The Successor

ONE. A DEATH IN DECEMBER

The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14. Albanian television made a brief announcement of the facts at noon: “During the night of December 13, the Successor succumbed to a nervous depression and took his own life with a firearm.”

International news agencies circulated the Albanian government’s version of the story around the world. Only later that afternoon, when Yugoslav radio voiced a suspicion that the suicide might actually have been murder, did the wire services amend their bulletins to allow for both versions of the event.

In the middle of the sky, which stretched as far as the eye could see and carried the news far and wide, stood a high clump of clouds like a celestial wrath.

Whereas the death shook the whole country, the absence of national mourning, and especially the unaltered television and radio schedules, failed to provoke the intended shock. Once their initial puzzlement had passed, people were persuaded by the explanation that was doing the rounds: despite the country’s rejection of the cross, suicide remained implicitly just as blameworthy as it was in the Christian faith. What was more — and this was the main thing — throughout the fall and especially after the onset of winter, people had begun to expect the Successor to topple.

Albanians had long been unaccustomed to the tolling of bells, so they looked next day for signs of mourning wherever they might be found — on the façades of government buildings, in the musical offerings broadcast by national radio, or on the face of their neighbor stuck in the long line outside the dairy. The nonappearance of flags at half-mast and the absence of funeral marches on the airwaves eventually peeled the scales from the eyes of those who had chosen to believe that things were just a bit behind schedule.

News agencies around the world persisted in reporting the event and in giving the two alternative explanations: suicide and murder.

In fact, it looked more and more as if the Successor had intentionally chosen to depart this vale of tears in a particular way, wrapped in not one but two shrouds of mourning, as if he had decided to have himself hauled away by two black oxen, one being insufficient to his needs.

As they anxiously opened their morning papers, hoping to learn something more about the event, people were actually trying to fathom which of the two alternatives — self-inflicted death, or death inflicted by the hand of another — would affect them less harshly.

For lack of news in the media, people fell back on what was being repeated in after-dinner gossip all over town. The night of the Successor’s death had been truly terrifying — and it was certainly not a figment of their imagination, for everyone had seen it. Lightning, downpours, and wild gusts of wind! It was no secret that after an autumn full of fears, the Successor had been going through a psychologically difficult time. The next day, in fact, he had been due to attend a decisive meeting of the Politburo where the errors he had to confess in his self-criticism would presumably have been forgiven.

But like so many people born under a cloud and who, on the very brink of salvation, slip and fall into the abyss, the Successor had been in too much of a hurry. He had penned a letter of apology for taking his leave and then ended his own life.

That night, the whole family had been at home. After supper, as he was on his way to bed, the Successor asked his wife to please wake him at eight in the morning. For her part, she who had found it impossible to sleep for weeks on end, as she would later admit, fell into a deep slumber that lasted all night. Her daughter, who had spotted light coming from under her father’s bedroom door as late as two in the morning, when it went out, turned in to bed shortly thereafter. Nobody heard any noise whatsoever.

And that was pretty much all the information that emanated, or seemed to emanate, from the house of the deceased. But other stories seeped out from the gated compound — the Bllok — where state officials lived. If the night had indeed been particularly wet and windy, an unusual number of cars had nonetheless been seen entering and leaving the Bllok. The strangest thing was that around midnight, or maybe a little later, the silhouette of a man had been seen slipping into the residence of the deceased. A prominent member of the government … but it was forbidden to say … not under any circumstances … so, an extremely high-ranking official … had gone in … and come out again shortly thereafter …

The files on Albania lay moldering under a thick coat of dust. That wasn’t by any means the first time that such lack of rigor had been observed inside various intelligence agencies. As can be imagined, the observation carried more than a hint of criticism on the part of the ranking officers and spread a sense of guilt among the subordinates, who set about reopening said files, promising never to shirk their duties again.

