The Successor Read online

  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?

  She turned the handle carefully and pushed the door open.

  “Mama,” she said in a whisper, so as not to startle her. But her mother seemed to be sleeping like a log.

  Suzana stood rigid on the threshold, not sure what to do. Incredible! she said inwardly. Her mother, who was in the habit of rising at first light, was still deep in the land of Nod. Just like the other time, on the night of December 14.

  “Mama!” she said a second time.

  It took the drowsy woman another minute to come to. You could see she was beginning to panic.

  “What’s the matter?” she snapped. “What’s going on?”

  “They’ve come to check … They’re here, in Papa’s bedroom, and downstairs as well, in the grand salon …”

  Her mother’s eyes bulged, but seemed to be blind.

  “To check what? What for?”

  “Their inquiries,” the daughter replied. “The minister himself has come. He said they were going to do an autopsy.”

  The woman’s hair, as much as her eyes, suggested distress. As if it was the last part of her to shake off sleep.

  “What’s all this nonsense about an autopsy? Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

  “They’re going to do an autopsy,” the daughter repeated. “They even said it was a scandal that one hasn’t been done before. Mama,” she added more gently, “I think it’s not … not a bad idea.”

  “You do, do you? And what’s not bad about it?” the older woman retorted, as she tried to cover her face with the pillow. It muffled the sound of her next words. “What’s not bad about it? You’re into autopsies now, are you?”

  Suzana bit her lower lip. She was about to walk out, but changed her mind.

  “I think it’s a good sign … The inquiry itself is a good thing. You’re aware there are suspicions that …”

  “Hold your tongue!” the mother shouted. And after a moment she wailed, “Unhappy that we are! Misfortune will be upon us evermore!”

  Suzana shook her head in despair, and left.

  The landing was still shrouded in half-light. Voices from downstairs had a muffled sound. Outside, dawn was breaking.

  She went back to her own room, shivering with the chill. All the same, she could not rid herself of a kind of good premonition. The minister’s eyes had been so kindly. And especially his voice. He had given just as much an impression of firmness when speaking of the autopsy as he had of attentiveness when he turned to her and said, “Did we wake you up?”

  So someone had not wanted an autopsy … somebody who might be held accountable … You avoid an autopsy when you have something to hide … In the present case, it wasn’t hard to imagine what … Had the event really been a suicide, or had it been … had it been … murder? In circumstances of this kind, an autopsy was normally obligatory … All the more so when the deceased was so prominent. Therefore, someone had wanted to hide something … Whereas now, someone else wanted the secret out in the open … Someone who went so far as to call the cover-up a “scandal” …

  My God, let it be so! Suzana implored. She wasn’t even surprised anymore that she had invoked the forbidden name.

  Truth would out in the end for all to see … The Party … as always … as ever … No, our comrade in arms, the trustworthy, the unforgettable … did not take his own life, as was first thought, but was murdered … perfidiously … by enemies of the Party … by saboteurs … by traitors …

  She had already dreamed so many times of hearing these words from the mouth of the Guide standing on a red-draped platform or speaking on the radio or the television! But this was the first time they seemed to her to be within the range of possibilities. My God, let it happen! she prayed once more.

  She was keeping her eyes shut in the hope that she would return to the dream she had been dreaming that morning and would discover its sequel. Such things had happened before, but rarely, so very rarely. And even when that did happen, there was never any correction. She tried to reconstruct it from memory, but she soon realized that, however hard she tried, she could not bring back its sweetness of tone any more than she could make pink clouds stay longer in the sky. The only thing she
could still feel was the bitter taste of regret at the moment of waking. Maybe the reason she so much wanted to return to the dream — if only for a few seconds — was so she could wash away the regret. Except that she was no longer very sure what depressed her the more — that she had not managed to speak to her father, or that she had not had a thought for her fiancé until the very end …

  2

  “Let’s do this again,” the minister said in a casual, almost jovial tone of voice.

