Authors: Ismail Kadare
Though it was true that marriage with a member of an ancien régime family could be interpreted in Albania as a sign of relaxation of the class struggle, aside from this fact the Successor was the last person who could be accused of slackness in class warfare. Throughout his long career, he had been a hard-liner at every turn, never a moderate. He had taken on that role long before, and for years people had suspected that when the Guide wanted to impose harsh measures, he first sent the Successor out ahead of him as a kind of herald. Then, if the measure once taken seemed excessive, the Successor was ready and willing to take the blame, allowing the Guide to play the role of moderator.
This time, everything had happened backwards. The specialists were dying to put the whole thing down to a classical case of Albanian crackpottedness but regrettably had to refrain, as they swung back to the second hypothesis, namely, that the reason for the crisis lay in the recent disturbances in Kosovo.
The whole preceding year had been marked by gloomy forecasts. Kosovo was going to be the next earthquake, it was a coming tornado, a horror waiting to happen in the Balkans. Everywhere, heads would roll as a result of the rebellion — that was only logical, but it was nowhere more logical than in Albania. But in what manner was the fate of the Successor connected to the uprising? The rumors on that topic became ever more confused. The Yugoslavs had been the first to sow the suspicion of murder, but, as if regretting having said too much, they had now fallen silent. Did they really know nothing, or were they just pretending?
One of the analysts, at his wit’s end because neither of the geopolitical explanations really stood up, thus went back to the discarded hypothesis that his colleagues had dubbed the “mirror on the wall” theory. Presumably in order to make it more credible, he had recourse to what was in those days the sine qua non of most conflict analyses, namely oil. Though his paper was backed up with all sorts of figures on Albania’s petroleum output since the 1930s and geological charts of the oil-bearing areas — it even included a rundown on the squabble between British Petroleum and the Italian Agip company in 1938 — it was dismissed as “ridiculous.” The latter epithet might well not have been used had the analyst not added, by way of conclusion, that it could hardly be a coincidence that the Successor’s daughter’s unfortunate putative ex-father-in-law was a seismologist, a profession that one way or another related to surveying for oil …
As a consequence of the failure of his attempt to pinpoint, at six thousand feet beneath the surface, the causes of the broken engagement and the suicide, the analyst, as might be expected, threw in the towel. In accordance with his recently acquired custom of adding long supplementary notes to everything he wrote, he accompanied his request for early retirement with a long account of the state of his health that winter, which was backed up by two medical certificates one of which was headed “impotence.”
His colleagues had no intention of following suit, though that did not stop them dreaming of one day having the Albania files removed from their purview. Any other desk would be better, even one with an abysmal reputation, like the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, or some African countries with frontiers that were less a reflection of political changes than of the desert winds, as they had been centuries earlier.
They sighed deeply, cursing that “basket case of a country,” and went back to the unyielding file, attempting to start over as simply as possible.
Murder or suicide? If a murder, who was the culprit? For what motive? Most of the material that had been collected continued to point to the very highly placed official whose silhouette had been seen slipping into the Successor’s residence in the course of the fateful night. Some reports even went so far as to give a name to the person suspected of being that shadow: Adrian Hasobeu, the minister of the interior. He had just left that job to go up a further rung in the hierarchy. All intelligence forecasts made him the Successor’s most likely replacement.
A host of other details combined with the fleeting shadow to make the fog even murkier. The Successor’s request to be awakened at eight; his wife sleeping like a log; the tang of gunpowder that had greeted her when she opened the door on the stroke of eight. All those comings and goings in the
Bllok
throughout the night. The wind and the rain that kept changing direction. Two men had apparently been seen from the outside (perhaps by one of the sentries) going up or down the staircase of the residence. Thanks to a flash of lightning, they had been glimpsed on the first-floor veranda propping the Successor up like a tailor’s dummy.
Was he still alive when they took him back up — or down? Had he fainted? Was he wounded? Or dead? Were they taking him to the basement or to the morgue? To have him made up to look presentable, perhaps? Or to move the wound, by stopping up the bullet hole, for instance, and replacing it with another? However, there was a secret passageway in the basement that nobody knew about …
All these ingredients churned unrelentingly in somber spirals moving now slower, now faster, swirling this way and that, in whorls that came and went, disappeared and reappeared, and finally sank out of sight. But in every variant of the mix, the ingredients themselves remained irreducible and in the end came to resemble shards of glass, or a substance that was simultaneously the stock and the fermenting agent without which no mystery could have risen.
Intelligence analysts were near the end of their rope as they struggled over the Albania files. It was the first time they had switched from one theory to another with such abandon. For instance, the first idea that occurred to anyone looking at the information about the silhouette was that it belonged to the Successor’s assassin. But you only had to look at things in their proper order to realize that such a deduction was far from safe. Even assuming that the said silhouette (and assuming it was Adrian Hasobeu’s) had gotten into the residence, how could you be sure what the purpose of the late-night visit was? Was he on his way to commit murder, or to push the Successor to kill himself? But what if instead of either of these he had been aiming to persuade the Successor not to pull the trigger, seeing that at the Politburo meeting scheduled for the next day he was going to be forgiven?
To cap it all, there was the secret passageway mentioned by some of the investigators, which made everything even more impenetrable.
Here and there in the paperwork you came across notes in telegraphese, such as: “Need know if architect villa still alive.” Didn’t the pharaohs kill the architect the moment a pyramid was completed?
There was something pyramid-like about the whole business. Walls suddenly sprang up all around and blocked the slightest progress. The main chamber of the pyramid, where the most precious secret was kept, was locked from the inside. The same timeless principle was probably involved in the affair of the Successor.
The analogy was reassuring, in a way. The mysteries of the pyramids had not been completely solved in four thousand years. So why should intelligence analysts be in so much of a hurry in this case?
