Agamemnon's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

had flung whole handfuls of mud without thinking for a moment that nothing stopped them from doing the same to me.
    The Grand Boulevard was not far off now. Haven’t you got anything on your own conscience? I asked myself. Six months previously, as I came out of a local Party inquiry where we’d heard the charges against us, I’d asked myself that question for the first time. Now I shook my head again, as I had then. No, there was no stain of that kind on my conscience! Although I had been the unwitting cause of two colleagues in a neighboring office being sentenced to relegation to some godforsaken hole, I was not guilty. Quite the opposite: you could say that their stupidity had very nearly caused my own ruination. “You are at a meeting of a committee of the Party, and you should know that at meetings of Party committees, lying is forbidden!” the secretary shouted as he looked straight into our eyes. “You there!” he said, pointing at me. “Where was it that you heard the perfidious insinuation that gossip and tittle-tattle about the fall of such and such a leader, far from emanating from the petit-bourgeois element in our society and from there seeping into the minds of the people, had been manufactured by the state itself — that is to say, according to your story, by a secret bureau set up for the specific purpose of paving the way for the actual fall of said leader?”
    I had never in all my life felt so uncomfortable. My office partner, who was gaping open-mouthed on the other side of the room, had indeed told me the story, but what I did not know then was that he had already confessed everything. I replied point-blank, with a strange confidence, which I allowed to take over for the seconds and minutes it lasted, that I had indeed read such a theory in a book about Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion. The secretary’s eyes looked right through me, but as I spoke I managed to convince myself that I really had read something like that in a book. What helped me make such a show of sincerity was that I genuinely had just finished skimming through a book about Czechoslovakia.
    I don’t know what it was that the secretary liked about my answer. It would have been only fair of him to lean toward my partner’s version, since he’d taken the risk of baring himself, and thus to treat my story with skepticism. But the opposite happened. Without giving them time to justify themselves (“Thank goodness,” they told me later on, “that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid having to do!”), he accused my office colleagues of being dangerous chatterboxes, sinister idiots, liars, and megalomaniacs who thought they understood politics when in fact they didn’t have a clue. Incurable gossips who lacked all sense of responsibility, who transposed anything they heard about the horrible truths of bourgeois countries onto our own fine socialist way of life, and so on. Whereas I got off with one of those criticisms that sounded more like praise. In other words, I should have taken greater care to separate subjects such as those involved in the present erroneous comparison, to ward off any confusions that could give rise to conversations such as those under consideration, especially if I ever talked of such things in the hearing of brainless twits who were as politically naive as my two colleagues.
    “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul, you understand?” Those were the secretary’s last words to me. For a long time I found his behavior and the sudden conclusion of the case rather puzzling. Did it come from some cog in the machine suddenly changing direction and causing a whole string of illogicalities to ensue? Or was it that the secretary simply seized upon the introduction of an alien element like Czechoslovakia to bring the whole thing to a rapid end? Maybe it was even simpler than that. He’d had a lot of problems to deal with at the time, what with criticisms