprised people was that the Sultan, whose eagle eye missed nothing, hadn’t noticed long before.

  “That’s not so easy,” others objected. “We all know now that crossed eyes aren’t always evil, as long as they’re not combined with other specific features.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” people retorted, “those are things you can interpret any way you like.”

  Straight after the grand vizier’s fall, the original rumor arose with new vigor: “Didn’t we tell you that the ultimate purpose of th
e whole massacre was simply to liquidate the grand vizier?”

  “Well, if that’s true,” came the response, “then tell us why, now that the purpose has been met, the campaign hasn’t been brought to an end?”

  “For the very reason of camouflaging why it was organized in the first place. Anyway, just as the terror machine takes some time to start up and to get into top gear, so it takes time for the brakes to bring it to a stop.”

  And just as it takes time for the dust to settle after a landslide, so it took quite a while for this shock and all the disturbance it caused to come to a final conclusion. A wave of purges, which everyone suspected would be the last, swept over the state. People had only one thing on their minds: keep clear of this rolling wave, for though it was most likely the last, it seemed well set to be the most murderous.

  10

  They were lying down together. She was entirely naked and he was half-undressed. He’d told her the truth only a few moments before. She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t sobbed, almost as if she’d been expecting the confession. She listened to what he had to say with her face as white as a sheet. Only when she nestled up to him did he feel her wet tears on his own cheek. That’s probably the way the acid will trickle down over my cheekbones, he thought, after it has burned out my eyes. If his request to be blinded by the medieval European method (that is to say, by darkness) was rejected (he hadn’t dared ask for the Romano-Carthaginian technique), then he would probably be let off with the acid. There is worse, an office colleague had remonstrated. Just think of the Byzantine, not to mention the Tibetan, which is the most awful by far.

  “So when you told me you were going to ask for leave for after our wedding, you already knew?” she asked.

  “Yes. That was the day they told me I was being removed from office.”