Ismail Kadare - The Successor

In the silent room, the familiar noise of a match being struck could be heard quite clearly, followed by the hungry flame and then its extinction. The faint crackling sound of carbonized paper went on for a while.

He waited for his wife to have left with the ashtray before he said to the secretary, “I don’t want her to send me any more letters. She shouldn’t even think of writing.”

He did not want to know what had gone on in that house. How they had striven, then taken fresh counsel, whether they had delayed, or screamed in the fog. Let them take it all to the grave with them!

The secretary’s heavy breathing told him the latter was about to make an observation. Maybe about the storks’ nest. For no reason, he suddenly recalled a swarthy Greek who answered to the name of Haxhi,* and the kids in the street who taunted him with the refrain: Haxhi, haxhibird, when are you going to fly off to Mecca?

*Albanian “xh” is pronounced like the English “dg” in “badge.” The Greek’s name thus sounds like hajj , the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Nowadays he often felt drowsy at this time of day.

The Central Committee plenum had begun on the stroke of four in the afternoon, and the first session was still going on. Dusk was coming on. The Guide had his elbows on the table, and he could feel the meeting going slack. He could imagine the questioning glances going around among the delegates. They had been expecting a dramatic meeting; they had probably only managed snatches of sleep before first light, but the agenda was going on and on with items that were frankly insipid. Questions of raising the budget for the energy sector and extending the schedule for fulfilling the Plan. Those who had been afraid were presumably enjoying it; long may this last, they must have been thinking; let’s keep on about hydroelectric generators, cotton plantations, the emancipation of women … Whereas others, who couldn’t wait to hear the crack of the whip, sank by stages into ill humor. The big secrets, the secrets that would make your hair stand on end, were probably only dealt with in the inner sanctum, in the Politburo, whereas they got the donkey-work: budgets, five-year plans, and so on …

When he’d entered the room, Adrian Hasobeu was ashen-faced. Head hung low, he’d gone to sit in the fourth row back; the adjacent seats stayed empty. The Guide learned these details from words whispered in his ear by the new Successor-designate, who for the first time was seated on the leader’s right-hand side.

He’d stopped taking interest in the audience, but after the break, when they had all come back to their seats and his freshly appointed Successor had informed him that there were now not four but six vacant seats around Hasobeu, the Guide’s resentment of his minister, as black as any long-buried rancor returning to life from the tomb, became unbearable.

“Dog!” he muttered under his breath.

There he was sitting on his own like a leper, but still he would not listen to reason!

The plenum had moved on to the second item on the agenda. When the first secretary of the Tirana branch of the Party had finished his speech, Hasobeu requested permission to speak. Each time he brought the microphone nearer to his mouth his voice grew more feeble. The Guide didn’t stop staring hard at the man’s blank and clouded eyes. But when Hasobeu got around to talking about the great conspiracy, he interrupted him:

“We’ve heard what you had to say, Comrade. You’ve told us about the twenty years you spent as minister of the interior, and so on and so forth. But since you’ve just mentioned the conspiracy, I’d like to ask you a question: Why have all conspiracies unmasked to this day been discovered by the Party, not by the Sig-urimi — which was under your command, wasn’t it?”

Since he could not see him, he could easily imagine Hasobeu holding on tight to the desk so as not to collapse, then grasping the microphone, and getting tangled up in the wire looping around him like a snake.

“Prowling hyena!” he raged silently. “Snake in the grass!”

Hasobeu had made an attempt to reply, but shuffling in the hall drowned out the sound of his words.

“Throttle the man once and for all!” the Guide snarled to himself.

He hadn’t expected his spite for the man to surge up quite so vigorously. At times it was on the point of taking his breath away.

A seventeen-year-old girl had committed suicide because a mere bicycle repairman had dropped her.

“You got the message too, didn’t you? That I didn’t love you anymore!” he growled under his breath.

Hasobeu ought to have seen the light as far back as last winter. Later on as well, and then again in the last few days. So what had he been waiting for? Had the Guide’s cold shoulder not sufficed to make him vanish into thin air? Did a bicycle repairman have more power than Himself? It made you want to tear your hair out.

From the back of the room someone shouted, “Hasobeu, stop shilly-shallying!”

“Throttle the man,” he mumbled again as he silenced the brouhaha with a wave of his hand.

You’re going to force me to set the black beast on you, he thought.

That was the name that he rather strangely gave to the intermediate night, the one he sometimes inserted between two sessions of the same plenum.

The suspended night was his own invention. It stifled like oakum. Everyone could feel it looming, but no one would dare admit it.

With the hand that he used to call for order, he now pulled on his watch chain.

He’d fingered the same ice-cold chain thirty years before, barely realizing what terror he was about to unleash. “Comrades, since it is getting late …”

Over the years, the silence at meetings had grown deeper.

Even before he had finished speaking, he felt the familiar thrill rippling around the room before washing back over him. He tarried a moment, until he had his full measure of it. The unending calm that followed that kind of ecstasy had no equal. Except maybe in distant regions of sleep, under other skies.

There was no need for a sharp-beaked eagle or for a clap of thunder. Both would emerge from the ensuing night.

At him, boy! At him! he thought affectionately as he rose to leave the hall.

He found it difficult to sleep. The first interruption left him only half awake, weighed down by some kind of impossibility. One way or another he would have liked to reward Hasobeu, but he just could not work out what to do with his ice-cold corpse or with the bullet wound in his forehead, which looked more than real, as if it had been painted on. The second time he awoke, just before dawn, it was as if, while washing according to ancient custom under the porch of a minaret, he had been suddenly beset by a question: Couldn’t they have found someone else to do this job? A Gypsy looking on said, “Don’t get so worked up, it’s what people have been doing for generations in your father’s family.” He meant to answer back: That’s a libel put out by the émigré press! — but the words wouldn’t come.

When he woke up in the morning, he recalled fragments of these meanderings and his mood darkened. If his mother had still been alive, she would have remonstrated: You only suffer those nightmares since you banned the Muslim faith!

As usual, his wife was waiting for him at the breakfast table. As soon as he caught her glance he knew there was no news on the Hasobeus front.

Snake! he thought. Impotent little goat!

As he sipped his coffee, he felt the emptiness in his breast increasing alongside the impression that something had been lost forever.

“I wouldn’t have expected this of him,” he mused.