Ismail Kadare - The Successor

Everyone was crying out for vengeance in a land where, after reigning for a thousand years, the ancient Customary Law of the Kanun had just been buried. Moreover, all my predecessors expected it from me, their great-great-grandson in misfortune, bereft of the arms or the courage to do justice to them.

What could I do, except make the renovation as ugly as possible?

I was the first to be taken aback by this additional fit of madness …

A ghastly residence … I felt like bursting out laughing at this petty vengeance, but it made me immediately want to burst into tears. When I got home, my wife blanched as soon as she saw me. “What are you saying, my darling sparrow?” she said over and over, as I told her what had happened. Imagining the worst, as was her wont, she could already see us deported to a muddy outpost, with me shoveling dung and she milking goats.

As always when this kind of thing happened, we ended up in bed. We moaned a lot louder than my persecuted predecessors.

Later on, we had coffee and tried to calm each other down. “You thought of making a mess of the residence, didn’t you?” she asked, without managing to laugh. I begged her not to nag me about that again. I promised her that if I was not taken off the job I would make the house the most beautiful residence in the whole of Albania. If they let me, I said more than once, if only they let me get on with it …

I worried for a whole week until a telephone call from the department responsible for state apartments made me understand that there had been no change in the assignment.

I felt resurrected, and had all the trouble in the world waiting until the next dawn to get to my studio. Grades, angles, and drafts seemed just as eager to jump back into my hands. In an instant they seemed to have joined together in a kind of inner harmony. To such an extent that I often had the impression that during the night, while I was sleeping, they were quietly getting on with putting on finishing touches themselves. It lasted two whole days. My two assistants didn’t hide their amazement. They now whispered, “A masterpiece!” without the slightest fear that they might be suspected of toadying. During the afternoon coffee break, we often said nothing, but it was obvious that our thoughts were revolving in common around the work at hand.

It was on just such an afternoon, in the midst of a silence pulsating with emotion, that I almost shouted out loud, “You idiot!” To judge by the expression on my assistants’ faces, I could see I must have been smiling in that foolish way my wife found so appalling, for she knew that it was my means of dissimulating and hiding secrets. Remembering my brief fit of stupid hate, when I had thought of making an unholy mess of the remodeling project, I almost burst into guffaws. That might in fact have been what I was gearing up to do spontaneously, without further reflection, but suddenly something switched, as if there had been an eclipse. An icy wind blew in from the distant past and suddenly enveloped me with an idea I had heard spoken of somewhere or other: in architecture as in all other domains, it is not ugliness, but its opposite, beauty, that can be fatal.

Six royal stallions …

It was the voice of my Hungarian teacher telling us a tale from days of yore, a story about a king of France envying one of his vassals for his splendid château. It all came back to me with astonishing precision. Six royal stallions at full gallop through the dark of night … Words spoken twenty-five years ago echoed in my ears as if they had been uttered just yesterday; similarly, I could feel myself sinking back into the drowsiness induced by the overheated classroom in the Budapest Architecture School. The vassal had not only had the cheek to have a castle built that was even finer than the king’s, but he had invited his monarch to its inauguration party.

Kiralyi hatos fogat* six of the king’s horses, at full gallop they rode …

I wanted to get it out of my mind but I could not.

Three hours after midnight, his face twisted by rage, the king and his escort set off at a gallop for Paris.

“Are you feeling okay?” one of my assistants asked.

I must have acknowledged the question some way or other. The thought that it was the overweening vassal and not the architect who had been punished began to soothe my spirit a little. Yes, it was the vassal, a kind of Successor, who had been struck down for having dared to compete with the monarch …

*In Hungarian in the original.

As I sipped my second cup of coffee, it struck me that the memory had probably not come back to the surface by mere chance. Incomplete snatches of sentences, evasive glances, and awkward silences swirled around in my mind like a cloud of dust suddenly brought into focus by a shaft of sunlight … This residence is beginning to look splendid … It’s unbelievably handsome … Maybe even more handsome than … more beautiful than … than the …

The light of their lanterns scouring the dark canopy of trees, the royal six-in-hand raced along at breakneck speed, drawing ever nearer to Paris. Inside the coach, where it was darker than night, the monarch mulled over the revenge he was about to mete out to his vassal.

“Khaany mori zurgaan,” I said under my breath, mechanically reciting the phrase my professor had taught me, not in Hungarian but in Mongol. It was one of those jokes that generate spontaneously in a circle of students and then spread all the more easily for their complete zaniness. It had started right after the class, as we were going into the canteen for lunch. Jan, the Slovak in the class, put on the professor’s voice and called out from afar to the waitress, “I’ll have a royal six-in-hand with mashed potatoes, please!” We all burst out laughing, but the laughter turned to applause when Cong, our Mongolian comrade, a normally very shy fellow, took up the refrain and bellowed, “I’ll have a royal six-in-hand too, thank you very much!” … Amid the general hilarity, the inevitable happened: We asked our Mongolian to give us the same quotation in his native language, and that’s the bizarre reason why the celebrated line became part of the folklore of the Architecture School in Mongol: Khaany mori zurgaan .

“How about a bit of fresh air?” one of my assistants shyly suggested.

As we walked I felt more and more uneasy. I was in a hurry to get back inside the studio so as to look over the drawings again.

An ill light seemed to be falling on them now.

I tried to reassure myself. It was a different age, full of whimsical kings and madcap vassals. But a small voice inside me said the opposite: Regimes change, as do customs and cathedrals, but crimes are ever the same. And envy, the prime though oft-forgotten mover of crime, doesn’t fade away but grows ever blacker.

I kept my eyes glued to the drawings. I had never thought before then that a murder could be seen in that way. As I picked up my ruler and pencil it was as if I was taking hold of the tools of crime. I kept telling myself: It is still in your power to avoid a fatal outcome. You can still make these blades into instruments of salvation, like the surgeon’s knife.

Well, that’s what I thought … All I needed to do was to touch up the blueprint. To spoil the proportions, to destroy the inner harmony. In a word: to mess it up.

I was besieged by thoughts of that kind especially at night. At the hour of pity, as I nicknamed it. Stop shilly-shallying! Go on, save one life, or rather, the lives of a whole family, and maybe hundreds of other lives as well.

At such times it seemed that my mind was made up. But in the light of the new day, my other inclination, my evil side, had no trouble reasserting itself. Apparently, aesthetic beauty had no truck with pity. It got on rather better with Death than its opposite.