Agamemnon's Daughter Page 9

  Apart from those who were already blind, nobody could be quite sure he was exempt from the order. As everyone soon realized, that was the source of the qorrfirrnan’s mortal power.

  Although some people told themselves they could keep the evil at bay by putting on a happy face and joking about the matter at every opportunity, others began to withdraw quietly from public life in the hope they would be forgotten. They shut themselves up at home, often staying in bed with their heads under the blanket, as they made mental lists of their personal enemies, or of all the people who envied them their jobs in the civil service and who might take advantage of the situation to make some critical remark about them. Among the latter, some tried to get ahead of the game by denouncing their enemies first, hoping that even if they didn’t manage to destroy them in time, they would at least undermine the force of denunciations yet to come.

  Meanwhile, as rumors and gossip about the new order reached their peak, steps were no doubt already being taken, admittedly behind a veil of secrecy: the first denunciations must have been made, and the first lists of suspects based on those denunciations must have been in the process of being compiled. A central commission had now been set up and entrusted with the task of directing the campaign. It was provided with myriad branches in every province of the empire. Shortly thereafter, strange new locales sprang up under a name even more bizarre, composed of the Ottoman term qorr prefixed to a word borrowed for God knows what reason from the cursed language of the giaours: the new bureaus were called qorroffices.

  People gathered in knots in front of the freshly painted signboards and even though the word qorroffice was most often glossed underneath as “Blinding Bureau” in smaller lettering and in parentheses, passersby almost always asked: What are these offices? And what are they for?

  What were they for? That was only too obvious! Are you living on the moon? Didn’t you hear about the latest order handed down by our great sultan, may Allah grant him long life . . .

  Even so, the precise function of the qorroffices was not made clear right away. Some thought their only function would be to collect denunciations and to pass them on to higher authority; but others — who grasped the fact as soon as they saw deliveries of high-sided cots equipped with straps on their side bars, reminiscent of the gurneys used in hospital operating theaters — easily guessed that the qorroffices would be the very places where eyes would be put out. But in due course, especially at the height of the campaign, the nature of the qorroffices and their true purpose were made entirely plain. Apart from the fact that the offices collected the denunciations, which every subject of the empire could deliver by hand (even though the address of the central commission was widely publicized), these locales were all equipped with an official iron blinding bed, called the qorryatak. However, this piece of equipment was mostly symbolic. In practice the act of blinding was most often carried out elsewhere, except when it turned out to offer an opportunity to teach this or that area or neighborhood or street a much-needed lesson.

  As could be verified over the following weeks, the qorroffices were used less for collecting denunciations or for putting out eyes than for something quite different, throughout the entire campaign. Contrary to initial impressions, these locales, though as sinister and desolate as their name implied, became noisy and excitable gathering-places. People went there to find out how the campaign was proceeding, to get information on various details of the order or on the latest instructions from the central commission, to swap news about so-and-so who, after much shilly-shallying, had finally decided to turn himself in to have his eyes put out while singing the sovereign’s praises, and so on.

  Some people actually enjoyed spending part of their time in the qorroffices. They even brought along the cup of coffee they’d picked up from the corner cafe to drink it there; others, mostly youngsters, played messenger, taking away letters and coming back with envelopes or instruction sheets issued by God knows who; and there were even some who indulged themselves in speechifying, describing in sonorous tones and with a strange light in their eyes all the benefits that would flow from the qorrfirman, as a result of which the world, finally cleansed of the evil eye and saved from the dreadful effect of its evil power, would be a finer, more splendid place.

  The almost festive atmosphere in the qorroffices was occasionally interrupted by the sudden entrance of a group of panting, cursing men dragging a carrier of the evil eye who had been caught in the act, or some other poor fellow convicted of having slighted the royal order.

  However, despite the fact that the qorrofftces had lost their sinister appearance and become more like public places, everyone agreed that it would not be at all easy to implement the Blinding Order. The central commission had issued a directive listing five acceptable ways of putting out eyes: the Byzantino-Venetian method (an iron bar forking into two sharpened tips); the Tibetan method (which involved piling heavy stones on the convict’s chest until his eyes popped out of their sockets); the local method (using acid); the Romano-Carthaginian method (sudden exposure to a bright light); and the European method (protracted incarceration in total darkness).

  The same directive also stipulated that people who turned themselves in, as well as some others who for various reasons were judged by the commission to deserve the privilege, would not only receive the regular monetary compensation but would have the right to choose the method of their own blinding.

  It was easy to guess the two methods that would be chosen most often, and, moreover, be considered a signal favor by their victims, as being the Romano-Carthaginian and the European. Apart from the fact they were painless, both methods left the victim’s eyes untouched, resulting in no empty sockets or mutilation of the face.

  The only difference between them was the length of the procedure. Whereas only two or three minutes of forced exposure to the sun was needed to blind the victim in the first case, in the second it required as much as three months of blindfolding for the sudden withdrawal of the wrap to provoke instant and total blindness.

