“Will the Order be implemented soon?”
He could not believe his own ears. How could he have spoken such words? He’d been working himself up to say something quite different, to move on to some entertaining irrelevance, so as to clear the atmosphere once and for all, and now his own mouth had gone and uttered other words, against his own will. You’re getting senile, he thought. you’ve lost control of your tongue. Worse than a woman!
“Implementation?” Xheladin repeated. “Yes, I believe it will happen quite soon. Even very soon,” he added after a pause. “It might even start this week.”
“Really?” two or three voices squeaked.
“Is it true that distinctions will be made between the people singled out, as far as the means of putting out their eyes is concerned?” Gjon’s wife asked. “Apparently things will be done differently, depending on whether the person belongs to the upper classes or not.”
“That would be only proper, in this respect as in all others.”
“I’ve heard talk of ways of blinding by exposure to sunlight. It’s the first time I’ve heard of anything like that. Must be a new technique, right?”
Aleks Ura was about to butt in, but to his surprise his future son-in-law began to laugh out loud.
“No, the technique isn’t new at all On the contrary, it’s perhaps the oldest of them all!”
So he began to describe empty beaches and villages and luxurious seaside hotels where those sentenced would quietly drag out as long as possible their last days of sight. One morning, when the sky was even clearer than usual, they’d be put in seats facing the sun, and there, in a matter of a few minutes. .
“Neat work, you can’t deny it,” Gjon said. “No blood, no branding iron, none of those barbaric devices. .”
“Well, I think it’s the cruelest way of doing it,” Gjon’s wife said. “To be basking in the light of the sky and the sea, and then to be suddenly deprived of both!”
“Would you prefer the opposite means, being blindfolded and locked in a cell for three months?” Gjon asked.
“I think it might be less painful overall,” she replied. “It would give you time to get used to darkness.”
“I don’t agree!” Gjon protested. “It must be dreadful torture. It must feel like your head is bursting apart with all the thoughts going around in it.”
“For heaven’s sake, could you please put a stop this nonsense!” the mistress of the house broke in. “Can’t you talk about something happier?”
She put the cake tray in the middle of the table and gestured to all to serve themselves.
“People say all sorts of things,” Gjon said pensively. “Some people say that this whole story about the evil eye is just balderdash and that the people who cooked it up don’t even believe in it themselves.”
“What was that, young man? Are you sure you have all your wits about you?” Aleks interjected.
“I’m not saying that, Father,” Gjon replied. “It’s just what I’ve heard other people say. In their view, this whole thing is a setup designed to keep people’s minds off our economic problems.”
“Enough of that!” Aleks cut him off. “I will not allow you to say such things!”
“But Father, I’m not saying that, it’s only..”
“Listening to such opinions is itself a guilty act!” Aleks shouted, his voice shaking with emotion.
Meanwhile, Xheladin hadn’t batted an eyelash.
The drums started beating again before dawn on Friday, this time to signal that the Blinding Order was about to be put into effect.
From behind their closed shutters and barred windows, with their hair still uncombed and their eyes puffy from having been suddenly dragged from sleep, people strained to make out the town crier’s words. What’s he saying? What’s he saying? people whispered to each other. Keep quiet so I can hear! I think he’s reading out names, lots of names. .
By next day the full roster of names of the first cohort of volunteers was made known. Directly beneath banner headlines reporting the start of the implementation of the qorrfirman, newspapers listed the last names of those who had initially volunteered for the qorroffices, together with the details of the cash bonus and annuity that had been granted each of them.
Several papers published the words of a certain Abdurrahim, a palace servant from the capital, who had declared: “I’m sacrificing my eyes very gladly. Apart from the satisfaction I feel at being able to do something that is useful to the state, I am grateful to the qorrfirman for having freed me from the awful pangs of conscience I felt at the thought that my eyes might be a cause of further misfortune.”
Apart from the list of the original volunteers, the media provided scarcely any information about the overall number of people concerned, their whereabouts, or the manner of their disoculation (this new term having entirely displaced the word blinding in journalists’ prose in the space of a few days).
Some said there were hundreds of victims, others upped the stakes by claiming there were thousands, and that they were being kept in huge camps.
Meanwhile, amid all the efforts to clothe the campaign in festive garb, the hunt for evil eyes went on, openly or in secret. People who had up to then escaped the crowd’s scrutiny were being denounced. Others who had been unmasked and gone underground were being ferreted out. Some who had heard or imagined they had been denounced had also gone into hiding, but because they were tormented by persecution mania their own behavior aroused suspicions that soon led them to ruin.
The next Tuesday, the town criers were out again, summoning carriers of the evil eye to report directly to the nearest qorroffice, seeing that they could only benefit from taking the initiative. “The Prophet declared that being born with an evil eye is not a sin in itself!” they bawled. “Guilty is only he who hides that power!”
Newspaper columnists began writing stories about events connected with misophthalmia. A man by the name of Selim had been caught in the act in a thicket of bushes, staring with his evil eye at a bridge under construction and trying to make its arch collapse. The bricklayers enlisted passersby to help deal with the man. They’d chained him up and blinded him on the spot. The paper didn’t state which technique had been used, but it was supposed that it was one of the three methods henceforth classified as the “harshest,” unless of course the bricklayers themselves had thought up something entirely different and even more atrocious.
Stories about the qorrfirman in the papers were sporadic, but in the qorroffices there was never the slightest letup. Volunteer messengers came and went bearing notes, new orders, and instructions, and scarcely did they get to their destinations than they were off again, their faces beaming, or else gravely composed in order to express the full dignity of their function.
The hunt for the evil eye was now at its peak. Qorroffices competed against each other for results. When things were not going too well in a bureau of that kind, glum-faced workers, slaving away late at night by the light of oil lamps, would suddenly panic and pass each other names of people who lived on their block or street and who maybe had eyes of that kind, but who’d escaped notice up till then.