The Successor Page 7

  Her brother smiled sourly. He wasn’t too sure what the elders would say on the question of a house going from one owner to another. Aunt Memë had been evasive on that point too. “I’m not at home in the present,” she sighed. “We used to have other customs, like spells and curses; but now there are rituals I can’t make head or tail of. People talk about con-cresses, blinums, and what have you. Ay, ay, ay!”

  When Suzana suggested that the new part of the house probably did not yet have any history, seeing that only her engagement party had ever taken place in it when the plaster was barely dry, her brother shook his head in disagreement. He took the view that crimes moved house with people, until they found walls within which they could hide. If the crimes hadn’t been committed within these walls, then they had taken place elsewhere. In the highlands, for instance, during the last war. They called it the War of Liberation, but many people said it had been more like a civil war. In other words, a really dirty dogfight.

  “Do you think Papa might have committed any crimes?” Suzana asked, almost wailing.

  He didn’t hear the question, or pretended not to.

  What he said next made her hair stand on end: A wedding snuffed out long before would suddenly demand what was due to it if talk of a new engagement woke it from slumber. So many engagements had been broken by the so-called class struggle!

  “You’re crazy!” she riposted. “Mad and bad.”

  He replied that he was neither mad nor bad. But when Suzana burst into tears and protested that she could not bear herself and her engagement being highlighted as the cause of all that had happened, he took her in his arms and stroked her hair at length.

  “Let me cry a little longer,” she begged when her brother urged her to stop weeping.

  The graying wisps of their mother’s hair that they had seen on the morning of the tragedy, as she screamed at the deceased, so as to be heard throughout the house — “Woe! What have you done to the Party?” — had as it were gotten stuck in their minds for days on end. She was grieving for the Party’s sake, Suzana’s brother whispered in her ear. Not for her own sake. Nor for ours.

  Later on, harking back to that scene, it seemed to Suzana that the mystery of their parents’ bond with the Party would forever remain inaccessible to her and her brother. It was a bond stronger than the ties of blood, and by the same token stronger than the knot of marriage.

  “In the highlands …,” she repeated after him. Atrocities must have been committed up there. And that peculiar bond must have been forged there too.

  The nature of such a bond was presumably still little understood, because it was too new. Unlike religious allegiances, it was in competition with the ties of clan and family, because it too was a tie of blood — but with a difference. It wasn’t based on inner blood, the blood in your veins, identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand years, according to genetics, but on the other kind, on outer blood. That’s to say, on the blood of others, blood they had drunk-enly spilled in the name of Doctrine.

  Whenever their conversation drifted toward topics of this kind Suzana put her hand to her brother’s mouth. “Please don’t speak of such things, put them out of your mind!” But in spite of herself, she went over it again and again. Inner blood, outer blood …

  She turned around on hearing the front door creak on its hinges. It was her brother. “Tirana is awash with rumors!” he said, still out of breath. “Apparently, Papa is going to be rehabilitated!”

  “Hold on, tell me everything, from the beginning!”

  They sat down in the little lounge on the second floor and lit cigarettes. People everywhere were now saying that no autopsy had been carried out earlier not by oversight but intentionally. They were going so far as to mention names of probable culprits. Suspect number one was Adrian Hasobeu.

  “What good news!” Suzana said, and jumped up to give her brother a kiss. She realized almost immediately that, as a result of her morning caresses, she must have left her blouse unbuttoned.

  He lit another cigarette and puffed at it energetically, as if he was gasping for air. He was staring at a fixed point on the ceiling, his pupils immobile.

  “What’s wrong?” she inquired gently. “You were going to say something, and now you seem to have fallen into deep thought.”

  He smiled at her vaguely.

  “Nothing wrong … I just wanted to say that from now on we should be prepared.” “Prepared for what?”

  “Don’t you remember Aunt Memë’s final piece of advice? — ‘Be prepared, know your words.’“

  “Know what we will say … You mean, about the night of December 13? But we’ve already told them everything we know!”

  “The old woman wasn’t referring to the investigators.”

  “What did she mean, then?”

  His breathing became labored.

  “She meant Papa. Know what you are going to say to him when he appears before you. That’s what she was talking about.”

  “Are you trying to scare the living daylights out of me?” Suzana complained.

  “There’s no reason for you to be afraid. The old woman’s mind works the same way as people’s did two thousand years ago. For the ancients, encounters with the dead were unavoidable. It didn’t matter so much where the encounter took place — it could be in a dream, in the hereafter, or in our own conscience …”

  “I dreamt of him twice, but wasn’t able to speak to him.”

  “One day you will. You, me, Mama, we all need to know what we will say to him.”

  He took his time trying to describe, in the least lugubrious terms possible, the wasteland that, in the imagination of the Ancients, separated this world from the shadow world. Where, as on some station platform or in an airport arrivals hall, the dead by the thousands stand around in little groups waiting for their nearest and dearest. Some are overwhelmed with longing to clasp in their arms those from whom they have been separated, but there are others who with somber and resentful visage display their wounds, waiting for an explanation. As they hold open the gashes in their bodies, so they turn the pages of law books, gospels, proclamations, the Kanun, autopsy reports, and ancient hymns.

