Agamemnon's Daughter (5 page)

“He’s a nephew of mine, he works in the broadcasting service,” he said, with no small pride, to a knot of acquaintances.

I did not like my uncle. Each time we had met these past many years, we got into an argument, since we held opposing views on every subject: on the incompetence of managers, on shortages, on Stalin, television programming, the Kosovo question, and so on. I don’t recall our ever having agreed about anything. Even the weather, which usually helps bring the most unwilling opponents onto common ground, gave rise to clashes between us. He liked hot climates and I preferred cool ones. He never failed to draw ideological conclusions from this difference of taste:

“It’s obvious that you prefer the climate of Europe, since it’s your model in every respect!”

“So what model should I have?” I used to retort. “Bangladesh? The Far East? Skanderbeg fought for a quarter of a century to snatch Albania out of Asia and to bring it into the European fold. What have you and your friends been doing? You’ve never stopped trying to push Albania back again!”

That’s when we usually got into another spat about the Chinese, and then things would really heat up. He would call me a liberal and a revisionist, and would foam at the mouth when he saw these epithets no longer awed me. He would try to come up with other, nastier epithets, but as he couldn’t find any (in his eyes, those were already the worst he could think of), he just kept repeating them.

“Unreconstructible revisionist! Hopeless liberal! . . .”

For my part, I just called him a China-lover and observed how lucky we were that countries could not be mounted on wheels, otherwise we would already have moved to somewhere near the Gobi Desert or Tibet. “Down there you’d feel safe, I’m sure!” I added. “Or wouldn’t that be far enough from accursed Europe for you?”

We’d fought about the Chinese when our country’s diplomatic love affair with Beijing was at its peak, but we argued even more when the affair was broken off. When news first went around that trouble was brewing, he dropped in at our place, looking fraught, with furrowed brow. “On a number of points, my boy, I think you were not entirely wrong; those Chinese weren’t all they claimed to be . . .” However, on the day that obviously should have been the occasion of our reconciliation, our most violent dispute arose. That was when I first called him brain-dead, and he threatened to denounce me.

To be honest, I had jumped at the opportunity of renewing hostilities as soon as he said he was surprised that I — champion Sinophobe that I was — hadn’t seemed happier on hearing the announcement that relations with Beijing were being broken off.

“Good Lord!” he said. “You really are a strange one, my boy, you’re a real killjoy. You’ve been griping about the Chinese for years, but now that things are turning your way, you’re not jumping for joy but sulking.”

That’s when I lost my temper. “So why should I be jumping for joy?” I screamed at him. “We should be weeping instead. But you won’t understand that, seeing that you’re already brain-dead!” I was really on a rampage. We were breaking off relations with the Chinese not because of their atrocities, but for the opposite reason — because they were on the point of giving them up. Whereas Albania would curl up and die if it had to give up being cruel! We’d connived with the Chinese for the sole purpose of inventing new horrors. Now they were moving in another direction, we couldn’t think of anything better to do than leave them behind! It was enough to make you tear your hair out! But then, we’d always behaved that way. We’d been friends with the Yugoslavs when they were ultra-orthodox, but we’d turned on them as soon as signs of a thaw came from Belgrade. We’d been allies of the Soviets during the worst period of Stalinist terror, but had turned our backs on them the moment they began to show a modicum of civilization. And it was the same old story with the Chinese. All other countries had ended up turning away from evil and obscurantism. But Albania remained their last bastion! We’d become the high priests of calamity and the shame of the universe. Was there any other country like ours? Accursed, O thrice-accursed land!

He was flabbergasted by what he heard, and he stared at me with wide eyes filled with hatred and horror. He tried to butt in two or three times, but his mouth had probably gone dry. Only when I got to de-claim “accursed land” did he manage to articulate: “I am going to report you!”

“Go ahead!” I responded. “But don’t forget that the shadow of my fall will affect you, too . . .”

At that point, as he usually did in such circumstances, he took out a box of pills and swallowed a dose of nitroglycerin.