  His words sounded less like those of a senior official in charge of a crucial autopsy, the most important to have taken place in the history of the Communist State of Albania and maybe in all Albanian history, than like someone saying goodbye to old friends after a sumptuous meal in one of the restaurants in the hills around Tirana’s artificial lake. “The fish is really great here. Let’s do this again, okay?”

  Is this case going to be tied up or not?

  Petrit Gjadri, the forensic pathologist, strode along the Grand Boulevard toward the Hotel Dajti, thinking all the while about the minister’s remark, which grew a tad more inconceivable with every step he took.

  The architect drank in the minister’s words with feverish eyes that could have signified either pathological inquisitiveness or prurient pleasure — the kind of look that spreads like wildfire at the circus or at a fistfight in the market, when spectators or passersby rub their hands as if to say: Let’s see how this turns out!

  Are they both blind, or are they just pretending? the doctor had wondered as he watched them trading jokes like a couple of youngsters.

  As for himself, he recalled quite clearly when he had been officially notified that he would be required to undertake an autopsy of prime importance. On the body of the Successor.

  He had gone deaf for a brief instant. The whole universe had gone silent. Inside him, everything stopped — his heartbeat, his brain, his breathing. Then, as those functions gradually returned, a thought slowly formed in his mind: So that’s how we’ll put an end to this business.

  “This business” was his own life.

  After an autopsy of this kind, the continued existence of the person who carried it out seemed as improbable as evidence of life on the face of the moon.

  In the oppressive silence, broken only by the minister giving instructions, the forensic pathologist, involuntarily as it were, looked back on his career with a strange sense of distance … He had lived an honest life, insofar as that was possible, and it had certainly not been easy, given the risky nature of the profession he pursued. He had always been vulnerable to attack on account of his “semi-bourgeois” family background, but he had escaped the campaign to unmask and denounce the “so-called intellectual circle of the Tirana doctors” — accused of denigrating Soviet life — as he had fortunately only been a student at the time. After that first stroke of luck, he had managed to steer clear of being identified with another group, a coalition of teachers and students who stood accused of making jokes about China’s barefoot doctors, at the time of his country’s idyll with Peking.

  The minister’s words were clear and unemotional, pregnant with ominous promises. One had failed to carry out a procedure that it was obligatory be made on any citizen, and even more so on the Successor: an autopsy.

  The doctor tried to concentrate, but he felt as if that was only muddling his mind even more.

  So the autopsy would be done, the minister went on, despite the delay. The truth must come out, irrespective of whether it was to any particular person’s taste. The minister’s eyes sparkled with sincere indignation.

  At the meeting over the Chinese, sincerity was precisely what had been lacking in the delegates from the Party Committee. They had feigned outrage by pounding the tabletop and making their voices quaver, but it was manifest that their hearts were as cold as damp kindling. All the same, the terror that cold fury can arouse is no less fearful than others — the sort that is accompanied by oohs and aahs. But at the end of the meeting, when they were waiting in petrified fear for the sentences to be declared, the first rumors of the break with Peking began to circulate, and the campaign was stopped in its tracks, as if by magic.

  Everything would be done by the rules, the minister went on with unchanging indignation. Apart from the autopsy, there would be a reenactment. A shot would be fired in the bedroom with the weapon that the victim had used. They would then verify whether the noise could be heard outside. In the garden, where the residence’s guards were on duty. On the landing. In the bedrooms where the other family members were sleeping. Everything would be carefully taken down. They would pick a stormy night with weather similar to that of December 14. Shots would be fired with a silencer, then without one.

  The doctor’s eyes met the architect’s, without meaning to. What self-destroyer had ever fitted a silencer to the gun he was going to use? But instead of a glimmer of disbelief, what shone in the architect’s eyes was the same feverish euphoria as before.

  Did he really understand nothing, or was that just a way of protecting himself?

  “We’ll begin with the test with the silencer on,” the minister repeated, but, as if he could read the doctor’s thoughts, he added immediately, “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this whole … business is strictly confidential.”

