Free Agamemnon's Daughter by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

defend himself by claiming that he had at least shown some anxiety about that letter from Lushnjë (which was true). Had he not said: “You must be careful with things like that, sometimes they can get you in deep shit”? But that was what sealed his fate.
    “So why didn’t you raise the issue, since you were anxious about it, eh? So as not to incur your boss’s displeasure? Out of servility, hmm? Or worse? Speak up, comrade! Ask yourself! You’re much more dangerous than your scatterbrained colleagues. You see evil staring at you, and you turn a blind eye!”
    After the Head of Radio had been banished, first to the countryside, then to the mines, most of us thought that, what with the scapegoat having been found, the hailstorm would abate. Nothing of the sort. Meetings continued to be called at the same grueling frequency. The most awful part was realizing we were getting used to the idea of what had seemed to be, only the day before, a somber foreboding too ghastly to seem plausible. At the bottom of each hole, another hole opened up beneath us, and we all thought: Oh, no! Not further! There has to be a limit, things are already abominable enough! But by the next day the abominable had turned into the sort of thing that nobody found surprising anymore. What was even worse was that wavering minds strove to find a justification for it.
    Each day we felt the cogs and wheels of collective guilt pushing us further down. We were obliged to take a stand, make accusations, and fling mud at people — at ourselves in the first place, then at everyone else. It was a truly diabolical mechanism, because once you’ve debased yourself, it’s easy to sully everything around you. Every day, every hour that passed stripped more flesh from moral values. Minds became drunk on an unwholesome brew: the euphoria of self-debasement, of universal corruption. Sell me, brother, I won’t hold it against you, I’ve sold you so many times already . . . And the noose of collective guilt carried on tightening around our necks.
    At first sight, you might have said it was nothing more than a war machine set in motion by malice, ambition, and the thirst for revenge. But a closer look would have shown that things were more complex than that. Like an alloy composed of extremely varied materials, it contained utterly contradictory ingredients: cruelty as well as compassion, repentance alongside unbounded joy at not having been struck down — which itself gave way almost instantly to the superstitious fear of having to pay for such luck. The complete absence of coherence and logic only increased people’s fatalism. Thus even those who had refrained from joining in the hysteria also got hit. They aroused a bizarre kind of commiseration that had the outward form of resentment. Poor guys! But, from another point of view, it serves them right, they were too hasty in thinking they could get off lightly . . . The hysterical were also taken down — those who had yelled louder than anyone else against the accused, and called for the heaviest sanctions. Their fall raised a wave of satisfaction. Serves them right! Everything has to he paid for in this life . . . And the blade also fell on those who dug in their heels and refused to write a self-criticism at first; but the pit was just as deep, if not deeper, for those who’d been in a hurry to confess their sins and to testify against themselves.
    It was impossible to know what was the better course — to stay in your shell or to come out fighting; to be prominent or just one of the crowd; to be a Party member or outside all parties. As it is during an earthquake, people ran about in all directions looking for shelter, but buildings that looked solid and shock-proof would suddenly collapse. Everything was shifting, nothing remained still, and this profound instability affected thoughts and behaviors. Reasoning was put out of joint, whims of resisting vanished into thin air, as did any thought of revolt.