“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 . . .”
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.
11
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.
12
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.
At the sight of these gaping wounds, some people were so disturbed they themselves began to stumble, as if the ground had suddenly opened up beneath them.
Why do they have to show themselves like that? people wondered. Why aren’t they forbidden access to main roads, to stop them curdling our blood with those ghastly holes in their heads?
The blind paid not the slightest heed to remarks of that kind. Not content to stay at tearoom and cafe tables for hours on end, they listened to the news read aloud from papers at nearby tables, and joined in the conversation. Fortunately, public affairs were taking a better turn nowadays, they would say, proving that their sacrifice had not been in vain. What a pity we can’t see what’s going on! some of them lamented over and over again. But that doesn’t really matter in the end. Even if we can’t see, we can imagine what it’s like, and we’re just as pleased about it as you are.
Some of them remained silent, black as crows, while others, taking up the tradition of the blind, got hold of a musical instrument and accompanied themselves as they sang epic rhymes or love songs of their own composition.
The tide of the blind continued to rise, at the same rate as hostile gossip about them. Rumor had it that a forthcoming decree would resettle most of them in some remote province of the country (the Empire wasn’t short of impoverished regions of that kind!) so that foreigners, at least, would never set eyes upon them.
Far from giving any substance to such rumors, on the last Friday in December — on the very day when a special order was announced granting a full pardon to people blinded by violent means — the state held a Banquet of Forgiveness (a sad
aka, as it was expressed in the language of the land) for the benefit of all the victims of the Blinding Order.
This “Reconciliation Banquet,” as it was subsequently dubbed by malicious tongues, was held in the Imperial Manége, which was the only building large enough for the number of tables required for the many thousands of guests.
The blind flocked toward the manege from all quarters of the capital in an unending clatter of clogs and sticks, and in such confusion that the police were obliged to close the entire area to traffic for several hours.
Dozens of functionaries were there to welcome them and lead them to their places, but all the same, when the blind finally entered the Great Hall and especially when they tried to get to their designated tables, things degenerated into a veritable riot. They knocked over chairs, they did not know where to put the Balkan lyres and lahutas which they had brought with them, God knows why, most of them groped clumsily at their dinner plates and spilled food on themselves, or else tipped the plates right oven.
Among this crowd of the blind, someone noticed a clog-wearing, raggedy man elbowing his way toward a table, who was none other than the former grand vizier.
At a long table sat the high officials of the court, together with members of the government and of the entourage of Sheikh ul-lslam. Journalists and foreign diplomats had also been invited.
One of the officials tried to make a speech, but as most of the blind had begun to stuff themselves with food, most of his words were drowned by the scraping of cutlery and the clatter of crockery. Nonetheless, the essential sentences about the need for sacrifice in service of the common good, and especially the message from the sultan encouraging everyone to forget the past and remain loyal to the state, were relatively well understood.
With gravy dripping from their chins, and in high spirits induced by such good food — especially the nut halvah — many of the blind started strumming on their lahutas.
The officials, journalists, and diplomats looked on in silence as the disorderly feast unfolded before their eyes.