The Successor Read online

  That’s what I was thinking until the hope I nurtured was dashed to the ground as I saw the look of his wife standing at his side. Her narrowed, sarcastic eyes were scrutinizing everything, down to the smallest detail. I thought: It would have been better if his were still the seeing eyes, not hers. I never found out what happened right after the ceremony, when the Guide left with his wife.

  Khaany mori zurgaan … He didn’t need a six-in-hand or a coach. It was not a long way from one house to the other, from the Guide’s to the Successor’s. But it was far enough.

  SEVEN

  THE SUCCESSOR

  Mediums and masters of the occult, you know the mysteries and the paths that lead to them. Nonetheless I say to you again, for the thousandth time: Leave me in peace! Even if I wanted, I could not give you what you seek. It is not transmissible, not because of any whim on my part, nor because of any incompetence on yours, but because it is so by its very nature.

  I am other. What’s more, I am not whole. I have no grave, and I am lacking half my skull. I have been exhumed so often — lugged here and there, flung unceremoniously into sacks and plastic bags with lumps of earth and shingle — that part of me has gone missing. But that’s a mere detail. Even if I were whole, even if I had been embalmed and preserved in a marble tomb, you would not get anything out of me besides fog and chaos.

  I am other in a different sense. I am of infinite otherness, such that each link in my otherness engenders another kind of otherness, which in turn engenders another, and so on, which prevents all understanding between us.

  I was the Pasardhës. He who comes next. But nextness was not a question of distance, such as the two paces I had to leave between us when standing behind the Guide as we paraded onto the platform or stood on the rostrum. Nor was it a chronological nextness, referring to the years I would reign after him. No, it was a much more complicated business.

  We are a race apart, and we can only understand each other. But we are so few in number that amid the dark turmoil of this world above which human souls swirl, it is only rarely, extremely rarely — once every thousand years, maybe every ten thousand? — that we ever come across one of our own.

  Thus, one summer’s night, I saw a scorched silhouette fleeing all alone, and thought I glimpsed my opposite number Lin Biao, the designated successor of Mao Tse-tung. But it can’t have been him, apparently, as he didn’t return my greeting. Or perhaps he didn’t recognize me, because you can’t argue that someone graced as I am with only half a head is more recognizable than a burnt-out skeleton.

  I was really sorry to miss that opportunity to exchange a few words with a colleague. To tell each other about our respective enigmas, or at least to share feelings about our fates: Have you seen what they’ve done to us! My need was so strong that I turned my head, but meanwhile it had become impossible to pinpoint him in the celestial vault. My only solace was the thought that the opportunity to meet again would perhaps recur in the next two or twelve thousand years.

  To him, a man of my own kind, I could have told the story of what happened to me; but no way can I tell you. For unlike the language that serves for us to talk to one another, a language allowing our kind to communicate with yours has not yet been invented on earth, and never will be.

  That’s why we can never agree on any subject. That’s why the suspicions that beset me on that night of December 13 remain vivid and topical despite Albania’s subsequent transformation. We could have more easily imagined the ground changing place with the sky than we could have foreseen the country’s turnaround. But in the end, Albania did turn. However, despite that upheaval my puzzle, or rather, the double enigma of the Guide and myself, remains unresolved. Nothing has helped to solve it: the opening of the archives, the belated autopsies, the identification of my remains, clairvoyants from Alaska, the Kremlin, and the Accursed Mountains, even Mossad — no thing or person has made a dent in the shield that protects our secret.

  The same questions will not stop nagging through the ages. What happened on the night of December 13? What caused the Successor to fall? Who pulled the trigger?

  That night … Ah, how impossible it is to explain anything about it! The night, to begin with. Was there a night of December 13? Hard to say. I was lying on my bed, drifting toward sleep, waiting for my wife to bring me another cup of chamomile tea. Now and again she wandered toward the window as if trying to spy something outside in the dark. I was half asleep, and in my mind I was already in the assembly room where I was to appear the next day, answering the same questions. The place I would be a few hours later, but not in flesh and blood, only in spirit. They were discussing me as if I were still alive, with the Guide barely succeeding in holding back his tears: And now that you are back among us after this terrible shock, dear Comrade Successor, make yourself vital to the Party once again!

