The Successor (2 page)

The December night swallowed the hills that surround Tirana one after the other, as if it was in a hurry to get the day over with. Two solitary soldiers in arms standing guard at the head and the foot of the newly filled grave of the Successor appeared to be all alone in the civilian necropolis. About a hundred feet away in the dark, other people not in uniform slunk behind the hedge, on the lookout.

The relief that a newly buried corpse brings to the living did not fail to materialize. Not to mention that, for reasons readily imagined, it was more profound than ever before.

The days of anxiety gave way to unseasonable quiet. Milder weather altered the December skies and drained off what had been tormenting the population, or at least made it seem less terrifying. Even the underlying question — deciding whether it had been suicide or murder — no longer had the same weight, since the Successor had taken the answer with him to the grave.

Now they were free of the bottomless dread that the deceased had exuded. Now that the man’s corpse had finally disappeared into the dark, people found it easier to grasp all that had happened in the course of that long-drawn-out fall. The event and its unfolding were now cast in a very different light.

It had all begun with the first days of September. On their return from vacation, city-dwellers found the capital buzzing with rumors of the kind that in the past might have been called scandals. The Successor had just promised the hand of his only daughter to a suitor. In addition, he’d just moved into his new residence, a building project that had attracted a great deal of interest and attention in Tirana. In fact, what was referred to as the “new residency” was the same villa he’d been living in for years, but it had been remodeled with such skill that over the course of the summer it had been transformed beyond recognition. Despite innumerable campaigns to eradicate superstitions, the old saw that “new houses bring new curses” seemed to be coming true as the fall set in. It was never known whether the Successor believed in the saying or not, but there was unending gossip about his rushing to celebrate his daughter’s engagement on the very day of the housewarming party. It looked as though, by taking this step, the Successor had wanted to force a blessing into his new house. In other words, he had tried to trick fate, or to defy it.

Everybody responded to the summons: family members and members of the government, the relatives of the putative son-in-law, and of course the young man himself, who had played the guitar, as well as the architect who had designed the new home, and who, having gotten roaring drunk, began to weep. Some people laughed and some cried as they wandered around a house lit by the glint of crystal and camera flashes. But before the party lights went out, and as the Guide (whose attendance and good wishes had constituted the high point of the soirée) was on his way back to his own residence on foot, an icy draft coming out of nowhere suddenly seemed to chill all who were still there.

Had he heard some unexpected news during the brief walk from the house of the Successor to his own? Had it been handed to him en route, as he plodded with short stride, weighed down by his black coat — or had he found it on the doorstep as he reached home? Nobody ever knew. On the other hand, it is true that from that point on, the first rumors of ill omen began to circulate: namely, that the Successor had made a political error in agreeing to the engagement. Despite the fact that the Party granted the future bridegroom’s father, the famous seismologist Besim Dakli, permission to give an occasional lecture at the university, the Dakli clan still belonged to the ancien régime. You could have turned a blind eye if the bride had been the daughter of a second-rank official, but there was no way you could pass over such an issue where the Successor was concerned.

The dread question, which was expressed less in words than through pregnant glances and oblique allusions, related to the fact that the alliance between the family of the Successor and the Dakli clan had been made public at least two weeks before the Guide had paid his visit. It could thus be inferred that his attendance at the party, and the expression of his good wishes, signified his approval of said engagement. That is, moreover, the probable reason why that unforgettable day had been so exceptionally joyous. Nonetheless, as soon as the Guide had left the house, something strange happened. Was it a last and unexpected discovery about the Daklis? A piece of information coming from who knows where, or maybe from far away, about some disturbing fact that two weeks of intense investigation by every branch of the service about every imaginable dimension of the Dakli case had failed to turn up until then?

As often happens to people who stave off asking dangerous questions by showing uncommon interest in matters they believe much safer, gossipers kept on circling back to the issue of whether or not what was forbidden to others might be permitted the Successor. Most people thought not, and they ventured to recall numerous instances where ill-considered marriages had brought families, and even whole clans, to sorry ends. But there were some people who thought differently. The Successor had done so much for the country, he had followed the Guide every step of the way with such touching steadfastness through the most horrible turns of fate, that he surely deserved an exception to be made for him. What’s more, they said, maybe this case in particular would set the wheels of change in motion. It was hard luck for people who’d already come unstuck, but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from profiting from new rules. That’s just our point, the naysayers insisted, that’s how rot sets in. No good can come of setting a bad example to others.

This sort of conversation was stopped in its tracks by the news that the engagement had been broken off. Each party had finally realized to what extent the whole thing had been worse than a mistake. It wasn’t a prospective marriage, it was mortal venom. But poison would have tasted sweet compared to the true horror of such an event! An event that would have plunged Albania into everlasting sorrow. For it would have signified a relaxation of the class struggle, and that would have borne a blow to the very heart of what had been the country’s pride for more than forty years. The country’s very Constitution, the foundation of its victories and its fame, rested solely on the principle of
ever greater firmness
, of
never letting up!
Other countries, enemy countries, had betrayed Albania one by one, and their wrongdoing had unfailingly started that way — with a loosening of the reins. Whereas here, in our country … heaven grant that the Successor had suffered only a passing weakness! That’s what it must have been, in all probability. That the engagement had been broken off so quickly spoke volumes about the depth of the man’s repentance. It was no mere trifle to take back your given word in a matter of marriage. In full sight of the entire nation, he had had to eat his shame on a dry crust, as people say in these parts. No betrothal had been abjured in the land for a thousand years. People may have slaughtered each other, may have flayed each other alive, but not once had a wedding been postponed, let alone canceled! But he had done it! And by so doing he had shown that obedience to the Party and to the
Prijs
— the Guide — ruled his heart. That showed you what sort of a fellow he was! You don’t get to be Successor for nothing, now do you?

