The Successor

by Ismail Kadare

  Suzana carried on watching the figure on the beach going back and forth, and for the third time she thought: Poor Mama …

  Then with that special, almost balletlike stride inspired by being naked without embarrassment, Suzana went back to her fiancé. He was all huddled over, gazing at the flames in the hearth with a mindless stare.

  She sat herself casually in his lap. “Tell me about the other girls,” she whispered with all trace of rancor gone. “You tell me yours first, then I’ll tell you mine.” His answer was curt: “Don’t want to.” She stroked his hair and the back of his neck in an attempt to bring him around, but he jerked her hand away: “You’re wrong, that’s not what’s bothering me. Anyway …” “Anyway what?” she tried to tease … “Anyway, it would have been amazing if things had gone normally. All of you exude such terror …” “What!?” Suzana yelled — but Genc hurriedly added, “It’s nothing, nothing, forget it …” In the deathly silence that suddenly followed, it was he who gently brushed her wavy hair and whispered, “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you …” She listened distractedly and without really concentrating on a story about a hospital where he’d had to go with a broken leg and where the nurse, who was a bit older than he, got into bed with him; then there was a classmate at university, then another fling during some Youth Movement work experience in the north of the country.

  “So you didn’t have any problems anytime at all?” she asked after a pause. “You saved that for me, didn’t you?” He shook his head the way people do when they utter a “no” separately, prior to contradicting their interlocutor. Each in turn was in the grip of resentment, as blind as ever. “How can you not realize you are different from the others?” he kept asking her. “You are other, you must understand, totally other.” She didn’t know how to take those terms. On the one hand they seemed reassuring, on the other they did not. And when he asked her to tell him about her single love affair, she put such passion into the way she told the tale that he could see how much she was still trying to get back at him. In any other circumstance, she would have talked about it more plainly, but that day, spite prompted her to describe the affair in incandescent terms, without a thought for the pain she might cause her boyfriend. “You described me as ‘other,’ didn’t you? Well, he was really different, in every sense of the word! He had no respect and no fear. You could have taken him for a silent opponent of the regime. But he probably wasn’t anything of the kind. He was simply indifferent. Indifferent, but domineering.” She had yielded to him, as people say, on their first date. She was then barely seventeen. After deflowering her, any man, at the sight of the signs proving the fact, would have shown if not fear, at least some concern. But he didn’t even comment on it. And she understood at that moment that he was the man she had ardently hoped for. She fell madly in love with him. Maybe he was in love with her? But he uttered words of love only at rare intervals. Each time he penetrated her she thought she perceived in his ardor some secret torment, as if he had been seeking something else in the deep recesses of her body. The mystery and the silence in which he enveloped himself became catching. So it was that one day, when he clumsily let slip that he had already been engaged, she, who on any other occasion would have flown into a rage, demanded an explanation, and burst into tears and recriminations, just bowed her head without a word. Their relationship went on in that way for a long time, until the day the affair was discovered. It coincided with the time when her father was in process of being officially designated as the Successor. It was very probably the new star that had suddenly begun to shine brightly over her father’s career that was responsible for bringing the affair to light. In cut-glass terms, without harping on what her daughter had done, but leaving her no option about future disobedience, her mother had demanded instant separation. “Your father is about to be designated as the next Prijs. You have to do this for him. Otherwise we will have no option but to have your lover interned, together with all his close and distant relatives.”

  Suzana stared at her mother with wild eyes. Intern the man who had made her so happy? “You are out of your mind!” she shouted. “It’s you who’s lost your head and doesn’t want to understand,” her mother riposted. And she went on to spill out her heart: “You had the cheek to go with that hooligan, and now you want to defend him!” “He’s not a hooligan,” Suzana retorted. She almost added that he was the man who had made a woman of her, but she thought better of it as she realized that even if the argument with her mother went on for a thousand years, they would never agree on that.

  Forty-eight hours later, her father asked to see her. The wide bay windows of his office seemed to emit a constant vibration, as if they were forever being battered by winds. Suzana felt freezing cold. She was aware that she would not say any of the sentences she had prepared for this interview. What could her father know about her body? How could she tell him about her breasts and her hips aching for caresses, or about her genitals, where pain and sensuality fatally merged and consumed each other? About renouncing love-making, when she counted the days, the hours, and the minutes that brought her closer to each encounter? When she still did not understand how, despite the heavenly evanescence that made everything in her fall apart and melt like wax, her body retained its solid shape? He and his comrades had other kinds of pleasures, what with their congresses, their flags, their anthems, and their cemetery of National Martyrs, whereas she only had him … his body … his inexhaustible body …

  Her father stared at her with his fair eyes, whose coldness oddly seemed more bearable that day. She felt that the look in her own eyes was of the same kind — alien and distant.

