The Successor Read online

  5

  Like all bad news, the report of the broken engagement got around much faster than its formal announcement. Convinced that the crisis was a thing of the past, most people liked to think that the incident, far from weakening the nation’s moral fiber, had in fact strengthened it. The country and its Guide had shown just how steadfast they were in a storm of whatever magnitude. Just as they had done during the squabble with the Yugoslavs. As they did later on, with the Russians. And, of course, with the Chinese.

  As tension declined, so interest in the sentimental details of the end of the affair grew. Though whispered, stories were passed on by word of mouth almost everywhere. No more phone calls between the two youngsters. The young man and his father, Besim Dakli, standing at the Successor’s front door, wrapped in heavy winter coats, waiting to find out what would happen. The girl in despair, who had shut herself in her room and stopped eating. The poor boy drowning his sorrow by strumming his guitar, for which he’d written a new song that began:

  And so that is how

  They tore us apart …

  In Albania, the majority of public holidays occur in the fall, which meant that the Successor had no chance of keeping himself out of the way of television cameras. Awkward as that was for him, there was no way he could avoid thousands of eyes studying his face onscreen, searching for a clue to the real truth. Some thought he looked more grumpy than usual; others thought on the contrary that he looked calmer. Both interpretations were obviously worrying, but the latter seemed the more ominous, since it implied that the Successor was feigning indifference.

  What had begun as mere curiosity took on a tragic hue at the National Day parade, where the Guide and the Successor stood side by side on the platform. In contrast to previous occasions, when the two had been seen smiling and chatting with each other, this year the Guide stood stock-still. Not only did he not utter a word to the Successor, but, as if to make his scorn doubly clear, he turned twice to say something to the person standing on his other side — the minister of the interior.

  From one end of the country to the other, people were dumbfounded by what they saw happening before their eyes. The benighted engagement had long been broken off, but no reward, not even a sign of clemency, had yet been granted the Successor for the action he had taken. On the contrary, everything seemed to suggest that the Guide was only growing angrier.

  It was the first time people had seen what almost amounted to a public display of things that in the old days could have had you convicted of malicious gossip seeking to undermine Party unity. The militant Party members were racked with worry. They would rise at dawn after sleepless nights, with bloodshot eyes, aching muscles, and coated tongues, turn to their graying wives and share with them what could not be broached in any bar: Could a forty-year-old comradeship be scrapped just like that?

  The optimists among them looked forward to the next parade, hoping that, if things would not be completely resolved by then, at least some slight improvement might be visible. And when the next parade day came, and not only had nothing mended, but the chill was even icier, they felt a great weight on their chest and, sighing with anxiety, barely managed to articulate the words “Woe betide us!”

  Toward the end of November, a tentative rumor had it that the whole business would come to an end at the winter break. Oddly enough, it gained greater acceptance than other stories, perhaps because it invoked the calendar and the natural cycle of the seasons. The red banners and bunting on the stands, the speeches and brass bands broadcast by the citywide loudspeaker system, would give way to whistling winds, to blankets of fog, and to the rumble of thunder, which had not changed in a thousand years.

  And if the first week of December had always been labeled “taciturn,” this year it seemed doubly, triply speechless. It was this silence that was broken by the gunshot that put an end to the life of the Successor. A fully muffled shot, moreover, a shot not heard outside the residence, or even inside its walls. As if the gun had been fired from beyond the grave.

  6

  The Albania files had come to give their users such troubles that, even if they did not admit it to themselves, their desire to see the short-term upheaval in the country settle down, and to see those files once again gathering dust, became almost noticeable.

  Alas, for the time being, there was no point even dreaming of such a thing. On the contrary, those brown folders got heavier by the day. Everyone realized that the material piling up inside them was contradictory and incoherent, to such a degree that even the most persistent analysts ended up making the same gesture of despair as everyone else and declaring, with arms thrown wide: The only way you can get a grip on a place overcome by paranoia is by becoming a little paranoid yourself.

  Their superiors in the agencies seemed to think otherwise. They scribbled spindly question marks over words and phrases like “hereditary Balkan lunacy,” “whim,” “delusion,” “symptomatic brain damage from iodine deficiency,” and so forth. A leader’s envy of his successor, envy taken to the point of murdering him, was such a common event in every place and period that it could not itself provide a key to understanding the Balkan malady. You could call to mind some of the customs of Albanian mountain tribes — for instance, their male beauty contests that were often followed by the killing of the winner, for reasons of envy, obviously — if you were writing a literary essay, but definitely not if you were trying to present a serious political analysis. And if you did, it would come down to saying that the whole history of the peninsula was no more than a working out of the old legend about the mirror on the wall: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all …”

  The analysts ended up coming back to the main questions, after wearing themselves out in the pursuit of the puzzling issues raised by the beauty contests in the northern highlands — which could be understood either as a symptom of almost prehistoric male vanity, or as an indulgence of homosexuality by Albanian common law, which in other respects was so harsh.

  Responding to repeated comments that it was time to be a bit more serious, the specialists on the Balkan desk came back once again to their other hypothesis, the one marked with a huge question mark: Is the country changing its political line? Obviously, the first thing that occurred to them was to make a connection between the murder of the Successor and some preceding attempt by him to deviate from orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the huge mass of intelligence now reaching them contained not the slightest, not the tiniest, sign that the Successor had ever tried to introduce the minutest change in the political line of the Albanian regime.

  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 havin
g 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.

  TWO

  THE AUTOPSY

  1

  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 h
ad 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.