What was known about Albania was mostly obsolete, and some of it was distinctly romanticized. A small nation whose name meant “Land of Eagles.” An ancient people of the Balkan Peninsula, who had succeeded the Illyrians and perpetuated their tongue. A new state that had emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century. A land of three faiths: Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim, declared a monarchy under a minor German prince of the Protestant persuasion. Then a republic under the leadership of an Albanian bishop. Who was overthrown in a civil war led by the next king, this one a native. Who was overthrown in his turn by another sovereign — an Italian monarch, as it happened, who confiscated the Albanian crown and proclaimed himself “King of Italy and Albania and Emperor of Abyssinia.” And finally, after that grotesque coupling, where for the first time in their history Albanians were led to constitute a state on an equal footing with Africans, came the outbreak of Communist dictatorship. With new friendships and bizarre alliances solemnly made and haughtily repudiated.

On that part of the story, in fact, and in particular on the two major squabbles, first with the Russians then with the Chinese, most of the files bore traces of subsequent revision. Several extra sheets had been slipped in, containing analyses, reflections, facts, and forecasts, most of which ended in a question mark. The addenda were mostly attempts to work out which way Albania would turn next: toward the West, or once again to the East? The answer was rendered even more uncertain by its being dependent on other questions for which answers had never been found. Was it in the West’s interest to draw Albania into its bosom? Some position papers seemed to refer to the possibility of a secret accord between the Communist bloc and the West: We’ll drop Albania — on condition you keep your hands off it too. One of the files even quoted a brief in which the issue was stated explicitly: Should the West risk alarming the Soviet camp by seducing poor little Albania, or keep the sweet talk for a better-endowed bride, namely Czechoslovakia?

But interest had manifestly waned as the years went by, and you could measure the growing distance by the resurgence of archaic and romantic terms in the notes and briefs in the agency files — words related to the royal fowl, the eagle, and to the age-old law book called the Canon of Lek, or Kanun.

All that seemed to be but a dress rehearsal for what would take place years later, when Albania broke off relations with China. The same questions would be asked, the same answers suggested, and apart from the fact that it was all a bit more bland, and that the word “Poland” replaced “Czechoslovakia,” the conclusions were roughly the same as before.

The death of the Successor that cold December was therefore the third time the files on Albania had been dusted off. Supervisors in various intelligence agencies grew ever more critical of their clerks: We’ve had enough folklore, and to hell with your avian raptors! We need some serious background on the country! There were forecasts of upheaval in the Balkans. An uprising in northeastern Albania, which some people called Outer Albania and others called Kosovo, had just been put down. Was there any connection between that rebellion and the event that had just taken place inside the country?

On one of the files, some exasperated hand had inked a red circle around the words “Are there six million Albanians, or only one million?” and added an exclamation mark to the question. Then scrawled his own exclamation: “Unbelievable!” In the view of the unnamed annotator, such hazy reporting, such imprecision, boggled the mind. Lower down the page, an identical question mark stood next to the query “Muslims or Christians?” A penciled note in the margin added, “If there are not just a million Albanians, and if they are not all Muslims, as the Yugoslavs assert, but six times as many, that’s to say roughly the same size as other Balkan peoples, and if they’re not just Muslim but split three ways between Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, then the geopolitical picture we have of the whole peninsula will probably have to be turned completely upside down.”

A transatlantic intelligence agency was the first to realize not only that its espionage operation in Albania was completely outdated, but that a significant number of its agents, most of whom were getting on in years, had gone over to the Albanian Sigurimi. That was presumably why the news from the country following the death of the Successor was so disconcerting.

Nonetheless, the western cemetery of the capital was the scene of the burial of the deceased, which took place in a biting December wind. Members of the family were in attendance, together with a couple of dozen high-ranking state officials. There were some government ministers and the heads of a number of institutions, among them the white-maned president of the Academy of Sciences. Soldiers and other officials bore wreaths. The funeral oration was pronounced by the dead man’s son. As he reached his final words — “Father, may you rest in peace” — his voice cracked. No salute was fired, no funeral march played. Suicide was still, very obviously, a mortal stain.

The December night swallowed the hills that surround Tirana one after the other, as if it was in a hurry to get the day over with. Two solitary soldiers in arms standing guard at the head and the foot of the newly filled grave of the Successor appeared to be all alone in the civilian necropolis. About a hundred feet away in the dark, other people not in uniform slunk behind the hedge, on the lookout.

The relief that a newly buried corpse brings to the living did not fail to materialize. Not to mention that, for reasons readily imagined, it was more profound than ever before.

