“So when you told me you were going to ask for leave for after our wedding, you already knew?” she asked.
“Yes. That was the day they told me I was being removed from office.”
“Oh. .” she said. “But how could you stop yourself from telling me? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t want to depress you before it was absolutely necessary. I was still hoping against hope, since I’d been told to stay in the capital while the denunciation was being examined. But that faint hope gradually faded away. . Apparently the denunciation has been accepted.”
“But why? Why?” she repeated, stifling a scream.
She looked at his gray-clouded eyes as if she could find in them the reason for the unfurling of the whole ghastly story.
“You’re asking me why?” he said with a faint and bitter smile. “I don’t consider myself to have eyes more clairvoyant than others, I can’t see better or further into the future, and if I could I would be instantly suspect in the eyes of any tyrannical power. .”
Good God! she thought. One evening her father had come out with the same thing, almost word for word.
“So, I don’t count myself particularly clearsighted. But there’s a good reason for our sight to be extinguished. Every trace has to be destroyed.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“It’s very simple. We were witnesses to many things that have to be wiped out.”
“Who is we?”
“All of us who up to last night worked in the blinding commissions. Our eyes saw so many things they should not have. . Do you understand?”
“Things you should not have seen,” she repeated in a trailing voice. “Horrible things?”
“Of course. We were too close to the machinery, we were almost brushed by its cogs and belts.”
“My poor darling.” She sighed, and once again he felt her tears on his cheek, but the thought of the acid hurt him less acutely this time, as if his skin had already grown less sensitive to it.
“Sometimes lists were brought to us that had already been approved by higher authority,” he said.
“Investigations were only made retrospectively.”
“What an abomination! In other words, all that gossip about the settling of scores wasn’t that far off the mark?”
He nodded.
She snuggled up even closer to him. “What about the others?” she asked a moment later. “Is everyone who worked there going to meet the same fate?”
“Probably not. The first batch to be struck down are people who are suspected of being able to talk.”
“Able to talk?” she repeated. “So what have eyes got to with that? The main requirement is the mouth. .”
“The mouth’s turn may come next,” he cut in. After a pause he added: “At any rate, if putting out eyes isn’t sufficient to make a man see reason. .”
“My God!” She sighed.
“In any case, even if none of us had been suspected, some would have been sacrificed automatically.”
She stared at him with the awkward look of someone who has simply not understood what has been said.
“That’s almost certainly one of the main reasons,” he continued. “We’re being sentenced so that a part of the horror of what happened gets attributed to us. Do you see what I mean? Everyone would like to put the blame for his own misfortune on us and our so-called mistakes. .”
In the silence that followed each could hear the other breathing.
“As soon as they began to talk of the commission’s mistakes,” she said, “I felt my heart sinking, but then I tried to put the thought out of my head.”
“Well, when those first rumors surfaced, my partner in the office said: ‘It’s our turn now.”’
Silence ensued once more, and nothing could be heard except the rustling of their bodies as they tried to find another position in which to hold each other tight.
“Was it just a coincidence, or was that why you asked me the other day about the Köprülüs?”
“No, it wasn’t coincidental at all. I could pretty much guess what you were going to say. I knew all too well that the Köprülüs have their own troubles to worry about. But a drowning man tries to pull himself out of the water by his own hair, if that’s all there is to grab!”
“Now I understand why my mentioning making love in the dark made you go on and on, like a man in a fever, saying, ‘In the middle of the night, in the dark. .’”
“Yes. I’d already begun to feel I belonged to the world of the night.”
She stroked him for a long while. “As long as I’m here you’ll belong to this world, the world of light.”
The gray shadow in his eyes was imbued with boundless suffering.
“Do you think there’s no hope at all?” she inquired. “Isn’t there any way to plead your case?”
He shook his head.
“Where do they do the investigations? Where are such decisions made? In your case, for example.”
“Nowhere, in all likelihood. The decision may have been made on day one, as soon as the poison-pen letter about me came in. .”
“Of course. . All trace has to be erased…”
She thought better of asking any more pointless questions and went back to cuddling him. He barely responded to her comforting caresses. But his eyes remained alert, with a kind of morbid gleam. He gazed hungrily at her breasts, at the blue marks on her upper thigh, at her belly, then still lower, between her legs, which she spread open so he could more easily see her sex.
He’s looking at me like that so he can memorize it completely, she thought.
“I shall live with your image engraved in my mind,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.
“I’ll wait for you,” she replied in a flattened voice. “Do you understand? I’ll wait for you to come back from that place. . Ill live only for you. If you don’t keep me engraved in your memory as I am today, I think I’d die… I would fade away like a shadow… I would lose all life and shape… I remain the same as you remember me. Only if you consciously blot me out of your mind will I truly disappear, like a drawing rubbed out by an eraser. .”
He didn’t reply but only went on slowly stroking the part of her body he had been gazing at so insistently a few minutes before. She noticed that as he moved his hand over her he kept his eyes shut. He’s imagining what it will be like to caress me when he’s not able to see, she thought.
She was on the point of bursting into tears and screaming like a madwoman, not only at the thought of the misfortune about to descend upon her, but also, and above all, for a reason she couldn’t even admit to herself but which surged up in confusion from the depths of her being: the fear of not being able to keep the promise she had just made Xheladin.
“What if I put out my eyes at the same time?” she asked suddenly, as if she’d been struck by a burst of fever. “On a bright morning, on the verandah, it couldn’t be easier. . That way we would both belong to the same side of the world. . Then even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to leave you. .”