Ismail Kadare - The Successor

After coffee, the guests hung around. He was eager to see the house empty and almost wanted to yell out loud: What are you waiting for, can’t you see you’re not wanted here anymore?

An unhealthy knot made of strands of blind rancor and of unreleased imprecations like: Are you standing around so as to get a better view of my fall? combined with the superstitious idea that maybe he was waiting for the floor to be cleared before making his entry, was bringing his mind to a complete standstill.

Dumdfoundedness followed his bout of exasperation. In his prostration, he suddenly saw the naked and implacable notion rise up before him that not only would the Guide not come, but that there would be no letter and no greetings telegram either. Nor would he even call on the telephone.

The sum of it was harsh enough, but an hour later, when the first shades of dusk spread across the garden, the Guide’s absence no longer seemed at all surprising. On the contrary, what now seemed crazy was to nurse the slightest hope that Himself would turn up. And it was not just the Guide’s presence, but the idea of a birthday card, a greetings telegram, or even a phone call now looked like the idle dreams of a schoolkid. He realized that very soon the downward slide of his despair would be so steep as to make him amazed they hadn’t already come to take him away.

After a short interval, the guests had begun to return in numbers. As before, bringing cakes and wine as well as bouquets. The maddest procession you could think of. Weren’t they aware there was nothing more that could be done? Except maybe to bring flowers, as they alone could be used at funerals as well as birthdays.

What was even more unbearable than their being here were the birthday wishes. On two occasions he couldn’t even understand what they were saying and blurted out, “What was that?” “May you rise ever upward!” they intoned by way of reply.

Try to look your best, his wife whispered in his ear as she pretended to come up to draw the curtains.

He turned to look at the French windows that opened onto the garden. Light was fading fast. It was years since Himself had been out so late in the day.

He encountered his wife in the hall once again. She said, “Listen, I never managed to understand why you went back … the second time … to that place.”

He looked her in the eye, at length. So, though she was putting on a good front, she too was thinking only of that.

“Why did I go back?” he answered in a ghostly voice. “You won’t believe me, but I tell you I have no idea.”

His wife, completely distraught, shook her head. “Haven’t you had enough of keeping all these secrets? You’ve spent your whole life with them!”

He too shook his head, to contradict her. “I have no secrets from you, my wife.”

He began softly, almost inaudibly, then suddenly his voice broke into a raging and inhuman bawl: “You really want to know what I did that night? I did nothing! Got that? The doors were bolted from the inside.”

“Get hold of yourself,” she urged.

He was gasping for breath.

“All the same, you must have been expecting something when you were standing outside the residence,” she went on, in a calmer voice.

“I don’t know what I was expecting. Of course, I was expecting something … Maybe a signal from inside. Or something like that … Perhaps it was supposed to be that way … Perhaps I had to wait for a sign … Maybe I was mistaken …”

“A sign from whom?”

Nothing was that simple … From someone who had been prevented from giving it … At least, that was my impression … But at no point was there any sign at all …

“But that’s dreadful!” his wife moaned. “Waiting for a sign you know nothing about … not knowing the why or the wherefore …”

“That’s where I made the wrong move. I failed to pick up the right wavelength … What he said to me that night was so unclear. And what he told me later, when I got back to his office, was even murkier. As if he had already gone to sleep …”

“That’s the worst of our misfortune,” his wife blurted out. “Even when he’s asleep he treats you like a plaything. But you and your kind, you don’t even see it! Wide awake and as blind as bats!”

He would have liked to tell her that she had probably hit upon his real secret: how to keep people on a string while fast asleep.

“Go circulate and talk to the guests,” she said. “We’ve been alone too long.”

“Are they still there? For God’s sake get rid of them for me! Tell them the party’s over. Say anything you like as long as it gets them out, and the doors closed!”

Six hundred feet away, in the large room he had been using as an office for a while, the Guide, facing the wide bay window, was listening to a secretary reporting on what could be seen going on in the garden that overlooked the rear of the presidential residence.

The last glimmer of daylight made the few trees that had been planted here and there seem to be moving off into the distance. Soon darkness would spread all over, and the dead leaves falling from the trees would no longer be seen at all.

He asked the secretary if the sky was overcast, then he wanted to know if the junket at the Hasobeus house was still in full swing.

The secretary satisfied both requests: some clouds, and the party had just come to an end.

He must have figured it out, he thought. Now he’ll need at least a week to recover.

His stone-cold hatred, reviving after a brief pause, was utterly unbearable.

I gave you almost a year, he addressed his minister in his mind. His mouth filled with bile. That man should never have been granted such a long reprieve.

An old ditty from his hometown came back to mind:

Those yarns you told

Were lies too bold;

Then for this fall

You promised me all …

Hasobeu had disappointed him. Even leaves, mere leaves on a tree, knew when it was time to fall — but that man pretended not to. He now had an interminable week to make amends for his mistake.

Don’t force me to bring on the black beast! he thought.

Not wanting to let himself sink into a bad mood before dinner, he tried to think of something else.

“It looks like it’s dark outside now,” he remarked to his secretary.

“Yes, it’s completely dark,” the secretary replied. “They’ve switched on the garden lamps.”

The week felt as if it would never end. Friday, when the Central Committee’s plenum would meet, was still far off. He spent the whole of Tuesday morning listening to ambassadors’ reports and to a summary of the underground news from Tirana. A seventeen-year-old girl in the adjacent quarter had taken her own life. Rumors about Hasobeu’s fall were still infrequent. Only one of the wire services mentioned it, and it got the man’s name wrong anyway, making it unrecognizable. The girl had killed herself for sentimental reasons. A young swank, who repaired bicycles on the square where she lived, had dropped her. “Haseberg …” he muttered, mulling over his minister’s mangled name. “Now you’re defying me under a Teutonic name!”

While virtual silence reigned on the Hasobeu situation, all the old surmises about the death of the Successor resurfaced, presumably by reaction. Probably an attempt at destabilizing the entire Balkan Peninsula. Expansion of the Atlantic alliance to this part of Europe. Oil. Suicide or assassination? The real reason. Who pulled the trigger …

“Always the same old stories,” he muttered under his breath.

The secretary waited for the Guide’s mumbling to cease before going on. The underground passageway. What might have happened in it on the night of December 13.