The Successor (6 page)

“Oh no,” moaned his wife. “I don’t want to hear any more!”

“It really is the last, I promise you. The very last. Then there’ll be nothing but calm water.”

She seemed to acquiesce, as she said nothing more. He brought his lips close to her ear and then blurted out, “The murderer, the man everyone is looking for but will never find, is … me!”

Only with great effort did the architect’s wife keep from bursting into tears.

“You think I’ve gone mad? You don’t believe me?”

His eyes were cold and blank. She had never seen them look like that before.

“So you too don’t want to believe me,” he continued flatly. His eyes were clouding over with anger, whereas she felt as though the world were falling apart irremediably.

She leaned over, kissed him tenderly, and whispered in his ear, “Of course I believe you, dearest. If you didn’t do it, then who else could have?”

He took her hand, brought it to his lips with gratitude, and promptly fell asleep.

She propped herself up on her elbow and gazed for a long while at his emaciated face, on which a strange mask of serenity seemed to have been laid.

The temperature in the Albanian capital had fallen to an unexpected low. Many had not realized that it was late March, or else had forgotten the old saying according to which the third month often asks its brother February to lend it three bitter days, to chill the bones of whoever offends it.

With their collars turned up to keep out the cold, the people who scurried along to the meetings they had been summoned to attend in one or another of the fourteen main halls in the city had other things to worry about. They knew they had to take part in meetings of great moment related to the death of the Successor, but they felt utterly unable to guess what else might lie in store.

Those same people had been astonished that morning when, in their various offices, they had slit open their envelope and seen on the invitation that the customary hierarchy of assembly rooms had been completely disregarded. The vice-minister’s typist was to go to the Opera, generally thought to be the most prestigious of the venues, whereas the vice-minister himself had been summoned to a classroom in the Agricultural College, in which he had never before set foot. However, that was only the first surprise. Once they were at their respective meeting places, the participants found other causes for astonishment. Unlike all other occasions of this kind, no long table stood on the podium, there was no red tablecloth on it, and no flowers either. All they could see was a chair by a plain square table on which a tape recorder stood. Even that was nothing compared to the shock caused by the seating plan. Office workers, professors, truck drivers, graying female party activists, members of the Politburo, and government ministers silently suffered inner dramas as they checked, and checked again, the seat number printed on their invitation before they finally sat down beside each other. Some occasionally felt a sudden wave of joy at having such high officials sitting next to them, but these feelings of pride metamorphosed almost instantly into dread, for reasons no one could quite explain.

An hour and a half later, as they came out, people seemed as if they had been struck dumb. By means of the tape recorder, they had just heard the Guide’s speech to the Politburo, the same speech that had been intended for the evening of December 13, in the presence of the Successor, which had had to be postponed, given the lateness of the hour, to the next day, December 14. And it was in the interval between the evening of the thirteenth and the dawn of the fourteenth that the Successor’s suicide had occurred.

The Guide’s speech began by making you think that the Successor, aware that he stood to be attacked next morning, had lacked the courage to wait for the hour of his punishment and so anticipated it by taking his own life. But lo and behold, to everyone’s surprise, the speech ended with the announcement of the Successor’s pardon. That sufficed to reverse the sequence of events in people’s imagination.

Thousands of the inhabitants of the capital felt the same disturbance, identical to what had been felt some time previously by Politburo members on the morning of December 14. In living memory, no one could recall such a brutal stop being put to the working of the clock. Because of this interruption, the twelve hours that had elapsed, most of them night hours topped with the beginning of sunrise, had been completely swallowed up. It had thus been a sudden Tuesday, though endowed with a secret dose of clemency that Monday had given it. The Guide’s soft and at times almost liquid voice, coming close to a gurgle, cut through total silence. He addressed the Successor by his first name, as he had in the past: “And now, when you have had time to think again during the night, I am absolutely certain that when we gather again tomorrow in this same room, you will have an even clearer understanding of your mistake and you will at last be with us once again, with your comrades who love you, and as precious to the Party as you have ever been.”

