Agamemnon's Daughter Read online

  “Every cloud has a silver lining . . . I think you must have a similar saying in your language too,” the Austrian consul eventually said to his colleague from France.

  “Yes, of course,” the Frenchman replied.

  “In spite of its ghastly and untranslatable name, and even in spite of the notorious horror it has caused, the Blinding Order has contributed to a new flowering of oral poetry, which, as I myself noticed, has been in sharp decline in this country in recent years.”

  “Do you really think so?” the Frenchman replied, looking at his colleague in astonishment. Then he recalled that his colleague had once told him he was engaged in research on oral poetry, which made his remark seemed less cynical than bizarre.

  “Just look at this crowd, if you want to see the evidence,” the Austrian added.

  “I guess so,” the French consul muttered, as he gazed into the Great Hall where the cacophony of the blind was rising to its peak.

  Tirana, 1984

  Footnote

  * Christians.

  * Eye trouble.

  The Great Wall

  Inspector Shung

  Barbarians always go back over in the end. My deputy sighed as he spoke those words. I guess he was staring into the far distance, where their horses could just be seen.

  For my part, I was reflecting on the fact that nowhere in the vast expanse of China, not in its small towns, nor its large cities, nor in the capital — although people there do know more than provincials — nowhere can you find a single soul who fails to comment, when nomads go over the Wall (even nomads that go over as part of an official delegation), Barbarians always go back over in the end, while releasing a sigh of the sort usually given in response to events you imagine you’ll eventually look back on with fond sadness.

  It’s been as quiet as the grave around here for decades. That does not stop our imperial subjects from imagining an unending brutal conflict, with the Wall on one side and the northern nomads on the other, both forever hurling spears and hot pitch at each other and tearing out eyes, masonry, and hair.

  But that no longer surprises me very much, when you think that people don’t just bedeck the Wall with false laurels of valor, but envision all the rest of it — its structure, even its height — quite differently from the way it really is. They can’t bring themselves to see that though there are places where the Wall is quite high — indeed, sometimes so high that if you look down from the top, as we could do right now from where we’re standing, you become quite dizzy — along most of its length the Wall’s dismal state of repair is a pity to behold. Because it has been so long abandoned, because its stones have been filched by local people, the Wall has shrunk: it barely tops a horse and rider now, and in one sector it’s a wall only in name, just lumps of masonry scattered around like the remains of a project that got dropped for God knows what reason. It’s in this kind of shape, like a snake you can hardly make out as it slithers through the mud, that the Wall reaches the edge of the Gobi Desert — which promptly swallows it up.

  My deputy’s eyes were blank, like the eyes of someone required to stare into the far distance.

  “We’re now awaiting an order,” I said, before he could ask me first what we ought to do next. It was obvious that the result of the negotiations with the official delegation of nomads would determine what that order would be — if any decision of the kind were ever made at all

  We waited for the order all summer long, then until the end of the summer-house season, when the emperor and his ministers were supposed to be back in the capital The fall winds came, then the snow-flecked drizzle of winter, but still no decision reached us.

  As always happens in cases of this kind, the order, or rather its reverberation, arrived just when everybody had stopped thinking about it. I call it a reverberation because long before the imperial mail reached us we learned of the government’s decision from the people living in the villages and camps strung out along the line of fortifications. They deserted their homes and resettled in the caves in the nearby hills, as they did every time news reached them, by means entirely mysterious, even before we were informed of impending repair work on the Great Wall.

  It was probably a wise move on their part, since by making off to the hills, they would spare themselves the officials’ whip, at the very least, not to mention many other punishments of every kind. I’d never understood why they constantly take masonry from the Wall to build their hovels and yards, knowing full well that they would have to bring it back to rebuild the Wall.

  The process, they tell me, has been going on for hundreds of years. Like the skein of wool used to make a scarf — which is then unpicked to knit a sweater, which is then undone to knit another scarf, and so on — the Wall’s great stones have made the return trip many times from peasant hovel to Wall and back again. In some places, you can still see streaks of soot, which predictably fire the fantasies of tourists and foreign plenipotentiaries, who can’t imagine that the marks are not the trace of some heroic clash but only smoke stains from hearths where, for many a long year, some nameless yokel cooked his thin and tasteless gruel.

  So when we heard this afternoon that the peasants had abandoned their dwellings, we guessed that the whole of China had already heard news of the call to rebuild the Wall.

  Although it was a symptom of heightened tension, the repair work did not yet add up to war. Unlike armed conflict, rebuilding was such a frequent occurrence that the Great Wall’s middle name could have easily been: Rebuilt. Generally speaking, it was less a wall in any proper sense than an infinite succession of patches. People went so far as to pretend that it was in just such a manner the Wall had come into being in the first place — as a repair job on an older wall, which was itself the remaking of another, even older, wall, and so on. The suggestion was even made that at the very beginning the original wall stood at the center of the state; but from one repair to another, it had gradually moved ever closer to the border, where, like a tree that’s finally been replanted in the right soil, it grew to such a monstrous size it terrified the rest of the world. Even people who could not imagine the Wall without the nomads sometimes wondered whether it was their presence that had led to the building of the Wall, or whether it was the Wall rising up all along the border that had conjured up the nomads.

