The Successor (13 page)

His stone-cold hatred, reviving after a brief pause, was utterly unbearable.

I gave you almost a year, he addressed his minister in his mind. His mouth filled with bile. That man should never have been granted such a long reprieve.

An old ditty from his hometown came back to mind:

Hasobeu had disappointed him. Even leaves, mere leaves on a tree, knew when it was time to fall — but that man pretended not to. He now had an interminable week to make amends for his mistake.

Don’t force me to bring on the black beast! he thought.

Not wanting to let himself sink into a bad mood before dinner, he tried to think of something else.

“It looks like it’s dark outside now,” he remarked to his secretary.

“Yes, it’s completely dark,” the secretary replied. “They’ve switched on the garden lamps.”

The week felt as if it would never end. Friday, when the Central Committee’s plenum would meet, was still far off. He spent the whole of Tuesday morning listening to ambassadors’ reports and to a summary of the underground news from Tirana. A seventeen-year-old girl in the adjacent quarter had taken her own life. Rumors about Hasobeu’s fall were still infrequent. Only one of the wire services mentioned it, and it got the man’s name wrong anyway, making it unrecognizable. The girl had killed herself for sentimental reasons. A young swank, who repaired bicycles on the square where she lived, had dropped her. “Haseberg …” he muttered, mulling over his minister’s mangled name. “Now you’re defying me under a Teutonic name!”

While virtual silence reigned on the Hasobeu situation, all the old surmises about the death of the Successor resurfaced, presumably by reaction. Probably an attempt at destabilizing the entire Balkan Peninsula. Expansion of the Atlantic alliance to this part of Europe. Oil. Suicide or assassination? The real reason. Who pulled the trigger …

“Always the same old stories,” he muttered under his breath.

The secretary waited for the Guide’s mumbling to cease before going on. The underground passageway. What might have happened in it on the night of December 13.

That last phrase made him sneer. “That’s a laugh!” Then he asked the secretary to read it out again. According to the informant, people were saying that the last meeting between the Guide and the Successor took place in the tunnel at midnight. The latter had reached for his gun but the Guide’s bodyguard had been quicker on the draw.

The secretary waited for
Himself
’s guffaws to die down before going on. The Successor was supposed to have gotten himself shot in the basement, so that what had been said about the lifeless body of the victim being brought up the stairs like a tailor’s dummy by two men could be incorporated into the story.

“Wait!” the Guide said. “Read that to me once more …”

The secretary read it again, this time more slowly, but when he had finished,
Himself
asked to hear it one more time. As he listened, he repeated the sentences under his breath. What had been said … in other words, what had been foretold.

“It’s like in the holy books,” he mumbled dreamily. “In the Bible, unless I’m mistaken, some events are laid out like that.”

The secretary looked at his master with veneration, as he did every time the Guide made a reference to what he had read. He put his nose back into the stack of papers, but
Himself
interrupted: “Wait, not so fast!”

At first the secretary did not grasp what the Guide was asking of him. He had been dealing with an abstruse report in which the analyst, after mentioning the mysterious death in Tirana, tried to unravel the functioning of the brain of a dictator.

Placidly, the secretary went back to the report. He’d been in this job for forty years, and in the course of time he had lost more or less everything, including his sense of fear.

The text he finally retrieved was quite brief. According to its author, the brain of a tyrant often worked according to what might be called the “architecture of terror.” Terror was constructed backwards, like dreams, which is to say, starting from the end. Then, in a flash, sometimes in a mere second or even less, the entire missing part was suddenly filled in. To make his meaning clearer, the analyst proposed the image of a building constructed out of its own ruins. All the rest — the walls, partitions, roof, chimney, and even the furniture — would suddenly be added, then knocked away. That was the process of the Master’s mind when passing sentence. First plan the victim’s death, and the rest would be fitted in afterwards.

That’s what you have done, he thought.

