Ismail Kadare - The Successor

She had meant to interrupt him, to say she’d already heard that old refrain. At school dances, boys in her class were as hot as hell when they brushed up against the other girls, but when they had to partner her on the floor, they went stone cold, as if they were bewitched. Their cheeks turned bright red, to be sure, and their hands were unsteady, but not from temptation, as you might first have thought, but rather from the opposite. From the waist down they became limp. Instead of pressing themselves up to her, they kept a safe distance, but went wild a few minutes later when they were up against other girls.

It was more or less what he was trying to tell her himself. The daughter of a top leader aroused desire as well as respect and fear, but it was the last that always overcame the other feelings. All the more so in his case, because of the additional factor of his own background. She heard disconnected fragments of sentences about Genc’s father: a seismologist, studied in Vienna under the monarchy, uncertainty forever hovering over the fate of the family …

She had listened to these paltry excuses with an ironical glint in her eye, for what she could hear herself saying inwardly was like a lament: Why does it have to happen to me? … As her stifled resentment showed no sign of abating, she blurted out harshly a question so sour that she immediately regretted saying it: “Does fear of dictatorship unman you to that extent?”

The young man bit his lip. She had tried to minimize the effect of her words by adding, in a joking tone, “Are we really so terrifying, my father and I? …”

The despair that was written on the boy’s face seemed irremediable. She had taken his hand, bent to kiss it, placed it on her breast, then between her legs. Abandoning all modesty made things easier for her. “Don’t look away,” she said sweetly. “Does it look black and threatening to you? More fearsome, more somber than the dictatorship of the proletariat? Say something, darling!”

He had not responded. Naked as she was, Suzana got up and walked over to the window. She gazed for a while at the empty beach. The sea was cold and gray. In the far distance you could make out the shape of a woman walking along the water’s edge. Had she not known it was her mother, she would not have recognized her. The long shawl draped over her shoulders made her gait look even more eerie. Suzana could feel a grimace distorting her features. She thought of her mother imagining her daughter’s orgasm. Poor Mama, if only she knew! she sighed to herself. A month ago, when she had told her mother about the boy she had just met, the older woman had shown Suzana a degree of tolerance for the first time in her life. Suzana had laid her heart bare with all her passion. She told her mother about things they had never spoken of before. In plain words, without shame, she spoke about her physical suffering. Since she had broken off … or rather, been forced to break off … with her first love, she had been living in hell. It wasn’t just a matter of emotional suffering, which her mother might have thought a spoiled girl’s luxury, but something else, which no one dared admit to: It had been physical torture. After two years of regular sexual relations, her body had suddenly been obliged to cut itself off from that whole world. She had obeyed her father’s injunction, she had yielded to the argument of force majeure relating to his career. She had been as meek as a lamb in respecting his wishes and in renouncing the most sublime pleasure that this world has to give. But it could not go on forever. She had at last met a boy she liked. Both of them took matters seriously, of course, and intended to get engaged, but she needed to see more of him to get to know him better. For well-known reasons, that seemed impossible: because of the guards, because of the Bllok where they lived, because the Sigurimi kept on her tail whenever she went into town. Only her mother could have the torture suspended. By helping them see each other, discreetly, from time to time. For example, at the villa on the shore, in the off-season … To Suzana’s great surprise, her mother did not say no.

Suzana carried on watching the figure on the beach going back and forth, and for the third time she thought: Poor Mama …

Then with that special, almost balletlike stride inspired by being naked without embarrassment, Suzana went back to her fiancé. He was all huddled over, gazing at the flames in the hearth with a mindless stare.

She sat herself casually in his lap. “Tell me about the other girls,” she whispered with all trace of rancor gone. “You tell me yours first, then I’ll tell you mine.” His answer was curt: “Don’t want to.” She stroked his hair and the back of his neck in an attempt to bring him around, but he jerked her hand away: “You’re wrong, that’s not what’s bothering me. Anyway …” “Anyway what?” she tried to tease … “Anyway, it would have been amazing if things had gone normally. All of you exude such terror …” “What!?” Suzana yelled — but Genc hurriedly added, “It’s nothing, nothing, forget it …” In the deathly silence that suddenly followed, it was he who gently brushed her wavy hair and whispered, “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you …” She listened distractedly and without really concentrating on a story about a hospital where he’d had to go with a broken leg and where the nurse, who was a bit older than he, got into bed with him; then there was a classmate at university, then another fling during some Youth Movement work experience in the north of the country.

“So you didn’t have any problems anytime at all?” she asked after a pause. “You saved that for me, didn’t you?” He shook his head the way people do when they utter a “no” separately, prior to contradicting their interlocutor. Each in turn was in the grip of resentment, as blind as ever. “How can you not realize you are different from the others?” he kept asking her. “You are other , you must understand, totally other.” She didn’t know how to take those terms. On the one hand they seemed reassuring, on the other they did not. And when he asked her to tell him about her single love affair, she put such passion into the way she told the tale that he could see how much she was still trying to get back at him. In any other circumstance, she would have talked about it more plainly, but that day, spite prompted her to describe the affair in incandescent terms, without a thought for the pain she might cause her boyfriend. “You described me as ‘other,’ didn’t you? Well, he was really different, in every sense of the word! He had no respect and no fear. You could have taken him for a silent opponent of the regime. But he probably wasn’t anything of the kind. He was simply indifferent. Indifferent, but domineering.” She had yielded to him, as people say, on their first date. She was then barely seventeen. After deflowering her, any man, at the sight of the signs proving the fact, would have shown if not fear, at least some concern. But he didn’t even comment on it. And she understood at that moment that he was the man she had ardently hoped for. She fell madly in love with him. Maybe he was in love with her? But he uttered words of love only at rare intervals. Each time he penetrated her she thought she perceived in his ardor some secret torment, as if he had been seeking something else in the deep recesses of her body. The mystery and the silence in which he enveloped himself became catching. So it was that one day, when he clumsily let slip that he had already been engaged, she, who on any other occasion would have flown into a rage, demanded an explanation, and burst into tears and recriminations, just bowed her head without a word. Their relationship went on in that way for a long time, until the day the affair was discovered. It coincided with the time when her father was in process of being officially designated as the Successor. It was very probably the new star that had suddenly begun to shine brightly over her father’s career that was responsible for bringing the affair to light. In cut-glass terms, without harping on what her daughter had done, but leaving her no option about future disobedience, her mother had demanded instant separation. “Your father is about to be designated as the next Prijs . You have to do this for him. Otherwise we will have no option but to have your lover interned, together with all his close and distant relatives.”