The Successor Page 10

  When they took their places at table for the meal, there was an unexpected excitement in the air. The appropriate toasts were proposed, and he managed to keep up appearances. It was only during the last course, when he tried to enjoy the baklava, that the food stuck in his throat. His sister’s words came back to his mind, in disorder: a baklava such as … a baklava like … He tried to put the thought out of his mind but did not succeed. Of such a baklava he had indeed never before partaken, nor had any of his relatives.

  After coffee, the guests hung around. He was eager to see the house empty and almost wanted to yell out loud: What are you waiting for, can’t you see you’re not wanted here anymore?

  An unhealthy knot made of strands of blind rancor and of unreleased imprecations like: Are you standing around so as to get a better view of my fall? combined with the superstitious idea that maybe he was waiting for the floor to be cleared before making his entry, was bringing his mind to a complete standstill.

  Dumdfoundedness followed his bout of exasperation. In his prostration, he suddenly saw the naked and implacable notion rise up before him that not only would the Guide not come, but that there would be no letter and no greetings telegram either. Nor would he even call on the telephone.

  The sum of it was harsh enough, but an hour later, when the first shades of dusk spread across the garden, the Guide’s absence no longer seemed at all surprising. On the contrary, what now seemed crazy was to nurse the slightest hope that Himself would turn up. And it was not just the Guide’s presence, but the idea of a birthday card, a greetings telegram, or even a phone call now looked like the idle dreams of a schoolkid. He realized that very soon the downward slide of his despair would be so steep as to make him amazed they hadn’t already come to take him away.

  After a short interval, the guests had begun to return in numbers. As before, bringing cakes and wine as well as bouquets. The maddest procession you could think of. Weren’t they aware there was nothing more that could be done? Except maybe to bring flowers, as they alone could be used at funerals as well as birthdays.

  What was even more unbearable than their being here were the birthday wishes. On two occasions he couldn’t even understand what they were saying and blurted out, “What was that?” “May you rise ever upward!” they intoned by way of reply.

  Try to look your best, his wife whispered in his ear as she pretended to come up to draw the curtains.

  He turned to look at the French windows that opened onto the garden. Light was fading fast. It was years since Himself had been out so late in the day.

  He encountered his wife in the hall once again. She said, “Listen, I never managed to understand why you went back … the second time … to that place.”

  He looked her in the eye, at length. So, though she was putting on a good front, she too was thinking only of that.

  “Why did I go back?” he answered in a ghostly voice. “You won’t believe me, but I tell you I have no idea.”

  His wife, completely distraught, shook her head. “Haven’t you had enough of keeping all these secrets? You’ve spent your whole life with them!”

  He too shook his head, to contradict her. “I have no secrets from you, my wife.”

  He began softly, almost inaudibly, then suddenly his voice broke into a raging and inhuman bawl: “You really want to know what I did that night? I did nothing! Got that? The doors were bolted from the inside.”

  “Get hold of yourself,” she urged.

  He was gasping for breath.

  “All the same, you must have been expecting something when you were standing outside the residence,” she went on, in a calmer voice.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting. Of course, I was expecting something … Maybe a signal from inside. Or something like that … Perhaps it was supposed to be that way … Perhaps I had to wait for a sign … Maybe I was mistaken …”

  “A sign from whom?”

  Nothing was that simple … From someone who had been prevented from giving it … At least, that was my impression … But at no point was there any sign at all …

  “But that’s dreadful!” his wife moaned. “Waiting for a sign you know nothing about … not knowing the why or the wherefore …”

  “That’s where I made the wrong move. I failed to pick up the right wavelength … What he said to me that night was so unclear. And what he told me later, when I got back to his office, was even murkier. As if he had already gone to sleep …”

  “That’s the worst of our misfortune,” his wife blurted out. “Even when he’s asleep he treats you like a plaything. But you and your kind, you don’t even see it! Wide awake and as blind as bats!”

  He would have liked to tell her that she had probably hit upon his real secret: how to keep people on a string while fast asleep.

  “Go circulate and talk to the guests,” she said. “We’ve been alone too long.”

  “Are they still there? For God’s sake get rid of them for me! Tell them the party’s over. Say anything you like as long as it gets them out, and the doors closed!”

  6

  Six hundred feet away, in the large room he had been using as an office for a while, the Guide, facing the wide bay window, was listening to a secretary reporting on what could be seen going on in the garden that overlooked the rear of the presidential residence.

  The last glimmer of daylight made the few trees that had been planted here and there seem to be moving off into the distance. Soon darkness would spread all over, and the dead leaves falling from the trees would no longer be seen at all.

  He asked the secretary if the sky was overcast, then he wanted to know if the junket at the Hasobeus house was still in full swing.

  The secretary satisfied both requests: some clouds, and the party had just come to an end.

  He must have figured it out, he thought. Now he’ll need at least a week to recover.

  His stone-cold hatred, reviving after a brief pause, was utterly unbearable.

