Agamemnon's Daughter (16 page)

The marks on Marie’s white legs also gradually disappeared. She thought that was probably how her own image would fade in her fiancé’s mind.

God knew what he was doing, with his hands and feet tied in some dark dungeon. They tied them up like that, so people said, as they did with men condemned to death, to stop them tearing off their blindfolds.

One of their acquaintances had spoken to them about what it was like to live in a dungeon. Prisoners spent daylight hours half-reclining, lying side by side in long rows. Some prayed nonstop, others wept, some silently, some sobbing out loud. Some talked to themselves for hours on end. Others revolted, yelled out like men possessed, swore at the accursed decree, and ended up calming down and asking for forgiveness, beseeching mercy, and begging Allah to grant long life to the emperor. And then there were those who went into a religious trance and looked forward to the day of their blinding so they would be freed, in their own words, from the sight of this sublunar world.

Some became delirious, and in a kind of ecstasy made speeches lasting hours on end. The world, they would say, looked more beautiful now that they could no longer see it, and far from suffering from the dark, they could feel their heads fill to the brim with light. They claimed they at last understood that eyes do not allow light to enter human minds, but on the contrary, like faucets installed back-to-front, let inner light leak out and thus impoverished the mind.

That’s what one kind of prisoner said, but most of them remained silent, as if they had been struck dumb. Now and then, they would wave their bound arms about incomprehensibly, as if they were clearing a cobweb away from in front of their blindfolded eyes.

God alone knew what Xheladin was doing! Had he kept her image intact in his memory? Or had that shape already begun to grow faint?

Marie instinctively put her hand to her cheek and her lips, as if the decomposition of her image could affect her physically. Then she stared at her body, where the blue marks had been, but had now almost vanished, and was overcome by gloomy thoughts on the ephemeral nature of all things.

She had told him she would wait, but she knew that was not entirely true. To be sure, she would wait for him in her thoughts, she would never forget him, but that was not the same thing at all. The first Sunday without him, when the family at table fell into a funereal silence, they all came to the conclusion that he was now in that place whence no man returns: she also convinced herself that it was all over between them.

The last and only piece of news they had about him was that his request to the authorities to be blinded in the European manner had been accepted.

“No point thinking about him again,” her father said. “You’re too young to spend the rest of your life with a blind man. In addition, you know full well that it’s not a blindness inflicted by disease or an act of God, but by the will of the state . . .”

She did not answer but went up to her room to mourn her separation in silent sobs.

Deep inside her heart, she felt immense joy at having given herself to him entirely. She could not have done more.

Winter was coming on with its miserable and endless nights, and she felt that henceforth he would really be her night, her uneasy sleep, her eternal regret. Sometimes she imagined that a similar feeling of guilt hung in the air, borne by winter’s first winds, and rattling in the windowpanes and the other sounds of ordinary life.

In early winter, the sightless suddenly began congregating on sidewalks and in cafes. Their fumbling steps caused passersby to stop and stare in disbelief. Although citizens had lived for months in fear of the
qorrfirman,
the sight of its results rooted them to the ground, petrified them.

For some time people had allowed themselves to think that the victims of that notorious order had been swallowed up in the dark night of oblivion, that the only people you would come across in the street or the square were the formerly blind, with their unchanging appearance, the peaceful tap-tap-tap of their sticks — the kind of blind people everyone’s eyes and ears were long accustomed to. But now the first winter freeze had brought with it innumerable blind folk of a new and far more lugubrious kind.

There was something specific about them that distinguished them from the traditionally unsighted. They had a disturbing swagger, and their sticks made a menacing knock-knock-knock on the cobblestones.

They’ve not yet grown used to their new condition, some argued. Blindness came to them at a stroke, not gradually, as is usually the case, so they haven’t yet acquired the necessary reflexes . . . But those who heard such remarks shook their heads, clearly not convinced. Could that be the only reason?

