The Successor (12 page)

All the doors were bolted on the inside.

He wasn’t absolutely certain he had said exactly that.
Himself
said, “Now I can sleep peacefully.”

Outside, on the path, it was raining harder than ever. Adrian Hasobeu thought he was on his way home, but his feet took him in another direction. When he glimpsed the Successor’s bedroom from afar once more, he understood. That’s when he took the revolver from the inside pocket in his oilskin and fitted the silencer onto the barrel.

Early next morning, the four telephones in the house rang incessantly. When he arrived at the Successor’s residence, he found the state prosecutor had gotten there first. His eyes crossed the puffy, insomniac, and desolate gaze of the bereaved wife, and he almost choked on the question: “Who moved the body? I meant to say, has the body been moved?”

He had put such effort into imagining every detail that the sight of the corpse gone cold now seemed quite familiar to him.

At the Politburo meeting, which began an hour later, he sought but failed to catch the Guide’s eye. What did
Himself
actually believe? The question nagged at him unrelentingly all that morning, and came back to haunt him even more later on, during that unending week of the autopsy. His last conversation with the leader, the one he’d had with him around midnight on December 13, appeared henceforth like a hallucination. It seemed to have either no sense at all, or far too much. It must have been then that the thread broke. From the moment when, after leaving the Guide, his steps took him back to the Successor’s residence, he had the palpable feeling that something needed to be put right. And that was probably where things had gotten all tangled up.

Perhaps, like half the population of Tirana, the Guide took him for the killer. Or did he suspect that his minister had intended to commit murder, but hadn’t managed to do so, seeing as someone else got his bullet in first? Or that the Successor had beaten both his assassins to the wire by pulling the trigger on himself?

What would he not have given to know even just half the surmises in the mind of
Himself!
Now and again, those surmises would disperse almost instantaneously, like a flock of crows taking fright and leaving a solitary bird in the empty lot they had just abandoned. Shouldn’t that crow be put down too, because of everything it was now the only bird to know? That was Adrian Hasobeu’s initial hypothesis, elemental in its simplicity, but which he did not find too hard to put aside precisely because it was so simple. It was too ordinary, too well-known to remain part of the Guide’s set of mental tools.

No! he said to bolster himself, despite his weariness, and not quite knowing to whom he was really talking. Maybe the Guide did suspect him of having committed murder, especially if he had been told of Hasobeu’s second visit to the Successor’s house. Or maybe, short of suspecting him of murder, he thought Hasobeu had prompted the suicide … that he had gone there to try to corner the man … or that he hadn’t gone over there at all. The threads had begun to unravel, but Hasobeu himself could no longer clearly see what was true and what was false in such a complicated imbroglio.

On several occasions, he came close to writing a letter to the man
Himself
. He was prepared to assume responsibility for all possible and imaginable crimes — murder, incitement to self-destruction, etcetera — if that could be of use to the Cause. The first lines of his letters provided him with a sense of relief, but then he was overcome with a sense of defeat. He realized with alarm that he had not known how to interpret
his
signs. In fact, the Guide had never been very forthcoming, as, for instance, in the Kano Zhbira affair: each time the body was exhumed, the current winners were cut down, until the next unburying brought down their successors too.

The wall of inscrutability had gotten even thicker these past few years. His increasingly poor eyesight seemed to give him perceptions that no one else could fathom. Such impenetrable fog that nobody knew what to believe.

Despite knowing all this, in his fit of gloom Adrian Hasobeu felt like shouting out loud: Why was it me that
he
had to send over there on the night of December 13? To set me up as a murderer, if a murderer should be needed? At times, he thought there could be no other way of accounting for it. The Successor’s death had worn two masks, but one of them would have to be chosen in the end. “If you didn’t do it,” his wife told him, “there’s no reason why you should bear the brunt.” He left a long pause, but when his wife repeated her question once again, he replied: Neither she nor anyone else would ever understand the first thing about it all.