  I gave you almost a year, he addressed his minister in his mind. His mouth filled with bile. That man should never have been granted such a long reprieve.

  An old ditty from his hometown came back to mind:

  Those yarns you told

  Were lies too bold;

  Then for this fall

  You promised me all …

  Hasobeu had disappointed him. Even leaves, mere leaves on a tree, knew when it was time to fall — but that man pretended not to. He now had an interminable week to make amends for his mistake.

  Don’t force me to bring on the black beast! he thought.

  Not wanting to let himself sink into a bad mood before dinner, he tried to think of something else.

  “It looks like it’s dark outside now,” he remarked to his secretary.

  “Yes, it’s completely dark,” the secretary replied. “They’ve switched on the garden lamps.”

  FIVE

  THE GUIDE

  1

  The week felt as if it would never end. Friday, when the Central Committee’s plenum would meet, was still far off. He spent the whole of Tuesday morning listening to ambassadors’ reports and to a summary of the underground news from Tirana. A seventeen-year-old girl in the adjacent quarter had taken her own life. Rumors about Hasobeu’s fall were still infrequent. Only one of the wire services mentioned it, and it got the man’s name wrong anyway, making it unrecognizable. The girl had killed herself for sentimental reasons. A young swank, who repaired bicycles on the square where she lived, had dropped her. “Haseberg …” he muttered, mulling over his minister’s mangled name. “Now you’re defying me under a Teutonic name!”

  While virtual silence reigned on the Hasobeu situation, all the old surmises about the death of the Successor resurfaced, presumably by reaction. Probably an attempt at destabilizing the entire Balkan Peninsula. Expansion of the Atlantic alliance to this part of Europe. Oil. Suicide or assassination? The real reason. Who pulled the trigger …

  “Always the sa
me old stories,” he muttered under his breath.

  The secretary waited for the Guide’s mumbling to cease before going on. The underground passageway. What might have happened in it on the night of December 13.

  That last phrase made him sneer. “That’s a laugh!” Then he asked the secretary to read it out again. According to the informant, people were saying that the last meeting between the Guide and the Successor took place in the tunnel at midnight. The latter had reached for his gun but the Guide’s bodyguard had been quicker on the draw.

  The secretary waited for Himself’s guffaws to die down before going on. The Successor was supposed to have gotten himself shot in the basement, so that what had been said about the lifeless body of the victim being brought up the stairs like a tailor’s dummy by two men could be incorporated into the story.

  “Wait!” the Guide said. “Read that to me once more …”

  The secretary read it again, this time more slowly, but when he had finished, Himself asked to hear it one more time. As he listened, he repeated the sentences under his breath. What had been said … in other words, what had been foretold.

  “It’s like in the holy books,” he mumbled dreamily. “In the Bible, unless I’m mistaken, some events are laid out like that.”

  The secretary looked at his master with veneration, as he did every time the Guide made a reference to what he had read. He put his nose back into the stack of papers, but Himselfinterrupted: “Wait, not so fast!”

  At first the secretary did not grasp what the Guide was asking of him. He had been dealing with an abstruse report in which the analyst, after mentioning the mysterious death in Tirana, tried to unravel the functioning of the brain of a dictator.

  Placidly, the secretary went back to the report. He’d been in this job for forty years, and in the course of time he had lost more or less everything, including his sense of fear.

  The text he finally retrieved was quite brief. According to its author, the brain of a tyrant often worked according to what might be called the “architecture of terror.” Terror was constructed backwards, like dreams, which is to say, starting from the end. Then, in a flash, sometimes in a mere second or even less, the entire missing part was suddenly filled in. To make his meaning clearer, the analyst proposed the image of a building constructed out of its own ruins. All the rest — the walls, partitions, roof, chimney, and even the furniture — would suddenly be added, then knocked away. That was the process of the Master’s mind when passing sentence. First plan the victim’s death, and the rest would be fitted in afterwards.

  That’s what you have done, he thought.

  His breathing accelerated from spite. Yes, they had been doing these things themselves since biblical times, and now they were claiming he had invented them!

  He became aware of his wife’s footsteps behind him.

  “There’s a letter from Hasobeu,” she said as she leaned over his shoulder.

  “Really? Let’s have a look at the brain functions of … von Haseberg!”

  The missive struck him as both interminable and cunning. Hasobeu complained of being cold-shouldered even though everything had now been brought out into the open. As long as it had been thought that the Successor might have been a martyr, assassinated by some other hand, suspicions about him, Hasobeu, had been understandable. But now that it had been admitted that the Successor had been a traitor and had killed himself, why was he, Hasobeu, still under a cloud of suspicion?

  “You wily hypocrite!” Anger rose inside him. “You think you can pull the wool over my eyes, do you?”

  His breathing quickened again. Hasobeu was playing innocent in order to get out of the hole he had dug with his own hands. He was pretending things were disarmingly simple: You say the Successor was a murdered martyr? Then you’re right to suspect me. But now you say the Successor was a traitor and a suicide. So what can you possibly hold against me, Hasobeu?

