She did her best to banish the thought that was uppermost in her mind, but she realized that it was beyond her. She was henceforth entirely conscious of the fact that if she did not find a way of coming upstairs with her fiancé after lunch, the torture would be unbearable.
On Sundays lunch was served at the big oval table in the main room of the house. Xheladin arrived a few minutes after twelve dressed in a Western suit — a fashion that a good number of young men in the capital had recently taken up.
“How’s it going?” Aleks Ura inquired when everyone had sat down at table.
The son-in-law replied with an inscrutable smile.
“Fine. . really fine.”
They exchanged disjointed remarks about this and that. It took quite a while for them to get down to the issue they had all been waiting impatiently to hear about for the whole past week, that is to say, the qorrfir-man.
“Are you getting a lot of denunciations?” Aleks’s son Gjon asked.
Gjon was as fair as his sister, but when he got angry the color of his hair seemed to darken.
Xheladin spread his hands wide in a gesture of explanation.
“How should I say. . Yes, quite a few.”
“And by what means is it to be established whether so-and-so really does have eyes possessing that power?” Gjon pursued.
Xheladin smiled. “Well manage, one way or another.”
“I have to admit that I think that will prove very difficult, if not impossible.”
“It all depends,” his brother-in-law replied. “For instance…”
“For instance,” Gjon cut in, “somebody, for entirely personal reasons, may find another’s eyes to be evil, whereas someone else sees them differently. How are you going to deal with cases of that kind?”
Xheladin kept on smiling as he listened to his brother-in-law, but his semi-scowl now seemed to be coming loose from his face, like a mask.
“You’re right,” he said. “However, to cope with such an eventuality, the central commission and all its dependent branches will abide by instructions laid out in an internal circular that defines in detail all the characteristics an evil eye must have to be counted as such. And contrary to what some people claim, external appearance is not the only criterion to be taken into account.”
He gave a loud laugh and then went on: “I myself, for example, have fair eyes. According to those people, I ought to be a suspect and not even go near the doors of the central commission. And certainly not have a seat on it!”
Most of those at the table nodded. Since the day the qorrfirman had been issued, everyone had examined, directly or indirectly, the tiniest details of the particular characteristics of the eyes of the people they knew, and none among them needed to raise their heads from their plates to verify that their son-in-law did indeed have fair eyes speckled with gray, which not only made them more charming, but gave his gaze a firm, cold, and masculine air.
“No, external appearance is not the only thing. Such details have to be matched with others. . I’m sorry, I know I am among my own kin at this table, but in the work that we do there are some secrets we are strictly forbidden to mention. . What I can say, in short, is that before declaring that this or that person has the evil eye, we have to study and check every aspect of the case very carefully, and, when necessary, we go so far as to put the suspect under discreet surveillance for a time.”
“Discreet surveillance? Well, well, that’s something new,” the brother said.
“Really?” Aleks’s wife blurted out.
Xheladin nodded.
“All the same,” Gjon continued, “I can’t bring myself to believe that there really is a reliable, or, properly speaking, a scientific way of determining misophthalmia.”
Xheladin said nothing. An angel passed, and clicking of knives on bone china made the silence seem even more frozen. Aleks Ura shot a look of disapproval at his son, to no effect.
“I think that is precisely where the real power of the qorrfirman resides,” Gjon went on.
“Where exactly is that?” his brother-in-law asked.
Gjon did not reply right away. Perhaps in order to escape his father’s glance, he cast his eyes up, over the heads of the seated guests, toward the French windows that looked onto the verandah.
“There’s not the slightest doubt that the qorrfir-man has given our people a seismic shock, and that it’s disturbed them more than any other decree ever issued in our state,” he said at last. “To come back to what I was saying, I think its fearsome power comes directly from the fact it’s so vague. The Blinding Order makes each of us suspect our neighbor. Nobody is exempt from worry, we all feel more or less guilty. The power of the order derives exclusively from the all-pervading anxiety it induces.”
“For my part, I think the power of any major edict derives solely from the sense of justice with which it is imbued,” Xheladin said, sounding not irritated, but on the contrary, rather conciliatory.
At the end of this exchange, everyone felt relieved and breathed a little more easily.
“Is it true anonymous letters have been sent and that suspicion even hovers about the person of Grand Vizier Muhta Pasha?” Gjon’s wife cut in, maybe only to move the conversation onto a different terrain.
Xheladin shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. “That may be just gossip.”
“Last year, there was another rumor of that kind. about Vizier Basri,” Gjon said. “At first it was discounted as mere gossip, but then it turned out to be true, and the vizier ended up with a rope around his neck.”
“Such things happen,” Aleks Ura declared, determined to ensure that this time no hasty or ill-judged comments would be made at his table.
He had always been in favor of a less rigid adherence to rules, and sneered at people who did not allow women to join in the conversation; more generally, he did not hide his hostility toward the fanatical customs of the Asiatics; but even so, there had to be limits. Gjon’s provocations had started it off, but now his wife was trying to pick a fight with their future son-in-law!
Xheladin’s answers grew ever sterner, and he would probably have begun to show annoyance if he hadn’t felt Marie’s soothing glance on him from time to time.
Aleks hadn’t missed the gleam of desire in his daughter’s eyes. They glinted in a different way than in the earliest days of her engagement, when she hadn’t even tried to hide the attraction she felt for her betrothed. It was also different from the look she had in the following period, when her glance was, so to speak, denser. But now it was something else altogether. There was something so evanescent, fragile, and vulnerable in her eyes that Aleks chose to avoid them altogether, for fear that an encounter might result in a painful clash.
Two weeks earlier, after lunch, at the same hour as now, he thought he’d heard them going upstairs to his daughter’s bedroom. He was stunned for a moment, but then refrained from turning to look, like a man trying not to see a ghost. . The wedding day was not far off, and the marriage seemed to him more and more like a really good idea. At times of worry, he felt an increasing desire to huddle with his nearest and dearest around the hearth, inside his own four walls, safe from the winds of anguish howling outside. What’s more, his son-in-law’s new position gave them a precious source of news from the very heart of the mystery, just at the time when, as people grew more and more curious, it was becoming increasingly dangerous to say anything. . His son and his rather scatterbrained young wife weren’t able to appreciate this advantage; all they did was irritate their guest. But he, Aleks, was going to bring some discipline back to his too liberal table. He was going to bring it back right now, by taking sole charge of the conversation.