Agamemnon's Daughter Read online

  11

  The brass band’s beat was now keeping time with the train of my thoughts. For a short while, I’d imagined the band had paused and then started up again even more deafeningly. Actually, there had been no interlude. It was just an impression, perhaps a consequence of taking in the music while lost in my mental reenactment of events at the Broadcasting Service. I must have incorporated the music unconsciously and allowed the furious and sinister flourishes of drums and brass to mark time to the horrors of that past madness.

  The hurricane had sucked up writers, ministers, allegedly right-deviationist ideas, movies, senior civil servants, and plays. Amid the general chaos, the expression “rightist deviation in cultural affairs” often floated to the surface, and in its wake came the even more ominous phrase, “anti-Party group.”

  Compared to what was going on in the capital, the circumstances of the former Head of Broadcasting in the little town of N. — which most of us had first considered utterly degrading — looked idyllic. To be responsible only for house painters, toilet repairers, and swimming pool maintenance workers! That was an oasis of peace compared to areas in the eye of the storm, as Ideology and Art now were. Some people must surely have envied him in secret . . .

  The peace didn’t last long, however. One day a delegate turned up at N. to attend a grassroots Party meeting for the locality that now provided the entire horizon of the former Head of Broadcasting’s political landscape.

  “In the light of recent events, what do you now have to say to the Party?”

  The meeting at which he lost everything he still had — his membership of the Central Committee, his Party card, his job as manager of municipal services, and his official car — was not a long one. Next morning he turned up for work as a municipal laborer wearing an old pair of dungarees and a paper hat of the sort house painters wear to protect their hair from splashes of whitewash, and maybe he thought he had touched bottom then. No one can say what he really felt, however, because from that day on nobody ever spoke to him. He worked alternate weeks as a house painter and as a tile layer in apartment bathrooms, a silent and nameless being under a paint-splotched cap.

  In the end, if somewhat late in the day, peace, or the soggy kind of calm that buckets of whitewash, white ceramic tiles, and especially mute anonymity seem to induce, would probably have come to him. So he must have been truly shaken by the knocking on the door in the wee hours when they came to arrest him one day. He was destined to know the fear of falling one more time, just when he thought he’d got to the bottom of the abyss and was safe from any further descent.

  The question “why?”— the accursed question that had nagged at him ever since he had begun to fall, right down to the day when they put on the handcuffs — was finally about to get an answer.

  But answer there was none. Indeed, during the investigation, as he lay all alone in his prison cell, he found it harder and harder to imagine what it might be. So it went on until the day he was charged and heard the heavy prison sentence pronounced: fifteen years.

  After all that, he must surely have felt relief. The relief was certain now, nothing could threaten it anymore, and it tasted almost like bliss . . . because he could not possibly have known of that dark, deep, and nameless pit in the chrome ore mines. And when in the half-light some unknown hand shoved him into it, he hardly had a moment to think about anything at all. The fall was so brief it left no time for questions, dilemmas, or regrets. Maybe he left this world screaming, but it could only have been by instinct, like the futile attempts we all make to stop ourselves from falling by grasping at the sides of the well. But his desperate arm-flapping, that vague, instinctive reminiscence of bygone ages when birdmen still flew, remained unseen by any human eye. Maybe the very absence of witnesses was what gave his fall its unreal dimension, and made it like an echo of the ancient tale about falling to the netherworld.

  But where could you find eagles to bring you back up? And supposing you did find a bird to carry you, all that would ever be seen of you again would be dry bones.

  12

  The band went on pounding out merry tunes. Squads of miners, whose plastic helmets made them look like dwarves, were now marching past the stands. Maybe they come from the chrome ore mines, I thought. I’d so often tried to wipe that story from my mind, but it kept coming back, like an obsession. I was certainly not the only person to have wondered hundreds, maybe thousands, of times if that notorious letter really had come from Lushnjë, or whether it had been penned somewhere else and then discreetly planted in one of the letter boxes you could find at street corners almost anywhere.

  The purge of the army, which came soon after Culture had been dealt with, began in the same kind of way. It was generally thought that it had started with a tank maneuver carried out directly across from the offices of a neighborhood Party committee. The purification campaign in the industrial sector, on the other hand, was set off by a handful of ore — ore with a suspicious gleam that betrayed an attempt at sabotage. Someone eventually managed to trace the lump of ore, which like the presenter’s dress and the design of the military exercise had led to a procession of coffins, right back to the Central Committee.