  Suzana lightly touched the back of her brother’s hand. “Brother dearest, that’s enough of such horrors! Don’t we have enough crosses to bear in this world?”

  But he shook his head. One day they would appear before their father, and they had to know what they would tell him. “You first of all,” he said, turning to Suzana, “you, the most innocent of us all! The purest! Trampled on more than anyone else. If ever he dared …”

  “No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to speak about it anymore. I’ve forgiven him.”

  “I’ll take you at your word,” he replied. “Your encounter with him might turn out to be just a nostalgic embrace. You might even be able to do without words. But things will be different for Mama.”

  Suzana did not raise her eyes.

  “‘You, my wife, you who couldn’t get a wink of sleep for three whole months, how do you account for having sunk into deep slumber on the very night of December 13?’ He’s bound to ask that. And I must say I can’t imagine what she’ll reply. What pills will she claim to have taken? What medical prescription will serve as her defense?”

  There was a long pause. But when he resumed in a barely audible undertone, as if afraid to awaken her, and said, “As for me, it will be even harder …” Suzana’s weary eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

  “Don’t be afraid!” the young man commanded. “It’s got nothing to do with what you’re thinking. It’s going to be hard for me for a quite different reason.”

  He bit his nails as he spoke. Suzana found it difficult to guess what he was getting at. It surely would be hard for him, no doubt about that. There could be nothing more awkward for a son confronted with a father displaying his bloodstained shirt not to promise to reclaim the blood debt, but to declare the opposite: “Stop waving that shirt about. You are my
father — I cannot blame you for what you have done, but I have to tell you that I shall not reclaim your blood.”

  “Dearest heart,” she mumbled to herself, “why do you torture yourself with abominations like that?”

  Then, looking like death warmed over, he explained, as if he was talking to himself, why even if the opportunity arose he would not avenge his father’s spilled blood. As he’d already told her on a previous occasion, his father’s blood was different from blood that had been spilled, it flowed in a different direction, belonged to a different group. Just as their mother’s breasts were different. His father, his mother, his blood, her milk, were ruled by different laws. In parades, in songs, and everywhere they had lauded “The Light of the Party,” they had chanted “The Party is our Mother.” Soon people would be clamoring praise for “The Milk of the Party! The Teats of the Party! The Genitals of the Party!” That was actually how it had all begun in the very earliest Communist cells, where activists (male and female) slept (or did not sleep) together not by human custom, but in accordance with the prescriptions of Doctrine.

  His tone grew ever more acerbic as he spoke, but Suzana could not find an opportunity to butt in and soothe her brother.

  That’s how the whole business they did not want to recall must have started. After seizing power, and after they had spawned their own offspring, they turned the other way.

  He laughed a bitter laugh.

  “They brought us into the world, but you have to realize that that gives us only provisional status. When the hour of duty sounds, they won’t hesitate to trample us into the ground if the Party requires it. Like they already trampled on you. As they would have trampled on me, if the Doctrine had called for it.”

  Suzana finally managed to get a word in. “Dearest heart, please, please stop this!”

  “Let me finish,” he said in a deathly tone. “I’m not just saying all this. In this room, right here, my own father threatened me personally: ‘You are my flesh and blood, but you need to know that if you were ever to betray the Party, I would clap you in irons and turn the key with my own hands.’ And by the look in his eye I could see he really meant it. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He would have done what Abraham did three thousand years ago, when God asked him to sacrifice his own son.”

  Suzana held her head in her hands. As she’d become accustomed to nightmares, now she was just waiting for the sound of her brother’s voice to come to an end. But he kept on coming back to the new genetics, which encouraged sons to sell their fathers, fathers to sell their sons, wives to sell their husbands … Which is why they had understood nothing about what happened while they were sleeping as deeply as if they’d suffered a stroke, on that night of December 13.

  Suzana rose at long last and went into the bathroom. She splashed some cold water on her face. Curiously, the dreadful things her brother had been telling her these past days washed off her as easily as her early-morning nightmares.

  Once back in her bedroom, she paused in front of the mirror. She looked over her makeup equipment with tears welling in her eyes. The lipstick seemed to have dried in the tube from long disuse. She wetted it slightly before putting some on. It came out in a color that looked peculiar, almost treacherous. If her brother had still been beside her, God knows what ghoulish comment he would have made about it.

  You must try to think about something else, she told herself. As for that shady old hag Aunt Memë, she’s welcome back if she brings a good omen, but if not, good riddance!

  You must try to think about other things, she reiterated. Maybe ordinary life will come back in the end. Life as under the old genetics, as her brother would say. Maybe all the others would line up in her father’s train to take their leave of this world. A whole generation, all the people who had come down from the highlands in a halo of mystery with a blanket over their shoulders, as they’d been told in school, the whole lot of them would vanish into the mist whence they came.

  Oh Lord, make them disappear, let life become livable again! Until the time came for the encounter, down there, in that wasteland where they would have been waiting for many a long year.