His breathing accelerated from spite. Yes, they had been doing these things themselves since biblical times, and now they were claiming he had invented them!

He became aware of his wife’s footsteps behind him.

“There’s a letter from Hasobeu,” she said as she leaned over his shoulder.

“Really? Let’s have a look at the brain functions of … von Haseberg!”

The missive struck him as both interminable and cunning. Hasobeu complained of being cold-shouldered even though everything had now been brought out into the open. As long as it had been thought that the Successor might have been a martyr, assassinated by some other hand, suspicions about him, Hasobeu, had been understandable. But now that it had been admitted that the Successor had been a traitor and had killed himself, why was he, Hasobeu, still under a cloud of suspicion?

“You wily hypocrite!” Anger rose inside him. “You think you can pull the wool over
my
eyes, do you?”

His breathing quickened again. Hasobeu was playing innocent in order to get out of the hole he had dug with his own hands. He was pretending things were disarmingly simple: You say the Successor was a murdered martyr? Then you’re right to suspect me. But now you say the Successor was a traitor and a suicide. So what can you possibly hold against me, Hasobeu?

“Take this down!” he instructed his secretary. “Hasobeu is conveniently forgetting a third hypothesis, which may well be the right one. Whether the man was a martyr or a traitor, whether he was murdered or killed himself, one thing is clear — Hasobeu was involved. He spent the night prowling around the Successor’s residence. Did he or did he not plan to kill him? Did he mean to corner him into taking his own life, which was already a waste of time? Did he or did he not let the murderers into the house? The answers to these questions make not one bit of difference. What we have is typical of conspiracies. As soon as they sniff danger in the wind, the plotters hasten to get rid of the mastermind. Everybody knows that.

“It’s been known for all eternity,” he mumbled. “Same as the epilogue.

“Take this down,” he said to the secretary again. “In my name, you’re going to send him a note that you’ll sign for me. Invite him to the Central Committee plenum the day after tomorrow, so he can lay out everything he knows. So he can bare his heart!”

He could already hear the deathly hush that would fall upon the meeting when he turned to Hasobeu and called on him to speak. Bare your heart, Hasobeu! We’ll soon see who’s scared by all the secrets you’re going to spill!

Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime. He’d only recently come to understand that, and it left him in a state of great calm. His blindness had no doubt helped him toward such serenity.

He didn’t know, and never had known, what had really happened at the Successor’s residence on that night of December 13. And since even he didn’t know, it could take a thousand years for anyone else to find out.

Like beasts of another species, they were all circling around him now, trying to explain with miserable whimpers, with all kinds of signals and glances, what in their view had taken place. But they could bark until their lungs were sore; what they had to tell him was necessarily incomplete and incoherent. All they knew of the matter had been seen as through the eyes of an insect, in parts and fragments.

Apart from the deceased, two other individuals seem to have been implicated. But no one would ever know exactly how they had gotten themselves tangled up in the murky business, where they had crossed paths, when they had put each other off, how they had blackmailed each other until the whole thing fell under the shroud of silence. Only one of them, Hasobeu, had spoken up, half screaming and half moaning: The doors had been bolted on the inside.

He was minister of the interior and seemed not to know that in all great murder cases doors are always bolted on the inside!

He thought he heard the wind rising, and asked what was going on in the garden. If his memory was to be trusted, ancient tragedies dealt exclusively with that: how to expunge the crime, how to detach it from the clan. He didn’t recall ever coming across a mention of the opposite problem — how to get a crime to stick.

It was probably the noise of the storks leaving their nests, his secretary told him. The rustling was loud enough to make that the most likely cause.

He heard his wife coming up behind him again, which made him hold back what he was about to say.

“Are you bringing me another letter?” he asked merrily, without turning around.

“Indeed I am,” she replied.

Before muttering, Unbelievable! he felt the envelope with the tips of his fingers. It had been sent by the Successor’s widow.

All that’s lacking now is a letter from the dead man himself! he thought.