The days of anxiety gave way to unseasonable quiet. Milder weather altered the December skies and drained off what had been tormenting the population, or at least made it seem less terrifying. Even the underlying question — deciding whether it had been suicide or murder — no longer had the same weight, since the Successor had taken the answer with him to the grave.

Now they were free of the bottomless dread that the deceased had exuded. Now that the man’s corpse had finally disappeared into the dark, people found it easier to grasp all that had happened in the course of that long-drawn-out fall. The event and its unfolding were now cast in a very different light.

It had all begun with the first days of September. On their return from vacation, city-dwellers found the capital buzzing with rumors of the kind that in the past might have been called scandals. The Successor had just promised the hand of his only daughter to a suitor. In addition, he’d just moved into his new residence, a building project that had attracted a great deal of interest and attention in Tirana. In fact, what was referred to as the “new residency” was the same villa he’d been living in for years, but it had been remodeled with such skill that over the course of the summer it had been transformed beyond recognition. Despite innumerable campaigns to eradicate superstitions, the old saw that “new houses bring new curses” seemed to be coming true as the fall set in. It was never known whether the Successor believed in the saying or not, but there was unending gossip about his rushing to celebrate his daughter’s engagement on the very day of the housewarming party. It looked as though, by taking this step, the Successor had wanted to force a blessing into his new house. In other words, he had tried to trick fate, or to defy it.

Everybody responded to the summons: family members and members of the government, the relatives of the putative son-in-law, and of course the young man himself, who had played the guitar, as well as the architect who had designed the new home, and who, having gotten roaring drunk, began to weep. Some people laughed and some cried as they wandered around a house lit by the glint of crystal and camera flashes. But before the party lights went out, and as the Guide (whose attendance and good wishes had constituted the high point of the soirée) was on his way back to his own residence on foot, an icy draft coming out of nowhere suddenly seemed to chill all who were still there.

Had he heard some unexpected news during the brief walk from the house of the Successor to his own? Had it been handed to him en route, as he plodded with short stride, weighed down by his black coat — or had he found it on the doorstep as he reached home? Nobody ever knew. On the other hand, it is true that from that point on, the first rumors of ill omen began to circulate: namely, that the Successor had made a political error in agreeing to the engagement. Despite the fact that the Party granted the future bridegroom’s father, the famous seismologist Besim Dakli, permission to give an occasional lecture at the university, the Dakli clan still belonged to the ancien régime. You could have turned a blind eye if the bride had been the daughter of a second-rank official, but there was no way you could pass over such an issue where the Successor was concerned.

The dread question, which was expressed less in words than through pregnant glances and oblique allusions, related to the fact that the alliance between the family of the Successor and the Dakli clan had been made public at least two weeks before the Guide had paid his visit. It could thus be inferred that his attendance at the party, and the expression of his good wishes, signified his approval of said engagement. That is, moreover, the probable reason why that unforgettable day had been so exceptionally joyous. Nonetheless, as soon as the Guide had left the house, something strange happened. Was it a last and unexpected discovery about the Daklis? A piece of information coming from who knows where, or maybe from far away, about some disturbing fact that two weeks of intense investigation by every branch of the service about every imaginable dimension of the Dakli case had failed to turn up until then?

As often happens to people who stave off asking dangerous questions by showing uncommon interest in matters they believe much safer, gossipers kept on circling back to the issue of whether or not what was forbidden to others might be permitted the Successor. Most people thought not, and they ventured to recall numerous instances where ill-considered marriages had brought families, and even whole clans, to sorry ends. But there were some people who thought differently. The Successor had done so much for the country, he had followed the Guide every step of the way with such touching steadfastness through the most horrible turns of fate, that he surely deserved an exception to be made for him. What’s more, they said, maybe this case in particular would set the wheels of change in motion. It was hard luck for people who’d already come unstuck, but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from profiting from new rules. That’s just our point, the naysayers insisted, that’s how rot sets in. No good can come of setting a bad example to others.