  If we had not seen the coming of the Barbarian delegation with our own eyes, and then seen it going again, we might have been among the few who would have attributed this rise in tension (like most previous events of this kind) to the disagreements that frequently flare up inside the country, even at the very center of the state. Smugly content to know a truth lost in an ocean of lies, we would have spent long evenings constructing all kinds of hypotheses about what would happen next and about the plots that could have been hatched in the palace, plots with such secret and intricate workings that even their instigators would have had a hard time explaining them, or emanating from jealousies so powerful that people said they could shatter ladies’ mirrors at dusk, and so on and so forth.

  But it had all happened under our noses: the nomads had come and gone beneath our very feet. We could still recall the polychrome borders of their tunics and the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves — not forgetting the expression “Barbarians always go back over in the end” uttered by my deputy, along with his sighs and his blank stare.

  In any other circumstance we could have felt, or at least feigned, a degree of doubt, but this time we realized there were no grounds for such an attitude. However tiresome winter evenings may be, we could find better ways of filling them than fabricating alternative reasons for the state’s anxiety apart from the coming of the Barbarians.

  A vague feeling of apprehension is coming down to us from the northlands. Right now the issue is not whether this state of heightened tension derives from the existence of a real external threat. From now on, and this is more than obvious, the only real question is whether there really will be war.

  The first stonemasons
have arrived, but most of them are still on the road. Some people claim forty thousand of them are on their way; others give an even higher figure. This is definitely going to be the most important restoration of the last few centuries.

  The call of the wild goose awakes the immensity of the void. Yesterday, as I was looking out over the wastes to the north, this line from a poet whose name I forget came back to me. For some time now, fear of the void has been by far the greatest form of apprehension I feel. They say the nomads now have a single leader, a successor to Genghis Khan, and that amid the swirling confusion and dust that is the Barbarians’ lot, he is trying to set up a state. For the time being we have no details about the leader except that he is lame. All that has reached us here, even before the man’s name, is his limp.

  These last few days, nomads have been emerging from the mist like flocks of jackdaws and then vanishing again. It’s clear that they’re keeping an eye on the repair work. I am convinced that the Wall, without which we could not imagine how to survive, is for them an impossible concept, and that it must disturb them as deeply as the northern emptiness troubles us.

  Nomad Kutluk

  I’ve been told to gallop and gallop and never stop watching over it, but it’s endless and always the same, stone on stone, stone under stone, stone to the left, stone to the right, all bound in mortar, however much I gallop, the stones never change, always the same, just like that damn snow that was always the same when we chased Toktamish across Siberia at the end of the Year of the Dog, when Timur, our Khan kuturdi-lar, told us: “Hold on in there, men, because it’s only snow, it’s only pretending to be cold like a conceited bitch, but just you wait, it’ll turn soft and wet before long.” But this army of stones is much more harmful, it won’t flake or melt, and it’s in my way, I don’t understand why the Khan doesn’t give us the order to attack that pile of rubble and take it down, the way we did at Chubukabad when we laid our hands on the Sultan Bayazed Yaldrem and the Khan sent us this yarlik: “Honor to you who have captured Thunder, no matter that you have not yet handcuffed the heavens entire, but that will come”; then, like at Akshehir during the Year of the Tiger when we buried our prisoners alive, all bent double as in their mothers’ wombs, the Khan kuturdilar told us: “If they’re innocent, as Qatshi the Magician believes, then Mother Earth, whose womb is more generous that that of a woman, will give them a second birth.” Oh! those were the good times, but our Khan hasn’t sent any more yarliks asking us to raze everything to the ground, and the chiefs, when they assemble to hold a palaver in the kurultai, claim that what people call towns are only coffins we must be careful never to enter, because once you’re in you can never get out, that’s what they say, but still the yarlik of destruction keeps on failing to come, all I get is that never-ending order over and over again just like the accursed stones: “Nomad, keep watch!”

  Inspector Shung

  Repair work is apparently proceeding along the entire northwestern stretch of the Wall. Every week parties of stonemasons arrive, gaily flaunting the many-colored flags and banners from their province (the regions of the Empire compete with each other to send the largest work detail to the Wall), but nowhere can any troop movements be seen. Nomad lookouts flit across the horizon as before, but because the fog has thickened in the winter season, we often cannot make them out very clearly, neither the rider nor the horse, so that they look less like horsemen than mutilated body parts from who-knows-which battlefield whipped by wild gusts of wind into a flying swarm.

