The Successor

  The rest of the girl’s story — of her tearful pleading that failed to soften her father’s heart — could just as well have been about her first love cut brutally short, as about her later engagement, which had been speeded up with a sinister end in view — as was only now becoming clear.

  What a cynic that man was! the Party veterans muttered as they left the hall. He offered up his daughter like a lamb — so imagine where he could have led Albania! The country had been really very fortunate in escaping a Successor of that ilk.

  As they chatted along these lines, some of the oldest stalwarts nursed private hopes that the Guide would in the end pick a Successor worthy of the name. Many others weren’t at all sure that a man deserving to stand that close to the Guide could ever be found. The best that might be done would be to appoint an acting Successor, so to speak, a kind of ante-Successor, if such a title could legitimately be used.

  In that case, someone piped up, it was no secret that the only plausible candidate for the post was Adrian Hasobeu. The others nodded. That was obvious. Hadn’t he long been thought of as a silent opponent of the Successor? He’d even been suspected of…

  As they got nearer home, their expressions softened, and when their families set eyes on them they breathed a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, the cleaners who were clearing up the meeting halls, opening doors and windows to let in some air, were surprised by the odd smell that filled the place. It was different from the odor of feet, sheep-wax, and sour milk they had encountered after the assembly of top-ranking herders. It was another smell, one that had been getting more common recently. It was the smell bodies make when they are afraid.

  4

  Adrian Hasobeu was aware that his name was now on everybody’s lips. But whereas rumors of that kind would have kept him awake all night long in days gone by, they now produced quite the opposite effect.

  Everything had changed in a flash when the Guide, after tergiversating unendingly throughout the spring, which had been a dark season for Adrian Hasobeu, had reached his decision and denounced the Successor for treason.

  Never before in his whole existence had he felt such relief. The slackening of the tension in his limbs and of all that coursed through his lungs, his blood vessels, and his brow made him realize that a part of his being that he had believed dead, but which had in fact only been sleeping, was coming back to life, as if it was slowly emerging from a static bank of fog.

  Several members of his clan had gathered under his roof. Near silence reigned over their solemn presence. They said nothing, but gazed with shared affection at his drawn features. The eldest of his uncles was the only one to put his arms around him, before breaking down in tears.

  After lunch, when he told them, “I’m going to take a short rest,” the same caring glances fell upon him, alongside muttered have-a-good-nap-have-a-good-rest-sweet-sister-souls.

  From his bedroom he lent an ear to the murmurs that his absence had probably revived. It lulled him to a sleep more delicious than any he had known before.

  When he woke up, he knew at once that they were still in the house. They were probably even more transported by joy than he was, just as in March, when the house had been almost entirely empty, they had probably been even more distraught than he had been. He didn’t feel the slightest resentment for their having abandoned him at that time. He had even strongly advised them to act that way. “It would be better if you didn’t show your faces here until things have been cleaned up.”

  The clarification took its time. Complications arose from the first morning after the Successor’s death. His wife had been the first to grill him: “What do you say to the rumors people are spreading about you?”

  He didn’t answer. A long silence followed, then his wife returned to the attack: Even supposing he had really been over there … at his house … around midnight … why should it have been divulged? Who had spotted him? In short, why had the gossip not been stopped?

  He raised his eyes, with a bitter smile on his lips, but his wife didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “I know what you’re going to say — that you can’t put a stop to gossip. But you know as well as I do that you can!”

  Indeed he knew. Despite that, this first phase, oddly enough, left him cold. At the end of the day, he had gotten the better of his perfidious rival. Even the suspicion that he had liquidated the Successor somewhat ahead of time served to show only that he’d been excessively eager. It was a well-known fact that, in this kind of case, overeagerness earned not only a reprimand, but also a degree of respect. The mere existence of the suspicion had suddenly enhanced his stature in the eyes of others. Because of it, his promotion to a higher position now seemed only a matter of course. The rumor that he might even be picked to fill the Successor’s shoes sprang from the same kind of reasoning.

  Things only started to turn the wrong way in March, with news of the autopsy. The scalpels and tongs used to section the Successor’s cadaver would have caused him less agony than the fragmentary speculations he heard from all quarters. The autopsy wouldn’t have been ordered if there hadn’t been doubts. Its results could turn things upside down. The Successor’s sudden return in the shape of a martyr could easily cast his rival into the abyss.

  The same questions preyed on Adrian Hasobeu’s mind from the moment he got up to his going to bed: Why was no one taking his defense? Why was the Guide not giving him any support?

  The latter’s eyes appeared to recognize him no longer. It was apparently the last benefit that the onset of total blindness could give him. But as he went over in his mind his last meeting with the Guide, Adrian Hasobeu still could not see what mistake he had made.

  … The Politburo meeting seemed to go on forever, on that late afternoon of December 13. The Successor was answering questions with ever sparser sentences. Sometimes he left a pause, as if waiting for the end of some inaudible translation. His eyes remained fixed on the typescript of his self-criticism, on which every now and again he penciled annotations.

