Agamemnon's Daughter (15 page)

“You are right. We’re so lucky to have him, may Allah grant him long life! Without him life would be a snakepit. Did you hear what went on yesterday in front of Tabir Sarrail?”

And that is how, despite all the turmoil and havoc, the most incredible stories managed to circulate. Now and then, like a straw borne on the crest of a wave, you got just a glimpse of that rumor about the grand vizier.

Everyone in the house must have noticed he’d grown slimmer, but she was the only one to mention it to him.

“You’ve lost weight,” she said, after they’d bolted the bedroom door behind them. “Why? Is it from all the work you have to do?”

“Yes, I do have lots of work.” After a pause, he repeated, “Lots.”

“Come, you’re going to forget all about it . . .”

She had now lost all modesty. She lay on the bed and first put her arms round him, and then her long, slim legs, of a white so pure that they gleamed in the half-light. She let out a faint, steady moan, which only at particular moments rose to a scream close to sobbing.

Moments later, when they were lying in peace, he cast his eye on the bluish marks on her naked thigh, where they looked like official seals. She expected him to make some comment about them, but to her great surprise the question he asked was of an entirely different nature.

“Have you ever approached the Köprülüs to ask them for help?”

She shook her shoulders in a gesture of surprise. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason ... I just noticed that in your household you hardly ever talk about them.”

“That’s true. They really are cousins of ours, but only very distant ones. And anyway, my father, with his funny character . . .”

“I see,” he said, not taking his eyes off the bruises.

She ran her fingers over his chest.

“You seem worried,” she said in a caressing tone.

He averted his eyes.

“No, I’m all right.”

“Does your work weigh on your mind?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. I have no reason . . . On the contrary.”

“What do you mean by ‘on the contrary’?”

“Stop asking me such irritating questions!”

“If that’s how you feel!” she exclaimed, clearly annoyed. She tried to turn her back to him, but he held on to the sheet she was attempting to pull over her belly. A special, almost abnormal light in her fiancé’s eye dissipated the squabble almost instantly, and she began to look at his face with great attention. His eyes were fixed on her crotch as if this was the first time he had seen it.

“In three weeks’ time we’ll be married, and we’ll be able stay like this for hours on end.”

“Yes . . . Maybe I’ll be given the leave I’m due at that time.”

“Really? That would be wonderful. . . We’ll get up late, and stay awake half the night . . . It’ll be splendid to do it again when we’re half asleep, in the middle of the night, in the dark.”

He shuddered as if he’d just awakened from a daydream. “In the middle of the night, in the dark?” he almost shouted.

“Shh! Keep your voice down. What’s come over you?”

“In the middle of the night, in the dark . . .” he said again, his voice now fading.

Slowly, she stroked his neck and his forehead. “Something is tormenting you,” she whispered as if she were talking to someone asleep. “But don’t worry. Basically, all you are doing is applying the law. Leave the remorse to the people who sowed this whirlwind ... Do you hear what I’m saying? They’re the ones who should have pangs of conscience . . . Now come here and do it again, my darling.”

Eventually they heard that the grand vizier had been fired. Gossips first said he’d been relieved of the top job to take up a less prominent position; then they said he’d simply been asked to resign; finally, “asked to” was replaced by “told to.” So it wasn’t a demotion or a change of position, or a discharge for slackness in implementing state decrees, among them, in particular, the
qorrfirman.
No, he was simply being sacked, accompanied by house arrest, on the specific and savage grounds that he was afflicted with the evil eye.

Now, all the grand vizier’s intimates and colleagues knew full well that their master had a slightly menacing cast. What surprised people was that the Sultan, whose eagle eye missed nothing, hadn’t noticed long before.

“That’s not so easy,” others objected. “We all know now that crossed eyes aren’t always evil, as long as they’re not combined with other specific features.”

“Yeah, yeah,” people retorted, “those are things you can interpret any way you like.”

Straight after the grand vizier’s fall, the original rumor arose with new vigor: “Didn’t we tell you that the ultimate purpose of the whole massacre was simply to liquidate the grand vizier?”