  “Stop that!” I ordered myself, again and again. I did not want any more recollections, I wanted only to commune with my sorrow. But the same old thoughts kept buzzing around in my head. The dress, the exercise, the suspicious nugget . . . But what could have been glinting in it, if not a beam from the Beyond?

  What had happened in our meeting room was rehearsed in the most varied walks of life and on a far grander scale, right across the nation. Soldiers who had treated the rout of the artists as a joke and rubbed their hands gleefully as they watched it unfold (Serves those liberal guys right! They’ve had it too good for too long! It’s their turn to take the rap!) shook like reeds when they saw the storm rushing toward them. Later on, people in industry, who’d crowed about the military’s foolish self-assurance, met the same fate. From then on, workers in other sectors kept their sarcastic comments to themselves as they waited anxiously for their turn to come.

  Like successive bouts of the same disease, the now familiar attitudes recurred: people lost their tempers, then collapsed, then tried to justify why they had been lacking in courage, then they submitted and turned their backs on the victims. No smoke without fire! Why else would they have been punished so harshly? It got to the point where you couldn’t find any Valium at the pharmacy (just asking for box of tabs became a suspicious act). Couples split up, people had depressions and mental breakdowns.

  It had all been laid out in as if in a prophetic triptych entitled Still Life with Long Dress, Military Map, and Nugget of Ore. But there was still room on the canvas — for Suzana . . .

  I scanned the sea of shoulders until I found what I was looking for. What sign of the zodiac do you represent, my darling, my dangerous love? I muttered.

  Now, if that had all happened before the great purges, if it had occurred to someone in that longgone age to think that a change in the way the daughter of a senior official dressed might signal a coming political storm, and if, as a result, he’d looked up books on classical mythology to find in them God knows what terrifying analogies, then that someone would have probably been treated as a madman, or else as a hysterical agitator throwing oil on the flames in order to make everyday life more dramatic than it really was.

  But meanwhile the purification campaigns had happened for real Even if they’d faded from memory, those campaigns, like great rivers leaving the trace of their passage wherever they flood, had left various layers of mud in us all So it took just a hint, such as we’d not have noticed in times gone by, to strike fear into our hearts and minds. The merest sign would reawaken a danse macabre of slumbering ghosts, make us superstitiously alert to symbols, keep us forever on the lookout, and bring back in turn suspiciousness, foreboding, and ancient nightmares.

  So it wasn’t so much Graves’s book or that Suzana’s father was a prominen
t figure in the political leadership of the country nor any other such fortuitous similarity that had drawn my mind to construct an analogy with an ancient tragedy. The parallel came simply from the real events of a few years before, which were still clawing at us ferociously Had these events never happened, then Suzana’s declaration that she needed to change her way of life would have be no more than the conventional way in which a well-brought-up young woman displays the necessary moral correctness when an official engagement is planned.

  A ripple and then a wave of whispers ran through the crowd on the stand. What was that? What’s going on? It took a few moments before we heard that somewhere over on stand D or B, diplomats from Eastern bloc countries were taking their leave. The same thing happened every year as soon as the first placard excoriating the Warsaw Pact appeared. A few minutes later a beanstalk of a boy appeared holding up a placard declaring “The Theory of the Three Worlds Is a Reactionary Theory!” Now it was the turn of the Chinese delegation to make itself scarce.

  Muted laughter swept across the stands.

  Meanwhile, as the placards that had prompted the departure of the Eastern bloc representatives came level with our stand, my eyes were riveted in stupefaction on the other watchwords: Live as in a State of Siege! Discipline, Military Preparedness, and Productive Labor!

  From the corner of my eye I was watching the guests standing around me. Which one of them would have to leave the stand next? For it had surely already been worked out on which day, at which hour, each one of them would be ejected from the cohort of celebrants . . .

  I turned toward stand D to try to catch a last glimpse of Th. D., as I reasoned that was where he must be. Had his hour now come? Or had it already passed without him noticing?

  And what about you? I asked myself. You’re playing at guessing when others might fall, but do you know how much time you have left?