This sort of conversation was stopped in its tracks by the news that the engagement had been broken off. Each party had finally realized to what extent the whole thing had been worse than a mistake. It wasn’t a prospective marriage, it was mortal venom. But poison would have tasted sweet compared to the true horror of such an event! An event that would have plunged Albania into everlasting sorrow. For it would have signified a relaxation of the class struggle, and that would have borne a blow to the very heart of what had been the country’s pride for more than forty years. The country’s very Constitution, the foundation of its victories and its fame, rested solely on the principle of ever greater firmness, of never letting up! Other countries, enemy countries, had betrayed Albania one by one, and their wrongdoing had unfailingly started that way — with a loosening of the reins. Whereas here, in our country … heaven grant that the Successor had suffered only a passing weakness! That’s what it must have been, in all probability. That the engagement had been broken off so quickly spoke volumes about the depth of the man’s repentance. It was no mere trifle to take back your given word in a matter of marriage. In full sight of the entire nation, he had had to eat his shame on a dry crust, as people say in these parts. No betrothal had been abjured in the land for a thousand years. People may have slaughtered each other, may have flayed each other alive, but not once had a wedding been postponed, let alone canceled! But he had done it! And by so doing he had shown that obedience to the Party and to the Prijs — the Guide — ruled his heart. That showed you what sort of a fellow he was! You don’t get to be Successor for nothing, now do you?

Like all bad news, the report of the broken engagement got around much faster than its formal announcement. Convinced that the crisis was a thing of the past, most people liked to think that the incident, far from weakening the nation’s moral fiber, had in fact strengthened it. The country and its Guide had shown just how steadfast they were in a storm of whatever magnitude. Just as they had done during the squabble with the Yugoslavs. As they did later on, with the Russians. And, of course, with the Chinese.

As tension declined, so interest in the sentimental details of the end of the affair grew. Though whispered, stories were passed on by word of mouth almost everywhere. No more phone calls between the two youngsters. The young man and his father, Besim Dakli, standing at the Successor’s front door, wrapped in heavy winter coats, waiting to find out what would happen. The girl in despair, who had shut herself in her room and stopped eating. The poor boy drowning his sorrow by strumming his guitar, for which he’d written a new song that began:

And so that is how

They tore us apart …

In Albania, the majority of public holidays occur in the fall, which meant that the Successor had no chance of keeping himself out of the way of television cameras. Awkward as that was for him, there was no way he could avoid thousands of eyes studying his face onscreen, searching for a clue to the real truth. Some thought he looked more grumpy than usual; others thought on the contrary that he looked calmer. Both interpretations were obviously worrying, but the latter seemed the more ominous, since it implied that the Successor was feigning indifference.

What had begun as mere curiosity took on a tragic hue at the National Day parade, where the Guide and the Successor stood side by side on the platform. In contrast to previous occasions, when the two had been seen smiling and chatting with each other, this year the Guide stood stock-still. Not only did he not utter a word to the Successor, but, as if to make his scorn doubly clear, he turned twice to say something to the person standing on his other side — the minister of the interior.

From one end of the country to the other, people were dumbfounded by what they saw happening before their eyes. The benighted engagement had long been broken off, but no reward, not even a sign of clemency, had yet been granted the Successor for the action he had taken. On the contrary, everything seemed to suggest that the Guide was only growing angrier.

It was the first time people had seen what almost amounted to a public display of things that in the old days could have had you convicted of malicious gossip seeking to undermine Party unity. The militant Party members were racked with worry. They would rise at dawn after sleepless nights, with bloodshot eyes, aching muscles, and coated tongues, turn to their graying wives and share with them what could not be broached in any bar: Could a forty-year-old comradeship be scrapped just like that?

The optimists among them looked forward to the next parade, hoping that, if things would not be completely resolved by then, at least some slight improvement might be visible. And when the next parade day came, and not only had nothing mended, but the chill was even icier, they felt a great weight on their chest and, sighing with anxiety, barely managed to articulate the words “Woe betide us!”

Toward the end of November, a tentative rumor had it that the whole business would come to an end at the winter break. Oddly enough, it gained greater acceptance than other stories, perhaps because it invoked the calendar and the natural cycle of the seasons. The red banners and bunting on the stands, the speeches and brass bands broadcast by the citywide loudspeaker system, would give way to whistling winds, to blankets of fog, and to the rumble of thunder, which had not changed in a thousand years.

And if the first week of December had always been labeled “taciturn,” this year it seemed doubly, triply speechless. It was this silence that was broken by the gunshot that put an end to the life of the Successor. A fully muffled shot, moreover, a shot not heard outside the residence, or even inside its walls. As if the gun had been fired from beyond the grave.