  When I was already in the morgue, they behaved as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no night of December 13, but instead, a different set of events, a kind of parallel sequence, some unnatural cut-and-paste of the day before and the day after that stopped time flowing between them. Or made it flow in reverse.

  Anyone one else would have found this reversal bizarre. But not I. It was part of my being, in its essence as well as its outward form.

  My life in no way resembled human living. Such cases are often called “a dog’s life.” It was worse than that. It was a Successor’s life. I was he who would come after. Preassigned to fill the Guide’s shoes. Which was how he reminded us all, but himself first of all, that one day he would not be there anymore, whereas I would go on existing.

  Some days, the thought of it terrified me. I wondered how he could bear it himself. How could he tolerate my being there, how could he tolerate all the others who had accepted the pact? Why didn’t he rise up and shout: What on earth makes you think the future course of events can be known with such certainty? Why are we looking to the grave to order current affairs? Was it so exceptional for mortals to die in defiance of the established order? Why in his case, or rather in both our cases, was this order to be treated as the bottom line, at any price?

  At times when I felt less tense with anxiety, I was sorry for the man. I swooned with the affection that his generosity inspired. I was prepared to throw myself at his feet and implore him: Prijs, if you have the slightest misgiving, take the title away from me, yes, take back the title! Sometimes I went even further and told him in my heart: Ask what you will, we are all prepared to lay down our lives for you. Gives us an opportunity to show these are not just vain words. And this time let me have the first turn. At the dark hour, when death is nigh, give me your leave to take the final step and, by quitting my place and my mortal coil, to stare death in the eye by laying down my life on your behalf.

  I knew I meant it. Maybe even more than I should have, as on that April night when we were hanging around together on the balcony after dining. We’d been discussing events of the past, in particular when we’d broken off certain relations. We’d got on to the falling out with China when, taking a deep breath, he blurted out that it was rumored than Lin Biao, Mao’s successor, hadn’t been a traitor and certainly hadn’t been burned to a crisp in the airplane in which he was trying to escape — but that Mao had had him to dinner and then had him killed when the meal was over.

  I have no idea how long I stood there like a statue! All I know is that each split second that passed seemed unbearable, because of all the dangerous conversation topics we could have touched on, that was by the far the worst. Unthinkingly I came out with a “You never know …” Just to make matters worse, I went on to say that I didn’t believe he was guilty any more than I thought him innocent.

  He stared at me with deep feeling. Then he got up from the sofa and came over to put his arm around me. His chest was heaving with sobs as he murmured softly, “You are the most loyal, the most faithful among the faithful.” His cheek wet with tears pressed against mine, but suddenly a question seared my heart. What was all th
is weeping about? Had I not deceived myself? Had I not sealed my fate with my own words? Was he in fact mourning me before my departure?

  That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I kept harping on his sobs and tears, which seemed to have only one explanation: He had been moved by my sincerity. I had said what I thought without imagining that my own suspicion of treason on the part of the Chinese successor could amount to an unwitting confession of a similar sentiment buried deep inside my unconscious mind. I talked myself down in that way but a contrary thought sprang up in immediate response: Hadn’t I gone too far with sincerity? Hadn’t I hoisted myself on my own petard? For days on end I tried to make out what he really thought of me, but I never picked up the slightest sequel to that after-dinner talk. I guessed he must have forgotten it. His brain needed to lose ballast, just like anyone else’s. I came to understand, only a little too late, that I was wrong. He never forgot anything.

  When my hour came, with the night of December 13 and then the day of December 14, when he stopped time in its track, only then did I grasp for a brief instant that by turning back the hands on the clock he had only restored things to their proper order. An order that in his mind had been undone when, as legends tell us, father and son mistake their places for each other’s.

  He was racked by sobbing when he gave a speech I was no longer there to hear, just as he had been the previous April during that moment after dinner when, perhaps for the first time, he had come to the conclusion I had knowingly signed my own death warrant.

