Agamemnon's Daughter (2 page)

“Was it he who asked you for that” — I still didn’t know what to call
that
— “or did you decide for yourself?”

She looked me in the eyes. “He did,” she answered after a pause “But . . .”

“But what?”

“When he explained it all to me, I saw his point of view.”

“Really?”

I thought my eyes must have gone bloodshot, as if someone had thrown sand in my face. Guiltily, she laid her head on my shoulder. She ruffled the hair on the nape of my neck with cold fingers that felt as jagged as broken test tubes.

But why? I wanted to protest. Why just you? The children of the others make the most of it, and lead freer lives, with cars and parties at their villas by the shore ... I surely would have remonstrated with her along those lines if she hadn’t brought up the issue herself. The others usually let their children enjoy more freedom, but her father... he really was a different kind of person. Who could tell what was going through his mind? Or was he, on the contrary, completely consistent, and was that not a principle to which he could not allow himself to make an exception? Anyway, if he was standing to the right of the Guide at the First of May parade, it would be all over between us.

I said nothing, and she thought I hadn’t quite understood. “Please understand,” she sobbed. Given the state of public opinion, her father could not comprehend her having an affair with a young man who was practically engaged to somebody else. Word would leak out, eventually. Especially now, don’t you see? It could not fail to.

I didn’t know what to reply, but my eyes wandered toward her legs.

“Even for you, it’s not wise,” she added a minute later.

“I don’t give a damn.”

“Well, you can say that now, but you’ll be sorry later on. Especially as you’re in the running for the Vienna scholarship.”

I carried on staring at the naked parts of her body. To be honest, I wasn’t at all sure I was inclined to swap the smooth, white body of this half-girl, half-woman for anything else in the world, including Vienna. The Champs-Elysées of her thighs led all the way to her Arc de Triomphe with its immortal flame ... I had never before met a woman like Suzana, who kept on smiling with ecstasy during lovemaking, as if she were in the midst of a blissful dream. Her bliss then spread to her cheekbones and spilled onto the white pillow, which even when it was abandoned, after her departure, seemed to keep on glowing faintly in the dark, the way a television screen appears to emit light for a few seconds after you’ve switched it off. Everything about her betrayed a passionate, serious, and fervent attention to the matter of love.

I continued to stare at the empty couch while the distant sounds of celebration echoed in my ears. Snatches of our conversations kept coming back to me, but in heightened form, as if intensified by the feeling of loss, like jewels enhanced by a display case.
If on the First of May
. . .
But you mustn’t take it to heart. . . It won’t he any easier for
me,
you know
. . . I
know what you’re going to say
. . .
But I simply
have
to make the sacrifice
. . .
I’ll never stop thinking of you
. . .

“The sacrifice,” I repeated to myself. “So that’s what it’s called.
^“

I trusted everything she said, because she always took things seriously and was not in the habit of using words lightly, of dissimulating or putting on airs. If she was convinced that this . . . sacrifice . . . had to be made, there was no point trying to make her change her mind.

In fact, I made no attempt to do so. When she’d gone, I spent hours pacing the floor and ended up in front of the bookcase. Half dreaming, I took out a book I had just read, and flicked through the pages again. It was
The Greek Myths
by Robert Graves.

I wasn’t able then, and have never since been able, to work out by what mysterious path the mechanisms of my mind stripped the word
sacrifice
of its ordinary meaning
(Comrades! The age in which we live demands sacrifices for the sake of oil. . . The sacrifices of our cattle breeders
. . . and so on) and took it far, far back, to its grandiose and blood-soaked beginnings.

This flight into the remotest past was undoubtedly a major turning point for me. From then on, I needed to take only a modest step to see in the sacrifice that Suzana had been talking about something similar to the fate of Iphigenia.

Why had the parallel occurred to me? Because Suzana had used the same word? Because her father, like Iphigenia’s, was a high dignitary of the state? Or simply because Graves’s book had kept me buried in the world of myth for several days?

As I said, I couldn’t fathom the reason why. But I was so feverishly impatient that I didn’t even bother to sit down to reread all the pages about the legendary sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, from the various more or less plausible hypotheses about what had really prompted the leader of the Greeks to perform that mortal act, down to the speculations about a sham sacrifice, which is to say a show put on for the benefit of the army (with the girl being replaced at the last minute by a fawn), and so on.

What’s the point of rereading all that stuff? I wondered. What use can it be? Nonetheless I carried on, avidly plowing through the heavy tome.

Had I invented this verse while wandering like a lost soul around the apartment after I’d put the book back in its place on the shelf, or had I fished it out from a long-sunken memory of something I’d read years before? True sadness often makes me feel sluggish and slow. And that’s how I felt then — drowsy, and unable to make things out. For instance, I was quite incapable of putting a name to the author of the poem. Nor was I up to deciding whether it was I or Suzana’s father who was performing the sacrifice. Sometimes it seemed to be me and sometimes him; more likely, it was the two of us in tandem.

The noise from outside had subsided. The street must have emptied. The masses that were going to form the parade had already assembled in the starting area. But this deafening silence was just as hostile and burdensome as the earlier commotion had been. It was a constant reminder that my place was down there amid the festive pandemonium, and not up here all on my own.

Half past eight had come and gone. I could no longer pretend that there was any chance of Suzana turning up. She had always been punctual. I almost regretted her having a quality for which I had so often been thankful, since it now destroyed my last shred of hope. To begin with, I tried to rationalize: being five minutes late is a woman’s privilege, even if Suzana had renounced it voluntarily. So I strove to find other reasons for making allowances — traffic jams are so common on celebration days — but instead of mitigating the torture of waiting, the explanations only made it worse. Then came the second set of five minutes, which was even gloomier than the first. Several times I found myself about to go out through the front door.

