Ismail Kadare - The Successor

“That’s the literal truth. Don’t get excited, it’s about something else. One day …”

The woman gripped his hand as all of a sudden her mind went back to the words of the old Muslim prayer.

He told her everything, in stark, cold, and unusually precise terms. One day, not long after the Successor’s son had revealed the existence of the door, he had gone back down to the basement. His own accursed curiosity had driven him to it. So he had gone back down and looked for the door in the dingy gloom. He spent a while going over it with his hands, like a blind man, until he was sure of what he had half guessed already. That door could be opened from only one side — from His side. On that other side, there had to be bolts and locks, because on this side, the Successor’s side, there was absolutely nothing!

“I don’t understand,” his wife butted in. “Is that all there is to your mystery?”

The architect smiled sourly. How could she not understand? The greatest mysteries are like child’s play. The Guide and his people could get into the Successor’s place whenever they wanted. Be it at dawn or on the stroke of midnight. But the Successor could not. Worse still: The Successor had no way of preventing the door from being opened. He wasn’t supposed to. He didn’t have the right to. Most likely that was what the agreement between them said.

At last the penny dropped. For a moment she was dumbstruck. “So the murderers could have gone that way at their leisure …?” she finally managed to articulate. “Do you realize what a catastrophe you have just unearthed, you poor man?”

“Of course I do,” he replied. “That’s why I didn’t mention it earlier. God be my witness of the torture I endured to keep it secret. It would have been easier to nurse a black hole in my heart. Now that I’ve told you, I feel a burden has lifted from my chest.”

His wife began stroking him again.

“My poor boy,” she murmured.

“That door,” the architect resumed, “had oneway hinges, like the gates of the hereafter.”

The woman put her arms around him. It was time for them to forget. Now that he had spat out the poison, there was nothing for them to do except to swear they would never speak of it again. Not even in a wasteland where not a breath of life stirred. Because even places like that could send an echo of such a secret. Like in the story of the barber who one day cut the hair of a lord of bygone days …

“Wasn’t that aristocrat called Gjork Golem?” he queried. “Tell me the story again, please.”

So she began to tell the tale, like she used to, speaking very quietly, as if she were humming a lullaby. With half-closed eyes, the architect imagined the wasteland and the barber coming across it, his face drawn and weary. The secret he had discovered when cutting the lord’s hair was too terrible even to think about. The lord’s threat had been of the same order — enough to send shivers up and down your spine. “If you repeat a single word about what you discovered when you were cutting my hair, you wretch, your life will not be worth a penny.” But the barber could not imagine anything strong enough to keep him from revealing what he had seen: two tiny horns right at the back of the lord’s head, at the top of his nape. Which was why he was wandering over the desolate moor in winter looking for the remotest spot possible where he could relieve himself of it by speaking it out loud. He stopped at an abandoned well, hidden by a few reeds waving in the wind, and squatting over it he spoke these words:

Hark my words else I’ll hold my tongue

Gjork Golem’s eyes may be dull and blear

But the back of his head is yet more drear

There’s two little horns where men have none …

Then he went back to his village, feeling much relieved, and believing that now he had gotten the secret out of himself it would no longer torment him at home or in the tavern. However, not long after, a passing herder stopped at the same place and cut a reed to make himself a pipe to play. He trimmed it deftly, as shepherds know how, then made the seven air holes, and finally put it to his lips to try it out. Imagine his surprise when, instead of playing the herder’s usual tune, the reed pipe spoke this rhyme:

Hark my words else I’ll hold my tongue

Gjork Golem’s eyes may be dull and blear

But the back of his head is yet more drear

There’s two little horns where men have none …

What an extraordinary story, he kept saying to himself, while his wife whispered in his ear that now he had spat out the poison he would feel calmer and wouldn’t even think anymore about that accursed door. Anyway … anyway, if perchance, like the barber, he felt the urge to unburden himself to some well, he could use her own well. Had he not told her that it was darker and more mysterious than any other?

He did what she suggested. But from deep inside his wife’s body, and although the sound was quite muffled, he could make out: “Hark my words … else I’ll hold my tongue … one way only … is that door hung!”

Terror stopped him from laughing. Then their mutterings drowned in the one’s then the other’s groaning, until silence returned.

His wife thought he had dropped off to sleep, but then he started mumbling again. All over Tirana people who suspected the Successor’s suicide of being a murder in disguise kept whispering the same question: Who could have killed him? They were besieged with all kinds of surmises, but nobody had a clue who the real murderer could be.

“Go to sleep now,” she insisted. “Forget all about it. You’re exhausted.”

“I will, I will, but I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve gotten one last thing off my chest. It is the absolutely last thing, believe me! — and so utterly secret that there really can be nothing more.”

“Oh no,” moaned his wife. “I don’t want to hear any more!”

“It really is the last, I promise you. The very last. Then there’ll be nothing but calm water.”

She seemed to acquiesce, as she said nothing more. He brought his lips close to her ear and then blurted out, “The murderer, the man everyone is looking for but will never find, is … me!”

Only with great effort did the architect’s wife keep from bursting into tears.

“You think I’ve gone mad? You don’t believe me?”

His eyes were cold and blank. She had never seen them look like that before.

“So you too don’t want to believe me,” he continued flatly. His eyes were clouding over with anger, whereas she felt as though the world were falling apart irremediably.

She leaned over, kissed him tenderly, and whispered in his ear, “Of course I believe you, dearest. If you didn’t do it, then who else could have?”

He took her hand, brought it to his lips with gratitude, and promptly fell asleep.

She propped herself up on her elbow and gazed for a long while at his emaciated face, on which a strange mask of serenity seemed to have been laid.

The temperature in the Albanian capital had fallen to an unexpected low. Many had not realized that it was late March, or else had forgotten the old saying according to which the third month often asks its brother February to lend it three bitter days, to chill the bones of whoever offends it.

With their collars turned up to keep out the cold, the people who scurried along to the meetings they had been summoned to attend in one or another of the fourteen main halls in the city had other things to worry about. They knew they had to take part in meetings of great moment related to the death of the Successor, but they felt utterly unable to guess what else might lie in store.

Those same people had been astonished that morning when, in their various offices, they had slit open their envelope and seen on the invitation that the customary hierarchy of assembly rooms had been completely disregarded. The vice-minister’s typist was to go to the Opera, generally thought to be the most prestigious of the venues, whereas the vice-minister himself had been summoned to a classroom in the Agricultural College, in which he had never before set foot. However, that was only the first surprise. Once they were at their respective meeting places, the participants found other causes for astonishment. Unlike all other occasions of this kind, no long table stood on the podium, there was no red tablecloth on it, and no flowers either. All they could see was a chair by a plain square table on which a tape recorder stood. Even that was nothing compared to the shock caused by the seating plan. Office workers, professors, truck drivers, graying female party activists, members of the Politburo, and government ministers silently suffered inner dramas as they checked, and checked again, the seat number printed on their invitation before they finally sat down beside each other. Some occasionally felt a sudden wave of joy at having such high officials sitting next to them, but these feelings of pride metamorphosed almost instantly into dread, for reasons no one could quite explain.