Her words were then smothered in tears, and he couldn’t make out what she said at the end.
“Don’t be so stupid!” he said kindly. “You said such sensible things a moment ago. What’s made you talk so crazy now?”
They hugged again, and then he said: “We can be together as night and day. I will be your night, and you will be my day. . All right?”
She sobbed so hard she couldn’t answer. She tried to hold back her tears, but instead burst into heart-rending hiccups of the sort that go with weeping over an irreparable loss.
By all visible evidence, the campaign was winding down. Admittedly, town criers hadn’t come back to the squares to proclaim a return to normal, but everyone was convinced the scourge had passed. Here and there, it could still strike someone down, like the last streak of lightning at the end of a storm, but its flashes were now enfeebled and far away.
The last days of fall were slowly turning into ordinary days, the way they had been before the qorrfirman. One by one, the blinding offices had been closed, and to many people it seemed as if they had never existed. Cafes were full of customers once more, and their faces glowed with the joy of having escaped blind fate. Ghastly words like misophthalmia, qorrof fice, Tibetan, which, when first heard long before seemed destined to mark out life’s path to all eternity, were now dropped and forgotten.
The marks on Marie’s white legs also gradually disappeared. She thought that was probably how her own image would fade in her fiancé’s mind.
God knew what he was doing, with his hands and feet tied in some dark dungeon. They tied them up like that, so people said, as they did with men condemned to death, to stop them tearing off their blindfolds.
One of their acquaintances had spoken to them about what it was like to live in a dungeon. Prisoners spent daylight hours half-reclining, lying side by side in long rows. Some prayed nonstop, others wept, some silently, some sobbing out loud. Some talked to themselves for hours on end. Others revolted, yelled out like men possessed, swore at the accursed decree, and ended up calming down and asking for forgiveness, beseeching mercy, and begging Allah to grant long life to the emperor. And then there were those who went into a religious trance and looked forward to the day of their blinding so they would be freed, in their own words, from the sight of this sublunar world.
Some became delirious, and in a kind of ecstasy made speeches lasting hours on end. The world, they would say, looked more beautiful now that they could no longer see it, and far from suffering from the dark, they could feel their heads fill to the brim with light. They claimed they at last understood that eyes do not allow light to enter human minds, but on the contrary, like faucets installed back-to-front, let inner light leak out and thus impoverished the mind.
That’s what one kind of prisoner said, but most of them remained silent, as if they had been struck dumb. Now and then, they would wave their bound arms about incomprehensibly, as if they were clearing a cobweb away from in front of their blindfolded eyes.
God alone knew what Xheladin was doing! Had he kept her image intact in his memory? Or had that shape already begun to grow faint?
Marie instinctively put her hand to her cheek and her lips, as if the decomposition of her image could affect her physically. Then she stared at her body, where the blue marks had been, but had now almost vanished, and was overcome by gloomy thoughts on the ephemeral nature of all things.
She had told him she would wait, but she knew that was not entirely true. To be sure, she would wait for him in her thoughts, she would never forget him, but that was not the same thing at all. The first Sunday without him, when the family at table fell into a funereal silence, they all came to the conclusion that he was now in that place whence no man returns: she also convinced herself that it was all over between them.
The last and only piece of news they had about him was that his request to the authorities to be blinded in the European manner had been accepted.
“No point thinking about him again,” her father said. “You’re too young to spend the rest of your life with a blind man. In addition, you know full well that it’s not a blindness inflicted by disease or an act of God, but by the will of the state. .”
She did not answer but went up to her room to mourn her separation in silent sobs.
Deep inside her heart, she felt immense joy at having given herself to him entirely. She could not have done more.
Winter was coming on with its miserable and endless nights, and she felt that henceforth he would really be her night, her uneasy sleep, her eternal regret. Sometimes she imagined that a similar feeling of guilt hung in the air, borne by winter’s first winds, and rattling in the windowpanes and the other sounds of ordinary life.
In early winter, the sightless suddenly began congregating on sidewalks and in cafes. Their fumbling steps caused passersby to stop and stare in disbelief. Although citizens had lived for months in fear of the qorrfirman, the sight of its results rooted them to the ground, petrified them.
For some time people had allowed themselves to think that the victims of that notorious order had been swallowed up in the dark night of oblivion, that the only people you would come across in the street or the square were the formerly blind, with their unchanging appearance, the peaceful tap-tap-tap of their sticks — the kind of blind people everyone’s eyes and ears were long accustomed to. But now the first winter freeze had brought with it innumerable blind folk of a new and far more lugubrious kind.
There was something specific about them that distinguished them from the traditionally unsighted. They had a disturbing swagger, and their sticks made a menacing knock-knock-knock on the cobblestones.
They’ve not yet grown used to their new condition, some argued. Blindness came to them at a stroke, not gradually, as is usually the case, so they haven’t yet acquired the necessary reflexes. . But those who heard such remarks shook their heads, clearly not convinced. Could that be the only reason?
What was most striking was their collective reappearance. It was probably not a coincidence, nor could it have been the result of secret collusion among them, contrary to the rumors that were being circulated by people who saw anti-state conspiracies in everything and anything. It came from the simple fact that the time needed for most of them to recover — either from the physical wounds caused by disoculation or from its attendant psychological trauma — had now elapsed.
Some among them, particularly those who had been blinded in the aristocratic manner, by exposure to the sun, bore a grave and dignified air as they went and sat down in cafes and tearooms. It was presumably easier for them to behave with hauteur, not just because of the cash bonus and the generous pension they had been granted but because their eyes had not been physically mutilated when they were blinded. On the other hand, most of the others had let themselves go. They were dressed in rags, and by way of footwear all they had were wooden clogs, which made the sound of their approach particularly distressing.
But those who had been unsighted by violent means were not the only ones to look wretched. Even some who had turned themselves in to the qorroffices and been received with all due honor were now shuffling around in tatters. Similarly, there were a number of well-dressed people — better dressed than they had been before — among those who had been disoculated violently. They stood defiantly in full sight of all, as if to challenge the world with their black and empty sockets.