  All of a sudden, the Guide took his fob watch out of the pocket of his black jacket. He kept looking at it as the secretary sitting next to him whispered something in his ear, presumably what time the watch said.

  The room froze and waited.

  “I think it’s getting late,” the Guide had declared. His eyes were trained on the place where the Successor was sitting. “I propose that we put your self-criticism off until tomorrow …”

  In the ever deeper silence, most of those present who had attended a similar meeting years before probably recalled the very same sentence being said at more or less the same time of day: “It is getting late; I suggest we leave your self-criticism, Comrade Zhbira, until the morning.” Not a muscle twitched on Kano Zhbira’s livid face, as if the death mask that would be placed over it the next day, after his suicide, had already begun to turn it into rock.

  “Well, then,” the Guide resumed, still gazing toward where he thought the Successor was seated. His voice was weary, almost gentle, after such a long day. “As for you, try to get a proper night’s sleep, so as to be in good shape for your speech tomorrow. And the rest of you too.”

  The pallor that had not left the Successor’s face was the same, still recognizable color. Adrian Hasobeu felt his body relax, as if the Guide’s wishes for a good night’s rest affected him first and foremost. The vague impression that it would once again be at night … a transitional night … yes, like the last time … on a calendrical quirk that only the blind man could control and which cropped up each time the latter invoked the passage of time … that idea made him go weak in the knees in anticipation.

  He went home in the same half-dead state. He was just getting into bed when he was called to the telephone. The Guide was waiting for him in his office. The old man’s eyes were cloudy and his diction even more so. “I have something like a bad intuition about what might happen tonight,” he had told him. That’s why he had called him in. “You’re the only person I trust.” What he was askin
g Hasobeu to do was not very clear. The more he tried to concentrate, the hazier it got. He was supposed to go over to the other man’s place. Try to find out what was going on there … “Only you can do it.”

  No help shone from the Guide’s dark brown pupils. Only the inscrutable opacity of blind eyes. Twice he thought the Guide was going to give him something, perhaps the keys to that underground passageway, if it really existed. But nothing of the sort occurred. No keys, and no further explanation. He just kept on repeating, “You’re the only person I trust.” He regurgitated his other assertions as well: He had to go over there on foot, around midnight; when the guards recognized him, he shouldn’t worry, he was a minister, it was okay for him to inspect the duty squad in the thick of night … not to mention the other … then he was to return … he, the Guide, would be waiting up for him, eagerly …

  Adrian Hasobeu did not once dare to interrupt him, and obeyed his instruction: “Now, go.” He went. He waited at home for midnight to come, then went out again, alone, on foot, by a side door, wearing his black oilskin cape. The night was dark and wet, cut asunder by lightning at irregular intervals. It was a special night, a night of transition, and he stepped through it as through a nightmare.

  From afar he made out the Successor’s bedroom. It was the only one on that side of the house that was lit. When he pushed back his cape, the guards recognized him. He paced up and down around the house like a man in a fever, peering at each of the doors as if he still hoped that one of them would suddenly open …

  A few minutes later, Hasobeu was back in the Guide’s office. The Prijs had indeed waited up. He even made to move toward Hasobeu.

  “Did you do it?” he asked, with unmasked impatience.

  Adrian Hasobeu nodded.

  Himself stared at Hasobeu’s hands as if trying to make out spots of blood on his skin. His gaze was so powerful that it made the minister want to hide his hands behind his back.

  All the doors were bolted on the inside.

  He wasn’t absolutely certain he had said exactly that. Himself said, “Now I can sleep peacefully.”

  Outside, on the path, it was raining harder than ever. Adrian Hasobeu thought he was on his way home, but his feet took him in another direction. When he glimpsed the Successor’s bedroom from afar once more, he understood. That’s when he took the revolver from the inside pocket in his oilskin and fitted the silencer onto the barrel.

  Early next morning, the four telephones in the house rang incessantly. When he arrived at the Successor’s residence, he found the state prosecutor had gotten there first. His eyes crossed the puffy, insomniac, and desolate gaze of the bereaved wife, and he almost choked on the question: “Who moved the body? I meant to say, has the body been moved?”

  He had put such effort into imagining every detail that the sight of the corpse gone cold now seemed quite familiar to him.

  At the Politburo meeting, which began an hour later, he sought but failed to catch the Guide’s eye. What did Himself actually believe? The question nagged at him unrelentingly all that morning, and came back to haunt him even more later on, during that unending week of the autopsy. His last conversation with the leader, the one he’d had with him around midnight on December 13, appeared henceforth like a hallucination. It seemed to have either no sense at all, or far too much. It must have been then that the thread broke. From the moment when, after leaving the Guide, his steps took him back to the Successor’s residence, he had the palpable feeling that something needed to be put right. And that was probably where things had gotten all tangled up.

  Perhaps, like half the population of Tirana, the Guide took him for the killer. Or did he suspect that his minister had intended to commit murder, but hadn’t managed to do so, seeing as someone else got his bullet in first? Or that the Successor had beaten both his assassins to the wire by pulling the trigger on himself?