  She conjured up a picture of herself standing in that desolate place, watching a man with a body all tattered and torn coming toward her from the far distance to take her in.

  They would embrace, clasping each other clumsily as her father tried to avoid her lipstick and she tried not to be touched by the blood on his shirt — but what would she find to say to him after so many years apart?

  Words rose to her lips but then slipped away again.

  She felt as if she was whirling around and around. It was probably spring fever, the feeling produced by an accumulation of happiness that made her bones feel like jelly.

  Her legs took her quite naturally toward the bed. Before letting herself doze, she made a last but fairly casual attempt to find the words she might say to her father on the banks of the funereal river. Father, sir, you didn’t trust me, and it’s through me that misfortune befell you.

  A large part of the day was spent in that way, between her bed and her dressing table.

  Several times as she went past the telephone she picked up the receiver because she imagined, though she didn’t know why, that after being cut off for so long this line would be the first to be reconnected.

  Night was falling when she caught sight of her brother through the window; he was marching up and down the garden like a man possessed. As if all the rest had not been enough, the poor boy was still finding new suspicions to torment himself with. It seemed to her that since Aunt Memë’s visit they were gnawing at him even more painfully.

  Aunt Memë … she mused, almost in slow motion. If it really was she …

  She ran down the stairs and up to the small gate, where she waited for her brother to be in earshot before sharing her doubts with him. He listened to her patiently, then, instead of saying, “What’s all this nonsense?” or “You call me a lunatic, but look at you!” he whispered by way of reply that the same suspicion had occurred to him, but he’d not mentioned it because he didn’t want to frighten her.

  “But what would be so awful about it, anyway?” Suzana answered, putting on a casual tone that wilted even before she had finished speaking. The worst possibility was that a self-proclaimed aunt had come knocking at their door … It’s the sort of thing that can happen, especially if … especially if … they were in the situation they were in.

  Sure, such things did happen, her brother mumbled. But his suspicion was of another kind. Years before — he remembered the occasion clearly — a bereavement telegram had lain around the house without anybody taking any notice of it. Because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Papa and Mama were spending all their time at endless, stressful meetings, so neither of them bothered about the telegram. As he’d only just learned to read at the time, he had a pretty vague memory of what it said. It was the first time he had ever slit open a telegram announcing someone’s death. When Aunt Memë had showed up the other day, he’d suddenly had a vision of the thick black line around the edges of that telegram and of the compressed wording that, he thought he recalled, had reported her death.

  Suzana’s knees nearly gave way. “Are you saying a dead woman came to our door? Are you trying to frighten me to death? Answer me: Is that what you want?”

  “Sissy!” he retorted. “Do the departed scare you to death? What do you think you are? What do you think all of our kind are? We’re the walking dead. Ghosts who scare the daylights out of decent folk. Yes, that’s what we are! Ghosts!”

  “Oh no,” Suzana pleaded, “don’t say that. Dearest heart, please don’t say such things. Just this morning you were so full of hope, and I was too. What’s happened to you?”

  He said he was sorry. He hadn’t changed. Nor had he had any bad news. It was just his nerves giving way.

  He smoothed down her hair and uttered words of comfort, words of hope. All the signs remained as favorable as before. Even th
e appearance of Aunt Memë wasn’t necessarily a bad omen. Whether the old woman was really a Sigurimi officer in disguise or a shadow that had gotten out of a country graveyard, she was altogether preferable to the nothingness that had been their lot up to then, to that deathly hush unbroken by any knock on the door, a door as silent as the stone lid of a burial chamber.

  Suzana calmed down and went back inside. In the corridor she thought she heard her mother’s bedroom door being slowly pulled closed. She had the impression that her mother had been looking very worried recently whenever she caught sight of Suzana and her brother deep in conversation.

  She awoke on the stroke of midnight. She got up to make a complete tour of the house, a recent habit. An ice-pale moon shone through the windowpanes. To her great surprise, the door to the first-floor lounge looked as if it was ajar. She hurried toward it. Yes, it was. Probably the investigators had left it like that in the morning. It was the first time they had forgotten to close that door since December. But maybe it was no accident. Maybe it was the result of the general change in the atmosphere.

  Her hand went toward the light switch, but pulled back. There were guards outside who were probably spying on every movement inside the house. Anyway, there was no need to switch on the light. Moonlight streamed into the room, making it look as if it was full of mist. Tears came into her eyes. The room was as unreal as it was in her imagination. Unbearably convincing morsels of the memory of her engagement party sprang up before her eyes. By the marble mantelpiece, her fiancé sipping champagne with two of his comrades. A little farther away, with his back turned, was her father in his dark suit. Then a newcomer, holding a bunch of red flowers, at the head of a merry group. Flashbulbs crackled. Someone saying, “But where is Suzana?” — then, once again, she saw the architect, weeping with emotion. Then everyone going stiff, and voices whispering, “The Prijs! The Guide is coming!” Then as soon as he had come into the room, everything went rigid again, but this time it was with the brittleness of glass, sparkling all the more brightly for the complete silence that fell on the party.