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Requiem for an Enigma

By Cardie-ologist

Garak felt decidedly ill at ease in the station's temple. He could sense the eyes of the Bajorans behind him boring into his back as they remembered that Cardassians had only ever entered their sacred places in order to despoil them. He tried to block out the candles, the incense, the sounds of bells, the Vedek's droning chant. He kept his gaze steady on the five drawings that were mounted on easels flanking the casket. Her drawings. Her casket. He didn't even let himself listen to what Major Kira was saying, save to notice how her voice caught as she made her good byes.

Well, he certainly wasn't going to cry that wasn't the Cardassian way. But neither was it their way to eulogize the departed in this manner. He must have been mad with grief when he had agreed to deliver "some brief remarks."

And now Kira had stopped, and returned to her seat beside him, and looked at him with her reddened eyes to indicate that it was his turn. He braced himself and stepped forward to do something he had never before done in his life: speak directly the feelings in his heart.

"Tora Ziyal was an enigma," he began. "Now I know that you are thinking that only the devious mind of Elim Garak could consider a young woman so open, so straightforward, so guileless to be an enigma. But ponder with me for a few minutes the mysterious contradiction at the core of her being, the contradiction between her experience of life and her view of life. Even before it ended so abruptly and so tragically, Ziyal's history had been one of hardship and loss. She was born of an illicit liaison between the head of a colonial occupying force and a woman who belonged to a subject race. Both Bajoran and Cardassian, and yet viewed as alien and suspect by each race, she could only have found peace far away from either world. And yet, on the way to seeking that peace, she lost her beloved mother and was enslaved by cruel taskmasters for most of those years that mark a young girl's passage into womanhood. When her father and our valiant Major Kira miraculously rescued her, she found herself the cause of her father's disgrace and self imposed exile, and she was once again forced to live apart from him. She had the good fortune to find refuge here, among all you good people who have gathered here to remember her, but this refuge lasted only fleetingly. Ziyal soon found herself caught again in the middle of terrible conflicts, both political and personal, and they eventually destroyed her.

"During my sojourn with the crew of the Defiant, I told my friend Dr. Bashir that I always hoped for the best, but that experience had taught me to expect the worst. Surely the experiences I have just recounted should have taught Ziyal the same lesson. As you well know, however, they did not. No matter what their consequences, to Ziyal every one of the events I have alluded to had its origin in love, in the love of her father for her mother and his love for her, his daughter. She herself had an unlimited capacity to love, and the more dark facts she knew about a person only made her love that person the more. Otherwise, how could she ever have treasured either her father or . . . me? You may think, she was young, she was naive, she was blind. But she was not blind. Look around you at her drawings. Can anyone deny that Ziyal had a keen eye? Yet that eye saw differently than ours; she had a transfiguring vision. I don't believe that she found the good in everyone so much as she created some good in everyone she chose to love.

How was this possible? We Cardassians have great skill in unraveling the enigmas of guilt. This enigma of innocence, I am powerless to interpret.

"There is still another enigma that haunts us. Why was a young woman so innocent and so loving taken from us so soon? Even though her untimely death was only one of millions this terrible war has brought about, surely we feel justified in protesting it nevertheless. To the Cardassian who took her life, the answer was simple. She had betrayed Cardassia and deserved to die. From his unfortunately parochial view, he was right. State and ideology were nothing to her when friendship and personal loyalties demanded differently. Beyond knowing that he was wrong, however, I have no answer to give you. I have thought long and hard, but nothing in my own beliefs can provide a consoling explanation. Perhaps, as you remember her, you will be more fortunate. I do know that, if Ziyal could communicate with us from the Celestial Temple, she would insist that her death had served some higher purpose. I can just hear her now, 'I know it sounds silly Elim, but ' I cannot yet imagine what would follow the 'but.' However, I assure you, friends of Tora Ziyal, that it would not have been silly."

His remarks ended, Garak only then dared look the gathered mourners in the face. Astonishingly, all eyes he met were tear swollen. More astonishing still, so were his.