“Well, if that’s true,” came the response, “then tell us why, now that the purpose has been met, the campaign hasn’t been brought to an end?”

“For the very reason of camouflaging why it was organized in the first place. Anyway, just as the terror machine takes some time to start up and to get into top gear, so it takes time for the brakes to bring it to a stop.”

And just as it takes time for the dust to settle after a landslide, so it took quite a while for this shock and all the disturbance it caused to come to a final conclusion. A wave of purges, which everyone suspected would be the last, swept over the state. People had only one thing on their minds: keep clear of this rolling wave, for though it was most likely the last, it seemed well set to be the most murderous.

They were lying down together. She was entirely naked and he was half-undressed. He’d told her the truth only a few moments before. She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t sobbed, almost as if she’d been expecting the confession. She listened to what he had to say with her face as white as a sheet. Only when she nestled up to him did he feel her wet tears on his own cheek. That’s probably the way the acid will trickle down over my cheekbones, he thought, after it has burned out my eyes. If his request to be blinded by the medieval European method (that is to say, by darkness) was rejected (he hadn’t dared ask for the Romano-Carthaginian technique), then he would probably be let off with the acid. There is worse, an office colleague had remonstrated. Just think of the Byzantine, not to mention the Tibetan, which is the most awful by far.

“So when you told me you were going to ask for leave for after our wedding, you already knew?” she asked.

“Yes. That was the day they told me I was being removed from office.”

“Oh . . .” she said. “But how could you stop yourself from telling me? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to depress you before it was absolutely necessary. I was still hoping against hope, since I’d been told to stay in the capital while the denunciation was being examined. But that faint hope gradually faded away . . . Apparently the denunciation has been accepted.”

“But why? Why?” she repeated, stifling a scream.

She looked at his gray-clouded eyes as if she could find in them the reason for the unfurling of the whole ghastly story.

“You’re asking me why?” he said with a faint and bitter smile. “I don’t consider myself to have eyes more clairvoyant than others, I can’t see better or further into the future, and if I could I would be instantly suspect in the eyes of any tyrannical power . . .”

Good God! she thought. One evening her father had come out with the same thing, almost word for word.

“So, I don’t count myself particularly clearsighted. But there’s a good reason for our sight to be extinguished. Every trace has to be destroyed.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“It’s very simple. We were witnesses to many things that have to be wiped out.”

“Who is we?”

“All of us who up to last night worked in the blinding commissions. Our eyes saw so many things they should not have . . . Do you understand?”

“Things you should not have seen,” she repeated in a trailing voice. “Horrible things?”

“Of course. We were too close to the machinery, we were almost brushed by its cogs and belts.”

“My poor darling.” She sighed, and once again he felt her tears on his cheek, but the thought of the acid hurt him less acutely this time, as if his skin had already grown less sensitive to it.

“Sometimes lists were brought to us that had already been approved by higher authority,” he said.

“Investigations were only made retrospectively.”

“What an abomination! In other words, all that gossip about the settling of scores wasn’t that far off the mark?”

He nodded.

She snuggled up even closer to him. “What about the others?” she asked a moment later. “Is everyone who worked there going to meet the same fate?”

“Probably not. The first batch to be struck down are people who are suspected of being able to talk.”

“Able to talk?” she repeated. “So what have eyes got to with that? The main requirement is the mouth . . .”

“The mouth’s turn may come next,” he cut in. After a pause he added: “At any rate, if putting out eyes isn’t sufficient to make a man see reason . . .”

“My God!” She sighed.

“In any case, even if none of us had been suspected, some would have been sacrificed automatically.”

She stared at him with the awkward look of someone who has simply not understood what has been said.

“That’s almost certainly one of the main reasons,” he continued. “We’re being sentenced so that a part of the horror of what happened gets attributed to us. Do you see what I mean? Everyone would like to put the blame for his own misfortune on us and our so-called mistakes . . .”

In the silence that followed each could hear the other breathing.