The Albania files had come to give their users such troubles that, even if they did not admit it to themselves, their desire to see the short-term upheaval in the country settle down, and to see those files once again gathering dust, became almost noticeable.

Alas, for the time being, there was no point even dreaming of such a thing. On the contrary, those brown folders got heavier by the day. Everyone realized that the material piling up inside them was contradictory and incoherent, to such a degree that even the most persistent analysts ended up making the same gesture of despair as everyone else and declaring, with arms thrown wide: The only way you can get a grip on a place overcome by paranoia is by becoming a little paranoid yourself.

Their superiors in the agencies seemed to think otherwise. They scribbled spindly question marks over words and phrases like “hereditary Balkan lunacy,” “whim,” “delusion,” “symptomatic brain damage from iodine deficiency,” and so forth. A leader’s envy of his successor, envy taken to the point of murdering him, was such a common event in every place and period that it could not itself provide a key to understanding the Balkan malady. You could call to mind some of the customs of Albanian mountain tribes — for instance, their male beauty contests that were often followed by the killing of the winner, for reasons of envy, obviously — if you were writing a literary essay, but definitely not if you were trying to present a serious political analysis. And if you did, it would come down to saying that the whole history of the peninsula was no more than a working out of the old legend about the mirror on the wall: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all …”

The analysts ended up coming back to the main questions, after wearing themselves out in the pursuit of the puzzling issues raised by the beauty contests in the northern highlands — which could be understood either as a symptom of almost prehistoric male vanity, or as an indulgence of homosexuality by Albanian common law, which in other respects was so harsh.

Responding to repeated comments that it was time to be a bit more serious, the specialists on the Balkan desk came back once again to their other hypothesis, the one marked with a huge question mark: Is the country changing its political line? Obviously, the first thing that occurred to them was to make a connection between the murder of the Successor and some preceding attempt by him to deviate from orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the huge mass of intelligence now reaching them contained not the slightest, not the tiniest, sign that the Successor had ever tried to introduce the minutest change in the political line of the Albanian regime.

Though it was true that marriage with a member of an ancien régime family could be interpreted in Albania as a sign of relaxation of the class struggle, aside from this fact the Successor was the last person who could be accused of slackness in class warfare. Throughout his long career, he had been a hard-liner at every turn, never a moderate. He had taken on that role long before, and for years people had suspected that when the Guide wanted to impose harsh measures, he first sent the Successor out ahead of him as a kind of herald. Then, if the measure once taken seemed excessive, the Successor was ready and willing to take the blame, allowing the Guide to play the role of moderator.

This time, everything had happened backwards. The specialists were dying to put the whole thing down to a classical case of Albanian crackpottedness but regrettably had to refrain, as they swung back to the second hypothesis, namely, that the reason for the crisis lay in the recent disturbances in Kosovo.

The whole preceding year had been marked by gloomy forecasts. Kosovo was going to be the next earthquake, it was a coming tornado, a horror waiting to happen in the Balkans. Everywhere, heads would roll as a result of the rebellion — that was only logical, but it was nowhere more logical than in Albania. But in what manner was the fate of the Successor connected to the uprising? The rumors on that topic became ever more confused. The Yugoslavs had been the first to sow the suspicion of murder, but, as if regretting having said too much, they had now fallen silent. Did they really know nothing, or were they just pretending?

One of the analysts, at his wit’s end because neither of the geopolitical explanations really stood up, thus went back to the discarded hypothesis that his colleagues had dubbed the “mirror on the wall” theory. Presumably in order to make it more credible, he had recourse to what was in those days the sine qua non of most conflict analyses, namely oil. Though his paper was backed up with all sorts of figures on Albania’s petroleum output since the 1930s and geological charts of the oil-bearing areas — it even included a rundown on the squabble between British Petroleum and the Italian Agip company in 1938 — it was dismissed as “ridiculous.” The latter epithet might well not have been used had the analyst not added, by way of conclusion, that it could hardly be a coincidence that the Successor’s daughter’s unfortunate putative ex-father-in-law was a seismologist, a profession that one way or another related to surveying for oil …

As a consequence of the failure of his attempt to pinpoint, at six thousand feet beneath the surface, the causes of the broken engagement and the suicide, the analyst, as might be expected, threw in the towel. In accordance with his recently acquired custom of adding long supplementary notes to everything he wrote, he accompanied his request for early retirement with a long account of the state of his health that winter, which was backed up by two medical certificates one of which was headed “impotence.”