I decided to wait until a quarter to nine, and then leave for the grandstand, so as not to lose out on both fronts at once. The fear of what might happen if my absence were noticed had up to that point been overshadowed by waiting for her to come, which itself would have given me the strength to wriggle my way out of trouble. (
I lost
my way
. . .
The police closed the road earlier than I expected,
and so on.) If only she had come . . . Whereas now that I had lost her anyway, I had no reason to make things more difficult for myself by not showing up at the parade. Apart from which, I had a good chance of seeing her there, on the grandstand or right next to it, where the offspring of the elite were normally placed.

That last thought finally overcame my hesitation. At five to nine I opened the front door and set off.

There was no one on the stairs, and barely any passersby on the street outside. I felt relieved, initially, perhaps because of all the open space. I looked up, as if drawn by the magnetic force of someone else’s eyes. Our neighbor was on his balcony, looking as sickly as ever, staring down at the street. I took a step to the side so as to get out of his line of sight. He was reputed to have laughed out loud on the day Stalin died, which brought his career as a brilliant young scientist to a shuddering halt. Many years had passed, of course, but if I remember rightly, a mask of supplication had remained frozen on his face ever since. He couldn’t be the only person to have chuckled or laughed among the crowds at the funeral marches that were held that day — for no reason at all, or just for a second, or because their laughter-reflex mechanism had been disturbed, as often happens in such circumstances, but all explanations of such kind were systematically rejected. Every one of them was punished without mercy. Now, many years later, they were still easily identifiable by the wistful appearance they were condemned to wear for the rest of their lives to atone for having once laughed out loud.

You’d better spend your time thinking about the way
you
look! I told myself. My face was probably just as pained as my neighbor’s.

As if fearing that my glumness might attract attention, I took the invitation card out of my pocket and pretended to be studying the verso side, which gave details of how to get into the stands.

Some of the people still in the street must have been in possession of invitations just like mine. You could tell who they were, not only because they were dressed to the nines, but from their attitudes, their postures, and their beaming faces. These features distinguished cardholders quite clearly from other pedestrians who had come down into the street in the hope of finding a spot where they could see the parade, or who had got separated from their delegations and were wandering around looking guilty.

Barricade Street, which runs parallel to the Grand Boulevard, was packed with people. A brass band could be heard thumping away in the distance, probably in the square where the stands had been put up. Each time I heard the beat, I walked a little faster, even though it wasn’t quite nine o’clock yet and I had no real reason to hurry.

Cardholders were still mixed with other people in the street, but it wasn’t long before a filtering device came into view. At the top of Elbasan Road, one of the sidewalks was open to all, but the other side, the right-hand side, was reserved for invitation-card holders only. The real checkpoint was presumably farther down — this was only a preliminary screening. All the same, most of those invited were happy to be separated henceforth from other people, who looked back at them, goggle-eyed.

I continued walking along the left-hand sidewalk, and was just speculating that Suzana would perhaps be in the CM stand, where I had my seat, when I bumped into Leka B.

I hadn’t seen him for years. Sprightly and beaming (though his smile was distinct from the one that seemed to radiate from the little red flags of the day), he gave me a hug and a kiss on each cheek. To be honest, I couldn’t think why he was so happy to see me again. We’d been pals years before, when I was a law student and he was enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, but not so close that long absence would make either of us miss the other very much.

“How are things?” he asked. “Do you like being a journalist? Lights, cameras, action — the cutting edge, eh?”

“How about you?” I responded. “Still at N?”

“Ah, let’s talk about something else!” he said in the same playful tone. “I’ve not been doing too well. Actually, it wasn’t so bad down there, but I did something stupid and got transferred to running amateur theatricals in the sticks.” “Really?”

“Word of honor! I put on a play that turned out to contain no less than thirty-two ideological errors! Can you imagine? Well, that’s all ancient history now, and when all’s said and done I suppose I got off rather lightly.“

My expression must have been hovering between amazement and disbelief, because he added: “You think I’m joking, but I’m telling you the plain truth, honestly.”

And he went on in a lighthearted tone entirely devoid of self-pity or spite about his famous thirty-two ideological errors. It was as if he were delighted with the whole business and held it in secret admiration — though you couldn’t tell whether what he admired were the people who had had sufficient wisdom and patience to pick out each one of his errors, or himself, as a man who had not committed a trivial blunder or a mere peccadillo, but had engineered a disaster of such magnitude, or else both at the same time.

“So that’s how it was,” he concluded.
“Twenty-six they were, twenty-six; sand will never cover o’er their graves
. . .”

I’ve never known what those lines from Esenin were doing there.
^*

Meanwhile, we had arrived at the crossroads where cardholders were to be finally segregated from commoners. In other circumstances, I would have done anything to avoid flashing my invitation in sight of a comrade still under sentence, but this time I had no option. It had to happen at the precise moment when he asked “And how are things with you?” As a result, smiling guiltily, and feeling more than a little embarrassed, I took the card from my pocket and blurted out: “As you can see, I’ve got an invitation to . . . I mean .
.
.”

I didn’t know how to finish my sentence: humorously, or plainly, or by adopting an ironical stance prompted by — well, I don’t quite know what. It could have been me, or him, or the whims of fate. But he solved my dilemma by exclaiming brightly: “You’ve got an invitation! Bravo! Now that’s really good news. But shouldn’t you hurry up? Aren’t you late?”

There wasn’t the slightest trace of mockery or repressed envy in his voice or on his face, and I felt sorry for having spent the last twenty-five yards worrying solely about how to get rid of the man.

When I got to the other side of the crossroads, and just before reaching the first line of plainclothes police, I turned around one last time and saw him waving good-bye, still watching me with his sparkling eyes.