Ismail Kadare - The Successor

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 the 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.