Ismail Kadare - The Successor

The euphoria that had welled up inside him the day before had been replaced by an anxiety that was difficult to pinpoint.

His wife looked at her watch.

He shook his head. What had been done could not be undone. “Just wait, you’ll soon find out who you’re up against,” he mumbled, and then left the table.

By the time he walked into the assembly room an hour later, he had convinced himself that no one had ever treated him with more brazen treachery than Adrian Hasobeu. He had flaunted his disrespect as openly as a flag on a masthead. So you expected me to commit suicide during the night between the two sessions? To follow in the footsteps of Kano Zhbira, Omer Shejnan, and the Successor?

For the time being Hasobeu was sitting on his own, as on the previous day, with a similarly ashen face, but visibly delighted by his defiant gesture.

The Guide imagined him being shot on the banks of some waterway in the northern suburbs of the city and being left unburied, but even then he didn’t feel at ease. He would have managed to pass on his evil before leaving this world. The stalwart black-haired beast, the intermediate night, would have ended up yielding to him. That would have been his final mission.

Maybe it was his own fault, he thought wearily. He shouldn’t have worked the beast so hard. For all the terror it cast, it was a delicate thing.

The hush in the hall told him that the assembled delegates were waiting for him to speak.

“It’s Comrade Hasobeu’s turn to take the floor,” he growled.

Hasobeu didn’t stay at the microphone for long. When a disapproving rumble rippled through the room, the Guide didn’t bother to mask his fury, and broke in:

“We told you yesterday already: Stop prevaricating, Hasobeu! That’s the last warning.”

Two minutes later, the Guide interrupted him again:

“Listen here, you swamp-fly!”

As he choked on his words, his Successor nudged a glass of water toward him.

He drank the contents of the glass, tried to go on, but because he was so upset, he still couldn’t get his voice to obey him.

The audience had turned to stone. Never before had such wrath been expressed in word or gesture by the Guide. His eyes shone with such supernatural brilliance that, according to later accounts of the scene, many of those present thought he had recovered his sight. First they felt like applauding him, then they fell into silent lamentation, then joy regained the upper hand. O Guide, O our leader, tell us what irks thee! they pleaded in their minds. Tell us all you know about that Judas, even if it’s hard for you. Feed us the poison with your own hand, watch us writhing in pain like Chimeras, watch us fall on one another, tearing our neighbors’ flesh with our teeth; then, as breath leaves us, crawl to your feet and lie there until we die.

Hasobeu had also frozen stiff on the platform. His jaw opened as if to form words, but an invisible vise clamped it shut. Hunched over the lectern, hanging onto it to stop himself from falling over, he finally managed to blurt out, “I — am — not — guilty!”

Glued to the lectern, with death in his eyes, he could hear shouts from all sides: “Traitor! String him up!” and immediately saw hands shoot up to vote in favor of expelling him from the Party.

Before he had quite recovered his senses he heard people saying, “Out you go!” As he walked toward the exit, he noticed the membership secretary standing in his way. He couldn’t make out what the man was saying to him, or what he meant by pointing toward the left side of his chest, where his heart was. His numbed mind was still able to reflect that, however much the man might have sharpened his nails, he wouldn’t manage to snatch out his heart with bare hands. But as he thought that thought, the man was putting his fingers inside Hasobeu’s jacket and into the inside pocket right next to his heart, whence he extracted the ex-minister’s Party card.

The feet that fell on the broad, red-carpeted steps seemed no longer his own. Now that his Party card had been confiscated, he was halfway to his death already.

He had already gone down many steps, but the stairway seemed endless. The cloakroom right at the bottom looked tiny, as if it were buried in some deep abyss, and the few staff seemed like so many dwarves.

When he finally made it to the cloakroom, one of the concierges took down a coat and brought it to him, holding it up with both hands. His expression was devoid of hostility. They looked each other in the eye for a good while. Not only were the concierge’s eyes entirely unaggressive, they were sparkling with unspoken thoughts. And the hands that helped Hasobeu into his overcoat were as respectful of him as they had ever been.

Are the people upstairs in the know? he wondered privately. To tell the truth, he didn’t quite understand the meaning of his own question. It got mixed up with other questions, while the concierge whispered in his ear, “Pull yourself together, boss!”

He was stroking Hasobeu’s aching back, not even seeking to mask his long-standing faithfulness and devotion.

It took the merest fraction of a second, as short as a flash of lightning, to realize that the tempest of anger that the Guide had unleashed on him upstairs could not possibly have been without cause, and that without knowing it, without even wanting it, he, Hasobeu, had probably been, for ages already, at the helm of a great conspiracy.

His supporters, unable to repress their veneration any longer, were about to proclaim him Prijs .

No! he meant to cry out. Though they had both trampled on him, he would never betray the Party or the Guide.

“No!” he shouted as he tried to disentangle himself from his cursed overcoat. He had but one wish now — to rush up those stairs, to burst into the hall, and to proclaim the news: The other conspirators, my henchmen, are downstairs; they’re waiting for you with long capes drenched in blood and dirt, the better to wrap you in!

He shifted his shoulders to try to get properly free from these sly glances, but the concierge’s grip grew firmer and he found himself held tight, as in a vise. The man’s assistant, who had been calmly observing the scene, stepped forward, and with a deft movement of his arm took the handcuffs out of his pocket and snapped them on.

The fall of Adrian Hasobeu was greeted in Tirana with more indifference than scorn.

As soon they heard it said that “Hasobeu has fallen,” city folk, as if waking from a snooze, recalled that his fate, like the Successor’s, had always been known. The only difference between the two cases was that whereas the fall of the Successor had taken but a single season, Hasobeu’s had begun a year before, or rather no, not a year, but six years, or even more, say sixteen years, or maybe even twenty years ago, when he’d been appointed commander-in-chief of the Sigurimi . His fall and its cause were obvious: He’d had access to secrets.

News came quickly from Tirana’s jailhouse that as soon as he had been taken in Hasobeu had had his tongue cut out, which proved how dangerous those secrets would have been had they been let out, even in the form of screams echoing between the four walls of a prison cell.

A persistent rumor sprang up in the capital at that time, as if to fill the silence left by Hasobeu’s sectioned tongue. But to everyone’s surprise, the rumor soon detached itself from Hasobeu and became refo-cused on the Successor, before being entirely swallowed up by the latter’s unfathomable enigma.

That was when it became apparent that the mystery of the Successor would emerge as the victor and would occupy a position that the unhappy man had never managed to gain in life: that of being at the top, or, as people had taken to saying in recent times, of being “Number one.”