Ismail Kadare - The Successor

A final glimmer of hope lit my heart when I saw the Guide’s blank stare. Though he was trying hard to mask them, the first signs of blindness were apparent. He can’t see a thing, I thought, he’s in no position to make anything out at all clearly. In spite of myself, I imagined him prowling around the house with shuffling gait feeling the walls with his hands, as the blind do in order to form an idea of things or people. But touch does not allow you to tell the beautiful from the ugly.

That’s what I was thinking until the hope I nurtured was dashed to the ground as I saw the look of his wife standing at his side. Her narrowed, sarcastic eyes were scrutinizing everything, down to the smallest detail. I thought: It would have been better if his were still the seeing eyes, not hers. I never found out what happened right after the ceremony, when the Guide left with his wife.

Khaany mori zurgaan … He didn’t need a six-in-hand or a coach. It was not a long way from one house to the other, from the Guide’s to the Successor’s. But it was far enough.

Mediums and masters of the occult, you know the mysteries and the paths that lead to them. Nonetheless I say to you again, for the thousandth time: Leave me in peace! Even if I wanted, I could not give you what you seek. It is not transmissible, not because of any whim on my part, nor because of any incompetence on yours, but because it is so by its very nature.

I am other. What’s more, I am not whole. I have no grave, and I am lacking half my skull. I have been exhumed so often — lugged here and there, flung unceremoniously into sacks and plastic bags with lumps of earth and shingle — that part of me has gone missing. But that’s a mere detail. Even if I were whole, even if I had been embalmed and preserved in a marble tomb, you would not get anything out of me besides fog and chaos.

I am other in a different sense. I am of infinite otherness, such that each link in my otherness engenders another kind of otherness, which in turn engenders another, and so on, which prevents all understanding between us.

I was the Pasardhës . He who comes next. But nextness was not a question of distance, such as the two paces I had to leave between us when standing behind the Guide as we paraded onto the platform or stood on the rostrum. Nor was it a chronological nextness, referring to the years I would reign after him. No, it was a much more complicated business.

We are a race apart, and we can only understand each other. But we are so few in number that amid the dark turmoil of this world above which human souls swirl, it is only rarely, extremely rarely — once every thousand years, maybe every ten thousand? — that we ever come across one of our own.

Thus, one summer’s night, I saw a scorched silhouette fleeing all alone, and thought I glimpsed my opposite number Lin Biao, the designated successor of Mao Tse-tung. But it can’t have been him, apparently, as he didn’t return my greeting. Or perhaps he didn’t recognize me, because you can’t argue that someone graced as I am with only half a head is more recognizable than a burnt-out skeleton.

I was really sorry to miss that opportunity to exchange a few words with a colleague. To tell each other about our respective enigmas, or at least to share feelings about our fates: Have you seen what they’ve done to us! My need was so strong that I turned my head, but meanwhile it had become impossible to pinpoint him in the celestial vault. My only solace was the thought that the opportunity to meet again would perhaps recur in the next two or twelve thousand years.

To him, a man of my own kind, I could have told the story of what happened to me; but no way can I tell you. For unlike the language that serves for us to talk to one another, a language allowing our kind to communicate with yours has not yet been invented on earth, and never will be.

That’s why we can never agree on any subject. That’s why the suspicions that beset me on that night of December 13 remain vivid and topical despite Albania’s subsequent transformation. We could have more easily imagined the ground changing place with the sky than we could have foreseen the country’s turnaround. But in the end, Albania did turn. However, despite that upheaval my puzzle, or rather, the double enigma of the Guide and myself, remains unresolved. Nothing has helped to solve it: the opening of the archives, the belated autopsies, the identification of my remains, clairvoyants from Alaska, the Kremlin, and the Accursed Mountains, even Mossad — no thing or person has made a dent in the shield that protects our secret.

The same questions will not stop nagging through the ages. What happened on the night of December 13? What caused the Successor to fall? Who pulled the trigger?

That night … Ah, how impossible it is to explain anything about it! The night, to begin with. Was there a night of December 13? Hard to say. I was lying on my bed, drifting toward sleep, waiting for my wife to bring me another cup of chamomile tea. Now and again she wandered toward the window as if trying to spy something outside in the dark. I was half asleep, and in my mind I was already in the assembly room where I was to appear the next day, answering the same questions. The place I would be a few hours later, but not in flesh and blood, only in spirit. They were discussing me as if I were still alive, with the Guide barely succeeding in holding back his tears: And now that you are back among us after this terrible shock, dear Comrade Successor, make yourself vital to the Party once again!

When I was already in the morgue, they behaved as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no night of December 13, but instead, a different set of events, a kind of parallel sequence, some unnatural cut-and-paste of the day before and the day after that stopped time flowing between them. Or made it flow in reverse.

Anyone one else would have found this reversal bizarre. But not I. It was part of my being, in its essence as well as its outward form.

My life in no way resembled human living. Such cases are often called “a dog’s life.” It was worse than that. It was a Successor’s life. I was he who would come after. Preassigned to fill the Guide’s shoes. Which was how he reminded us all, but himself first of all, that one day he would not be there anymore, whereas I would go on existing.

Some days, the thought of it terrified me. I wondered how he could bear it himself. How could he tolerate my being there, how could he tolerate all the others who had accepted the pact? Why didn’t he rise up and shout: What on earth makes you think the future course of events can be known with such certainty? Why are we looking to the grave to order current affairs? Was it so exceptional for mortals to die in defiance of the established order? Why in his case, or rather in both our cases, was this order to be treated as the bottom line, at any price?

At times when I felt less tense with anxiety, I was sorry for the man. I swooned with the affection that his generosity inspired. I was prepared to throw myself at his feet and implore him: Prijs , if you have the slightest misgiving, take the title away from me, yes, take back the title! Sometimes I went even further and told him in my heart: Ask what you will, we are all prepared to lay down our lives for you. Gives us an opportunity to show these are not just vain words. And this time let me have the first turn. At the dark hour, when death is nigh, give me your leave to take the final step and, by quitting my place and my mortal coil, to stare death in the eye by laying down my life on your behalf.

I knew I meant it. Maybe even more than I should have, as on that April night when we were hanging around together on the balcony after dining. We’d been discussing events of the past, in particular when we’d broken off certain relations. We’d got on to the falling out with China when, taking a deep breath, he blurted out that it was rumored than Lin Biao, Mao’s successor, hadn’t been a traitor and certainly hadn’t been burned to a crisp in the airplane in which he was trying to escape — but that Mao had had him to dinner and then had him killed when the meal was over.