The Successor (17 page)

When my hour came, with the night of December 13 and then the day of December 14, when he stopped time in its track, only then did I grasp for a brief instant that by turning back the hands on the clock he had only restored things to their proper order. An order that in his mind had been undone when, as legends tell us, father and son mistake their places for each other’s.

He was racked by sobbing when he gave a speech I was no longer there to hear, just as he had been the previous April during that moment after dinner when, perhaps for the first time, he had come to the conclusion I had knowingly signed my own death warrant.

Most people might have thought the Guide’s sentimentality mere playacting, but I was in a better position than anyone else to know the truth. Those sobs were completely genuine. You can’t understand that, just as you can’t understand so much else. You find it hard to realize that in this world, he and I hated each other even while we loved each other, and conversely, we adored each other even as each deplored the other. Especially on days like that December 14. Or on nights like December 13.

Ah, that night …

Even if you stopped asking me for answers, the questions would still take up half of my nonexistence. Lightning flashed outside. My wife had gone over to the window again and I meant to ask her: What are you trying to locate? On the other side of the window-pane there was nothing but darkness and desolation. But I never managed to question her because I was already falling asleep. It was a kind of unhealthy torpor streaked with snowflakes through which I could barely make out the shape of my first lover, the partisan girl, and, at her side, my bodyguard. He was there as he had been forty years before when, in the highlands, as we were trying to escape from our nationalist enemies, I lay in mortal fever, and begged them both, my lover and my bodyguard, to finish me off. Kill me, I begged them, but don’t let me fall into their hands … They looked at me as if they had been turned to stone. My fever had turned them into spectral figures, who now split into three, and now merged into a single fearsome creature, half man and half woman.

It was when my wife moved away from the window and drew closer to me that I saw her in the shape of my first lover, the one I was never able to marry. And she came this time as she had done forty years earlier with my old bodyguard … Silently, they both stepped nearer, then the guard stood back and only she was there, in the mist, but again in duplicate, simultaneously lover and wife — a bicorporal woman who instead of bringing me a cup of chamomile tea was pointing the black mouth of a gun barrel straight at me. I didn’t feel the slightest fear, I even thought: Why did I have to wait four decades for them to hear my prayer? Kill me, I thought then as I had done before, don’t let me fall into their hands! And then all of a sudden everything went blank.

I have now been floating in the void for years, carried here and there by inconstant winds. I suspect I am moving, and yet I stay still; I seem to be standing still and yet I am dashing I know not where. And to cap it all, in this bottomless and boundless space, in this desperate vastness where one soul meets another only too rarely — in the midst of this void, as I’ve told you again and again, we successors, escorted by our retinues, are, like the guides among us, no more than a paltry handful of pitiful beings.

You try in vain to unscramble our signs. To understand the motives of one or another among us. But we, who are both guides and successors, now and forever more reunited, embrace and throttle each other, we tire ourselves out trying to tear off each other’s heads, with equal anger. If I had been the Guide, I would have inflicted the same fate on him; he and I would have ended up changing places dozens of times, as many times as similar events came to recur throughout all eternity. That’s why I felt no rest or reassurance when I saw his statue torn down by the crowd and his bronze head shattered. Only sterile grieving, resembling everything else that surrounds me in these funereal regions where I am condemned to wander without end.

That is how we are.

That is why you have no cause to lament or feel any regret. And even less cause to expect us to reappear in the form of medieval ghosts hovering over museums and fortresses, demanding that our sons take revenge. We were impossible fathers, and so we could only have impossible wives, sons, and daughters.

Don’t try to work out where we went wrong. We are but the offspring of a great disorder in the universe. And as we came into the world, by mistake, in accursed cohorts, on each other’s coattails, with one of us now in the lead, now in second place, now Guide and now Successor, so we began our long march through blood and ashes toward you.

We never knew prayers or repentance, so don’t ever think of lighting candles for the salvation of our souls. You’d be better off praying for something else. Pray that as we gyrate to no end in the dark abyss of the universe, we never happen to spy in the blackness and far distance the light of the terrestrial globe, and — like cutthroats who happen on the village where they were born— we exclaim: Oh, but that’s Earth! Otherwise, like those assassins who turn off their path to visit their first home, we might also make a detour and, pitiless and unrepentant, masked and bloodstained as we always were and always will be, we might return to bring you new misfortunes, sans amen.

Tirana—Paris
October 2002—March 2003