  A gleam from the comb in Suzana’s hairdo drew my thoughts toward her once more. No, it definitely could not have been just a wish to maintain her image, or a passing bout of modesty in the run-up to the engagement, or a piece of advice that the Supreme Guide might have dropped in her father’s ear. A little more discretion would be advisable, if only for a while. There’s been too much gossip of late about what our youngsters are up to. No, I could see more clearly than a Cassandra the coffins and the executioner’s bloody ax hovering over the altar.

  Stalin’s portrait was making its way toward us now, swaying gently in time to the synchronized march of the placard bearers. Those eyes with their creases standing in for a silent smile filled the horizon. What about your son Yakov? Why did you sacrifice him . . . ?

  I could not take my eyes off the huge painted banner bulging in the breeze. Your son Yakov, I kept on muttering, may he rest in peace . . .

  I was surprised by the resurgence of that obsolete expression, for it had been completely expunged from the language taught to people of my generation. Dozens of similarly gentle and compassionate set phrases that reminded you of the precariousness of the human condition had likewise been erased from daily life. Just like belfries, prayers, and candles; and alongside them, pity and repentance . . . Lord, they have eradicated everything so completely — so that nothing should be left standing to bar the way of crime!

  Why, why did you make an offering of your son Yakov? May he rest in peace . . . Every day your field marshals tried to make you reverse the decision. There was nothing unusual about swapping prisoners of war. It would be even more straightforward in the case of your son. For one thing, it would be good for your own peace of mind. In the current circumstances, the fate of us all hangs on that. But you dug in your heels. No, and no again! What was in your mind, O Spinx, when you said that?

  Suzana’s father’s portrait was in something like tenth position, not far from Stalin’s. You’ll never understand the reason for the change in Suzana, he seemed to be saying to me. You may be able to get inside her vagina, even inside her heart, but you’ll never know what she herself is unaware of.

  The serried ranks of the procession stretched out into the far distance. The only thing missing was a portrait of Agamemnon. Of Comrade Agamemnon MacAtreus, member of the Politburo, grand master of all sacrifices after him. As the founder and classic example of his kind, he presumably knew better than anyone else how the springs and levers of this affair had been set.

  13

  The parade seemed to be about to come to a close. As tradition required, the tail of the procession was made up of representatives of our cultural institutions: the opera, the national ballet, the Kinestudio, and Tirana University. I hid my face as best I could when my colleagues from Broadcasting Services came level with the stand. Then behind them came the technical controllers, the makeup people, and the evening news presenters in long dresses, like vestal virgins . . .

  It was all over in just a few minutes. As the last squads of activists yelled their last chorus of applause and moved off briskly toward Skanderbeg Square, the stands emptied faster than you would have thought possible. Invited guests climbed down from their seats with a slightly flummoxed look on their faces, as if they were coming away from a dinner party for which they’d had excessive expectations, or from a trial, or from a sexual encounter. I glimpsed Suzana a couple of times but then lost sight of her again.

  Little by little I ended up back on the Grand Boulevard, in a slow-moving crowd, under a sun that now felt scorching. Cardboard wreaths and silk flowers were scattered over the pavement. Burst and trampled balloons lay in the dust. The giant effigies, which no one was now bothering to hold up straight, were leaning against walls and fences, staring at a slant, and sometimes upside down. There was a palpable sense of sweaty fatigue, of winding down, letting go.

  Two thousand eight hundred years before, Greek soldiers had probably left the scene of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in a similar state. Their faces had blanched at the sight of blood on the altar, and in their hearts they felt a gaping hole they didn’t think would ever leave them. They said not a word, and in any case they had hardly anything to say, except for the same few thoughts that kept on going around in their heads. Private Teukr, for instance, who up to then had planned on deserting at the first opportunity, now felt as if that idea belonged to a vanished epoch. Idomene, his comrade in arms, who’d been determined to answer back if his commander should dare speak to him roughly, now found that idea quite foreign as well. Same thing for Astyanax, who’d been planning on sneaking off to see his fiancée, an idea that up to then had seemed easier and easier as his longing for her grew greater. Anything light or happy or likely to lessen the tension of war — joking, slacking off, going wild with loose women — was now dangerously close to being extinguished for good. If the supreme leader Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, that meant that there would be no pity for anyone else either. The ax’s blade was already smeared with blood . . .

  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.