That was our next-to-last quarrel The last one arose over a slogan in one of the Guide’s speeches:
We shall eat grass if we have to but we will never renounce the principles of Marxism-Leninism!
I told my uncle I thought the statement was the height of absurdity and deeply offensive to the nation’s dignity.

“What are the principles for whose sake we are supposed to turn into cows? What use could they possibly be to us then? To glorify our shepherd?”

He went pale, and his jaw began to quiver. He didn’t know what to say.

“Well, go on, then! Give us an answer!” I pursued. “What use could we make of principles whose purpose is to turn us into cattle, like a flock of Circes?”

As I was speaking, my mind was wondering whether that was not in fact the secret wish entertained by the Guide — to bring humanity down to the level of a herd of herbivores . . . meek and dumb . . . all in the name of the principles of Marxism-Leninism . . . Lord, what a pantomime!

“Do you have any idea of the terrible joke that’s being played on us?” I went on at the top of my lungs. “The rest of the world is moving on and making the most of life, whereas we are supposed to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of some so-called principles? What have the principles of Marxism-Leninism got to do with Albania, since, as you yourself agree, the rest of the world has given them up for good? By what right must our martyred, pauperized countrymen remain the last defenders of principles they didn’t even invent? In the name of the future of humanity? Do you mean to say that because in London and Paris and Vienna and so on people have followed the primrose path and ended up wallowing in luxury, music, and self-indulgence, we Albanians have to sacrifice ourselves and eat grass for the salvation of their souls? Really! What a farce!”

“Stop!” he finally managed to blurt out. “You are rotten to the core, and totally incapable of understanding these things! You can’t understand that it would not matter one iota if Albania were wiped off the face of the earth so long as the ideas of the Guide were assured of an eternal future!”

I was struck dumb by this argument, which I hadn’t heard before. (I later learned that it had been issued by the minister of the interior during a secret meeting of Party cadres.)

He took my silence for defeat, and interpreted it as a surrender. He looked me up and down for a moment with a triumphant glance, until I returned to the attack, from an angle that took him completely by surprise.

“What you’ve just come out with is the most heinous accusation ever made against the Guide,” I said.

“Accuse the Guide? Me?” He grinned. “Anyway, who’s talking about the Guide?”

“You are!” I replied. “The mere fact of positing an alternative between ‘Albania’ and the ‘Guide’ is the same as making a grave accusation against the latter. It comes down to saying that it has to be one or the other, that’s there’s no room for both in this world. In other words,
mors tua vita mea.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t twist my words!” he shouted.

“But that
is
what you said!” I answered. “You said it explicitly: may Albania be wiped off the face of the earth so that the ideas of the Guide may go marching ever on!”

All of sudden, my head was a mass of confusion. Maybe that was the Guide’s true secret: to wipe this infuriating country called Albania off the face of the earth, this nation of paupers forever getting under his feet, whom he had to feed and rule over all these years! Once they’d been got rid of, turned into thin air, how clean it would be, how spotless! A country that had died, but was kept alive in the ideas and books of its Leader. How convenient, too! No awkward reality to contradict you, not a trace of evidence of the crimes that had been committed. Nothing but his books, his ideas, his
lumières .
. .

“I never said that!” my uncle kept on screaming. “You’ve twisted my words, you’re the devil incarnate!”

Our argument was winding down and about to end with its invariable routine exchange: I’ll report you . . . Go on, and the shadow will fall on you . . . Then the dose of heart medicine, and so on. Except that this time, it was I who said: “I’m going to report you.” I went further. Egged on by my own excess of sarcasm (I’d noticed that sarcasm calmed me down, especially when it hit my uncle right in the eye), I added: “I’m going to report you, but it’s a damn nuisance, as the shadow will fall on me, too.”

At this point he completely lost his temper, and our fight ended in a particularly grotesque scene. Each screamed he would denounce the other, that the shadow of the other’s fall would fall on him too, then we went through the ritual of the pills — but to his surprise and to mine, I snatched the box and downed a pill myself, then ran off like a scalded cat.