  He was on the verge of saying explicitly that at the end of the story the Successor’s death would be shown to have been murder, that the man would be declared a Martyr of the Revolution, and that all the suspicions that had darkened his name like so many leaden clouds would be blown away there and then. That fact would lead directly to the punishment of those who had brought the Successor down.

  “Be that as it may,” the minister went on as he glanced at the doctor with just an ounce of affection, “the key to the whole business is the autopsy.”

  Of course it is, Petit Gjadri thought.

  In his heart of hearts, he had always known that one day or another an autopsy would be his undoing.

  Do you think your words fill me with joy? he responded inwardly to the minister’s remarks.

  Obviously he knew what the score was. In times like these, any given autopsy could be interpreted and then reinterpreted on a whim or a change of wind. The results might be appropriate to the general climate on this day, and not at all acceptable the day after. Barely a few weeks ago, Kano Zhbira, a former member of the Politburo who had committed suicide quite a few years back, had been exhumed from the Martyrs of the Motherland Cemetery. It was his third unearthing! Every tack and turn in the political line exercised its primary effect on human remains, not on the national economy. Zhbira’s posthumous rheumatism — rheumatismus post mortem, a condition that does not yet afflict us — was a better indicator of political change than any analyst’s prediction. Immediately after his suicide (together with rumors that it had been murder, of course) he had been buried with full honors in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, he had been hauled up at the request of the Yugoslavs and transferred to Tirana’s municipal graveyard, signs of anti-Yugoslavianism having been detected in his file. A year later, after the break with Yugoslavia, he was dug up again so as to be put back in his original tomb in the national cemetery — as a herald of anti-Yugoslavianism. His third and most recent unburying, which took his body to the municipal graveyard once again, had been done almost on the sly, but no one yet knew why.

  Cawing from above made the doctor raise his eyes. He smiled to himself, thinking that the Greeks must have been quite near the mark in divining political fortunes from patterns made by flocks of birds.

  They were all washed up, the three of them, that was for sure. Including the minister, who headed their little group. But like the architect, he did not seem to have grasped the fact, unless the pair of them were putting on an act. Instead, they seemed to find the case entertaining; far from hiding this, they went in for larks and japes as if they were not a government minister and a senior architect but a couple of merrymakers. When it was over, before parting, they
had a few words in private, then vanished together into the basement of the residence.

  The doctor immediately put them out of his mind in order to concentrate his thoughts on the autopsy. That it was, at the very least, an autopsy of the first magnitude was not much consolation to him, but on the other hand he could have ended up like his colleague Ndré Pjetergega. A Gypsy from Brraka had lain in wait for him behind his door and, with a shout of, “Doctor? Bastard! Are you the one who said my daughter was pregnant?” he had beaten him to death.

  The yellowing leaves in the park on the other side of the Grand Boulevard made him sigh. God knows why, but the refrain of an old homosexual lament, which he’d heard years before in Shkodër, kept running through his mind:

  They say two candles were lit

  At the Vizier’s yesterday.

  Holy Virgin, for Sulçabeg we pray:

  His throat a razor has slit.

  In the corridor of the Successor’s residence, the doctor was suddenly seized by the vision of the young woman in a nightdress revealing the shape of her delicate, quivering limbs. It was her engagement, it was she herself who lay at the root of her father’s tragedy. And therefore at the root of a tragedy that would be their common lot.

  As he was stepping inside the Hotel Dajti, a question began to form unobtrusively and gradually in his mind. Why had he, Petrit Gjadri, been chosen to perform this prestigious autopsy? But henceforth he should not try to answer that or any other question. He was under a stay of execution, and he had to try to use the time remaining to good effect. The coffee he was going to enjoy in a hotel set aside for the exclusive use of foreigners and members of the nomenklatura — a place he would have dared to enter previously only in quite exceptional circumstances — would be just a foretaste of the higher serenity that was slowly spreading through his being. The kind of freedom that humans call “the peace of the grave,” without really appreciating it insofar as they usually experience it only as they die, had, in this particular case, become available to him a little ahead of time.