Sometimes lights in the qorroffices were on late into the night, and people who lived nearby, unable to get to sleep until the lights went out, muttered to one another: What the hell are they doing so late in the night? What new miseries are they cooking up now? May God make them stark, raving mad!
Meanwhile, threats against people who spoke ill of the glorious qorrfirman continued to be made — which didn’t stop anyone from cursing it with ever greater vigor. People threw insults at it, and twisted its name this way and that, calling it the Dark Decree, or the Sinister Sentence, or the Fateful Firman. The same thing happened as far as gossip was concerned. Efforts to put a stop to rumors only made more of them flourish. They got weirder by the day, and some of them made your blood run cold. Just recently, for instance, a rumor about the grand vizier had made the rounds. Suspicion of the evil eye was said to have fallen on him, despite his being the sovereign’s right hand. An anonymous letter writer had had the audacity to name his name. People could not stop talking about that piece of news, with a terror whose special flavor came from a combination of fear, curiosity, and a kind of relief and contentment. So there you are! Higher-ups can get in just the same mess as little folk! But how could people question the grand vizier himself?. . Why are you so surprised? As if this was the first time that kind of thing had happened. . There’s more to it, you know. It’s said that the whole hullabaloo over the evil eye is really aimed solely at getting rid of the grand vizier! Look, I’m sorry, but what you’ve just said is completely illogical; if that really had been what the sovereign was after, if he’d wanted to topple the grand vizier, who in the world could have stopped him? There’s no shortage of grand viziers who’ve gone to sleep one night with their heads on their shoulders, and found them cut off in the morning. . Sure, sure, things used to be done that way, but times have changed. Nowadays they don’t only use knives to deal with matters of state. It also takes a bit of skill. And besides, you’re forgetting that the grand vizier was appointed with the heavy backing of the Köprölü clan. I guess you know you can’t joke with that crew. To bring one of their men down, you’d have to lay the ground carefully, inside and outside the empire. Because people are talking about this overseas as well, you know. .
Thus did gossip spread. But these particular rumors were not the only ones that were considered punishable. Attempts were made to root out things considered just as harmful, such as inappropriate witticisms, ironic remarks and anecdotes, alongside a number of puns and riddles.
One Saturday afternoon, the famous poet Tahsin Kurtoglu was summoned to one of the qorroffices in the center of town. In front of a large crowd, and after it was first explained that a favor was being done to him, as a great poet, by having him summoned to a qorroffice and not to a court of law, he was asked to explain some lines of poetry he had published a couple of weeks before, as well as remarks he was said to have made here and there among his circle of friends.
As far as his poems were concerned (the issue revolved mainly around one of them, “We were struck by the bow not by the arrow”), the writer defended himself energetically, maintaining that it was but a simple love poem addressed to a woman graced with fine eyebrows, and the fact that he had declared the lady’s brows (the bow) to be more fearsome than her glance (the arrows) in his lines of verse had absolutely nothing to with any kind of subversion of the glorious Blinding Order.
His listeners, visibly skeptical, then quoted back to the poet some of his double entendres, which he denied ever having uttered. Then someone in the crowd took a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and took it upon himself to read its contents aloud:
On the seventh day of this month, during a dinner with friends, you declared that this great blinding would only deepen the darkness of the world. On the twelfth, in a cafe, you claimed there was a balance between light and dark, between the visible and the invisible, and that this balance between the two sides would now be broken, to the disadvantage of the light and the visible. And you also claimed — and this is the most heinous claim it is possible to make — that the sum of the eyes of all human beings on earth, about a thousand million, make up what you called the eye of whole humanity, and that it grows weaker when a large number of individuals go blind, especially when — and now you all listen to this! — especially when those blinded are the most clear-sighted of all!
After each of the sentences spoken by the qorroffice employee, Tahsin Kurtoglu shook his head, and when his accuser had finished, exclaimed: “Those are nothing but calumnies and fabrications bruited about by my rivals!”
These words, far from calming the crowd that had gathered, only served to excite it, and things began to get noisy and rough. People were even heard to shout: “You’ve let him have his say, now give him what he deserves, the Tibetan method!” “We want the Tibetan! We want the Tibetan!” others began to chant, but one of the officials, after signaling to the crowd to stop shouting, made a short speech in which he stressed the clemency of the state, which, on this occasion, would only reprimand Kortoglu. “But the main thing,” he said, wagging his finger at the poet, “is that this is your last warning!”
Everybody could now see clearly that the tide of denunciations and poison-pen letters had gone over the top, and when people caught sight of the mail-wagon going down the street, they would stop to gaze at it in horror, as they knew that at least half its load consisted of just such kinds of missives.
It was on one of those gloomy days that Marie closed her bedroom door behind her, went to the window, and watched her fiancé go out into the street. He’d seemed altered, and rather sterner than usual During lunch, despite her father’s efforts to liven things up, the conversation had hardly got off the ground.
It was because of him, she could see it now! She watched him saunter down the street until he vanished behind the shade trees on the sidewalk, and the same thought occurred to her: he must be worried about something.
She ran through a list of possible reasons. Overwork, office intrigues, pangs of conscience. . but in the end she began to wonder whether she had only imagined it. Didn’t everyone sometimes wake up in a bad mood, which only gets worse when someone else remarks, “You don’t seem your usual self today.” That must be it. No doubt about it.
Only half-dressed, she went to the mirror and looked at herself, bending first one knee, then the other. There, at the top of her right thigh, she saw two bluish bruises, the trace of the preceding Sunday afternoons. Whereas the latest bruises would not become visible for two or three days. . She looked for a moment at her smooth belly and the low black tufts that covered her crotch, then she sat on the carpet with legs half-crossed, and studied her sexual organ.
“It’s all quiet now,” she thought, “as if nothing had ever happened.”
She could not take her eyes off the slightly curved line separating the pink lips of her vulva. They looked like lips that would never speak. . And yet, just a few moments before, they had been almost crazily talkative, dribbling. .
“Unbelievable,” she said inwardly. It then occurred to her that a woman’s sex was without any doubt the most inexplicable and enigmatic thing in the world. Those silent labia would never tell anyone what had gone on inside and around them.
Feeling suddenly grateful, she stroked her belly, her crotch, then the lips themselves. But she soon felt a shiver of cold, and got up to put on some clothes.