What was most striking was their collective reappearance. It was probably not a coincidence, nor could it have been the result of secret collusion among them, contrary to the rumors that were being circulated by people who saw anti-state conspiracies in everything and anything. It came from the simple fact that the time needed for most of them to recover — either from the physical wounds caused by disoculation or from its attendant psychological trauma — had now elapsed.

Some among them, particularly those who had been blinded in the aristocratic manner, by exposure to the sun, bore a grave and dignified air as they went and sat down in cafes and tearooms. It was presumably easier for them to behave with hauteur, not just because of the cash bonus and the generous pension they had been granted but because their eyes had not been physically mutilated when they were blinded. On the other hand, most of the others had let themselves go. They were dressed in rags, and by way of footwear all they had were wooden clogs, which made the sound of their approach particularly distressing.

But those who had been unsighted by violent means were not the only ones to look wretched. Even some who had turned themselves in to the
qorroffices
and been received with all due honor were now shuffling around in tatters. Similarly, there were a number of well-dressed people — better dressed than they had been before — among those who had been disoculated violently. They stood defiantly in full sight of all, as if to challenge the world with their black and empty sockets.

At the sight of these gaping wounds, some people were so disturbed they themselves began to stumble, as if the ground had suddenly opened up beneath them.

Why do they have to show themselves like that? people wondered. Why aren’t they forbidden access to main roads, to stop them curdling our blood with those ghastly holes in their heads?

The blind paid not the slightest heed to remarks of that kind. Not content to stay at tearoom and cafe tables for hours on end, they listened to the news read aloud from papers at nearby tables, and joined in the conversation. Fortunately, public affairs were taking a better turn nowadays, they would say, proving that their sacrifice had not been in vain. What a pity we can’t see what’s going on! some of them lamented over and over again. But that doesn’t really matter in the end. Even if we can’t see, we can imagine what it’s like, and we’re just as pleased about it as you are.

Some of them remained silent, black as crows, while others, taking up the tradition of the blind, got hold of a musical instrument and accompanied themselves as they sang epic rhymes or love songs of their own composition.

The tide of the blind continued to rise, at the same rate as hostile gossip about them. Rumor had it that a forthcoming decree would resettle most of them in some remote province of the country (the Empire wasn’t short of impoverished regions of that kind!) so that foreigners, at least, would never set eyes upon them.

Far from giving any substance to such rumors, on the last Friday in December — on the very day when a special order was announced granting a full pardon to people blinded by violent means — the state held a Banquet of Forgiveness (a
sadaka,
as it was expressed in the language of the land) for the benefit of all the victims of the Blinding Order.

This “Reconciliation Banquet,” as it was subsequently dubbed by malicious tongues, was held in the Imperial Manége, which was the only building large enough for the number of tables required for the many thousands of guests.

The blind flocked toward the manege from all quarters of the capital in an unending clatter of clogs and sticks, and in such confusion that the police were obliged to close the entire area to traffic for several hours.

Dozens of functionaries were there to welcome them and lead them to their places, but all the same, when the blind finally entered the Great Hall and especially when they tried to get to their designated tables, things degenerated into a veritable riot. They knocked over chairs, they did not know where to put the Balkan lyres and
lahutas
which they had brought with them, God knows why, most of them groped clumsily at their dinner plates and spilled food on themselves, or else tipped the plates right oven.

Among this crowd of the blind, someone noticed a clog-wearing, raggedy man elbowing his way toward a table, who was none other than the former grand vizier.

At a long table sat the high officials of the court, together with members of the government and of the entourage of Sheikh ul-lslam. Journalists and foreign diplomats had also been invited.

One of the officials tried to make a speech, but as most of the blind had begun to stuff themselves with food, most of his words were drowned by the scraping of cutlery and the clatter of crockery. Nonetheless, the essential sentences about the need for sacrifice in service of the common good, and especially the message from the sultan encouraging everyone to forget the past and remain loyal to the state, were relatively well understood.

With gravy dripping from their chins, and in high spirits induced by such good food — especially the nut halvah — many of the blind started strumming on their
lahutas.

The officials, journalists, and diplomats looked on in silence as the disorderly feast unfolded before their eyes.

“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

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.