His colleagues had no intention of following suit, though that did not stop them dreaming of one day having the Albania files removed from their purview. Any other desk would be better, even one with an abysmal reputation, like the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, or some African countries with frontiers that were less a reflection of political changes than of the desert winds, as they had been centuries earlier.

They sighed deeply, cursing that “basket case of a country,” and went back to the unyielding file, attempting to start over as simply as possible.

Murder or suicide? If a murder, who was the culprit? For what motive? Most of the material that had been collected continued to point to the very highly placed official whose silhouette had been seen slipping into the Successor’s residence in the course of the fateful night. Some reports even went so far as to give a name to the person suspected of being that shadow: Adrian Hasobeu, the minister of the interior. He had just left that job to go up a further rung in the hierarchy. All intelligence forecasts made him the Successor’s most likely replacement.

A host of other details combined with the fleeting shadow to make the fog even murkier. The Successor’s request to be awakened at eight; his wife sleeping like a log; the tang of gunpowder that had greeted her when she opened the door on the stroke of eight. All those comings and goings in the Bllok throughout the night. The wind and the rain that kept changing direction. Two men had apparently been seen from the outside (perhaps by one of the sentries) going up or down the staircase of the residence. Thanks to a flash of lightning, they had been glimpsed on the first-floor veranda propping the Successor up like a tailor’s dummy.

Was he still alive when they took him back up — or down? Had he fainted? Was he wounded? Or dead? Were they taking him to the basement or to the morgue? To have him made up to look presentable, perhaps? Or to move the wound, by stopping up the bullet hole, for instance, and replacing it with another? However, there was a secret passageway in the basement that nobody knew about …

All these ingredients churned unrelentingly in somber spirals moving now slower, now faster, swirling this way and that, in whorls that came and went, disappeared and reappeared, and finally sank out of sight. But in every variant of the mix, the ingredients themselves remained irreducible and in the end came to resemble shards of glass, or a substance that was simultaneously the stock and the fermenting agent without which no mystery could have risen.

Intelligence analysts were near the end of their rope as they struggled over the Albania files. It was the first time they had switched from one theory to another with such abandon. For instance, the first idea that occurred to anyone looking at the information about the silhouette was that it belonged to the Successor’s assassin. But you only had to look at things in their proper order to realize that such a deduction was far from safe. Even assuming that the said silhouette (and assuming it was Adrian Hasobeu’s) had gotten into the residence, how could you be sure what the purpose of the late-night visit was? Was he on his way to commit murder, or to push the Successor to kill himself? But what if instead of either of these he had been aiming to persuade the Successor not to pull the trigger, seeing that at the Politburo meeting scheduled for the next day he was going to be forgiven?

To cap it all, there was the secret passageway mentioned by some of the investigators, which made everything even more impenetrable.

Here and there in the paperwork you came across notes in telegraphese, such as: “Need know if architect villa still alive.” Didn’t the pharaohs kill the architect the moment a pyramid was completed?

There was something pyramid-like about the whole business. Walls suddenly sprang up all around and blocked the slightest progress. The main chamber of the pyramid, where the most precious secret was kept, was locked from the inside. The same timeless principle was probably involved in the affair of the Successor.

The analogy was reassuring, in a way. The mysteries of the pyramids had not been completely solved in four thousand years. So why should intelligence analysts be in so much of a hurry in this case?

Taking advantage of all this haziness, clairvoyants — who had been making a comeback in recent times, after nearly fifty years’ absence from the field of state secrets — tried to intervene. But once contact was established with the spirit of the Successor, what could be gleaned from him was so obscure and undecipherable that, one after the other, the clairvoyants all ended up admitting defeat.

Oddly enough, Albania seemed to have sunk into never-ending silence. Over the border, the other Albania, “Outer” Albania, lay still and stiff under the winter sky, as if it had been laid low by a stroke. The same December sky arched over them, but it was a sky of such desolation that it seemed to be nursing two winters, not just one, two winters that were pacing up and down and howling like wolves.