  For a long while he said nothing. Then, when he began to speak, she realized right away that it was not only his tone of voice but also his words and his diction that had changed. And it was indeed about a change that he spoke. As from now, her father would no longer be what he had been up to then. What a designated Successor actually was could not be known except by becoming one … He would not go on about it, but would only say this to her: People believed he would now be more powerful than ever. That was only half the truth. The other half he would tell her, and her alone: He would henceforth be more powerful and more vulnerable than ever … “I hope you understand me, daughter dear.”

  Suzana listened to him with her head hung low. A wordless flash of light as cold as steel had suddenly made transparent what ought to have taken her days or weeks to grasp. When she felt she could not hold back her tears much longer, she looked up and nodded her assent. Her father looked fuzzy, as seen through a haze, still standing as she turned to leave. At the door she burst into sobs, and as she ran up the stairs to her room she thought she could hear her tears dripping to the floor.

  That was how her one and only affair had ended. When she met her lover for the showdown, she had tried to maintain a degree of discretion. She did not mention that he was in danger of relegation, nor did she mention her own quarrel with her mother. All the same, after making love, and still in the thrall of her pleasure, she had not hidden the fact that she was sacrificing herself for the sake of her father’s career. He listened to her with furrowed brow, without really grasping what she meant to say. Later on, when she came back to the matter, he must have gotten the gist in the end. He didn’t say a word, but, after a long pause, he muttered something about such sacrifices reminding him of ancient tales that he’d assumed were things of the distant past.

  Those were the last words they spoke to each other.

  “So that’s how it was …” Suzana’s fiancé kept his eyes fixed on her as she told her story. “Did I make you angry, darling?” she asked as she stroked the back of his head. “There’s no reason you should be, that’s all ancient history now” … No, curiously he didn’t seem to have been distressed by the story. As she spoke, something had changed inside him. She could not quite identify which detail of the story had prompted his transformation, but, suddenly, leaning his lips toward her ear, he interrupted her in a whisper and said
, “Are you going to show me your dark mystery again, then? …”

  Glowing with joy she tore off her clothes with trembling hands. “My love, my love,” she murmured when he first touched her between the legs. Her screams turned into a muffled sob before reawakening as a succession of spasms. When the young man withdrew, she kept her eyes half closed. “How beautiful you are!” he whispered to her. Without opening her eyes she replied “It’s you who make me so.”

  Still panting for breath, she covered him in kisses and smothered him in endearments. “Shall we do it again? We’ll do it again in the evening, in the afternoon, at dawn, won’t we?” “Absolutely,” he said, as he fumbled around for a cigarette.

  2

  Suzana snuggled under the blanket, relaxed her body, and tried to get back to sleep. Never had she felt so exhausted by an act of recollection. Her cheeks were as wet as before. So was her pubic hair.

  Outside, dawn was breaking. The whole abomination seemed to be coming to an end. The autopsies, the white-coated judges, the instruments and the measurements would surely have an effect in due course. Poor Papa, honor would befall him late in the day. But at least his soul would rest in peace. As for them, her mother, her brother, and herself, life would go on. Without him, of course, without his dangerous eminence; they would go back into their shells with their heads down, and hope to find warmth to share inside.

  That was the advice they got from their aunt Memë, the only person who came to see them in the days of desolation right after the tragedy: Stick together and keep each other warm.

  She’d turned up before dawn from the remotest part of the south on a train that seemed to have been invented specially for her, wearing a black headscarf bespattered with drops of snow or sleet garnered in unlikely locations.

  As surprised as she was anxious, Suzana stared at the unfamiliar old woman, who had been knocking for some while at the door.

  “I’m your aunt Memë, I’ve come to visit,” the caller said, raising her voice.

  Suzana shouted up from the bottom of the stairs, “Mama, Aunt Memë’s come to see us!”

  She had thought that her mother would be somehow glad that after their protracted isolation someone had at last come knocking at their door. But her mother’s eyes, puffy from insomnia or else from deep sleep, looked the old lady up and down superciliously, as if she didn’t recognize her.

  “You’ve forgotten me, but I won’t hold it against you. Since God has not yet called me to him, I was just wondering: For what trial has he spared me?”

  In outdated language that Suzana only half understood, Aunt Memë rattled off her advice. Most of it began with a negative: “Do not.” Do not open the door, whoever calls; do not remember anything, not even your own dreams; do not try to guess whose hand struck down your unhappy father; for although one hand may hide another, behind the other there is always the hand of God. “As for you, my child,” she said to Suzana, “stop thinking you’re the cause of it all.” “Nor should you, my boy,” she added, turning toward Suzana’s brother, “nor should you think you have to take revenge. But above all,” she said to Suzana’s mother, you who are a mourning widow, you must not think about it anymore. “What’s done cannot be undone, and what’s undone is not for mending. Forget so that you may be forgotten.”

  Suzana’s mother kept her eyes on the old lady as she made her speech, staring blankly except for moments when panic welled up in them.