“As soon as they began to talk of the commission’s mistakes,” she said, “I felt my heart sinking, but then I tried to put the thought out of my head.”

“Well, when those first rumors surfaced, my partner in the office said: ‘It’s our turn now.”’

Silence ensued once more, and nothing could be heard except the rustling of their bodies as they tried to find another position in which to hold each other tight.

“Was it just a coincidence, or was that why you asked me the other day about the Köprülüs?”

“No, it wasn’t coincidental at all. I could pretty much guess what you were going to say. I knew all too well that the Köprülüs have their own troubles to worry about. But a drowning man tries to pull himself out of the water by his own hair, if that’s all there is to grab!”

“Now I understand why my mentioning making love in the dark made you go on and on, like a man in a fever, saying, ‘In the middle of the night, in the dark. . .’”

“Yes. I’d already begun to feel I belonged to the world of the night.”

She stroked him for a long while. “As long as I’m here you’ll belong to this world, the world of light.”

The gray shadow in his eyes was imbued with boundless suffering.

“Do you think there’s no hope at all?” she inquired. “Isn’t there any way to plead your case?”

He shook his head.

“Where do they do the investigations? Where are such decisions made? In your case, for example.”

“Nowhere, in all likelihood. The decision may have been made on day one, as soon as the poison-pen letter about me came in . . .”

“Of course . . . All trace has to be erased ...”

She thought better of asking any more pointless questions and went back to cuddling him. He barely responded to her comforting caresses. But his eyes remained alert, with a kind of morbid gleam. He gazed hungrily at her breasts, at the blue marks on her upper thigh, at her belly, then still lower, between her legs, which she spread open so he could more easily see her sex.

He’s looking at me like that so he can memorize it completely, she thought.

“I shall live with your image engraved in my mind,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.

“I’ll wait for you,” she replied in a flattened voice. “Do you understand? I’ll wait for you to come back from that place . . . Ill live only for you. If you don’t keep me engraved in your memory as I am today, I think I’d die ... I would fade away like a shadow ... I would lose all life and shape ... I remain the same as you remember me. Only if you consciously blot me out of your mind will I truly disappear, like a drawing rubbed out by an eraser . . .”

He didn’t reply but only went on slowly stroking the part of her body he had been gazing at so insistently a few minutes before. She noticed that as he moved his hand over her he kept his eyes shut. He’s imagining what it will be like to caress me when he’s not able to see, she thought.

She was on the point of bursting into tears and screaming like a madwoman, not only at the thought of the misfortune about to descend upon her, but also, and above all, for a reason she couldn’t even admit to herself but which surged up in confusion from the depths of her being: the fear of not being able to keep the promise she had just made Xheladin.

“What if I put out my eyes at the same time?” she asked suddenly, as if she’d been struck by a burst of fever. “On a bright morning, on the verandah, it couldn’t be easier . . . That way we would both belong to the same side of the world . . . Then even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to leave you . . .”

Her words were then smothered in tears, and he couldn’t make out what she said at the end.

“Don’t be so stupid!” he said kindly. “You said such sensible things a moment ago. What’s made you talk so crazy now?”

They hugged again, and then he said: “We can be together as night and day. I will be your night, and you will be my day . . . All right?”

She sobbed so hard she couldn’t answer. She tried to hold back her tears, but instead burst into heart-rending hiccups of the sort that go with weeping over an irreparable loss.

By all visible evidence, the campaign was winding down. Admittedly, town criers hadn’t come back to the squares to proclaim a return to normal, but everyone was convinced the scourge had passed. Here and there, it could still strike someone down, like the last streak of lightning at the end of a storm, but its flashes were now enfeebled and far away.

The last days of fall were slowly turning into ordinary days, the way they had been before the
qorrfirman.
One by one, the blinding offices had been closed, and to many people it seemed as if they had never existed. Cafes were full of customers once more, and their faces glowed with the joy of having escaped blind fate. Ghastly words like
misophthalmia, qorrof fice, Tibetan
, which, when first heard long before seemed destined to mark out life’s path to all eternity, were now dropped and forgotten.