Ismail Kadare - The Successor

“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.