  What would he not have given to know even just half the surmises in the mind of Himself! Now and again, those surmises would disperse almost instantaneously, like a flock of crows taking fright and leaving a solitary bird in the empty lot they had just abandoned. Shouldn’t that crow be put down too, because of everything it was now the only bird to know? That was Adrian Hasobeu’s initial hypothesis, elemental in its simplicity, but which he did not find too hard to put aside precisely because it was so simple. It was too ordinary, too well-known to remain part of the Guide’s set of mental tools.

  No! he said to bolster himself, despite his weariness, and not quite knowing to whom he was really talking. Maybe the Guide did suspect him of having committed murder, especially if he had been told of Hasobeu’s second visit to the Successor’s house. Or maybe, short of suspecting him of murder, he thought Hasobeu had prompted the suicide … that he had gone there to try to corner the man … or that he hadn’t gone over there at all. The threads had begun to unravel, but Hasobeu himself could no longer clearly see what was true and what was false in such a complicated imbroglio.

  On several occasions, he came close to writing a letter to the man Himself. He was prepared to assume responsibility for all possible and imaginable crimes — murder, incitement to self-destruction, etcetera — if that could be of use to the Cause. The first lines of his letters provided him with a sense of relief, but then he was overcome with a sense of defeat. He realized with alarm that he had not known how to interpret his signs. In fact, the Guide had never been very forthcoming, as, for instance, in the Kano Zhbira affair: each time the body was exhumed, the current winners were cut down, until the next unburying brought down their successors too.

  The wall of inscrutability had gotten even thicker these past few years. His increasingly poor eyesight seemed to give him perceptions that no one else could fathom. Such impenetrable fog that nobody knew what to believe.

  Despite knowing all this, in his fit of gloom Adrian Hasobeu felt like shouting out loud: Why was it me that he had to send over there on the night of December 13? To set me up as a murderer, if a murderer should be needed? At times, he thought there could be no other way of accounting for it. The Successor’s death had worn two masks, but one of them would have to be chosen in the end. “If you didn’t do it,” his wife told him, “there’s no reason why you should bear the brunt.” He left a long pause, but when his wife repeated her question once again, he replied: Neither she nor anyone else would ever understand the first thing about it all.

  Something he had recently discovered lay at the root of the incomprehensibility he was referring to. Suspicions were by far the most cherished attributes of the mind of a guide. They formed as it were a pack of hounds, to play with and relax at lonely times. But if anyone dare get too close, beware!

  His wife bowed her head while he, feeling almost a sense of relief, tried to explain. It was because the Guide, as far as he could grasp, expected no explanation to be forthcoming that he, Adrian Hasobeu, had refrained from offering any. What he had meant to say by remaining silent was to indicate that he was prepared to accept his fate, or, in other words, that his fate would be whatever the Guide so desired. If you need to brand me as a criminal, then so be it, my Lord! Or whatever else. The choice is yours.

  The rumblings of his tribe reached his ears from the main room, and brought him even greater comfort. Above the low hum he could make out little noises as of snaps or muffled clicks, which, oddly enough, far from irritating him, aroused faint nostalgia.

  When he got up and opened the door to the main room, he immediately understood why. In the kitchen, on the other side of the hall, his three sisters, together with the servants, were rolling puff pastry. “You look surprised, cousin,” one of the visitors said to him. “Could you have forgotten that the day after tomorrow is your birthday?”

  One of his sisters, with flour up to her elbows, greeted him with a kiss. “Did you have a good rest, dear heart? We’re in the middle of making a baklava like you’ve never tasted before.”

  Still in the haze of sleep, he looked on at the layers of pristi
ne pastry piled as high as he remembered on days before weddings in the big house back in the village. He had completely forgotten the date of his birthday, like so much else in the course of that sinister winter.

  He asked for a glass of water, then turned back to gaze greedily at those layers of pastry, as if he could never have his fill of the sight of them.

  5

  Adrian Hasobeu’s birthday ought to have marked the very summit of his career, but a few hours of the day were all that was needed to finish him off.

  A first, almost imperceptible eddy, faint as a fluttering of wings, arose at about eleven o’clock. Almost the entire government and the majority of the Politburo were in attendance. The Prijs was expected any minute. He usually came to this sort of event at about this time. Symptoms included a kind of withdrawal of people to the corners of the room, flagging conversations, and eyes that returned almost in spite of themselves to keep watch on the main door. Even the glasses and bottles seemed to be holding their sparkle back. Adrian Hasobeu was making a superhuman effort not to watch the clock. But the time was plain to see wherever you looked. For the expression on all his guests’ faces resembled nothing in the world so much as the round dials of a clock!

  Are you all so worried on my behalf? he thought with a touch of bitterness. But he saw immediately that he was being unfair to them. They were all his people, and he would bring them down with him when he fell.

  By noon the partygoers’ whispering had become incomprehensible and their meaning could only be guessed at.

  Though he had already been petrified, so to speak, he still managed to summon up the thought that there was still time for a letter or a telegram to come. There was no written rule that said the Guide always had to attend in person. He couldn’t remember when, but it had happened before, he was sure of that, all the more so in view of the ever-declining state of His health.