The morrow had come for everyone, except for the Successor. So it had been laid down that these words would never be heard by their addressee. The extension of the plenum — this delay that had prompted the Guide to say, “All the comrades on the Politburo have expressed themselves, now it’s my turn to speak, but since it’s so late, I think it’s preferable for me to leave my speech until tomorrow morning” — had therefore turned out to be fatal for the Successor.

The adjournment, that isthmus of time between Monday and Tuesday, the furrow that the Successor had been unable to stride over, had tipped him into the abyss. Everybody had been present at his pardon except the man pardoned.

People in the meeting halls began by stages to feel a great sadness. How was it that a man who had put up with anxieties and irritations throughout that unending fall had been unable to endure one more night of worry? Why had he been in such a hurry?

The Guide’s voice droned on in tones no less merciful, and at times it even almost broke into a lament. Members of the audience stole glances at each other: Ah, what things the Successor had missed!

But the wave of regret was suddenly crossed by a kind of glacial current. How far could such feelings go? The suspicion that had been nagging at them all morning reasserted itself. There was something very unnatural about all this. The words they were hearing were from the Monday, when the Successor was still alive, but they had not been spoken until the Tuesday, when he was no more than a cadaver. Breaking the rule of the passage of time, the past had been made present. The day before, the day after. It was enough to make them all feel lost.

In the course of the afternoon, people’s feelings of bewilderment evaporated. They were seized instead by unusual agitation as they recalled the main lines of the story: the Successor’s mistake, the atypical nature of the announcement of his death, the absence of a day of mourning, the rumors about that famous silhouette, the suspicions. Then, as if that had not been enough, now they had to cope with a permutation between Monday and Tuesday. That really took the cake! A cramp in time was, it seemed, something that a capital was least able to tolerate.

“Albania continues to live with the unsolved mystery of the Successor,” was the more or less standard sentence at the start of reports now finding their way into intelligence agencies around the world.

Given the two long-familiar hypotheses — murder or suicide — supporters of the second alternative still wondered: Why was he killed, and by whom? It was logical to expect that the answer to one of the questions would help to solve the other. To date, however, there was no sign of any answers whatsoever.

Meanwhile, an Icelandic medium, who had taken a second stab at the mystery of the Successor, had finally managed to get somewhere with it. The deep sounds of the dead man’s death rattle reached him as through a winter squall. Among those sounds had been heard something about the night of December 13, and also about a woman, or more precisely about two women, either one of whom excluded the other for the good reason that the presence of one of these women made the presence of the other abnormal, and in fact impossible. Between the Successor and these two women there was some sort of debt or arrears, which could equally well be interpreted as a request, a promise, or even a threat. The medium’s explanations, written up very oddly, aside from the passages in German and Latin, raised knowing smiles in intelligence agencies. To believe that the enigma of the Successor might be wrapped up in a story of rival women showed a profound misunderstanding of the Communist universe. To the Icelander’s great despair, that was pretty much all the response he got from intelligence analysts.

At the same moment, more than a thousand miles away, at the place where the events had occurred, the Guide’s speech that had been delivered right after the announcement of the death now plunged the Albanian capital into a frenzy of guesswork. Nonetheless, through the fog of supposition, you could possibly theorize that the case might be reopened, and perhaps that the Successor might even be rehabilitated: There was that autopsy carried out rather late in the day, then there was this new inquiry into the circumstances of the death, alongside rumors that if they had not been officially prompted were probably being actively tolerated (such as the one about the “shadow” slipping into the residence under cover of darkness, or the one about the two men glimpsed by a housekeeper as they accompanied the Successor down to the basement, or alternatively manhandled his corpse down the steps), and so on and so forth.

