Ismail Kadare - The Successor

Suzana stared at her mother with wild eyes. Intern the man who had made her so happy? “You are out of your mind!” she shouted. “It’s you who’s lost your head and doesn’t want to understand,” her mother riposted. And she went on to spill out her heart: “You had the cheek to go with that hooligan, and now you want to defend him!” “He’s not a hooligan,” Suzana retorted. She almost added that he was the man who had made a woman of her, but she thought better of it as she realized that even if the argument with her mother went on for a thousand years, they would never agree on that.

Forty-eight hours later, her father asked to see her. The wide bay windows of his office seemed to emit a constant vibration, as if they were forever being battered by winds. Suzana felt freezing cold. She was aware that she would not say any of the sentences she had prepared for this interview. What could her father know about her body? How could she tell him about her breasts and her hips aching for caresses, or about her genitals, where pain and sensuality fatally merged and consumed each other? About renouncing love-making, when she counted the days, the hours, and the minutes that brought her closer to each encounter? When she still did not understand how, despite the heavenly evanescence that made everything in her fall apart and melt like wax, her body retained its solid shape? He and his comrades had other kinds of pleasures, what with their congresses, their flags, their anthems, and their cemetery of National Martyrs, whereas she only had him … his body … his inexhaustible body …

Her father stared at her with his fair eyes, whose coldness oddly seemed more bearable that day. She felt that the look in her own eyes was of the same kind — alien and distant.

For a long while he said nothing. Then, when he began to speak, she realized right away that it was not only his tone of voice but also his words and his diction that had changed. And it was indeed about a change that he spoke. As from now, her father would no longer be what he had been up to then. What a designated Successor actually was could not be known except by becoming one … He would not go on about it, but would only say this to her: People believed he would now be more powerful than ever. That was only half the truth. The other half he would tell her, and her alone: He would henceforth be more powerful and more vulnerable than ever … “I hope you understand me, daughter dear.”

Suzana listened to him with her head hung low. A wordless flash of light as cold as steel had suddenly made transparent what ought to have taken her days or weeks to grasp. When she felt she could not hold back her tears much longer, she looked up and nodded her assent. Her father looked fuzzy, as seen through a haze, still standing as she turned to leave. At the door she burst into sobs, and as she ran up the stairs to her room she thought she could hear her tears dripping to the floor.

That was how her one and only affair had ended. When she met her lover for the showdown, she had tried to maintain a degree of discretion. She did not mention that he was in danger of relegation, nor did she mention her own quarrel with her mother. All the same, after making love, and still in the thrall of her pleasure, she had not hidden the fact that she was sacrificing herself for the sake of her father’s career. He listened to her with furrowed brow, without really grasping what she meant to say. Later on, when she came back to the matter, he must have gotten the gist in the end. He didn’t say a word, but, after a long pause, he muttered something about such sacrifices reminding him of ancient tales that he’d assumed were things of the distant past.

Those were the last words they spoke to each other.

“So that’s how it was …” Suzana’s fiancé kept his eyes fixed on her as she told her story. “Did I make you angry, darling?” she asked as she stroked the back of his head. “There’s no reason you should be, that’s all ancient history now” … No, curiously he didn’t seem to have been distressed by the story. As she spoke, something had changed inside him. She could not quite identify which detail of the story had prompted his transformation, but, suddenly, leaning his lips toward her ear, he interrupted her in a whisper and said, “Are you going to show me your dark mystery again, then? …”

Glowing with joy she tore off her clothes with trembling hands. “My love, my love,” she murmured when he first touched her between the legs. Her screams turned into a muffled sob before reawakening as a succession of spasms. When the young man withdrew, she kept her eyes half closed. “How beautiful you are!” he whispered to her. Without opening her eyes she replied “It’s you who make me so.”

Still panting for breath, she covered him in kisses and smothered him in endearments. “Shall we do it again? We’ll do it again in the evening, in the afternoon, at dawn, won’t we?” “Absolutely,” he said, as he fumbled around for a cigarette.

Suzana snuggled under the blanket, relaxed her body, and tried to get back to sleep. Never had she felt so exhausted by an act of recollection. Her cheeks were as wet as before. So was her pubic hair.

Outside, dawn was breaking. The whole abomination seemed to be coming to an end. The autopsies, the white-coated judges, the instruments and the measurements would surely have an effect in due course. Poor Papa, honor would befall him late in the day. But at least his soul would rest in peace. As for them, her mother, her brother, and herself, life would go on. Without him, of course, without his dangerous eminence; they would go back into their shells with their heads down, and hope to find warmth to share inside.

That was the advice they got from their aunt Memë, the only person who came to see them in the days of desolation right after the tragedy: Stick together and keep each other warm.

She’d turned up before dawn from the remotest part of the south on a train that seemed to have been invented specially for her, wearing a black headscarf bespattered with drops of snow or sleet garnered in unlikely locations.

As surprised as she was anxious, Suzana stared at the unfamiliar old woman, who had been knocking for some while at the door.

“I’m your aunt Memë, I’ve come to visit,” the caller said, raising her voice.

Suzana shouted up from the bottom of the stairs, “Mama, Aunt Memë’s come to see us!”

She had thought that her mother would be somehow glad that after their protracted isolation someone had at last come knocking at their door. But her mother’s eyes, puffy from insomnia or else from deep sleep, looked the old lady up and down superciliously, as if she didn’t recognize her.

“You’ve forgotten me, but I won’t hold it against you. Since God has not yet called me to him, I was just wondering: For what trial has he spared me?”

In outdated language that Suzana only half understood, Aunt Memë rattled off her advice. Most of it began with a negative: “Do not.” Do not open the door, whoever calls; do not remember anything, not even your own dreams; do not try to guess whose hand struck down your unhappy father; for although one hand may hide another, behind the other there is always the hand of God. “As for you, my child,” she said to Suzana, “stop thinking you’re the cause of it all.” “Nor should you, my boy,” she added, turning toward Suzana’s brother, “nor should you think you have to take revenge. But above all,” she said to Suzana’s mother, you who are a mourning widow, you must not think about it anymore. “What’s done cannot be undone, and what’s undone is not for mending. Forget so that you may be forgotten.”

Suzana’s mother kept her eyes on the old lady as she made her speech, staring blankly except for moments when panic welled up in them.