  Faint nostalgia for family members relegated to obscure rural outposts came back confusedly to Suzana’s mind — relatives who sometimes resurfaced under the guise of remorse, but quickly disappeared again.

  Aunt Memë didn’t blame them, nor did she let fly with all the resentment she felt. She recited her list of “do not’s,” and was visibly satisfied not only to see that they had caught the young man’s imagination, but that after coffee he took her aside to talk about them further, in private.

  “Forget so that you may be forgotten,” Suzana muttered to herself, going over her aunt’s advice. Easier said than done, even if you restrict it to dreams. Henceforth half of her whole existence, not to say the most substantial part of her life, was made up of memories and dreams.

  It was still April, but the inescapable and sparkling month of May, with at its head the first of the month — a day revered like a god — was about to cross the border and make its grand entrance.

  Never before could she have dreamt that the hardest day of her life would be invaded by marching crowds, big drums, placards, little red flags, and brass bands broadcast over the loudspeakers in the street. Pictures of her father were more numerous than ever before, waving amid the procession, right behind the portraits of the Guide.

  She was on the platform, staring at the unending tide of people in the procession. At times it made her dizzy. A pang of anxiety went through her as she wondered if the man was still expecting her to come to the apartment on Pine Street. Which of her words was he thinking over? If I’m not there by eight-thirty that will mean we will never see each other again. I shall love you all my life. And if I live twice, I will love you both my lives.

  From time to time she stole a glance at the central platform where her father stood to the right of the Prijs, waving at the crowd, accompanied by the crackling of photographers’ flashbulbs. She waited a few minutes, then discreetly looked again, as if to make sure nothing had changed, and she didn’t know whether to be glad or saddened that it was all still there, with her father in exactly the same place, at the Guide’s side, two paces behind him. Her tired-out brain ran disjointed dreams before her eyes: her father stepping two paces backward, herself pushing through the dignitaries toward him and saying: Father, sir, so you are in the end not the designated Successor? You just said that to deceive me, didn’t you? If that’s right, then you must release me, Father, sir, so that I can go back to my lover, tear off my clothes, and melt in his arms.

  The commemoration banquet was just as awful. The lavish table, the toasts wishing her father ever greater success, and which he pretended not to hear, putting on that distant smile that was meant for no one in particular, plunged her into a state of numbness, where scattered fragments of scenes and sentences mostly unrelated to each other floated around in her drowning mind.

  The distinguished assembly at her table made her see it more and more as the altar on which she would be required to lie, to be sacrificed, surrounded by candles. Her eyes sometimes caught her mother’s glance. Father, sir, let all this be at least of some use! That’s what she believed she was thinking as she watched her father’s face, looking like a young bridegroom flabbergasted by his own good fortune. He had disposed of his daughter’s fiancé so as to proclaim himself the groom at this nightmare banquet.

  Quite unexpectedly, it turned windy and rainy in the afternoon of that first of May. Suzana spent the whole of it locked in her bedroom, sobbing.

  It was the same bed as the one in which she was now awakening, without quite managing to figure out to which level of time she was returning.

  3

  At last she got up. Her eyes were swollen, but this time the thought that had always first come to mind these past few months — what’s the point of looking pretty? — didn’t even occur to her.

  The residence was quiet. It seemed scarcely credible that only a few hours earlier men with guns and instruments had been tramping from one room to another. Her brother had gone out, as he usually did. Her mother was probably out as well. She went up to her father’s bedroom door, as she had done so many times before, and tried the handle. It was locked, as it always was.

  She went back to her mirror, moved a lock of hair out of the way, examined a spot on her face, then took up her hairbrush. She felt she had forgotten even what it really meant to do her own hair, a practice tied up in so many ways with being beautiful.

  Her brother’s bedroom door was ajar. She looked in at the table untidily piled high with books. It was here, where no one was allowed to go, that her brother had shu
t himself up for ages with Aunt Memë.

  She had seen them come downstairs afterward and then wander around the house, in and out the back door to the garden, with him leaning over and with his spidery arms around her, so that her twisted figure all in black looked like his secret torment.

  Aunt Memë left in the afternoon, but her shadow and her words stayed on in the house. Suzana’s brother made no effort to hide his interest in the dark mysteries of their family’s past — for instance, in the curse that people in Tirana would not stop gossiping about. He wanted to know which part of the curse related to the house, and which part to the family, or to the layout of doors and thresholds. As well as the precise spot where the misfortune had arisen.

  On that last point brother and sister didn’t know what to believe. If a curse really existed, was it to be found in the old part of the residence, or in the new-built section? In other words, on which of the house’s two levels did it fall?

  As they went on discussing the matter, Suzana could not get the architect’s face out of her mind. She was almost certain that the curse emanated from the rebuilt part of the residence. She’d always been told, since earliest childhood, that before being requisitioned by the new government, the house had belonged to the pianist who played the first waltz at the royal wedding. So even if the pianist had had blood on his hands, it would not concern them at all.