Like all bad news, the report of the broken engagement got around much faster than its formal announcement. Convinced that the crisis was a thing of the past, most people liked to think that the incident, far from weakening the nation’s moral fiber, had in fact strengthened it. The country and its Guide had shown just how steadfast they were in a storm of whatever magnitude. Just as they had done during the squabble with the Yugoslavs. As they did later on, with the Russians. And, of course, with the Chinese.

As tension declined, so interest in the sentimental details of the end of the affair grew. Though whispered, stories were passed on by word of mouth almost everywhere. No more phone calls between the two youngsters. The young man and his father, Besim Dakli, standing at the Successor’s front door, wrapped in heavy winter coats, waiting to find out what would happen. The girl in despair, who had shut herself in her room and stopped eating. The poor boy drowning his sorrow by strumming his guitar, for which he’d written a new song that began:

And so that is how
They tore us apart …

In Albania, the majority of public holidays occur in the fall, which meant that the Successor had no chance of keeping himself out of the way of television cameras. Awkward as that was for him, there was no way he could avoid thousands of eyes studying his face onscreen, searching for a clue to the real truth. Some thought he looked more grumpy than usual; others thought on the contrary that he looked calmer. Both interpretations were obviously worrying, but the latter seemed the more ominous, since it implied that the Successor was feigning indifference.

What had begun as mere curiosity took on a tragic hue at the National Day parade, where the Guide and the Successor stood side by side on the platform. In contrast to previous occasions, when the two had been seen smiling and chatting with each other, this year the Guide stood stock-still. Not only did he not utter a word to the Successor, but, as if to make his scorn doubly clear, he turned twice to say something to the person standing on his other side — the minister of the interior.

From one end of the country to the other, people were dumbfounded by what they saw happening before their eyes. The benighted engagement had long been broken off, but no reward, not even a sign of clemency, had yet been granted the Successor for the action he had taken. On the contrary, everything seemed to suggest that the Guide was only growing angrier.

It was the first time people had seen what almost amounted to a public display of things that in the old days could have had you convicted of malicious gossip seeking to undermine Party unity. The militant Party members were racked with worry. They would rise at dawn after sleepless nights, with bloodshot eyes, aching muscles, and coated tongues, turn to their graying wives and share with them what could not be broached in any bar: Could a forty-year-old comradeship be scrapped just like that?

The optimists among them looked forward to the next parade, hoping that, if things would not be completely resolved by then, at least some slight improvement might be visible. And when the next parade day came, and not only had nothing mended, but the chill was even icier, they felt a great weight on their chest and, sighing with anxiety, barely managed to articulate the words “Woe betide us!”

Toward the end of November, a tentative rumor had it that the whole business would come to an end at the winter break. Oddly enough, it gained greater acceptance than other stories, perhaps because it invoked the calendar and the natural cycle of the seasons. The red banners and bunting on the stands, the speeches and brass bands broadcast by the citywide loudspeaker system, would give way to whistling winds, to blankets of fog, and to the rumble of thunder, which had not changed in a thousand years.

And if the first week of December had always been labeled “taciturn,” this year it seemed doubly, triply speechless. It was this silence that was broken by the gunshot that put an end to the life of the Successor. A fully muffled shot, moreover, a shot not heard outside the residence, or even inside its walls. As if the gun had been fired from beyond the grave.

The Albania files had come to give their users such troubles that, even if they did not admit it to themselves, their desire to see the short-term upheaval in the country settle down, and to see those files once again gathering dust, became almost noticeable.

Alas, for the time being, there was no point even dreaming of such a thing. On the contrary, those brown folders got heavier by the day. Everyone realized that the material piling up inside them was contradictory and incoherent, to such a degree that even the most persistent analysts ended up making the same gesture of despair as everyone else and declaring, with arms thrown wide: The only way you can get a grip on a place overcome by paranoia is by becoming a little paranoid yourself.

Their superiors in the agencies seemed to think otherwise. They scribbled spindly question marks over words and phrases like “hereditary Balkan lunacy,” “whim,” “delusion,” “symptomatic brain damage from iodine deficiency,” and so forth. A leader’s envy of his successor, envy taken to the point of murdering him, was such a common event in every place and period that it could not itself provide a key to understanding the Balkan malady. You could call to mind some of the customs of Albanian mountain tribes — for instance, their male beauty contests that were often followed by the killing of the winner, for reasons of envy, obviously — if you were writing a literary essay, but definitely not if you were trying to present a serious political analysis. And if you did, it would come down to saying that the whole history of the peninsula was no more than a working out of the old legend about the mirror on the wall: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all …”

The analysts ended up coming back to the main questions, after wearing themselves out in the pursuit of the puzzling issues raised by the beauty contests in the northern highlands — which could be understood either as a symptom of almost prehistoric male vanity, or as an indulgence of homosexuality by Albanian common law, which in other respects was so harsh.

Responding to repeated comments that it was time to be a bit more serious, the specialists on the Balkan desk came back once again to their other hypothesis, the one marked with a huge question mark: Is the country changing its political line? Obviously, the first thing that occurred to them was to make a connection between the murder of the Successor and some preceding attempt by him to deviate from orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the huge mass of intelligence now reaching them contained not the slightest, not the tiniest, sign that the Successor had ever tried to introduce the minutest change in the political line of the Albanian regime.