If the new investigation was intended to bring back to the fore the supposition of murder, then the Successor would probably end up as a Martyr of the Revolution, the victim of assasination by a group of evil conspirators — an extremely common scenario in Communist countries.

One of the new analysts advanced the idea that it was likely the Successor would wander
ad aeternam
from one hypothesis to another like a damned soul wandering through the circles of Dante’s inferno. The last words of the sentence — beginning “like a damned soul” and ending with “Dante’s inferno” — were subsequently erased from the report by the writer, who wanted to hold them in reserve for future use, maybe in his memoirs.

The morning would have been like any other if “they” hadn’t turned up so early. But they might as well be here, Suzana thought, as she stuffed her head under the pillow. She had been expecting them for several days. It felt like they had been dragging their feet, that they’d dropped the autopsy and all the rest. So that’s fine, she said to herself as she tried once again to get back to sleep. But something unusual about the noise they were making prompted her to get up instead.

Her brother was standing in the half-light in the middle of the hallway, nervously biting his fingernails. Before she had time to ask him, What’s going on? he nodded toward the bedroom door. A narrow slit of light shone from underneath, unnervingly, like the last time.

A very distinct but muffled noise could be heard coming from the room.

“They’re firing shots in Papa’s bedroom,” the young man whispered in explanation.

“What?” she exclaimed.

“They’re firing a gun. But don’t be afraid.”

“You’re out of your mind!” the young woman replied.

Her brother did not respond. Instead, he stretched his head toward the door, almost losing his balance on his long legs. Suzana realized that his nightshirt must be open, revealing his bare chest; her mind a blank, she tried to do it up, but could not find the buttons.

Then there was another thud, clearly audible in spite of its dull tone. You’re all completely insane! Suzana thought. In her sleep-waking mind, the idea that someone was assassinating her father anew, or rather, murdering his corpse, seemed as plausible as it was insane.

She felt that her brother was about to rush toward the door, and she grabbed his hand tightly.

“Wait!”

They stood side by side, almost glued to each other, in total silence, hearing only each other’s breathing, until the door opened. Against the light that streamed forth from it they could make out the shape of a man hurrying out. He was holding a revolver, without any doubt the one he had just fired.

The young woman felt she was not in a state to ask the question “So what are you doing here?” or even the words “madness” or “horror.” Through the half-open door, on the heels of the man with the gun, came two others, wearing white coats and holding various implements in their hands. Oh no! Suzana groaned to herself. The implements looked as if they had been splashed by blood. Then, to make bad worse, a fourth man emerged, carrying in his outstretched arms a receptacle containing a huge chunk of raw meat.

What a nightmare! Suzana thought as she buried her head on her brother’s shoulder. It was probably only one of those bad dreams she’d been having more and more of lately. She dug her nails into her brother’s hand, but that didn’t help to wake her up at all. “Don’t be afraid,” he kept saying to comfort her. “They’re doing weapons trials.” One of the experts had just explained it all to him. “Do you understand?”

Suzana wasn’t listening. He put his mouth to her ear, to explain the details that were most painful to understand. “They’re conducting tests, to check whether the gunshot could or could not have been heard outside, got it? The trials had to be done by shooting into flesh, in this case a hunk of beef, because a gunshot has a sound like nothing else when it’s fired point-blank.”

Some part of all that was at last making its way into Suzana’s brain.

“Where did you get all these details?” she butted in. “Are you collaborating with them?”

Now it was the young man’s turn to say, “You’re out of your mind!”

For days on end, the two of them had shared their suspicions about this or that member of their clan they thought had been involved in the murder.

The young man put an arm around his sister’s shoulder, to lead her back to her bedroom. She was grateful to him for not having said, So you aren’t satisfied with being the cause of this catastrophe, you also have to get on our nerves with your stupid questions! The bloodied implements that had so scared her a moment ago were there, like all the rest of the setup, for their own good. Thanks to these tests, she and her family might possibly be going back to the life they had known before.