Agamemnon's Daughter (3 page)

I was upset by how nice he had been. However, the suspicion that his behavior was simply a sign of the implosion of a personality which, for reasons that are hard to explain, takes pleasure in its own downfall (in other circumstances, such a suspicion would have left an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach) was swept away by his goodhearted and happy gesture, which made me all the more relaxed for my encounter with the first line of police.

“ID!”

From the corner of my eye, I watched the inspector’s glance going back and forth from my passport photograph to my face, as I tried (for reasons I cannot fathom) to detect in it some sign of disbelief, or ill will, or, on the contrary, respect. A few seconds later, as I left him behind me, I thought I must already be in an advanced state of mental degeneration to worry at all about the impression my face, my name, or my invitation card might make on an insignificant plainclothes policeman I would probably never see again in my life.

Boulevard Marcel Cachin, which connects El-basan Road to the Grand Boulevard, was packed and at a standstill The only people who could get through, along the side, were people with invitations, moving individually, as I was, or in small groups. Some of the latter included children carrying toy flags or paper flowers. Others were wearing medals, which cast a yellow gleam on their faces. I was just behind a short, squat man striding boldly forward and holding a little girl by each hand. Both wore ribbons in their hair — one blue, one red — and their charming faces looked as though they had come straight out of a documentary film about official festivities.

The second checkpoint wasn’t far from the first. I was expecting it to be stricter, but the procedure was in fact identical, which must have been a disappointment to first-time invitees who were looking forward to a rigorous identity check whose stringency would establish the true value of their invitation. That was completely borne out by the man with the two girls in front of me, who displayed a kind of frustration when, having informed the policemen that the girls were his daughters and that he had their birth certificates with him to prove it, got by way of answer from one of the two cops just a casual “On you go!”

The man was dumbstruck and shook his head as if to say: “You call that a security check?” It was so visible that I almost wanted to get involved and tell him: “Don’t worry, there’ll be more checks before you get to the grandstand, and they’ll be much tighter!”

Boulevard Marcel Cachin is not only particularly wide at this point, it is also curved, so you could look around and get a good view of the various groups of invited guests. They moved forward in line with stilted eagerness, and what with the spring sun above them and the medals and flags they bore, not to mention the nearing sound of the brass band, a warm glow of solidarity arose among people who were otherwise unknown to one another. It wasn’t difficult to see why. They had all been singled out by the same hand (the index finger of the state) to participate in the same solemn celebration, and that sealed them in a golden union and made them want to talk to each other, or at least to smirk discreetly. After all, hadn’t other people, ordinary people, people not invited, been kept behind the security cordon so as not to bother us any longer with their stunned, overinsistent, and interrogative eyes, asking: “So why did they invite you, in particular?”

I felt ashamed to be part of this idyllic and peaceful holiday tableau and was suddenly overcome with a strong desire to see Leka B. again, in whose presence I had at first felt uneasy but who had shown such tact and nobility. Not only had he not allowed the fateful question to emerge, he had demonstrated real warmth, despite having himself been banished for years from all public celebrations.

At the third checkpoint, I came across a Party activist from our own neighborhood. (Only then did I realize that the plainclothesmen were complemented by all sorts of Interior Ministry employees, as well as by volunteers from various neighborhoods, who were surely also “shadow workers.”) In other circumstances, I would have given him a look of scorn, but here, in the radiance of reconciliation emanating from this high mass of togetherness, I was more inclined to favor him with a smile. But he didn’t return my greeting; what’s more, he pretended not to recognize me. He flicked through my passport looking bored, as if he didn’t know me from Adam, although I had bumped into him only the day before at the dairy store. Then, without even looking up, he blurted out: “On you go!”

I felt the blood rising in my cheeks from the humiliation, but it did not take long for the man’s display of indifference to become the source of an unspecifiable pleasure. The episode proved that even if I was one of the elect on that day, and putting aside the fact that in some insidious and barely perceptible way I was just a little proud of it (despite also feeling a degree of shame for the same reason), I had not become an indistinguishable part of the elite or, to be more precise, of the upper circle’s dark side. That’s why our neighborhood activist had looked me over with his evil eye and had probably muttered under his breath: “What’s this guy doing here? Who the hell selected such a nonentity to sit in the grandstand?”

That’s all it took to make me begin to watch out for signs of hostility. And the nearer I got to the Grand Boulevard, the more I noticed them. But I hadn’t seen anything yet. Just when I was least expecting it, when I had come to believe that I could now be pricked only by hauteur (people who were accustomed to getting invited every year would naturally take exception to newcomers), and that I had nothing to fear apart from a single enemy called jealousy, since the other, nagging, questioning foe (“So what did you do to earn the invitation, eh?”) had been cordoned off by our common condition on that score, since we were all more or less in the same boat, it was precisely at that point that the snake reared its ugly head higher than ever. Two youngish men in raincoats, with the kind of faces that made you think you’ve seen them before somewhere, but who knows where, looked me up and down from the side as they crossed my path. I got the impression that their glances had a touch of sarcasm about them. I turned around to make sure they weren’t focusing on me, that I was simply a trifle paranoid, but I saw to my alarm that it really was me they were glaring at. Not only did they carry on ogling me, they were also whispering in each other’s ears while the smiles on their lips twisted into something close to a sneer.

I went red in the face. The automatic reflex of hurrying on past suddenly went into reverse, and I almost stopped to shout at them: “What’s making you cluck like a pair of hens? What makes you think I don’t have my own suspicions about you two as well!”

I didn’t do anything of the sort, of course, but kept on going and tried to forget about them, to no avail I calmed down slightly when we got separated by a good-humored group, in the middle of which I could make out the squat father with his redand blue-beribboned girls.