Taking advantage of all this haziness, clairvoyants — who had been making a comeback in recent times, after nearly fifty years’ absence from the field of state secrets — tried to intervene. But once contact was established with the spirit of the Successor, what could be gleaned from him was so obscure and undecipherable that, one after the other, the clairvoyants all ended up admitting defeat.
Oddly enough, Albania seemed to have sunk into never-ending silence. Over the border, the other Albania, “Outer” Albania, lay still and stiff under the winter sky, as if it had been laid low by a stroke. The same December sky arched over them, but it was a sky of such desolation that it seemed to be nursing two winters, not just one, two winters that were pacing up and down and howling like wolves.
Whatever was that feeling of joy, which seemed like nothing on earth? With a glass of champagne in her hand, Suzana sauntered among the guests as if she was walking on air. The great house, uninhabited since her father’s suicide, was once more full of people, light, and sound, just like it used to be. Nobody expressed surprise, moreover, just as nobody asked how the impossible had happened or why things had gone back to the way they were. Quite a few of the guests were unfamiliar, but that also did not seem surprising. Similarly, no one worried about how some of the bulbs in the chandeliers had failed to come on — having burned out from long disuse. For the second time, she heard someone saying, “What’s gone is gone and never comes back,” and then she set about looking for her father. Although he was the overall focus of attention, he was standing a little to the side, with a thin smile on his face that seemed to express some mild displeasure that would not be hard to dissipate. Suzana’s eyes lighted immediately on the white bandage that could be seen through her father’s shirt, presumably to protect the wound while it was healing. She put down her glass of champagne before going up to him and saying simply, “Papa, how are you feeling?” At that very moment she remembered she had still not seen Genc, her fiancé, among the guests, and almost shouted: How is it possible that he is the only one not to have come?
Albeit silent, the shout was what must have awakened her. As on the last occasion when she had had the same dream, Suzana burst into tears. She must have been weeping in her sleep as well, since the pillow was damp. She was holding it tightly to her face in the hope of going back to sleep when she thought she heard sounds. She raised her head to listen, and realized that her ears had not deceived her. There were people coming and going in the house.
Her eyes wandered toward the window. Then she switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was six-thirty in the morning, but the sky behind the curtains was still dark.
The noises resumed. They were not her mother’s footsteps, nor those of her brother, who habitually locked the bathroom door at that hour. They were something different. Apprehension lay like a lead weight on her chest, yet deeper down she felt no fear at all, but a kind of joy, as if she was still inside her dream.
She got up in a state of bewilderment and went to the door. Before turning the handle, she stood stockstill, to listen for voices.
The landing was quiet, but muffled sounds of speech and feet rose from below. Her mother’s and brother’s bedroom doors were shut. She went over to the railing and looked down into the hall. The lights had been switched on in the dining room and the
grand salon
, the room where her dream had taken place.
Her heart raced. Since her father’s suicide, irrespective of anyone’s wishes, it had been forbidden to enter that room, which had been formally sealed by order of the Ministry of the Interior.
She turned her head slowly to look once more at the doors of the bedrooms where her mother and brother slept, and then, in a growing panic, she stared at the other door on the landing, the door to her father’s room. A razor-thin strip of light shone from beneath. Every part of her body — her lungs, her eyes, her hair — screamed in unison: Papa! It was the same strip of light she had watched until two in the morning during the fatal night. She told herself she must still be dreaming, as she had not collapsed instantly like someone struck by lightning. With measured step, fearing she might wake herself up and thus lose this second chance of seeing her father come back, she moved toward the door. Yes, she must be asleep, or else out of her mind, since she felt that she would see her father again in the very bedroom where she had seen him dead, with a hole in his bloodstained shirt.
One more step, then another. Don’t give up now, she told herself. In any case, you’re done for.
At that moment the door swung open. A stranger rushed out. He was holding something black that looked like an old kind of camera. He looked the young woman up and down, somewhat surprised, and then, without uttering a word, raced down the stairs two at a time.
From the other side of the bedroom door that the stranger had left ajar came the sound of an exasperated man. Suzana managed to make out the word “autopsy.”
What next? That would really be the last straw if, after all the horror, they were now going to conduct an autopsy on the spot using an obsolete instrument in the shape of a camera.
Suzana put a hand to her forehead. It was probably just the continuation of her dream. Or did she mean hallucination?
Voices rose in the bedroom once more. A snatch of speech caught her ear: “… failing to carry out an autopsy was a scandalous omission!”
The door opened wide. His face crimson with anger, a man she thought she recognized as the new minister of the interior hurried out. Of his two escorts she recognized only one — the architect of the residence, the only one of them to have been in her recent dream.
The minister stared at her with some surprise. He stopped in his tracks to say, “Good morning!” then added, “Did we wake you up?”
The young woman hardly knew what to say.
The architect greeted her with a gentle nod of his head.
“We are making some inquiries,” the minister said before moving toward the staircase.
The other two followed in his footsteps. As they went down the stairs, Suzana once again heard the words “autopsy” and “scandal.”
The minister had sounded and looked very friendly.
She felt as if she was regaining her senses. They had apparently come before dawn to proceed with their inquiries. The day after Father’s death they had given close family members permission to go on living in part of the residence but not to enter the closed rooms and areas designated by red sealing wax. From time to time they would come to carry out various checks. They had the keys.
That’s what they had said, but they hadn’t come. This morning was the first time they had shown their faces. So if Suzana had felt entitled to ask a single question, it would have been: What took you so long?
The young woman felt a wave of cold settle on her shoulders. Her feet took her to her mother’s bedroom door. How in the world could she not be up, with all the commotion in the house?