No, it couldn’t be that simple! Sure, I was at the end of my rope, I was flailing, but all the same, I was utterly certain that things were not so simple. It wasn’t so much the word sacrifice or Graves’s book that had planted the seed of the analogy in my head. It was something else, something that I could not quite see for the fog surrounding it, but which I could feel quite near. It must be here, in full sight, all I had to do was to shake off a veil that was clouding my vision. . Had not Stalin sacrificed his own son Yakov to… in order to… to be able to say that his own son. . had to share the same destiny.. the same fate… as any Russian soldier? And what had Agamemnon been trying to say two thousand eight hundred years ago? What was Suzana’s father trying to get at now?
My thoughts were interrupted by the sight of her head, swaying between the shoulders of two others. I don’t know why, but the memory of our first meeting suddenly came back to my mind. Portrait of a young girl bleeding. . That’s how it had crystallized in my memory. . It was one afternoon late in the fall. After our first kiss on the couch, she looked me in the eye at leisure, then said with quiet composure: I love you. She maintained her quizzical stare, as if checking to see that I’d understood her. She needed only a sign from me to offer proof of what she’d just said, and when I responded — rather hesitantly, as I was somewhat taken aback at the prospect of such an easy triumph — “How about lying down?” she got up right away and, with the same placid manner as she had spoken, got undressed.
I followed her orderly gestures. Her lace lingerie appeared when she took off her dress, and when she pulled down her tights her smooth white legs came into view. I got up from the couch and kissed her as cautiously as if she were sleepwalking, and pressed a bunch of her hair to my right cheek. I like expensive women… I mumbled, without knowing then or since whether “expensive” referred to her Western underwear, to the valuable comb that embellished her hair, or to the ease and simplicity with which she offered herself.
On the couch she put up no resistance. She’d taken off the last of her underwear, and everything would have happened as perfectly as in a painted dreamscape if an abrupt, subterranean tremor hadn’t suddenly shaken us apart. Her earlier eagerness gave way to opposite emotions of awkwardness and tension, which she tried but failed to hide.
“What’s the matter, Suzana?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath.
She didn’t answer. But I guessed that a kind of safety catch had clicked on somewhere right inside her and locked her up, and then I thought I understood. But I was greatly surprised nonetheless when she blurted out, point-blank: “I’m a virgin.”
We lay for a long while on the couch without speaking. Then, with a smile that was more like a brightening above her cheekbones, she said to me: “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”
I didn’t know what to say, but she went on: “That’s why I preferred not to tell you beforehand.”
I felt unable to react, perhaps because happiness had shown itself in its most certain form, surrounded by a halo of sadness. The triumph, which a short while before had seemed to come so easily, now felt like a feat of arms. I beg you, Suzana, don’t be my downfall! was my unspoken prayer.
The band suddenly stopped playing, the loudspeakers roared with a storm of applause, and all heads turned toward the central stand. The leaders were coming out onto the platform. From where I was sitting I could make out only some of them. I couldn’t manage to see the Guide, or Suzana’s father, who was maybe standing at his side. From the C-1 stand, only four of the leaders’ heads were visible. Were they really oversized? Maybe it was just the effect of the nickname that one of our colleagues in the music department was alleged to have given them — “the bigwigs.” He’d been sentenced to hard labor in the mines for having asked why, after forty years of socialism, most of the members of the Politburo still had to come from the least educated layer of society. That’s what he was supposed to have said at a dinner party. But some people claimed he’d gone even further and declared that the government of the nineteenth-century League of Prizren had been better educated than the one we had now! Well, that’s what he was supposed to have said, but it wasn’t even mentioned at the meeting where we voted to fire him. The same thing happened in my own case, presumably because it was thought too dangerous to say it out loud, even as incriminating evidence. So, again like the case I was involved in, he was found guilty of professional lapses, of having sloppy ideas about Western music, and of making sarcastic remarks about productive labor. .
The New Man is the Party’s greatest triumph. . our most famous victory. . the happiest land on earth. . no debt, no taxes. . the one and only Socialist nation!
I hardly listened to the dire and deadly opening speech. Those hopeless, irremediable clichés that we’d all heard a thousand times went in one ear and out the other, as such things usually did. Some of the current watchwords, like shadows cast by the hand of a master puppeteer, summoned up the shapes of the people they’d helped to bring down. You only had to open your eyes and look around to find slogans, symbols, and portraits that had served directly to bring some people to ruin. For instance, the Constitution forbade any borrowing from foreign sources, any reference to the availability (that is to say, to our shortage) of butcher meat, and any allusions to the decadent Jean-Paul Sartre or to the shape of Mao Zedong’s eyes.
Our colleague in the music department had been luckier than one of the technical controllers, howeven. That young man had taken a swipe at the privileges enjoyed by the elite and their offspring, such as villas and foreign travel. Once again, he wasn’t openly blamed for what he’d said, but for different things, like his notions about free love (which were just about enough to get him thrown out of work). In the meantime, he was caught talking to a foreign tourist, and that really did him in. During his trial, and despite the plight he was in already, he stuck to his guns (so people said), denouncing “The Royal Court” as before, but laying it on thicker than ever, accusing the leadership of transferring gold and diamonds to foreign banks as if we were still living in the days of King Zog, of committing secret assassinations, and other equally sinister deeds. He hadn’t spared a soul, not even the Guide, but he’d been specially harsh about his wife, whom he’d described as the true inspiration for her husband’s crimes, a real Lady Macbeth — Lady Macbeth of the Backwater, he’d said, the Qiang Qing of Albania, and so forth. He was sent down for fifteen years, but he never served a quarter of his sentence. In the chrome ore mines, people said, there were deep pits, in whose vicinity common criminals frequently bumped into politicals, by accident. That’s how it all ended: a gradual fall from grace, from season to season, from year to year, cruelly summarized in a headlong rush lasting a few seconds.
The privileges of the leadership and especially of their children was one of the regular topics of argument with my uncle. However, unlike all the other subjects we argued over, this particular argument did not send him into a frenzy. Though he would never admit it, he probably felt ill at ease with the privileges himself. My polemics with him on this subject stopped the day I met Suzana. She amazed me. Were the rumors about the children of the top rung just idle gossip, or was she different from the others? I quickly came to understand that the latter hypothesis was correct, Suzana was indeed different in every way.