  What is happening is like a puzzle. At first sight, you might think it a mere maneuver, each camp trying to show its strength by displaying contempt for the other. But if you consider matters with a clear mind, you can see they contain perfectly illogical elements. I do believe it is the first time there has ever been such a gap between the Wall and the capital. I had always imagined they were indissolubly connected, and that was not only when I was working in the capital, but even before then, when I was a mere minor official in the remotest valleys of Tibet. I always knew they had tugged on each other the way they say the moon does on the tide. What I learned when I came here was that while the Wall is able to move the capital — in other words, it can draw it toward itself or else push it farther away — the capital has no power to shift the Wall. At most, it can try to move away, like a fly trying to avoid the spider’s web, or else come right up close so as to nestle in its bosom, like a person quaking with fear; but that’s all it can do.

  In my view, the Wall’s forces of attraction and repulsion are what explain the movements of the capital of China over the last two centuries — its shift to the south of the country, when it went to Nanking, as far away from the Wall as possible, and then its return to the north, to the closest possible location, when it came back to Beijing, which for the third time assumed its role as China’s capital city.

  I have been racking my brains these last few days trying to find a more accurate explanation for what is going on at the moment. Sometimes I think the wobble, if I can use that word, results directly from the proximity of the capital Orders can be countermanded more easily than if the capital were, say, four or five months away —when the second carriage bearing news of the cancellation of the order either fails to catch up with the first carriage or, because of excessive speed or its driver’s anxiety, the carriage tips over, or else the first one crashes, or they both do, and so on.

  Yesterday evening, as we were chatting away (it was one of those exquisitely relaxed conversations that often arise after time spent hidden from the view of others and thus seem all the more precious), my deputy declared that if not only the capital but China herself were to move, the Wall would not budge an inch. “And what’s more,” he added casually, “there is proof of what I say.” Indeed, we could both easily recall that in the one thousand or so years that have elapsed since the Wall was built, China has more than once spilled out over its borders, leaving the Wall all alone and without meaning in the midst of the gray steppe, and it has shrunk back inside the same number of times.

  I remembered an aunt who in childhood had had a bracelet put on her arm, a bangle. As she grew plumper, the bracelet, forgotten but left in place, became almost buried in her flesh. It seemed to me that something of the same kind had happened to China. The Wall had alternately squeezed her tight, and loosened its grip. For some years now, it had seemed about right for her size. As for the future, who could say? Each time I saw my aunt, I recalled the story of her bangle, which continued to obsess me. I really don’t know why I could not stop thinking of what would have happened if the bangle had not been taken off in time, and, taking things to their limit, I could hear it jangling incessantly after her death, hanging all too loosely on the wrist of her skeleton . . . I lay my head in my hands, embarrassed at having imagined China herself decomposing with a trivial adornment around her wrist.

  It was a starless night, but the moonlight gave off such a strong sense of indolence that you could believe that in the morning everyone would abandon all activity — that nomads, birds, and even states would lie flat out, exhausted, as lifeless as corpses laid out beside each other, as we two then were.

  We have at last learned the name of the nomad chief: he is called Timur i Leng, which means Timur the Lame. He is said to have waged a fearsome war against the Ottomans, and after having captured their king — called Thunder — had him paraded from one end of the vast steppes to the other.

  Apparently, before long he’ll be going after us next. Now it is all becoming clearer — the order for the rebuilding of the Wall, as well as the temporary calm which we all hastened to describe as a “puzzle,” as we do for anything we can’t understand in the workings of the state. While he was dealing with the Turks, the one-legged terror did not constitute a threat. But now . . .

  A returning messenger who stopped here last night brought us disturbing news. In the western marches of our Empire, right opposite our Wall and barely a thousand feet from it, the Barbarians had built a kind o
f tower, made not from stone but from severed heads. The edifice as it was described to us was not tall — about as high as two men — and from a military point of view it was no threat at all to the Wall, but the terror those heads exude is more effective than a hundred fortresses. Despite the meetings with soldiers and stonemasons, where it was explained that the pile was, in comparison to our Wall, no more significant than a scarecrow (the crows that nonetheless swarmed around it had actually suggested the comparison), everyone, soldiers included, felt the wind of panic pass through them. “I’ve never had so many letters to take to the capital,” the messenger declared as he patted his leather saddlebag. He said most of the epistles had been penned by officers’ wives, writing to their aristocratic lady friends to report intolerable migraines and so forth, which was a way of asking them to please see if they could get their husbands transferred to another posting.

  The messenger also said that the pestilential air that this pile of heads exhaled was so unbearable that for the first time in its existence the Wall had apparently contracted, and the messenger had prayed to God that the rebuilding work which had been launched at such an opportune moment should be completed as quickly as possible.

  The messenger’s tale left us all utterly depressed. Without admitting it to ourselves, we were aware that we would henceforth cast a quite different eye on the Wall’s damaged parts, on its cracks and crumbly patches. Our minds obstinately kept turning toward the pile of severed heads. Once the messenger had left, my deputy pointed out that the wise old saying “Skull on stone breaks nothing but bone” — a phrase whose brushstrokes we mastered at primary school thanks to our teacher’s liberal use of the rod — had become obsolete. The way things looked now, heads seemed more likely than anything else to be the weapon of choice against the Wall.