Ismail Kadare - The Successor

His long-deserted residence, where no light had shone for ages, could still just about be made out through the foliage lining the Grand Boulevard. Passersby, especially late-nighters on the way home from the National Theater after watching some self-congratulatory play full of vulgar laughs and noble feelings, were always seized by a shiver of fear that they would not have missed for anything in the world. It must presumably have been one such person who, on coming out of a show, suggested that the deserted residence was precisely where Europe began — an idea that got him called in a few hours later, in the middle of the night, to explain what he had said. At first he tried to wriggle out of it, claiming what he’d more or less meant to say was that that was where the conspiracy had started, that’s to say the curse of Albania, or in other words its perdition, until, during the third day of torture, he confessed that he was against socialist realism, that it was indeed his disrespect for it that had led him to have such a twisted idea because, if it had been in his power, he would have shut down the National Theater because it could not compete in any way with the Elizabethan residence of the Successor, the only building in Albania to have some degree of resemblance to the castles and baroque palaces of Europe.

It was a fact that the gloomy dwelling aroused increasing numbers of crazy fantasies and all kinds of fevered emotions. On that December night the dead man, his wife, and Hasobeu had paced untiringly around it, inside and out. They had made signals to each other, had sought to interpret them, as in a mime show, but they dealt with something on which they appeared not to agree. Maybe the lightning had obscured the light of the lantern that was supposed to be a signal from someone inside to someone waiting outside, or perhaps it was the opposite, someone outside signaling to someone in the house.

To this whirligig of wraiths a fourth character was added by a patient in the Tirana Psychiatric Hospital. The architect. Although he had long familiarity with these kinds of delusions, the doctor who first heard the man was dumbstruck. What was an artist with white-skinned hands doing in this murky imbroglio? With hands that only moved to take a pencil and give life to lines that in their very subtlety only served to tie everyone else in knots?

That was the doctor’s first thought, but on further reflection he saw that it was only to be expected that in such a mysterious house, with all its deceptive signs and doorways, the miraculous role of the architect must have been essential to the unfolding of the whole story.

Meanwhile, at the start of that winter, questions about the true story of the Successor’s fall, about which hand — his own or another’s — had shortened his life, swirled around more furiously than ever.

As could have been foreseen, clairvoyants, who had been lying low for a time, made a comeback. The most persistent was the Icelander. He had started by establishing contact with the denizen of the Other-world, whose death rattle was now just as awful as before, and his story just as murky. He was complaining about something missing, perhaps referring to a part of his body, but he might also have meant a part of his faculties.

As a result, apart from the presence of the two women, who were still there, if only very faintly, behind what the clairvoyant called a “curtain of snow,” the rest of it seemed impossible to interpret. It was especially hard to understand what connected the Successor to these two women, just as it was not easy, not to say impossible, to explain the squabble and the blame-casting that was going on between them. As before, the recriminations sounded like pleading, to be sure, but they also were just as much reminiscent of commands or bawling. Someone’s death was being demanded. But whose? And from whom?

In other circumstances, commentators would have sneered as in the old days: sentimental nonsense about wives wanting to get rid of a mistress, or vice versa, and so on, but the end of that week had been exhausting, and nobody was in the mood to laugh. With the weariness induced by having said it all before, one of the analysts suggested that, in addition to the two by now well-known hypotheses — an attempt to enlarge the Atlantic alliance to southeastern Europe, on the one hand, and the discovery of new oilfields off the Albanian coastline — the Icelandic clairvoyant’s opinion was that you could not rule out the possibility that the events of the night of December 13 had involved one of the members of the family.

When one morning in early spring — the whole city was still striving without success to solve the puzzle of the most mysterious death of the period — when on that morning in March I confessed to my wife that I was the killer, the poor woman must surely have thought I had gone out of my mind.

On getting up, I noticed tear-streaks on her cheek, but neither then nor ever after, not even now that my name belongs to the list of shadows on patrol around the residence on the night of December 13, did she or I broach the subject again.

Now and again, just before making love, at those moments when the impossible seems within reach, I notice a little glimmer in her eyes, a twinkle suggesting curiosity, and I expect her to ask: What came over you the other day to make you tell such a crazy story? But she remains silent, presumably out of fear that the question itself would bring the craziness back into being.

One evening, thirsting to confess, I took the initiative and said, “Do you remember when in the halflight I told you that I … that it was I who …,” she put her hand over my mouth and wouldn’t let me finish the sentence. Pain and entreaty were writ so large on her face that I swore to myself I would never again yield to temptation.

So now I am condemned forever more to turn all these things over in my mind alone. What things? Questions and hypotheses, hers and other people’s.

Sometimes I resent her for this. She is certainly entitled to believe I am not the murderer. But all the same, she was in a better position than anybody else to sense my crime. For she was the only person who knew about the humiliation I suffered at the hand of the Successor, about my anger with him and my sudden need for revenge.

It all arose at the first, last, and only luncheon party I was invited to at his house, to mark the launch of the remodeling project. I don’t recall which joke of mine or of the son’s managed to irritate the master of the house. The wine we had been drinking made us tipsy and we had probably uttered words that could be called sophomoric. Looking daggers at me with his icy stare, he riposted that liberal brains such as ours might find cooperative cow barns more profitable than studying for diplomas.

That was enough to make us all sober up instantly. The humiliation he had inflicted made me profoundly resentful. Under his own roof, in this great residence that I was about to transform into an object of beauty, he dared to threaten me, the architect, with mucking out cattle on a cooperative farm! As I plodded home, resentment boiled over into rage. The anger was hot and unprecedented, it seemed to be coming from various spirits that had come to inhabit my body.

I felt breathless even as I sauntered along the banks of the Lana. My fury, far from subsiding, grew only worse, becoming blind and violent, and was already beginning to merge into a thirst for revenge.

I was beside myself. I was clearly suffering some kind of sudden madness. The feeling that this could not be just a matter of an offended luncheon guest experiencing a fit of anger but had to come from a longer-standing resentment passed through my mind once again. The entire mass of certain other former architects’ rancor weighed heavily on my heart. All those abuses inflicted at the foot of the pyramids, forty centuries ago — hands cut off, eyes put out. Screams percolating from the dungeons in the Tower of London. The moaning of Minos, the inventor of the fearsome Labyrinth. Pleas made to the palace of the Atreides. To the palace of Ceausescu …