Memories of these episodes must have also come into my uncle’s mind in some form or another because the amazement you could read in his eyes just kept on growing. But there was also a note of triumph in his expression:
At last! Now you’re on the right road, my boy! You snorted and snarled to your heart’s content, but now you’ve come back into the fold!

“So they issued you an invitation?” he queried, patting me on my shoulder. “Congratulations! Congratulations! I’m delighted for you.”

If we’d been alone he would probably have said: “Cut the niceties. Now tell me just how . . . ?” But though he said nothing, his whole attitude — the way he looked at me, the pat on the shoulder copied from “New Albania” movies — got the message across maybe even more effectively.

I started to shake his hand in farewell, but he went on cheerfully: “What, are you leaving? Stay here, my dear boy. It’s a good spot, you can see everything.”

“Well, it’s just that.. .”

The instinct for self-preservation would have held me back from telling him that I had a seat in the grandstand, but as I couldn’t think what else to say, I had to let him know.

His attitude switched entirely. As if what he’d seen in my hand was not an official invitation card but a death announcement.

He took it from me, or rather, snatched it out of my fingers with the angry swoop of a bird of prey. Greedily, skeptically, his fierce eyes pecked every word on the card looking for some unforgivable error. He hung on to it for a while (I thought I could see his hands shaking) and drips of perspiration glazed his forehead. His face, his whole being, even the medals that I thought I heard making an ominous clinking sound, seemed to be saying: There’s been a misunderstanding! A misunderstanding! You! Admitted to the grandstand! You with your sick ideas about management, about Stalin, about free trade
.
. . The look in his eyes was a mixture of suspicion and spite. I would have sworn that if he could have, he would have called the appropriate authorities on the spot to report the event, or rather to stab me in the back, as was only right and proper.
It’s true he’s my brother’s son, but the Party has to come first, yes?

“Are you two having an argument?” one of his friends asked jovially.

“Er ... no, not at all. . .”

At last my uncle gave the card back to me. His face looked utterly flabby and worn. Then, in spite of his lingering bewilderment, a devilish gleam came into his eyes. They narrowed and narrowed until his glance was as sharp as a knife. He flashed it at me with an intensity that seemed unbearable. Awareness of his own superiority unconsciously reshaped his face, which a few seconds before had looked so defeated. The question I feared the most was plain to see in all its cruelty: What did you do to earn this invitation? And on its tail the sarcastic implication: You played at being a little hero as long as you could, didn’t you, but in the end you realized that there is no other way.

It was my turn to have sweat on my brow.

You may enjoy denigrating us day and night, but we
did at least earn these invitations honestly, like we earned everything else. We mean what we say, and this is our celebration. But you don’t think that way. So what are you doing here?

Unless what made you so bitter was not being able to rise to the very top? Then at the first opportunity you denied what you are, and sold yourself body and soul in order to clamber up the greasy pole. You must have been really good at it, my boy, because you’ve not only caught up, but overtaken the lot of us! Yes, you must have done something really special! Well, I guess that’s how these kinds of things happen. Now it’s our turn to give you a wide berth, my boy!

I was pretty sure that that was what was swirling around in his head, whereas I was overcome with an irresistible desire to shout out loud: No! I’ve done nothing of the sort you’re mulling over in your squalid little pigeon-brain, you stupid old fogey! On the contrary! An hour ago I was fully prepared to swap this invitation for an assignation. If only you know who she was . . . But what could a retarded oaf like you understand about that?

I was still gripping the invitation card in my hand when he came out with: “Go on up, you’re going to be late . . .”

His eyes, like his words, were as cold as ice. Alternative expressions such as “Be gone, evil scourge!” would have been no harsher.

“Shove off yourself, you old nitwit, and take your rusty old medals with you!” I muttered to myself as I moved off without even shaking his hand.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself among the small trickle of people wending their way up to the stands. We were assailed from all sides by furtive, sideways glances charged with such a particular blend of envy, admiration, and bitterness that it twisted mouths into smiles that could just as well be called anti-smiles.