Agamemnon's Daughter (8 page)

It was the same old routine we’d seen so many times on television. Gymnasts formed patterns with vaulting poles bedecked with bunting, bouquets, and wreaths. Then color-coded squads of boy and girl athletes. Next would be the factory delegations, steel-workers in the lead, as always, followed by miners, textile workers, shop assistants, cultural workers, then neighborhood groups, then school parties, dum de dum . . . Jiggling stiffly up and down over all those heads came the outsize portraits of members of the Politburo. My gaze attached itself to one of them in particular, the portrait of Suzana’s father. Why had he asked his daughter to make such changes in her dress and in the people she saw? What was the message? What was the symbol?

It would have been perfectly comprehensible if he’d taken that step out of fear, or if he suspected his foothold was giving way. But he wasn’t on a downward trajectory. On the contrary, he seemed to be climbing by the day. And it was that rise, specifically, that had engendered the word
sacrifice
and had directed it to the remodeling of Suzana’s future.

His portrait was now almost level with the grandstand. For the tenth time I exclaimed inwardly: What
is
the message?

Years before, the terrible campaign against cultural liberalization had begun just that way, with a step so small as to be almost imperceptible. A letter came in from the province of Lushnjë casting aspersions on the dress worn by the presenter at the Broadcasting Service’s Song Contest. Accompanied by sly grins and snide comments, the letter went on up from the music department to one of the assistant directors of the radio service.
(All right, the presenter’s dress was
a hit too long and caused offense. That’s because those bumpkins are still living in the last century! They get everything wrong. You can’t really hold it against them .
. .
unless this is a put-up job?)
In much the same state of mind, the assistant director, more out of curiosity than because he took the matter seriously, showed the letter to the Head of Radio. He was a naturally timid man, so he didn’t laugh out loud, but he didn’t make a big fuss about it either. He just said: “You must be careful with things like that, sometimes they can get you in deep shit,” and that sobered up the assistant director on the spot. It was only when they were having coffee a couple of days later with the Head of Broadcasting himself—Big Boss, as we all called him — and the latter interrupted the guffaws going on all around to inquire about that “famous letter from Lushnjë” that the assistant director felt the weight off his shoulders.

So they had all had a good laugh over coffee together: the Head of Broadcasting, the Party secretary, and the quaking Head of Radio.

It wasn’t long before the laughter stuck in their throats. A week later Big Boss himself got a telephone call from a branch of the Central Committee asking about the letter. Why hadn’t an answer been sent out? The Head of Broadcasting protested vigorously: It wasn’t the job of the Broadcasting Service to follow through on every piece of correspondence that came in, especially one as stupid as that!

Everyone who heard about what happened, including subordinates who had no great love for Big Boss and who would have been delighted to know he’d gotten a rap on the knuckles, were for once all agreed that he had been right, and that they’d all had enough of letters from the grass roots.

A few days later, however, the Head of Broadcasting was summoned to a meeting of the Central Committee, and he came back to the office with a long face. A meeting was called the same afternoon. The Party secretary reminded us of the attention we should pay to comments coming from the masses, and then read out his own self-criticism. The Head of Broadcasting spoke next, briefly. After emphasizing how fatal it would be not to value the views of the masses at their true worth, he too (and this was quite unprecedented!) read out a self-criticism dealing principally with the letter from Lushnjë.

All of us in the Broadcasting Service found that was going too far. Right after the meeting and several times over the following days we discussed whether it was necessary for the dignity of the Head of Broadcasting to be tarnished for such a trifling matter. We were all of like mind that it was not appropriate. It was all the more inappropriate because Big Boss was himself a member of the Central Committee and on this issue, after all, he had done no more than defend the interests of the Broadcasting Service.

It has to be said, however, that apart from feeling revolted by the affair, all of us (probably including Big Boss himself) felt a degree of relief. Because it meant that someone’s yearning to take the Head of Broadcasting down a peg or two (which was the sense we made of the whole maneuver) had now been satisfied. All it took were two or three well-chosen expressions, copied from the watchwords stenciled on walls
(Always learn from the people! Keep things simple!
and so on) to have the affair wrapped up. Self-criticism was a truly miraculous cure.

