He strode purposefully toward a table without even glancing at the customers at the bar. With an icy stare he turned to the waiter and asked almost casually for a double shot.
3
Six hundred feet away, the architect was hurrying home, with his chin buried in the upturned collar of his coat. His wife had been more adamant than ever: “As soon as you’re done, you come straight back. No café, no club, no ‘just ran into whatsisname.’ Is that clear? I’ll be waiting for you in fear and trembling. Can’t you imagine? Our lives, the lives of our children, everything depends on what happens today, doesn’t it?”
The architect looked at his watch. After the forensic pathologist had left the room, as he himself was about to bid the minister goodbye with a handshake, the politician had whispered to him, “Stay a while longer!”
Putting an arm around his shoulder, the way leaders do when wishing to indicate a degree of goodwill toward intellectuals, the minister asked almost in the same breath, “So what’s this story about an underground passageway? …”
The architect lowered his eyelids, then shook his head as if to say: I don’t know anything, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. The minister kept on staring at him, but his eyes shone not so much with disbelief as with a kind of warmth. “So it was just boozers’ idle gossip!” he exclaimed without hesitation, letting his anger show. “If the building’s own architect isn’t aware of it, how could they know about it?” He went on cursing gossipmongers for a while. Dogs, runts, incurable shit-eaters … One of these days he would have them strung up by their balls.
To bring his litany of oaths to an end, and just as the architect was about to take his leave, the minister said, in the same conspiratorial whisper as before, “What say we take a quick trip into the basement, just to give it the once-over?”
The architect felt overcome by dizziness. The floor seemed to be opening up beneath his feet.
A bodyguard went ahead of them. The architect began to give brief explanations. “This passageway gives onto a second exit into the garden. The door cannot be opened from the outside, only from the inside, if you release several bolts. The other passage, the main one, leads to the air-raid shelter.”
He was aware that his eyes were bulging, as if he was expecting at any moment to see someone’s ghost looming out of the gloom.
“That way, no, there’s nothing. This way, there’s another wall. And over there … Hold tight! … Don’t let me down! …” These words were not spoken to himself, but rather to a third wall that looked utterly normal and in every respect similar to the other walls. But he knew full well that its appearance was deceptive. Beneath the cladding lay an enigma whose existence was known to very few. That mystery was another door.
Nothing could have been more terrifying to the architect than the sight of that door. It had been fitted by someone else, without his having been informed; but that would not save him from having to answer for it if any problems arose. He would have preferred not to know, to have never known about it, but bad luck had deemed otherwise. A few days before completion of the remodeling, when at the request of the son of the Successor he went down into the basement to check whether the air-raid shelter was sufficiently well soundproofed to keep the racket of a disco from seeping out, the son pointed to an almost unnoticeable door and said in an almost jocular tone, “And there’s the door, which according to what people suspect, leads all the way to the basement of the house of Himself…” Himself was the Guide. Taken aback when he realized the architect knew nothing about it, the young man didn’t try to hide his distress at having let out the secret. Then he begged the architect never to whisper a word of it to anyone. But that very evening, as he did with many things he would have done better to forget, the architect mentioned it to his wife. And she wept, as she always did, and through her tears, not once but a dozen times, she kept on saying, “And from now on you keep quiet about it! Forget that door! Since nobody outside of the two households knows, you’re not supposed to be in on it either. What’s more, they kept it hidden from you, even though you’re the architect in charge of the rebuilding. Which definitely means you should be the last to know.”
When the Successor died, that door once again became an even gloomier issue between the architect and his wife. “Are you sure you never said anything about it? Are you sure you never will say a word?” “Never, ever,” he swore, “not even to my own grave.” “Especially now,” she said. “Because people are going to be having the worst kinds of thoughts from now on: the underground passageway connected the two villas … and the murderers could have used it. Oh, it’s going from bad to worse for us!”