The envelope seemed weighty, but he decided it could not be otherwise for a letter from a widow. What is she saying? he wondered. What news do you have for us, Comrade Clytemnestra? …

“Burn it!” his wife said, matter-of-factly.

In the silent room, the familiar noise of a match being struck could be heard quite clearly, followed by the hungry flame and then its extinction. The faint crackling sound of carbonized paper went on for a while.

He waited for his wife to have left with the ashtray before he said to the secretary, “I don’t want her to send me any more letters. She shouldn’t even think of writing.”

He did not want to know what had gone on in that house. How they had striven, then taken fresh counsel, whether they had delayed, or screamed in the fog. Let them take it all to the grave with them!

The secretary’s heavy breathing told him the latter was about to make an observation. Maybe about the storks’ nest. For no reason, he suddenly recalled a swarthy Greek who answered to the name of Haxhi,* and the kids in the street who taunted him with the refrain:
Haxhi, haxhibird, when are you going to fly off to Mecca?

*Albanian “xh” is pronounced like the English “dg” in “badge.” The Greek’s name thus sounds like
hajj
, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Nowadays he often felt drowsy at this time of day.

The Central Committee plenum had begun on the stroke of four in the afternoon, and the first session was still going on. Dusk was coming on. The Guide had his elbows on the table, and he could feel the meeting going slack. He could imagine the questioning glances going around among the delegates. They had been expecting a dramatic meeting; they had probably only managed snatches of sleep before first light, but the agenda was going on and on with items that were frankly insipid. Questions of raising the budget for the energy sector and extending the schedule for fulfilling the Plan. Those who had been afraid were presumably enjoying it; long may this last, they must have been thinking; let’s keep on about hydroelectric generators, cotton plantations, the emancipation of women … Whereas others, who couldn’t wait to hear the crack of the whip, sank by stages into ill humor. The big secrets, the secrets that would make your hair stand on end, were probably only dealt with in the inner sanctum, in the Politburo, whereas they got the donkey-work: budgets, five-year plans, and so on …

When he’d entered the room, Adrian Hasobeu was ashen-faced. Head hung low, he’d gone to sit in the fourth row back; the adjacent seats stayed empty. The Guide learned these details from words whispered in his ear by the new Successor-designate, who for the first time was seated on the leader’s right-hand side.

He’d stopped taking interest in the audience, but after the break, when they had all come back to their seats and his freshly appointed Successor had informed him that there were now not four but six vacant seats around Hasobeu, the Guide’s resentment of his minister, as black as any long-buried rancor returning to life from the tomb, became unbearable.

“Dog!” he muttered under his breath.

There he was sitting on his own like a leper, but still he would not listen to reason!

The plenum had moved on to the second item on the agenda. When the first secretary of the Tirana branch of the Party had finished his speech, Hasobeu requested permission to speak. Each time he brought the microphone nearer to his mouth his voice grew more feeble. The Guide didn’t stop staring hard at the man’s blank and clouded eyes. But when Hasobeu got around to talking about the great conspiracy, he interrupted him:

“We’ve heard what you had to say, Comrade. You’ve told us about the twenty years you spent as minister of the interior, and so on and so forth. But since you’ve just mentioned the conspiracy, I’d like to ask you a question: Why have all conspiracies unmasked to this day been discovered by the Party, not by the
Sig-urimi
— which was under your command, wasn’t it?”

Since he could not see him, he could easily imagine Hasobeu holding on tight to the desk so as not to collapse, then grasping the microphone, and getting tangled up in the wire looping around him like a snake.

“Prowling hyena!” he raged silently. “Snake in the grass!”

Hasobeu had made an attempt to reply, but shuffling in the hall drowned out the sound of his words.

“Throttle the man once and for all!” the Guide snarled to himself.

He hadn’t expected his spite for the man to surge up quite so vigorously. At times it was on the point of taking his breath away.