  The Romano-Carthaginian method, quite apart from the fact that it did not involve any psychological torture (long months spent in total darkness with depressing memories weighing down on you, and so forth), was carried out in conditions of blistering cleanliness, since it was based on the action of sunlight. As a result it rapidly became the preferred method among volunteers, as among other suspects, often from the higher social classes, who had no special protection from the qorrfirmaris wrath.

  As for the other techniques based on force, compounding physical pain with mutilation and the lack of financial compensation, it was hard to say which was the most repulsive. The difficulty of choosing among them was, as people later explained, the reason for the hesitation often observed among victims, who dallied until, in the end, they asked their executioners to choose, begging them to bring their suffering to an end as quickly as they could.

  With the promulgation of the instructions on the five different blinding techniques came other emergency measures that clearly indicated full implementation of the Blinding Order was imminent. The Medical High School launched an accelerated training program in ophthalmectomy, several iron yards in the capital completed their first batches of forked iron bars for the Byzantino-Venetian style of blinding, and other workshops began the manufacture of acid, which was stored in small and sturdy kegs intended to make sure it would survive lengthy transportation to the remotest provinces of the Empire. But nothing special was needed for the Tibetan method. Large stones could be found anyplace, and no particular preparation was called for.

  3

  Marie concentrated on finishing the domestic chores she shared with her sister-in-law, then, saying she had a migraine, went up to her room. Her sister-in-law scowled. They were both very young (there was barely a year between them), and they were in the habit of sitting down to gossip after the housework was done each day, until Marie’s mother came to put a stop to their girlish chatter. “She worries that I might
be telling you the secrets of my married life!” Marie’s sister-in-law used to say with a muffled giggle. Marie, for her part, bit her lip.

  She had heard a few of the secrets, actually, especially the day before her engagement was made official, and then more in the course of the following few weeks. Her eyes blazed with curiosity as she drank in her sister-in-law’s sparse words, constrained by modesty and good manners to a mere trickle — whereas she thirsted for a raging torrent, as if she were lost in a desert.

  But just recently, to the great surprise of her sister-in-law, who was inclined to be more open about things as Marie’s wedding day drew near, the young woman had stopped asking about intimate matters.

  The sister-in-law shrugged. What could you expect from a family of lunatics whose different members followed different religions?

  She had been genuinely surprised when she found out that the family of her future husband, like many households of Albanian descent, had maintained over the generations the custom of including within its bosom members of different, that is to say opposite, faiths. Her father-in-law, Aleks Ura, was a Christian, but one of his sons, who had gone into the navy, had been brought up a Muslim; whereas the other, her future husband, remained a Christian. Maybe the father would have done the same with daughters had he had two of them, but since Marie was the only one, he had tried, in a sense, to split her in two. As he could not raise her in two different faiths at the same time (though such cases were not unheard of), he had given her two first names, each from a different religion. So for her first family and close friends, her name was Marie; for the rest of the world, including her fiancé, it was Miriam.

  Her future husband had tried to explain to her the reasons for such duplication, which had to do with the fate and history of their far-off homeland, Albania, but she did not really get much out of his knotty explanations. All that was plain in her eyes was that the brothers of Aleks had followed two different faiths, and that their forebears and ancestors had always done the same.

  In the course of the several weeks during which preliminary discussions relating to her engagement were held, she had been astonished at her own family’s determination to become allied to this strange tribe, but it was not long before she learned the truth. The house she was going to join was related — distantly, it is true, but related nonetheless — to the famous Köprülü clan. To the degree that its name, Ura, was none other than the former and original patronymic of the Quprilis — translated, for reasons of state, from Albanian into the Ottoman Köprülü.

  In fact, since her marriage she had not seen so much as a twig of the famous family tree, except for a nephew, a pasty-faced boy of ten or twelve, who had come to visit with his mother about a year ago. The boy was named Mark-Alem. He didn’t say much, and when her father-in-law Aleks, who was eager to try to explain the origin of the family’s name to the boy, had drawn a sketch of a three-arched bridge for him — a bridge located somewhere in central Albania where some kind of sacrifice had occurred in the dim and distant past — the lad just shook his head obstinately, and muttered: “I don’t want to hear those gruesome tales.”

  A madhouse! the young woman thought once more, as her eyes wandered toward the staircase Marie had taken on the way up to her room. What in heaven’s name could she be doing up there on her own for hours on end?

  She was not accustomed to spying on others, but after a brief inner struggle curiosity overcame her scruples, and she tiptoed silently to the top of the stairs. Once on the landing, she took a deep breath, looked around to make sure no one else was nearby, then crouched down and looked through the keyhole of Maria’s bedroom door.

  What she managed to glimpse left her dumbfounded. Marie was standing stark naked in front of the dressing mirror, putting on and taking off a pair of lace-edged silk panties.

  Already? How can that be? the young married woman wondered, unable to take her eyes off Marie as she shifted her marble-white body from one slinky pose to another. For a second her crotch displayed its troubling black triangle before the silk swallowed it afresh.

