The Successor

TWO. THE AUTOPSY

Whatever was that feeling of joy, which seemed like nothing on earth? With a glass of champagne in her hand, Suzana sauntered among the guests as if she was walking on air. The great house, uninhabited since her father’s suicide, was once more full of people, light, and sound, just like it used to be. Nobody expressed surprise, moreover, just as nobody asked how the impossible had happened or why things had gone back to the way they were. Quite a few of the guests were unfamiliar, but that also did not seem surprising. Similarly, no one worried about how some of the bulbs in the chandeliers had failed to come on — having burned out from long disuse. For the second time, she heard someone saying, “What’s gone is gone and never comes back,” and then she set about looking for her father. Although he was the overall focus of attention, he was standing a little to the side, with a thin smile on his face that seemed to express some mild displeasure that would not be hard to dissipate. Suzana’s eyes lighted immediately on the white bandage that could be seen through her father’s shirt, presumably to protect the wound while it was healing. She put down her glass of champagne before going up to him and saying simply, “Papa, how are you feeling?” At that very moment she remembered she had still not seen Genc, her fiancé, among the guests, and almost shouted: How is it possible that he is the only one not to have come?

Albeit silent, the shout was what must have awakened her. As on the last occasion when she had had the same dream, Suzana burst into tears. She must have been weeping in her sleep as well, since the pillow was damp. She was holding it tightly to her face in the hope of going back to sleep when she thought she heard sounds. She raised her head to listen, and realized that her ears had not deceived her. There were people coming and going in the house.

Her eyes wandered toward the window. Then she switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was six-thirty in the morning, but the sky behind the curtains was still dark.

The noises resumed. They were not her mother’s footsteps, nor those of her brother, who habitually locked the bathroom door at that hour. They were something different. Apprehension lay like a lead weight on her chest, yet deeper down she felt no fear at all, but a kind of joy, as if she was still inside her dream.

She got up in a state of bewilderment and went to the door. Before turning the handle, she stood stockstill, to listen for voices.

The landing was quiet, but muffled sounds of speech and feet rose from below. Her mother’s and brother’s bedroom doors were shut. She went over to the railing and looked down into the hall. The lights had been switched on in the dining room and the grand salon, the room where her dream had taken place.

Her heart raced. Since her father’s suicide, irrespective of anyone’s wishes, it had been forbidden to enter that room, which had been formally sealed by order of the Ministry of the Interior.

She turned her head slowly to look once more at the doors of the bedrooms where her mother and brother slept, and then, in a growing panic, she stared at the other door on the landing, the door to her father’s room. A razor-thin strip of light shone from beneath. Every part of her body — her lungs, her eyes, her hair — screamed in unison: Papa! It was the same strip of light she had watched until two in the morning during the fatal night. She told herself she must still be dreaming, as she had not collapsed instantly like someone struck by lightning. With measured step, fearing she might wake herself up and thus lose this second chance of seeing her father come back, she moved toward the door. Yes, she must be asleep, or else out of her mind, since she felt that she would see her father again in the very bedroom where she had seen him dead, with a hole in his bloodstained shirt.

One more step, then another. Don’t give up now, she told herself. In any case, you’re done for.

At that moment the door swung open. A stranger rushed out. He was holding something black that looked like an old kind of camera. He looked the young woman up and down, somewhat surprised, and then, without uttering a word, raced down the stairs two at a time.

From the other side of the bedroom door that the stranger had left ajar came the sound of an exasperated man. Suzana managed to make out the word “autopsy.”

What next? That would really be the last straw if, after all the horror, they were now going to conduct an autopsy on the spot using an obsolete instrument in the shape of a camera.

Suzana put a hand to her forehead. It was probably just the continuation of her dream. Or did she mean hallucination?

Voices rose in the bedroom once more. A snatch of speech caught her ear: “… failing to carry out an autopsy was a scandalous omission!”

The door opened wide. His face crimson with anger, a man she thought she recognized as the new minister of the interior hurried out. Of his two escorts she recognized only one — the architect of the residence, the only one of them to have been in her recent dream.

The minister stared at her with some surprise. He stopped in his tracks to say, “Good morning!” then added, “Did we wake you up?”

The young woman hardly knew what to say.

The architect greeted her with a gentle nod of his head.

“We are making some inquiries,” the minister said before moving toward the staircase.

The other two followed in his footsteps. As they went down the stairs, Suzana once again heard the words “autopsy” and “scandal.”

