Agamemnon's Daughter (14 page)

“People say all sorts of things,” Gjon said pensively. “Some people say that this whole story about the evil eye is just balderdash and that the people who cooked it up don’t even believe in it themselves.”

“What was that, young man? Are you sure you have all your wits about you?” Aleks interjected.

“I’m not saying that, Father,” Gjon replied. “It’s just what I’ve heard other people say. In their view, this whole thing is a setup designed to keep people’s minds off our economic problems.”

“Enough of that!” Aleks cut him off. “I will not allow you to say such things!”

“But Father, I’m not saying that, it’s only . ..”

“Listening to such opinions is itself a guilty act!” Aleks shouted, his voice shaking with emotion.

Meanwhile, Xheladin hadn’t batted an eyelash.

The drums started beating again before dawn on Friday, this time to signal that the Blinding Order was about to be put into effect.

From behind their closed shutters and barred windows, with their hair still uncombed and their eyes puffy from having been suddenly dragged from sleep, people strained to make out the town crier’s words. What’s he saying? What’s he saying? people whispered to each other. Keep quiet so I can hear! I think he’s reading out names, lots of names . . .

By next day the full roster of names of the first cohort of volunteers was made known. Directly beneath banner headlines reporting the start of the implementation of the
qorrfirman,
newspapers listed the last names of those who had initially volunteered for the
qorroffices,
together with the details of the cash bonus and annuity that had been granted each of them.

Several papers published the words of a certain Abdurrahim, a palace servant from the capital, who had declared: “I’m sacrificing my eyes very gladly. Apart from the satisfaction I feel at being able to do something that is useful to the state, I am grateful to the
qorrfirman
for having freed me from the awful pangs of conscience I felt at the thought that my eyes might be a cause of further misfortune.”

Apart from the list of the original volunteers, the media provided scarcely any information about the overall number of people concerned, their whereabouts, or the manner of their disoculation (this new term having entirely displaced the word
blinding
in journalists’ prose in the space of a few days).

Some said there were hundreds of victims, others upped the stakes by claiming there were thousands, and that they were being kept in huge camps.

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:

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 worried 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.

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.”