Something he had recently discovered lay at the root of the incomprehensibility he was referring to. Suspicions were by far the most cherished attributes of the mind of a guide. They formed as it were a pack of hounds, to play with and relax at lonely times. But if anyone dare get too close, beware!

His wife bowed her head while he, feeling almost a sense of relief, tried to explain. It was because the Guide, as far as he could grasp, expected no explanation to be forthcoming that he, Adrian Hasobeu, had refrained from offering any. What he had meant to say by remaining silent was to indicate that he was prepared to accept his fate, or, in other words, that his fate would be whatever the Guide so desired. If you need to brand me as a criminal, then so be it, my Lord! Or whatever else. The choice is yours.

The rumblings of his tribe reached his ears from the main room, and brought him even greater comfort. Above the low hum he could make out little noises as of snaps or muffled clicks, which, oddly enough, far from irritating him, aroused faint nostalgia.

When he got up and opened the door to the main room, he immediately understood why. In the kitchen, on the other side of the hall, his three sisters, together with the servants, were rolling puff pastry. “You look surprised, cousin,” one of the visitors said to him. “Could you have forgotten that the day after tomorrow is your birthday?”

One of his sisters, with flour up to her elbows, greeted him with a kiss. “Did you have a good rest, dear heart? We’re in the middle of making a baklava like you’ve never tasted before.”

Still in the haze of sleep, he looked on at the layers of pristine pastry piled as high as he remembered on days before weddings in the big house back in the village. He had completely forgotten the date of his birthday, like so much else in the course of that sinister winter.

He asked for a glass of water, then turned back to gaze greedily at those layers of pastry, as if he could never have his fill of the sight of them.

Adrian Hasobeu’s birthday ought to have marked the very summit of his career, but a few hours of the day were all that was needed to finish him off.

A first, almost imperceptible eddy, faint as a fluttering of wings, arose at about eleven o’clock. Almost the entire government and the majority of the Politburo were in attendance. The
Prijs
was expected any minute. He usually came to this sort of event at about this time. Symptoms included a kind of withdrawal of people to the corners of the room, flagging conversations, and eyes that returned almost in spite of themselves to keep watch on the main door. Even the glasses and bottles seemed to be holding their sparkle back. Adrian Hasobeu was making a superhuman effort not to watch the clock. But the time was plain to see wherever you looked. For the expression on all his guests’ faces resembled nothing in the world so much as the round dials of a clock!

Are you all so worried on my behalf? he thought with a touch of bitterness. But he saw immediately that he was being unfair to them. They were all his people, and he would bring them down with him when he fell.

By noon the partygoers’ whispering had become incomprehensible and their meaning could only be guessed at.

Though he had already been petrified, so to speak, he still managed to summon up the thought that there was still time for a letter or a telegram to come. There was no written rule that said the Guide always had to attend in person. He couldn’t remember when, but it had happened before, he was sure of that, all the more so in view of the ever-declining state of
His
health.

When they took their places at table for the meal, there was an unexpected excitement in the air. The appropriate toasts were proposed, and he managed to keep up appearances. It was only during the last course, when he tried to enjoy the baklava, that the food stuck in his throat. His sister’s words came back to his mind, in disorder: a baklava such as … a baklava like … He tried to put the thought out of his mind but did not succeed. Of such a baklava he had indeed never before partaken, nor had any of his relatives.

After coffee, the guests hung around. He was eager to see the house empty and almost wanted to yell out loud: What are you waiting for, can’t you see you’re not wanted here anymore?

An unhealthy knot made of strands of blind rancor and of unreleased imprecations like: Are you standing around so as to get a better view of my fall? combined with the superstitious idea that maybe
he
was waiting for the floor to be cleared before making his entry, was bringing his mind to a complete standstill.

