Ismail Kadare - The Successor

The clarification took its time. Complications arose from the first morning after the Successor’s death. His wife had been the first to grill him: “What do you say to the rumors people are spreading about you?”

He didn’t answer. A long silence followed, then his wife returned to the attack: Even supposing he had really been over there … at his house … around midnight … why should it have been divulged? Who had spotted him? In short, why had the gossip not been stopped?

He raised his eyes, with a bitter smile on his lips, but his wife didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “I know what you’re going to say — that you can’t put a stop to gossip. But you know as well as I do that you can!”

Indeed he knew. Despite that, this first phase, oddly enough, left him cold. At the end of the day, he had gotten the better of his perfidious rival. Even the suspicion that he had liquidated the Successor somewhat ahead of time served to show only that he’d been excessively eager. It was a well-known fact that, in this kind of case, overeagerness earned not only a reprimand, but also a degree of respect. The mere existence of the suspicion had suddenly enhanced his stature in the eyes of others. Because of it, his promotion to a higher position now seemed only a matter of course. The rumor that he might even be picked to fill the Successor’s shoes sprang from the same kind of reasoning.

Things only started to turn the wrong way in March, with news of the autopsy. The scalpels and tongs used to section the Successor’s cadaver would have caused him less agony than the fragmentary speculations he heard from all quarters. The autopsy wouldn’t have been ordered if there hadn’t been doubts. Its results could turn things upside down. The Successor’s sudden return in the shape of a martyr could easily cast his rival into the abyss.

The same questions preyed on Adrian Hasobeu’s mind from the moment he got up to his going to bed: Why was no one taking his defense? Why was the Guide not giving him any support?

The latter’s eyes appeared to recognize him no longer. It was apparently the last benefit that the onset of total blindness could give him. But as he went over in his mind his last meeting with the Guide, Adrian Hasobeu still could not see what mistake he had made.

… The Politburo meeting seemed to go on forever, on that late afternoon of December 13. The Successor was answering questions with ever sparser sentences. Sometimes he left a pause, as if waiting for the end of some inaudible translation. His eyes remained fixed on the typescript of his self-criticism, on which every now and again he penciled annotations.

All of a sudden, the Guide took his fob watch out of the pocket of his black jacket. He kept looking at it as the secretary sitting next to him whispered something in his ear, presumably what time the watch said.

The room froze and waited.

“I think it’s getting late,” the Guide had declared. His eyes were trained on the place where the Successor was sitting. “I propose that we put your self-criticism off until tomorrow …”

In the ever deeper silence, most of those present who had attended a similar meeting years before probably recalled the very same sentence being said at more or less the same time of day: “It is getting late; I suggest we leave your self-criticism, Comrade Zhbira, until the morning.” Not a muscle twitched on Kano Zhbira’s livid face, as if the death mask that would be placed over it the next day, after his suicide, had already begun to turn it into rock.

“Well, then,” the Guide resumed, still gazing toward where he thought the Successor was seated. His voice was weary, almost gentle, after such a long day. “As for you, try to get a proper night’s sleep, so as to be in good shape for your speech tomorrow. And the rest of you too.”

The pallor that had not left the Successor’s face was the same, still recognizable color. Adrian Hasobeu felt his body relax, as if the Guide’s wishes for a good night’s rest affected him first and foremost. The vague impression that it would once again be at night … a transitional night … yes, like the last time … on a calendrical quirk that only the blind man could control and which cropped up each time the latter invoked the passage of time … that idea made him go weak in the knees in anticipation.

He went home in the same half-dead state. He was just getting into bed when he was called to the telephone. The Guide was waiting for him in his office. The old man’s eyes were cloudy and his diction even more so. “I have something like a bad intuition about what might happen tonight,” he had told him. That’s why he had called him in. “You’re the only person I trust.” What he was asking Hasobeu to do was not very clear. The more he tried to concentrate, the hazier it got. He was supposed to go over to the other man’s place. Try to find out what was going on there … “Only you can do it.”

No help shone from the Guide’s dark brown pupils. Only the inscrutable opacity of blind eyes. Twice he thought the Guide was going to give him something, perhaps the keys to that underground passageway, if it really existed. But nothing of the sort occurred. No keys, and no further explanation. He just kept on repeating, “You’re the only person I trust.” He regurgitated his other assertions as well: He had to go over there on foot, around midnight; when the guards recognized him, he shouldn’t worry, he was a minister, it was okay for him to inspect the duty squad in the thick of night … not to mention the other … then he was to return … he, the Guide, would be waiting up for him, eagerly …

Adrian Hasobeu did not once dare to interrupt him, and obeyed his instruction: “Now, go.” He went. He waited at home for midnight to come, then went out again, alone, on foot, by a side door, wearing his black oilskin cape. The night was dark and wet, cut asunder by lightning at irregular intervals. It was a special night, a night of transition, and he stepped through it as through a nightmare.

From afar he made out the Successor’s bedroom. It was the only one on that side of the house that was lit. When he pushed back his cape, the guards recognized him. He paced up and down around the house like a man in a fever, peering at each of the doors as if he still hoped that one of them would suddenly open …

A few minutes later, Hasobeu was back in the Guide’s office. The Prijs had indeed waited up. He even made to move toward Hasobeu.

“Did you do it?” he asked, with unmasked impatience.

Adrian Hasobeu nodded.

Himself stared at Hasobeu’s hands as if trying to make out spots of blood on his skin. His gaze was so powerful that it made the minister want to hide his hands behind his back.

All the doors were bolted on the inside.

He wasn’t absolutely certain he had said exactly that. Himself said, “Now I can sleep peacefully.”

Outside, on the path, it was raining harder than ever. Adrian Hasobeu thought he was on his way home, but his feet took him in another direction. When he glimpsed the Successor’s bedroom from afar once more, he understood. That’s when he took the revolver from the inside pocket in his oilskin and fitted the silencer onto the barrel.

Early next morning, the four telephones in the house rang incessantly. When he arrived at the Successor’s residence, he found the state prosecutor had gotten there first. His eyes crossed the puffy, insomniac, and desolate gaze of the bereaved wife, and he almost choked on the question: “Who moved the body? I meant to say, has the body been moved?”

He had put such effort into imagining every detail that the sight of the corpse gone cold now seemed quite familiar to him.