I suddenly thought I could see the answer. The sensation of breakthrough was so strong that I stood still and closed my eyes, as if the sight of the external world might cloud what was at last coming clear. . Yakov, may he rest in peace, had not been sacrificed so as to suffer the same fate as any other Russian soldier, as the dictator had claimed, but to give Stalin the right to demand the life of anyone else. Just as Iphigenia had given Agamemnon the right to unleash the hounds of war. .
It had nothing to do with the belief that the sacrifice would calm the winds that were keeping the fleet in port, nothing to do with a moral principle declaring that all Russian young men were equal before death. No, it was nothing but a tyrant’s cynical ploy.
I know what you’re after, too, what you’re trying to use Suzana for. . You probably won’t sully your blade with warm blood, but though you may keep it bright and clean, it won’t be any the less harsh or brutal.
Perhaps I had sensed it long before, and had been approaching the truth step by step ever since Suzana told me of her decision. What her father had requested looked pretty insignificant, but it was much more than it seemed. Though hidden from the general gaze, it was a sacrifice to be counted among the crudest ever invented. The letter from Lushnje, the suspicious lump of ore, or that fatal military map, had led to lines of coffins, but Suzana’s sacrifice would certainly have consequences even bleaker than those horrors. . Should untold thousands of canceled evenings out count for less than a heap of corpses? Or poisoned Novembers, evening conversations choked as by an odorless gas, and the snows and smells of winter all sullied and soured? Blue benches around the swimming pool turned into useless accessories, student parties gone as flat as stale beer, tangos without a beat, bronze clocks striking midnight in empty hallways, hair brushed in front of the mirror, and jewels, and furs, and makeup gone all streaky and worn. .
Yes, Suzana was the harbinger of an irreversible impoverishment of ordinary life. A life that like a cactus in an arid desert had barely managed to accumulate a few last drops of human vitality.
You were nothing but a poison and the specter of the scourge! I exclaimed in my mind. Your change of heart was really the continuation of the campaigns sparked off by the letter from Lushnjë, the ore, and the map. There was no Calchas whispering advice; no, Suzana’s father probably didn’t even know why he was acting as he did. Someone else, the Supreme Guide, who was in process of appointing him as his official successor, must have asked him to do it. “Papa’s as tenderhearted as they come,” Suzana had confided, “he’s completely incapable of scolding me.”
Maybe the Guide had also grasped the man’s real character and found a way of saying: Choose one of the two ax blades. If you aren’t up to using the bloodstained one, use the clean one instead. But while I’m still alive, show me what you can do, and show me now! Strike! If you know how to use it properly, the clean blade can be the more fearsome of the two.
So what Suzana portended was the clean blade. Worn out by the rampage of the bloody blade, the country was now going to suffer a different kind of terror.
My God, spare this country from dehumanization! I screamed silently. Protect it from yet another ruination! For it is about to inflict on itself what the sweaty haze and desert dust of the East has failed to achieve!
The placards of the now weary activists could be seen swaying as they moved off in all directions. Revolutionize Life Ever More! Learning, Labor, and Military Training!
But I’ve been staring at it throughout the parade! I thought. Those were the watchwords that had been repeated over and over these past few years. Those were the values that were supposed to replace lovers’ sighs at sunset, melancholy moments on the verandah, jewels, and dance bands. Productive labor, military training, studying the works of the Guide. . But as they’d not yet stamped out all normal life, a new campaign was being set in motion.
Let us work, live and think revolution.. Let us revolutionize everything. . How many years of such a drought would it take to reduce life to a stony waste? And why? Only because when life is withered and stunted, it is also easier to control.
I had a pounding headache and remained incapable of controlling my train of thought. How the hell can you revolutionize a woman’s sex? That’s where you’d have to start if you were going to tackle the basics — you had to start with the source of life. You would have to correct its appearance, the black triangle above it, and the glistening line of the labia. . Reeducate it by abolishing all trace of its past: all memory of orgasm, all recollection of thousands of years of pleasure. .
I would have burst out laughing if I hadn’t felt so dismayed.
The revolutionary triad: learning, productive labor, and military training. . And what would become of the dark delta of a woman’s sex? A parched, desiccated estuary dotted about with puny blades of yellowing desert grass.
I’d never seen such a dense accumulation of placards. Ah, here’s the notorious one about grass: We shall eat grass if we have to hut we will never renounce the principles of Marxism-Leninism!
“You blind fool!” I said to myself. “The truth was right there, in front of your eyes, but you tried to find clues by going back three thousand years! You combed through books and racked your brains to find something that needed no research at all.”
“So what?” I responded to my self-accusation. “Was I wrong? The signal that Suzana gave me was clear and precise, and that was the main thing. Whereas murdered Iphigenia wasn’t around to testify for the defense. On the contrary.”
Everything was happening as it had happened before, but in a perhaps even crueler way. Greek ships are leaving the coast of Aulis for Troy. One by one they haul up their anchors, spilling clumps of mud and stones into the choppy waters. The mooring lines are being cut, like last hopes.
The Trojan War has begun.
Nothing now stands in the way of the final shriveling of our lives.
Tirana, 1985
Footnote
* The lines are from Sergey Esenin’s “Ballad of the Twenty-Six,” written in 1924 to commemorate the execution of twenty-six Soviet commissars by a British firing squad in 1918. In Russian:
THE BLINDING ORDER
By the last week of September it became obvious that the sequence of events could not have been just a string of coincidences. No sooner had he sung his first call to prayers — and done so admirably, in the view of all who were lucky enough to hear him — our new young hodja Ibrahim fell down the minaret stair. Next, we learned that the crown prince had been taken ill, likewise after a public appearance. Two or three more unusual things then happened in a row before the end of a week, which had a real twist in its tail. As he was making his way to the imperial palace, where he was widely expected to make the long-awaited announcement of his government’s agreement to a substantial loan, the British ambassador was involved in an accident, and his carriage overturned.