It did not occur to any of us to think we might have been wrong from start to finish. A week later, after the Party meeting where we were told that the boss and our other superiors had restated their self-criticisms, but with greater attentiveness and gravity, we got notice of a full staff meeting.
Can it be about the same old business?
—
I can’t believe it!
—
Can you imagine, going over it all again, in front of everybody?

The purpose of the meeting turned out to be exactly what we had surmised. A representative of the Central Committee was in attendance, and he threw his piercing glance at everyone in the room in turn.

“I have as it were the feeling that you’ve treated this business a little too lightly, comrades. You thought a handful of superficial self-criticisms would do the trick and there was no need to dig into the causes and roots of evil. But the Party won’t be hoodwinked as easily as that!”

Big Boss’s eyes drooped with weariness. Weary, too, were the faces of us all. For it was but the start of a whole string of meetings that we would have to attend, like stations of the Cross. We would come out of it unrecognizable as our former selves, with our skin torn, our flesh bruised, and our bodies marked by it forever.

Our initial arguments about respect for the authority of the Head of Broadcasting, our fear of offending him, and so forth —how antiquated they now seemed! We were in a different climate, and our priority had to be to shelter from the hailstorm that was going to rain down on every one of us. Each new day brought utterly unexpected changes in mental composition. What was absurd, unimaginable, literally impossible on a Monday turned out to be quite all right on Tuesday, when it promptly began to eat away another, even more horrifying barrier.

The first to meet his comeuppance was the Head of Radio. He tried to defend himself by claiming that he had at least shown some anxiety about that letter from Lushnjë (which was true). Had he not said: “You must be careful with things like that, sometimes they can get you in deep shit”? But that was what sealed his fate.

“So why didn’t you raise the issue, since you were anxious about it, eh? So as not to incur your boss’s displeasure? Out of servility, hmm? Or worse? Speak up, comrade! Ask yourself! You’re much more dangerous than your scatterbrained colleagues. You see evil staring at you, and you turn a blind eye!”

After the Head of Radio had been banished, first to the countryside, then to the mines, most of us thought that, what with the scapegoat having been found, the hailstorm would abate. Nothing of the sort. Meetings continued to be called at the same grueling frequency. The most awful part was realizing we were getting used to the idea of what had seemed to be, only the day before, a somber foreboding too ghastly to seem plausible. At the bottom of each hole, another hole opened up beneath us, and we all thought: Oh, no! Not further! There has to be a limit, things are already abominable enough! But by the next day the abominable had turned into the sort of thing that nobody found surprising anymore. What was even worse was that wavering minds strove to find a justification for it.

Each day we felt the cogs and wheels of collective guilt pushing us further down. We were obliged to take a stand, make accusations, and fling mud at people — at ourselves in the first place, then at everyone else. It was a truly diabolical mechanism, because once you’ve debased yourself, it’s easy to sully everything around you. Every day, every hour that passed stripped more flesh from moral values. Minds became drunk on an unwholesome brew: the euphoria of self-debasement, of universal corruption.
Sell me, brother, I won’t hold it against you, I’ve sold you so many times already
. . . And the noose of collective guilt carried on tightening around our necks.

At first sight, you might have said it was nothing more than a war machine set in motion by malice, ambition, and the thirst for revenge. But a closer look would have shown that things were more complex than that. Like an alloy composed of extremely varied materials, it contained utterly contradictory ingredients: cruelty as well as compassion, repentance alongside unbounded joy at not having been struck down — which itself gave way almost instantly to the superstitious fear of having to pay for such luck. The complete absence of coherence and logic only increased people’s fatalism. Thus even those who had refrained from joining in the hysteria also got hit. They aroused a bizarre kind of commiseration that had the outward form of resentment.
Poor guys! But, from another point of view, it serves them right, they were too hasty in thinking they could get off lightly
. . . The hysterical were also taken down — those who had yelled louder than anyone else against the accused, and called for the heaviest sanctions. Their fall raised a wave of satisfaction.
Serves them right! Everything has to he paid for in this life . . .
And the blade also fell on those who dug in their heels and refused to write a self-criticism at first; but the pit was just as deep, if not deeper, for those who’d been in a hurry to confess their sins and to testify against themselves.