Dumdfoundedness followed his bout of exasperation. In his prostration, he suddenly saw the naked and implacable notion rise up before him that not only would the Guide not come, but that there would be no letter and no greetings telegram either. Nor would he even call on the telephone.

The sum of it was harsh enough, but an hour later, when the first shades of dusk spread across the garden, the Guide’s absence no longer seemed at all surprising. On the contrary, what now seemed crazy was to nurse the slightest hope that
Himself
would turn up. And it was not just the Guide’s presence, but the idea of a birthday card, a greetings telegram, or even a phone call now looked like the idle dreams of a schoolkid. He realized that very soon the downward slide of his despair would be so steep as to make him amazed they hadn’t already come to take him away.

After a short interval, the guests had begun to return in numbers. As before, bringing cakes and wine as well as bouquets. The maddest procession you could think of. Weren’t they aware there was nothing more that could be done? Except maybe to bring flowers, as they alone could be used at funerals as well as birthdays.

What was even more unbearable than their being here were the birthday wishes. On two occasions he couldn’t even understand what they were saying and blurted out, “What was that?” “May you rise ever upward!” they intoned by way of reply.

Try to look your best, his wife whispered in his ear as she pretended to come up to draw the curtains.

He turned to look at the French windows that opened onto the garden. Light was fading fast. It was years since
Himself
had been out so late in the day.

He encountered his wife in the hall once again. She said, “Listen, I never managed to understand why you went back … the second time … to that place.”

He looked her in the eye, at length. So, though she was putting on a good front, she too was thinking only of that.

“Why did I go back?” he answered in a ghostly voice. “You won’t believe me, but I tell you I have no idea.”

His wife, completely distraught, shook her head. “Haven’t you had enough of keeping all these secrets? You’ve spent your whole life with them!”

He too shook his head, to contradict her. “I have no secrets from you, my wife.”

He began softly, almost inaudibly, then suddenly his voice broke into a raging and inhuman bawl: “You really want to know what I did that night? I did
nothing!
Got that? The doors were bolted from the inside.”

“Get hold of yourself,” she urged.

He was gasping for breath.

“All the same, you must have been expecting something when you were standing outside the residence,” she went on, in a calmer voice.

“I don’t know what I was expecting. Of course, I was expecting something … Maybe a signal from inside. Or something like that … Perhaps it was supposed to be that way … Perhaps I had to wait for a sign … Maybe I was mistaken …”

“A sign
from whom?”

Nothing was that simple … From someone who had been prevented from giving it … At least, that was my impression … But at no point was there any sign at all …

“But that’s dreadful!” his wife moaned. “Waiting for a sign you know nothing about … not knowing the why or the wherefore …”

“That’s where I made the wrong move. I failed to pick up the right wavelength … What he said to me that night was so unclear. And what he told me later, when I got back to his office, was even murkier. As if he had already gone to sleep …”

“That’s the worst of our misfortune,” his wife blurted out. “Even when he’s asleep he treats you like a plaything. But you and your kind, you don’t even see it! Wide awake and as blind as bats!”

He would have liked to tell her that she had probably hit upon his real secret: how to keep people on a string while fast asleep.

“Go circulate and talk to the guests,” she said. “We’ve been alone too long.”

“Are they still there? For God’s sake get rid of them for me! Tell them the party’s over. Say anything you like as long as it gets them out, and the doors closed!”

Six hundred feet away, in the large room he had been using as an office for a while, the Guide, facing the wide bay window, was listening to a secretary reporting on what could be seen going on in the garden that overlooked the rear of the presidential residence.

The last glimmer of daylight made the few trees that had been planted here and there seem to be moving off into the distance. Soon darkness would spread all over, and the dead leaves falling from the trees would no longer be seen at all.

He asked the secretary if the sky was overcast, then he wanted to know if the junket at the Hasobeus house was still in full swing.

The secretary satisfied both requests: some clouds, and the party had just come to an end.

He must have figured it out, he thought. Now he’ll need at least a week to recover.