Agamemnon's Daughter by Ismail Kadare

Author:Ismail Kadare [Kadare, Ismail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-188-7
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Blinding Order

1

By the last week of September it became obvious that the sequence of events could not have been just a string of coincidences. No sooner had he sung his first call to prayers — and done so admirably, in the view of all who were lucky enough to hear him — our new young hodja Ibrahim fell down the minaret stair. Next, we learned that the crown prince had been taken ill, likewise after a public appearance. Two or three more unusual things then happened in a row before the end of a week, which had a real twist in its tail. As he was making his way to the imperial palace, where he was widely expected to make the long-awaited announcement of his government’s agreement to a substantial loan, the British ambassador was involved in an accident, and his carriage overturned.

Bystanders chased down the alleys in pursuit of someone — a woman, or perhaps a man wearing a veil — who had stared at the landau as it crossed Blue Mosque Bridge a few moments before toppling over, but in vain, which is why the culprit was never found. But everyone agreed about one thing: the ambassador’s accident, the young hodja’s fall, and the sickness of the crown prince, as well as other facts of a similar kind, must have had a single, common cause. It was the evil eye.

This was obviously not the first time the eye had exercised its maleficent power. Collective memory, not to mention the archives and annals of the state, were full of similar occurrences, which tended to prove that from time to time, when aroused, the eye could spread misfortunes and calamities on an epidemic scale, if not worse. So there was no reason to be surprised that since time immemorial people had often had recourse to the saying: “He’s been struck by the evil eye!”

Maybe because of the cold wet weather that autumn, or because of the economic crisis, the harmful actions of the carriers of the evil eye were doing more damage than ever. That made people all the more tense and angry, just as it provided unusually detailed material for the report that, people said, had already been submitted to the sovereign.

The sultan’s response had been expected for days. If it was not to be a decree (some people were convinced it would take that form), then at least there would be a decision, or a proclamation, or perhaps a secret circular.

By Tuesday evening, no edict had been issued by the imperial chancery. And as always in such circumstances, initial speculation about the expected measures were embroidered by yet more badly muddled tongue-wagging.

In times gone by, any suspected sabotage by an “evil eye” was punished by harsh measures of the same order as those meted out to heretics: the guilty were thrown into a pit of quicklime, flayed alive, or stoned to death. People in the capital still remembered the flaying of Shanisha, an old woman who with

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