Ismail Kadare - The Successor

Once again I tried to find reassurance. That old story had taken place more than three hundred years earlier. It was a different period, there was private property, laws weren’t the same as now. However, that didn’t stop me in any way from having a clear vision of the king of France’s anger, and I could see him in the pale light of dawn, all bespattered with the dirt of the journey, drawing up the decree laying down his vassal’s sentence. And as one thing leads to another, I could envision the Guide’s resentment of his Successor. In his own lifetime, he dared to build, barely a few paces away, a finer residence than his own. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine how large his statue would be after his death.

As soon as I got back to the studio with my head spinning from these thoughts, I pored over the architectural drawings to get down to work. I took out a balcony, I shortened two pillars, but instead of spoiling the villa as I intended, the changes only added to the perfection of the plans.

Had anyone known my inner turmoil, he or she would presumably have accused me of being petty-minded, of attempting by underhand means to take revenge for the offense suffered at that now far-off luncheon with the Successor.

May my soul be witness to the fact that the offense had long been expunged from my heart. What was happening could be ascribed to anything you like, save to that episode.

Something quite different was at stake. Something a thousand times more secret and by the same token far more painful. It was my own hell, which I had sworn to divulge to no living being, to my dying day. That pain had to do with art. I had betrayed it. By my own hand I had stifled my own talent. We all did the same, and for the most part we all had the same excuse for our contempt of art: the times we lived in.

It was our collective alibi, our smokescreen, our wickedness. There was socialist realism, indisputably; there were laws, actually not so much law as a reign of terror, but in spite of all that, we could have drawn at least a few harmonious lines, even if only haphazardly, as in a dream. But our fingers were all thumbs, because our souls were bound.

I was probably one of the few who asked themselves the fateful question: Do I or do I not possess any talent? Was it the age that had turned my hands into clay, or was I so clumsy that I would have vegetated no matter what period I lived in — in the capitalist era, in the feudal age, at the end of paganism, at the dawn of Christianity, in the Paleolithic, under the Inquisition, or at the time of post-Impressionism? Would I not have exclaimed and lamented in all and any age that I would have been a great artist but for Pharaoh Thutmose blocking my gifts, but for Caligula, but for McCarthy, but for Zhdanov …

When at the end of a storm-tossed afternoon I poured my heart out to my wife, she replied with tears in her eyes, “If you are going through such pain, you must be unlike the others.”

Perhaps I am … In what looked like an unending wasteland, she planted the first seed of hope.

At that luncheon with the Successor, alongside humiliation I felt a vague, as yet ill-defined foreboding of fame. Of course I was offended … but at the sovereign’s table. Like my illustrious predecessors who dined with Nero, with the ruler of the Middle Empire, with Stalin, with Kubla Khan. They too had been threatened with relegation.

Later on, when the fear of punishment had subsided and I was back in the studio, I felt not that my hands were even more tied, but the opposite. Something seemed to have been released inside me. That freeing suddenly made me feel I had jumped over the rainbow, a fantasy we had as children when we imagined that was how boys could turn into little girls and girls could become boys.

What I actually felt was that I had taken a step of much greater import: I had escaped from the desert of mediocrity. That was the straw I clutched at, and it kept me afloat.

Absorbed as I was by the beauty of the planned remodeling, I lost track of all those thoughts. Sometimes when I looked over the drawings I said to myself: This is the residence of a Communist sovereign. A private dwelling in a country where collective property is the rule. An androgynous building half built under the monarchy, and half built now. That’s why it had such a foreign look, like something from very far away. Like a dream.

All the same, the royal six-in-hand frequently galloped through my mind. I did my best not to pay it any attention. I owed accounts only to my art. The rest was none of my business.

I was well aware I had taken a dangerous gamble.

I was convinced I was putting up a temple that would be crowned by mourning. As the saying goes, something to die for …

An inner voice urged: If you want to save the master of the house and his relatives, hold back and give in to mediocrity. But the other voice answered back: They’ve got nothing to do with you; art is your vocation, its laws alone you should obey. Even if your art engenders murder, your hands will be clean. There is no art without grieving. Which is precisely what constitutes its somber greatness.

It was at about the same time that I first heard of the underground passageway. To begin with, it prompted a feeling of great relief. So a murder plan had already been around, unconnected to me or my remodeling project. Independently of my proposals, someone had thought that the murderers ought to have a secret passageway available to them, for surreptitious entry into the building. It wasn’t me who had thought of it, it was someone else.

The relief was short-lived. I quickly recalled that the rumor had been reported to me by the Successor’s son. It was probably his own imagination, presumably the fruit of his curious ponderings on the ties between the two leaders. He talked about them in a bizarre way, calling them ties of blood, and he even went so far as to compare the tunnel to an umbilical cord.

However, even if they sprang from an exuberant imagination, these wild suggestions were very pertinent to my plan. It was not by chance that they had arisen at the same time as the remodeling project. However much I tried to keep the rumors at a distance, the tunnel was part of the project. Everything was dependent on it. It would be by my order alone that murderers would use it. A parancsomra ök gyilkolhatnak …* At my command they will kill …

These notions buzzed around in my head for days on end. It became something as repetitive as boredom. I had the fate of a whole clan in my hands. All I had to do was to make a mess of the dwelling and the murderers would have to stay crouching in the tunnel for centuries. Otherwise …

The days sped by. The work was nearing completion. The residence was still hidden by scaffolding. It seemed to me that everyone was waiting impatiently for it to be dismantled so as to reveal the new residence.

September was on us, and the leaves began to fall quietly. The scaffolding was taken down at night, a few days before the engagement party. All around, silence reigned.

When on the day of the party, that Sunday afternoon, I crossed the threshold, the other guests were already there. I wasn’t at ease in the glowing atmosphere, joyous and relaxed. Suzana, in her pale dress, seemed the incarnation of harmony and proportion.

*In Hungarian in the original.

Good wishes were on everyone’s lips. May there be only happiness under this roof! Who’s the architect? Ah, so you’re the architect. Congratulations, a thousand congratulations, what a gem!

After my second glass of champagne, I almost screamed out: Talk about whatever you want, but not about this house! We can do without your comments, close your eyes, for pity’s sake!

But it was too late. The assassins had already taken up their quarters, underneath, in the dark, lower down than even the foundations of the house. A parancsot nem lehet megtagadni … The order could not be countermanded …