“Congratulations, congratulations,” he hissed as he gave me the card, but at the very moment he handed it over, his eyes seemed to me to express something beyond envy and surprise. It hovered within the smile that gave it life, yet it was something separate and different. The right word for it might have been connivance. In short, it was an intense, interrogative, and rather sly smile, but sly in that particular wellmeaning manner that arises between people who share some secret involvement. His smile seemed to be saying: “This invitation didn’t fall off a tree, did it, pal? What job did you do to earn the reward? But who cares anyway! Congratulations, my boy!”
It was so crass I felt myself blush. All the way home, I could not throw off a guilty feeling, as I wondered over and over again: he must be right, but what did I do to earn this invitation?
Isolated from the hubbub on the street, the apartment seemed even more silent than usual Silent and empty. Everyone had left for the starting point of the parade, and my own steps, far from filling the space of the apartment, only emphasized how silent and empty it was. Even the silence and the emptiness had a peculiar quality, as did everything else on a day of that kind.
I was waiting for Suzana. However, the feeling that had burrowed into my chest was not remotely like the anxiety customarily associated with waiting for a woman. It was much more crushing, and no doubt heightened by the music and the unending, exhausting commotion rising from the street. I almost thought that one of the portraits would end up detaching itself from its bearer, then float up to my window, and look inside with its painted frozen stare, and say: “And what are you doing up here? Aha! So that’s the reason! You’ve relinquished your place down there on the reviewing stand to wait for a woman, haven’t you?”
“If I’m not there by half past eight, don’t wait for me,” Suzana had said.
Each time those words came into my mind my eyes glided inexorably toward the couch where our last conversation had taken place. It had been infinitely sad. She’d been half-undressed, and her words had come out the same way — in shreds, with only half their meaning. It was getting harder and harder for her to see me, she said. Papa’s career was on the rise. . Their family was more than ever in the limelight. . Two weeks before, at the last plenum of the Central Committee, Papa had gone up another rung. . So it was obvious she would have to make changes to her way of life, to her wardrobe, to the people she saw. Otherwise she might hurt his career.
“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.