Agamemnon's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

from above about the shortfall in the Economic Plan, and so on, and maybe he’d just wanted to get an awkward piece of business over and done with as quickly as possible.
    He looked on me almost with kindness, simply because I had taken this burden off his shoulders. As I left the room, I thought he was about to put his avuncular hand on my shoulder just as I’d seen done so many times in films made in the “New Albania” studios. And although his hand did not actually materialize, I spent many days wondering what people would now say about me. That was inevitable, as I was the only one of the three people caught up in this business to get off without a scratch. It was a stroke of pure luck that, before they left for the back of beyond, the other two kept on saying to all and sundry that I had nothing to do with it, that they had only themselves to blame, and that they were very glad the story stopped there, because it could have turned out much worse.
    Later on, whenever my mind wandered back to this episode, I was more and more struck by the words: “Make yourself scarce now! Get out, and remember, not a word of this to a living soul!” The secretary’s hurry to close the case, his gratitude toward me, and especially his inclination to treat it as mainly a matter of harebrained idiots and boastful liars, gradually clarified what had at first seemed a real puzzle. There really wasn’t any mystery, even less an illogical chain of events caused by a loose cog in the machine. And it had nothing to do with the secretary being exhausted by an overheavy workload. It was a device intended to nip the rumor in the bud. The rumor was of an especially dangerous sort that the state had every reason to stop before it started. That was why, when the sentence was made public, the real charge was not mentioned at all, and the two men were sent down officially for professional lapses of the kind anyone could be accused of at any time.
    It would have been more logical for the state to turn a blind eye and let the two men go scot-free. But who knows which cog was whizzing away on its own and still demanding a punishment at any cost . . . Unless something else was going on that I could not figure out.
    That was what was chaotically floating around in my mind as I came up to the Grand Boulevard. After a lapse of several months, I was once again worried that what had really happened would look suspicious to some people. After all, anyone who knew me would be quite right in finding my presence in the grandstand suspicious. I myself had wondered two or three times whether or not I had served as an unwitting tool to dig my colleagues’ graves a little deeper. After all, I was the person responsible for their having been accused of mistakenly confusing revisionist waywardness with the realities of socialism . . . Not to mention what they might think if they both saw me today on their television screens! They would probably think: “We believed he was getting us off the hook, but apparently he must have been digging our grave even deeper to wind up with such a lavish reward!”
    They would have done better not to give me this invitation, I reflected. Or I would have been better off not coming, as Suzana and I had agreed . . . Suddenly all the pain of her absence hit me as heavily as the lid of a tomb. Oh Lord! I sighed bitterly. Too many burdens to bear all at once!
    Where the two boulevards intersected there was another checkpoint, which was stricter than the others. But I had now stopped worrying about them. A secret hope that the cops would find something out of order on my invitation and make me turn back made my heart beat faster as I waited at each security check.
    No such luck! In some areas of life, delays, oversights, and sloppiness just don’t arise. Issuing official invitations was one of them.
    Both sidewalks of the Grand Boulevard were packed with people. That was where most of the invited guests were placed. That’s exactly