It was impossible to know what was the better course — to stay in your shell or to come out fighting; to be prominent or just one of the crowd; to be a Party member or outside all parties. As it is during an earthquake, people ran about in all directions looking for shelter, but buildings that looked solid and shock-proof would suddenly collapse. Everything was shifting, nothing remained still, and this profound instability affected thoughts and behaviors. Reasoning was put out of joint, whims of resisting vanished into thin air, as did any thought of revolt. Nobody would have dared ask what was going on or why. And you didn’t feel angry in the slightest, just as you wouldn’t think of railing against thunder and lightning.

Was the plan to scatter and destroy us all so that only the state would remain standing, like an inaccessible, untouchable Fate? Or was there just some mysterious set of circumstances allowing the storm to rage ever on? The force of its gale, the way it gusted from unexpected angles, and the sheer randomness of what it knocked down certainly incited terror. What was quite noticeable, however, was that it also aroused admiration for Power.

As we went from meeting to meeting, our mangled souls and diminished beings became ever more un-hinged. A comrade of mine who worked for the courts told me that a similar kind of decline usually set in among prisoners held in solitary confinement, especially during the first phase of the investigation. We, of course, could go out into the open and mingle in noisy crowds, but we felt as isolated as if we had been incarcerated between the four walls of a cell. Maybe even more so.

By now the letter from Lushnjë had come to seem as remote and unlikely as the omen that in bygone days was believed to tell of a coming plague. Where was that letter now? On what shelf, in what archive had it been filed? In what closet now hung that only slightly overlong dress that had provoked the fatal letter?

If anyone had said a few days ago — a whole era ago — that the letter that prompted the Head of Broadcasting’s witticisms over coffee would one day cost him his job, we’d have split our sides laughing. But that day had come, and nobody found it surprising. We were all rather more inclined to feel a kind of relief. The boil had been lanced at long last! The cure would bring peace to all, and not least to the Head of Broadcasting himself. Granted, the penalty could hardly have been more humiliating for a member of the Central Committee. Big Boss was redeployed to manage municipal services in a small town called N. That’s not too bad a deal for him when all is said and done, people opined. He would still have a car. All right, only an old rattletrap. But a jalopy is still a car — and a whole lot better than being eaten away by anxiety.

Of course, you could look on the bright side. Yes, the hurricane had drifted away from the Broadcasting Service and was now battering all the other institutions of cultural life. It was said that grievous errors of liberal inspiration had spread their tentacles almost everywhere — to the Union of Writers and Artists, books and magazines, and film production . . .

The brass band’s beat was now keeping time with the train of my thoughts. For a short while, I’d imagined the band had paused and then started up again even more deafeningly. Actually, there had been no interlude. It was just an impression, perhaps a consequence of taking in the music while lost in my mental reenactment of events at the Broadcasting Service. I must have incorporated the music unconsciously and allowed the furious and sinister flourishes of drums and brass to mark time to the horrors of that past madness.

The hurricane had sucked up writers, ministers, allegedly right-deviationist ideas, movies, senior civil servants, and plays. Amid the general chaos, the expression “rightist deviation in cultural affairs” often floated to the surface, and in its wake came the even more ominous phrase, “anti-Party group.”

Compared to what was going on in the capital, the circumstances of the former Head of Broadcasting in the little town of N. — which most of us had first considered utterly degrading — looked idyllic. To be responsible only for house painters, toilet repairers, and swimming pool maintenance workers! That was an oasis of peace compared to areas in the eye of the storm, as Ideology and Art now were. Some people must surely have envied him in secret . . .