Ismail Kadare - The Successor

That last phrase made him sneer. “That’s a laugh!” Then he asked the secretary to read it out again. According to the informant, people were saying that the last meeting between the Guide and the Successor took place in the tunnel at midnight. The latter had reached for his gun but the Guide’s bodyguard had been quicker on the draw.

The secretary waited for Himself ’s guffaws to die down before going on. The Successor was supposed to have gotten himself shot in the basement, so that what had been said about the lifeless body of the victim being brought up the stairs like a tailor’s dummy by two men could be incorporated into the story.

“Wait!” the Guide said. “Read that to me once more …”

The secretary read it again, this time more slowly, but when he had finished, Himself asked to hear it one more time. As he listened, he repeated the sentences under his breath. What had been said … in other words, what had been foretold.

“It’s like in the holy books,” he mumbled dreamily. “In the Bible, unless I’m mistaken, some events are laid out like that.”

The secretary looked at his master with veneration, as he did every time the Guide made a reference to what he had read. He put his nose back into the stack of papers, but Himself interrupted: “Wait, not so fast!”

At first the secretary did not grasp what the Guide was asking of him. He had been dealing with an abstruse report in which the analyst, after mentioning the mysterious death in Tirana, tried to unravel the functioning of the brain of a dictator.

Placidly, the secretary went back to the report. He’d been in this job for forty years, and in the course of time he had lost more or less everything, including his sense of fear.

The text he finally retrieved was quite brief. According to its author, the brain of a tyrant often worked according to what might be called the “architecture of terror.” Terror was constructed backwards, like dreams, which is to say, starting from the end. Then, in a flash, sometimes in a mere second or even less, the entire missing part was suddenly filled in. To make his meaning clearer, the analyst proposed the image of a building constructed out of its own ruins. All the rest — the walls, partitions, roof, chimney, and even the furniture — would suddenly be added, then knocked away. That was the process of the Master’s mind when passing sentence. First plan the victim’s death, and the rest would be fitted in afterwards.

That’s what you have done, he thought.

His breathing accelerated from spite. Yes, they had been doing these things themselves since biblical times, and now they were claiming he had invented them!

He became aware of his wife’s footsteps behind him.

“There’s a letter from Hasobeu,” she said as she leaned over his shoulder.

“Really? Let’s have a look at the brain functions of … von Haseberg!”

The missive struck him as both interminable and cunning. Hasobeu complained of being cold-shouldered even though everything had now been brought out into the open. As long as it had been thought that the Successor might have been a martyr, assassinated by some other hand, suspicions about him, Hasobeu, had been understandable. But now that it had been admitted that the Successor had been a traitor and had killed himself, why was he, Hasobeu, still under a cloud of suspicion?

“You wily hypocrite!” Anger rose inside him. “You think you can pull the wool over my eyes, do you?”

His breathing quickened again. Hasobeu was playing innocent in order to get out of the hole he had dug with his own hands. He was pretending things were disarmingly simple: You say the Successor was a murdered martyr? Then you’re right to suspect me. But now you say the Successor was a traitor and a suicide. So what can you possibly hold against me, Hasobeu?

“Take this down!” he instructed his secretary. “Hasobeu is conveniently forgetting a third hypothesis, which may well be the right one. Whether the man was a martyr or a traitor, whether he was murdered or killed himself, one thing is clear — Hasobeu was involved. He spent the night prowling around the Successor’s residence. Did he or did he not plan to kill him? Did he mean to corner him into taking his own life, which was already a waste of time? Did he or did he not let the murderers into the house? The answers to these questions make not one bit of difference. What we have is typical of conspiracies. As soon as they sniff danger in the wind, the plotters hasten to get rid of the mastermind. Everybody knows that.

“It’s been known for all eternity,” he mumbled. “Same as the epilogue.

“Take this down,” he said to the secretary again. “In my name, you’re going to send him a note that you’ll sign for me. Invite him to the Central Committee plenum the day after tomorrow, so he can lay out everything he knows. So he can bare his heart!”

He could already hear the deathly hush that would fall upon the meeting when he turned to Hasobeu and called on him to speak. Bare your heart, Hasobeu! We’ll soon see who’s scared by all the secrets you’re going to spill!

Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime. He’d only recently come to understand that, and it left him in a state of great calm. His blindness had no doubt helped him toward such serenity.

He didn’t know, and never had known, what had really happened at the Successor’s residence on that night of December 13. And since even he didn’t know, it could take a thousand years for anyone else to find out.

Like beasts of another species, they were all circling around him now, trying to explain with miserable whimpers, with all kinds of signals and glances, what in their view had taken place. But they could bark until their lungs were sore; what they had to tell him was necessarily incomplete and incoherent. All they knew of the matter had been seen as through the eyes of an insect, in parts and fragments.

Apart from the deceased, two other individuals seem to have been implicated. But no one would ever know exactly how they had gotten themselves tangled up in the murky business, where they had crossed paths, when they had put each other off, how they had blackmailed each other until the whole thing fell under the shroud of silence. Only one of them, Hasobeu, had spoken up, half screaming and half moaning: The doors had been bolted on the inside.

He was minister of the interior and seemed not to know that in all great murder cases doors are always bolted on the inside!

He thought he heard the wind rising, and asked what was going on in the garden. If his memory was to be trusted, ancient tragedies dealt exclusively with that: how to expunge the crime, how to detach it from the clan. He didn’t recall ever coming across a mention of the opposite problem — how to get a crime to stick.

It was probably the noise of the storks leaving their nests, his secretary told him. The rustling was loud enough to make that the most likely cause.

He heard his wife coming up behind him again, which made him hold back what he was about to say.

“Are you bringing me another letter?” he asked merrily, without turning around.

“Indeed I am,” she replied.

Before muttering, Unbelievable! he felt the envelope with the tips of his fingers. It had been sent by the Successor’s widow.

All that’s lacking now is a letter from the dead man himself! he thought.

The envelope seemed weighty, but he decided it could not be otherwise for a letter from a widow. What is she saying? he wondered. What news do you have for us, Comrade Clytemnestra? …

“Burn it!” his wife said, matter-of-factly.