  Most people might have thought the Guide’s sentimentality mere playacting, but I was in a better position than anyone else to know the truth. Those sobs were completely genuine. You can’t understand that, just as you can’t understand so much else. You find it hard to realize that in this world, he and I hated each other even while we loved each other, and conversely, we adored each other even as each deplored the other. Especially on days like that December 14. Or on nights like December 13.

  Ah, that night …

  Even if you stopped asking me for answers, the questions would still take up half of my nonexistence. Lightning flashed outside. My wife had gone over to the window again and I meant to ask her: What are you trying to locate? On the other side of the window-pane there was nothing but darkness and desolation. But I never managed to question her because I was already falling asleep. It was a kind of unhealthy torpor streaked with snowflakes through which I could barely make out the shape of my first lover, the partisan girl, and, at her side, my bodyguard. He was there as he had been forty years before when, in the highlands, as we were trying to escape from our nationalist enemies, I lay in mortal fever, and begged them both, my lover and my bodyguard, to finish me off. Kill me, I begged them, but don’t let me fall into their hands … They looked at me as if they had been turned to stone. My fever had turned them into spectral figures, who now split into three, and now merged into a single fearsome creature, half man and half woman.

  It was when my wife moved away from the window and drew closer to me that I saw her in the shape of my first lover, the one I was never able to marry. And she came this time as she had done forty years earlier with my old bodyguard … Silently, they both stepped nearer, then the guard stood back and only she was there, in the mist, but again in duplicate, simultaneously lover and wife — a bicorporal woman who instead of bringing me a cup of chamomile tea was pointing the black mouth of a gun barrel straight at me. I didn’t feel the slightest fear, I even thought: Why did I have to wait four decades for them to hear my prayer? Kill me, I thought then as I had done before, don’t let me fall into their hands! And then all of a sudden everything went blank.

  I have now been floating in the void for years, carried here and there by inconstant winds. I suspect I am moving, and yet I stay still; I seem to be standing still and yet I am dashing I know not where. And to cap it all, in this bottomless and boundless space, in this desperate vastness where one soul meets another only too rarely — in the midst of this void, as I’ve told you again and again, we successors, escorted by our retinues, are, like the guides among us, no more than a paltry handful of pitiful beings.

  You try in vain to unscramble our signs. To understand the motives of one or another among us. But we, who are both guides and successors, now and forever more reunited, embrace and throttle each other, we tire ourselves out trying to tear off each other’s heads, with equal anger. If I had been the Guide, I would have inflicted the same fate on him; he and I would have ended up changing places dozens of times, as many times as similar events came to recur throughout all eternity. That’s why I felt no rest or reassurance when I saw his statue torn down by the crowd and his bronze head shattered. Only sterile grieving, resembling everything else that surrounds me in these funereal regions where I am condemned to wander without end.

  That is how we are.

  That is why you have no cause to lament or feel any regret. And even less cause to expect us to reappear in the form of medieval ghosts hovering over museums and fortresses, demanding that our sons take revenge. We were impossible fathers, and so we could only have impossible wives, sons, and daughters.

  Don’t try to work out where we went wrong. We are but the offspring of a great disorder in the universe. And as we came into the world, by mistake, in accursed cohorts, on each other’s coattails, with one of us now in the lead, now in second place, now Guide and now Successor, so we began our long march through blood and ashes toward you.

  We never knew prayers or repentance, so don’t ever think of lighting candles for the salvation of our souls. You’d be better off praying for something else. Pray that as we gyrate to no end in the dark abyss of the universe, we never happen to spy in the blackness and far distance the light of the terrestrial globe, and — like cutthroats who happen on the village where they were born— we exclaim: Oh, but that’s Earth! Otherwise, like those assassins who turn off their path to visit their first home, we might also make a detour and, pitiless and unrepentant, masked and bloodstained as we always were and always will be, we might return to bring you new misfortunes, sans amen.

  Tirana—Paris

  October 2002—March 2003