  “Take this down!” he instructed his secretary. “Hasobeu is conveniently forgetting a third hypothesis, which may well be the right one. Whether the man was a martyr or a traitor, whether he was murdered or killed himself, one thing is clear — Hasobeu was involved. He spent the night prowling around the Successor’s residence. Did he or did he not plan to kill him? Did he mean to corner him into taking his own life, which was already a waste of time? Did he or did he not let the murderers into the house? The answers to these questions make not one bit of difference. What we have is typical of conspiracies. As soon as they sniff danger in the wind, the plotters hasten to get rid of the mastermind. Everybody knows that.

  “It’s been known for all eternity,” he mumbled. “Same as the epilogue.

  “Take this down,” he said to the secretary again. “In my name, you’re going to send him a note that you’ll sign for me. Invite him to the Central Committee plenum the day after tomorrow, so he can lay out everything he knows. So he can bare his heart!”

  He could already hear the deathly hush that would fall upon the meeting when he turned to Hasobeu and called on him to speak. Bare your heart, Hasobeu! We’ll soon see who’s scared by all the secrets you’re going to spill!

  Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime. He’d only recently come to understand that, and it left him in a state of great calm. His blindness had no doubt helped him toward such serenity.

  He didn’t know, and never had known, what had really happened at the Successor’s residence on that night of December 13. And since even he didn’t know, it could take a thousand years for anyone else to find out.

  Like beasts of another species, they were all circling around him now, trying to explain with miserable whimpers, with all kinds of signals and glances, what in their view had taken place. But they could bark until their lungs were sore; what they had to tell him was necessarily incomplete and incoherent. All they knew of the matter had been seen as through the eyes of an insect, in parts and fragments.

  Apart from the deceased, two other individuals seem to have been implicated. But no one would ever know exactly how they had gotten themselves tangled up in the murky business, where they had crossed paths, when they had put each other off, how they had blackmailed each other until the whole thing fell under the shroud of silence. Only one of them, Hasobeu, had spoken up, half screaming and half moaning: The doors had been bolted on the inside.

  He was minister of the interior and seemed not to know that in all great murder cases doors are always bolted on the inside!

  He thought he heard the wind rising, and asked what was going on in the garden. If his memory was to be trusted, ancient tragedies dealt exclusively with that: how to expunge the crime, how to detach it from the clan. He didn’t recall ever coming across a mention of the opposite problem — how to get a crime to stick.

  It was probably the noise of the storks leaving their nests, his secretary told him. The rustling was loud enough to make that the most likely cause.

  He heard his wife coming up behind him again, which made him hold back what he was about to say.

  “Are you bringing me another letter?” he asked merrily, without turning around.

  “Indeed I am,” she replied.

  Before muttering, Unbelievable! he felt the envelope with the tips of his fingers. It had been sent by the Successor’s widow.

  All that’s lacking now is a letter from the dead man himself! he thought.

  The envelope seemed weighty, but he decided it could not be otherwise for a letter from a widow. What is she saying? he wondered. What news do you have for us, Comrade Clytemnestra? …

  “Burn it!” his wife said, matter-of-factly.

  In the silent room, the familiar noise of a match being struck could be heard quite clearly, followed by the hungry flame and then its extinction. The faint crackling sound of carbonized paper went on for a while.

  He waited for his wife to have left with the ashtray before he said to the secretary, “I don’t
want her to send me any more letters. She shouldn’t even think of writing.”

  He did not want to know what had gone on in that house. How they had striven, then taken fresh counsel, whether they had delayed, or screamed in the fog. Let them take it all to the grave with them!

  The secretary’s heavy breathing told him the latter was about to make an observation. Maybe about the storks’ nest. For no reason, he suddenly recalled a swarthy Greek who answered to the name of Haxhi,* and the kids in the street who taunted him with the refrain: Haxhi, haxhibird, when are you going to fly off to Mecca?

  *Albanian “xh” is pronounced like the English “dg” in “badge.” The Greek’s name thus sounds like hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  Nowadays he often felt drowsy at this time of day.

  2

  The Central Committee plenum had begun on the stroke of four in the afternoon, and the first session was still going on. Dusk was coming on. The Guide had his elbows on the table, and he could feel the meeting going slack. He could imagine the questioning glances going around among the delegates. They had been expecting a dramatic meeting; they had probably only managed snatches of sleep before first light, but the agenda was going on and on with items that were frankly insipid. Questions of raising the budget for the energy sector and extending the schedule for fulfilling the Plan. Those who had been afraid were presumably enjoying it; long may this last, they must have been thinking; let’s keep on about hydroelectric generators, cotton plantations, the emancipation of women … Whereas others, who couldn’t wait to hear the crack of the whip, sank by stages into ill humor. The big secrets, the secrets that would make your hair stand on end, were probably only dealt with in the inner sanctum, in the Politburo, whereas they got the donkey-work: budgets, five-year plans, and so on …