I was still carrying on under my breath my argument with the two young men. What gives you a monopoly on the right to suspect people? When all is said and done, what makes you any more qualified than I am in that domain?

That’s what I muttered to myself, but, who knows why, I felt that nothing would ever wipe the snigger off their faces. However, I suddenly thought I had found the key to the mystery: the first person to entertain suspicion wins the match. The suspected person, despite probably being innocent, is always on the defensive simply from having been slow off the mark.

What a crazy idea! I protested inwardly. As a last resort, I tried to recall what I had read about collective guilt and so on. But nothing came back to me.

The beribboned girls ahead of me had started demanding something in twittering voices. The father dealt with them patiently, sugaring his answer with affectionate nicknames for each of his daughters.

An ideal paterfamilias, holding his daughters by the hand, on a sunny socialist First of May. A pretty picture, I said to myself. But tell me — who’s paying for this idyllic tableau? Who did
you
put away to get your place in the sun?

I was the first person to be surprised by my own outburst of anger. But surprise didn’t stop me from looking around with hatred streaming from my eyes. I’d turned into a terrorist, driven to ecstasy by the sight of blood, who starts to fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Since that was the way things were, I preferred to shoot first, and take my punishment later.

He who lingers is lost.

Soon thereafter, I felt my forehead glazing over with cold sweat. I’d lost sight of the two guys in raincoats and of the model family in blue and red ribbons. I was moving forward among strangers whom I had shamelessly attacked, at whom I had flung whole handfuls of mud without thinking for a moment that nothing stopped them from doing the same to me.

The Grand Boulevard was not far off now. Haven’t you got anything on your own conscience? I asked myself. Six months previously, as I came out of a local Party inquiry where we’d heard the charges against us, I’d asked myself that question for the first time. Now I shook my head again, as I had then. No, there was no stain of that kind on my conscience! Although I had been the unwitting cause of two colleagues in a neighboring office being sentenced to relegation to some godforsaken hole, I was not guilty. Quite the opposite: you could say that their stupidity had very nearly caused my own ruination. “You are at a meeting of a committee of the Party, and you should know that at meetings of Party committees, lying is forbidden!” the secretary shouted as he looked straight into our eyes. “You there!” he said, pointing at me. “Where was it that you heard the perfidious insinuation that gossip and tittle-tattle about the fall of such and such a leader, far from emanating from the petit-bourgeois element in our society and from there seeping into the minds of the people, had been manufactured by the state itself — that is to say, according to your story, by a secret bureau set up for the specific purpose of paving the way for the actual fall of said leader?”

I had never in all my life felt so uncomfortable. My office partner, who was gaping open-mouthed on the other side of the room, had indeed told me the story, but what I did not know then was that he had already confessed everything. I replied point-blank, with a strange confidence, which I allowed to take over for the seconds and minutes it lasted, that I had indeed read such a theory in a book about Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion. The secretary’s eyes looked right through me, but as I spoke I managed to convince myself that I really had read something like that in a book. What helped me make such a show of sincerity was that I genuinely had just finished skimming through a book about Czechoslovakia.

I don’t know what it was that the secretary liked about my answer. It would have been only fair of him to lean toward my partner’s version, since he’d taken the risk of baring himself, and thus to treat my story with skepticism. But the opposite happened. Without giving them time to justify themselves (“Thank goodness,” they told me later on, “that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid having to do!”), he accused my office colleagues of being dangerous chatterboxes, sinister idiots, liars, and megalomaniacs who thought they understood politics when in fact they didn’t have a clue. Incurable gossips who lacked all sense of responsibility, who transposed anything they heard about the horrible truths of bourgeois countries onto our own fine socialist way of life, and so on. Whereas I got off with one of those criticisms that sounded more like praise. In other words, I should have taken greater care to separate subjects such as those involved in the present erroneous comparison, to ward off any confusions that could give rise to conversations such as those under consideration, especially if I ever talked of such things in the hearing of brainless twits who were as politically naive as my two colleagues.

“Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul, you understand?” Those were the secretary’s last words to me. For a long time I found his behavior and the sudden conclusion of the case rather puzzling. Did it come from some cog in the machine suddenly changing direction and causing a whole string of illogicalities to ensue? Or was it that the secretary simply seized upon the introduction of an alien element like Czechoslovakia to bring the whole thing to a rapid end? Maybe it was even simpler than that. He’d had a lot of problems to deal with at the time, what with criticisms from above about the shortfall in the Economic Plan, and so on, and maybe he’d just wanted to get an awkward piece of business over and done with as quickly as possible.

He looked on me almost with kindness, simply because I had taken this burden off his shoulders. As I left the room, I thought he was about to put his avuncular hand on my shoulder just as I’d seen done so many times in films made in the “New Albania” studios. And although his hand did not actually materialize, I spent many days wondering what people would now say about me. That was inevitable, as I was the only one of the three people caught up in this business to get off without a scratch. It was a stroke of pure luck that, before they left for the back of beyond, the other two kept on saying to all and sundry that I had nothing to do with it, that they had only themselves to blame, and that they were very glad the story stopped there, because it could have turned out much worse.

Later on, whenever my mind wandered back to this episode, I was more and more struck by the words: “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul!” The secretary’s hurry to close the case, his gratitude toward me, and especially his inclination to treat it as mainly a matter of harebrained idiots and boastful liars, gradually clarified what had at first seemed a real puzzle. There really wasn’t any mystery, even less an illogical chain of events caused by a loose cog in the machine. And it had nothing to do with the secretary being exhausted by an overheavy workload. It was a device intended to nip the rumor in the bud. The rumor was of an especially dangerous sort that the state had every reason to stop before it started. That was why, when the sentence was made public, the real charge was not mentioned at all, and the two men were sent down officially for professional lapses of the kind anyone could be accused of at any time.