That morning as he was getting ready to go out, his tearful wife had reminded him again, “Be careful about that door business! You’re the architect. But you’re not at fault in any way. Only one thing can bring your downfall: your having seen that door.”
Throughout the inspection of the Successor’s residence, the architect kept repeating in his mind: Thank you, Lord, it’s nearly over, this torture will soon be finished! But as luck would have it, at the very last moment, just as he was about to be on his way, the minister came out with that “What say we take a quick trip into the basement?” — and the evil trap snapped shut. An invitation to step downstairs into hell would not have been any more frightening to him.
The architect realized he had reached the building where he lived. His wife must be worrying herself sick in the meantime. He ran up the stairs. The door of his apartment opened the very moment he put his finger on the bell. His wife was actually standing just behind, waiting for him and shaking like a leaf. He kissed her and put her head to his cheek. He spoke to her through her hair: “It’s over, over at last,” he kept on saying. She looked up and noticed how pale he was. “Come in and calm down …”
They went into the bedroom. He lay down on his back and resumed his sighing prayer: Lord, it’s over at last! She sat at the head of the bed and stroked his hair as he told the tale. He was very precise when he drew up plans for buildings, but a complete muddle when it came to words. When he got to the point where they had gone down the steps to the basement, his wife grasped his wrists. An old Muslim prayer for the dead came back to her: Be not afraid now that you must cross the darkness all alone …
So he had followed the minister’s steps down the stairs, alert for the moment when the door would appear. But all of a sudden, in its stead and place, they had come upon a smooth-clad wall. The smell of plaster and new cement meant that the surfacing had been done very recently. “Two or three days ago, definitely not more than that. But for me it was the most beautiful finish in the whole wide world. Blessed wall! I thought. Wall of my hopes and prayers! I wanted to bow down to it like a Jew at the Western Wall. I wanted to weep and to chant. I don’t know how I contained myself. The minister definitely had his eye on me. He was testing me, that much was obvious. What he was going to put in his report flashed through my head: ‘The architect, when confronted with the wall, displayed no surprise; likewise when I mentioned the underground passageway to him.’“
His wife went on stroking his hair. “It’s over, thank the Lord, it’s over,” she said from time to time. “Now it’s shut for good …” “As far as we’re concerned, yes indeed,” he replied. “From our point of view the door is done for, but not for whoever installed it in the first place. Those poor guys must be shaking in their boots, if they’ve not been taken care of already.”
She felt that her husband was getting ready to tell her something else, but was still unsure.
“Have a nap,” she suggested. “Do you want me to lie down with you?”
“Come here, darling.”
She took off her clothes and snuggled up to him. “Sleep, my dear, relax,” she whispered in his ear. But his mind did not seem to be at rest. He clearly wanted to say something else.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked after a while.
He grunted. “Well, yes, there is something … that I just c
an’t keep to myself.”
His wife stiffened. “But you did tell me everything, didn’t you?” she said sweetly and softly. “Besides all that, nothing else really matters. Now get some sleep!”
“No,” the architect said. “It’s better to bring it all up. That way it’ll be off my chest … That door …”
His wife heard herself screaming out loud, “That damn door again! But you said it had been walled up! Shut up for all eternity …”
“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.
4
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.
An hour and a half later, as they came out, people seemed as if they had been struck dumb. By means of the tape recorder, they had just heard the Guide’s speech to the Politburo, the same speech that had been intended for the evening of December 13, in the presence of the Successor, which had had to be postponed, given the lateness of the hour, to the next day, December 14. And it was in the interval between the evening of the thirteenth and the dawn of the fourteenth that the Successor’s suicide had occurred.
The Guide’s speech began by making you think that the Successor, aware that he stood to be attacked next morning, had lacked the courage to wait for the hour of his punishment and so anticipated it by taking his own life. But lo and behold, to everyone’s surprise, the speech ended with the announcement of the Successor’s pardon. That sufficed to reverse the sequence of events in people’s imagination.
The Successor Page 4