  No, she thought, as her mouth went dry, heaven only knows why. A woman cannot make movements of that kind unless she has experienced love. But was it conceivable that such was already the case?

  Apparently the young wife must have made the floorboards creak because Marie swung round suddenly and put a hand over her breasts. But she soon relaxed, probably because she saw that the door was bolted on the inside.

  Her sister-in-law slowly withdrew and with muffled steps went back down the stairs as silently as she had gone up. They must have already slept together, she thought. That was also the only way of accounting for the lack of curiosity Marie had been showing recently.

  She could not get that unbearably smooth white body out of her mind. The curvaceous hips that swayed at the slightest movement troubled her, and she thought to herself once again: Yes, yes, that must be it. There’s no other explanation.

  4

  She was right. Two weeks earlier, something had happened quite suddenly between Marie and her fiancé which, to her mind, should not have occurred until their wedding night.

  It was true that the family, like many others who had come down from the Balkan Peninsula, was relatively easy-going, at least in comparison to Muslim families in the capital But however relaxed their behavior and however eccentric the paterfamilias, no one within that family would have dreamed that Maria had spent time alone in a bedroom with her fiancé. And they could simply not have imagined she might have prematurely lost her virginity.

  The day it happened had been no ordinary day, however. The new edict plunged everyone in the house into something like an inner maelstrom. From the nearby square came the roll of drums, then the voice of the town crier, declaiming the text of the qorrfirman. Marie had been unable to take her eyes off her father’s face. It had turned quite livid.

  She quietly went up to him and, as was her habit, placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, asking him sweetly: “What’s worrying you so, Father dear? There isn’t anything like that in our family, is there?”

  Aleks shook his shoulders as if to cast off a cloak of weariness.

  “No, of course not. . . Of course there isn’t, my child.”

  She looked at her father with a quizzical expression, which repeated the same question in silence. He pretended not to notice, though it’s possible that in the kind of trance he had fallen into he really didn’t register his daughter’s glance.

  “And besides, the Köprülüs are distant cousins of ours, aren’t they?”

  “What?” the father almost shouted. “Cousins of the Köprülüs? Yes, sure we are, but in these kinds of circumstances that is of no use whatsoever.”

  Gradually his eyes narrowed, grew smaller, and at the same time his voice fell almost to a whisper. “In these kinds of circumstances it’s better to have no cousins at all!”

  At that moment there was a knock at the door. In came Xheladin, Marie’s fiancé. His demeanor, unlike everyone else’s, was so placid that Aleks glanced at him sternly as if to say, “Are you living on the moon? Haven’t you heard about the qorrfirman yet?”

  Very soon, even before the table had been set, they were all to learn the reason for Xheladin’s serenity, or rather, his contained satisfaction. (He wasn’t in a state of elation, of course, but set against their own quaking fear his quiet ease made him appear almost joyous.) Very soon they all heard what lay behind the future son-in-law’s state of mind. Not only was he apprised of the decree, he knew rather more about it than any of them, for the simple reason that he had been summoned by his bosses two days before, and had been told he had been appointed a member of the central commission entrusted with the implementation of the qorrfirman.

  Xheladin’s words precipitated a sudden change in the domestic atmosphere. There was a sense of relief, accompanied by admiration for a son-in-law who had been given such a demanding job. But that wasn’t the main thing. The overriding emotion came from think
ing — even if only vaguely for the time being — that as they now had their own man inside the citadel, at the heart of the machine, in the very lair of evil, then said evil would automatically be directed elsewhere.

  Outright admiration could be read not only in the eyes of Marie but in those of her mother, her sister-in-law, and even her brother, who up till then had stayed aloof, heaven knows why, from his sister’s fiancé.

  Glad to have brought about a new mood, Xheladin relaxed and warmed up. An irresistible wave of good humor swept over the dinner table. The distant roll of the crier’s drum now seemed to come from another planet.

  Aleks’s face was the only one that clouded over from time to time, as if darkened by a passing shadow. He stared at Xheladin as if he were trying to make out what was going on in the depths of his being, under his skin, down in the marrow of his bones. And it was just when he had given him a stare of that kind that he put his hand on the younger man’s arm and said: “I hope that when you’re there you’ll manage to keep clean . . .”

  “What was that?” Xheladin said, imperceptibly drawing his hand away. “What did you mean to say?”

  His face had suddenly turned icy and alert.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Aleks said with a smile, patting the young man on the shoulder. “Nothing, my boy. Maybe well talk about it again some other time.”

  Aleks was visibly sorry to have said what he had said, and for the remainder of the meal you could see he was trying to make up for his blunder. Merriness returned, and maybe it was precisely because people were not paying attention amid the good cheer that Marie and her fiancé, instead of going out on the verandah, where they were granted the right of whispering sweet nothings in private, quietly went up the stairs leading to the girl’s bedroom.