Free Agamemnon's Daughter by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

Nobody would have dared ask what was going on or why. And you didn’t feel angry in the slightest, just as you wouldn’t think of railing against thunder and lightning.
    Was the plan to scatter and destroy us all so that only the state would remain standing, like an inaccessible, untouchable Fate? Or was there just some mysterious set of circumstances allowing the storm to rage ever on? The force of its gale, the way it gusted from unexpected angles, and the sheer randomness of what it knocked down certainly incited terror. What was quite noticeable, however, was that it also aroused admiration for Power.
    As we went from meeting to meeting, our mangled souls and diminished beings became ever more un-hinged. A comrade of mine who worked for the courts told me that a similar kind of decline usually set in among prisoners held in solitary confinement, especially during the first phase of the investigation. We, of course, could go out into the open and mingle in noisy crowds, but we felt as isolated as if we had been incarcerated between the four walls of a cell. Maybe even more so.
    By now the letter from Lushnjë had come to seem as remote and unlikely as the omen that in bygone days was believed to tell of a coming plague. Where was that letter now? On what shelf, in what archive had it been filed? In what closet now hung that only slightly overlong dress that had provoked the fatal letter?
    If anyone had said a few days ago — a whole era ago — that the letter that prompted the Head of Broadcasting’s witticisms over coffee would one day cost him his job, we’d have split our sides laughing. But that day had come, and nobody found it surprising. We were all rather more inclined to feel a kind of relief. The boil had been lanced at long last! The cure would bring peace to all, and not least to the Head of Broadcasting himself. Granted, the penalty could hardly have been more humiliating for a member of the Central Committee. Big Boss was redeployed to manage municipal services in a small town called N. That’s not too bad a deal for him when all is said and done, people opined. He would still have a car. All right, only an old rattletrap. But a jalopy is still a car — and a whole lot better than being eaten away by anxiety.
    Of course, you could look on the bright side. Yes, the hurricane had drifted away from the Broadcasting Service and was now battering all the other institutions of cultural life. It was said that grievous errors of liberal inspiration had spread their tentacles almost everywhere — to the Union of Writers and Artists, books and magazines, and film production . . .

11
    The brass band’s beat was now keeping time with the train of my thoughts. For a short while, I’d imagined the band had paused and then started up again even more deafeningly. Actually, there had been no interlude. It was just an impression, perhaps a consequence of taking in the music while lost in my mental reenactment of events at the Broadcasting Service. I must have incorporated the music unconsciously and allowed the furious and sinister flourishes of drums and brass to mark time to the horrors of that past madness.
    The hurricane had sucked up writers, ministers, allegedly right-deviationist ideas, movies, senior civil servants, and plays. Amid the general chaos, the expression “rightist deviation in cultural affairs” often floated to the surface, and in its wake came the even more ominous phrase, “anti-Party group.”
    Compared to what was going on in the capital, the circumstances of the former Head of Broadcasting in the little town of N. — which most of us had first considered utterly degrading — looked idyllic. To be responsible only for house painters, toilet repairers, and swimming pool maintenance workers! That was an oasis of peace compared to areas in the eye of the storm, as Ideology and Art now were. Some people must surely have envied him in secret . . .
    The peace didn’t last long, however. One