The minister had sounded and looked very friendly.

She felt as if she was regaining her senses. They had apparently come before dawn to proceed with their inquiries. The day after Father’s death they had given close family members permission to go on living in part of the residence but not to enter the closed rooms and areas designated by red sealing wax. From time to time they would come to carry out various checks. They had the keys.

That’s what they had said, but they hadn’t come. This morning was the first time they had shown their faces. So if Suzana had felt entitled to ask a single question, it would have been: What took you so long?

The young woman felt a wave of cold settle on her shoulders. Her feet took her to her mother’s bedroom door. How in the world could she not be up, with all the commotion in the house?

She turned the handle carefully and pushed the door open.

“Mama,” she said in a whisper, so as not to startle her. But her mother seemed to be sleeping like a log.

Suzana stood rigid on the threshold, not sure what to do. Incredible! she said inwardly. Her mother, who was in the habit of rising at first light, was still deep in the land of Nod. Just like the other time, on the night of December 14.

“Mama!” she said a second time.

It took the drowsy woman another minute to come to. You could see she was beginning to panic.

“What’s the matter?” she snapped. “What’s going on?”

“They’ve come to check … They’re here, in Papa’s bedroom, and downstairs as well, in the grand salon …”

Her mother’s eyes bulged, but seemed to be blind.

“To check what? What for?”

“Their inquiries,” the daughter replied. “The minister himself has come. He said they were going to do an autopsy.”

The woman’s hair, as much as her eyes, suggested distress. As if it was the last part of her to shake off sleep.

“What’s all this nonsense about an autopsy? Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

“They’re going to do an autopsy,” the daughter repeated. “They even said it was a scandal that one hasn’t been done before. Mama,” she added more gently, “I think it’s not … not a bad idea.”

“You do, do you? And what’s not bad about it?” the older woman retorted, as she tried to cover her face with the pillow. It muffled the sound of her next words. “What’s not bad about it? You’re into autopsies now, are you?”

Suzana bit her lower lip. She was about to walk out, but changed her mind.

“I think it’s a good sign … The inquiry itself is a good thing. You’re aware there are suspicions that …”

“Hold your tongue!” the mother shouted. And after a moment she wailed, “Unhappy that we are! Misfortune will be upon us evermore!”

Suzana shook her head in despair, and left.

The landing was still shrouded in half-light. Voices from downstairs had a muffled sound. Outside, dawn was breaking.

She went back to her own room, shivering with the chill. All the same, she could not rid herself of a kind of good premonition. The minister’s eyes had been so kindly. And especially his voice. He had given just as much an impression of firmness when speaking of the autopsy as he had of attentiveness when he turned to her and said, “Did we wake you up?”

So someone had not wanted an autopsy … somebody who might be held accountable … You avoid an autopsy when you have something to hide … In the present case, it wasn’t hard to imagine what … Had the event really been a suicide, or had it been … had it been … murder? In circumstances of this kind, an autopsy was normally obligatory … All the more so when the deceased was so prominent. Therefore, someone had wanted to hide something … Whereas now, someone else wanted the secret out in the open … Someone who went so far as to call the cover-up a “scandal” …

My God, let it be so! Suzana implored. She wasn’t even surprised anymore that she had invoked the forbidden name.

Truth would out in the end for all to see … The Party … as always … as ever … No, our comrade in arms, the trustworthy, the unforgettable … did not take his own life, as was first thought, but was murdered … perfidiously … by enemies of the Party … by saboteurs … by traitors …

She had already dreamed so many times of hearing these words from the mouth of the Guide standing on a red-draped platform or speaking on the radio or the television! But this was the first time they seemed to her to be within the range of possibilities. My God, let it happen! she prayed once more.

She was keeping her eyes shut in the hope that she would return to the dream she had been dreaming that morning and would discover its sequel. Such things had happened before, but rarely, so very rarely. And even when that did happen, there was never any correction. She tried to reconstruct it from memory, but she soon realized that, however hard she tried, she could not bring back its sweetness of tone any more than she could make pink clouds stay longer in the sky. The only thing she could still feel was the bitter taste of regret at the moment of waking. Maybe the reason she so much wanted to return to the dream — if only for a few seconds — was so she could wash away the regret. Except that she was no longer very sure what depressed her the more — that she had not managed to speak to her father, or that she had not had a thought for her fiancé until the very end …

“Let’s do this again,” the minister said in a casual, almost jovial tone of voice.

His words sounded less like those of a senior official in charge of a crucial autopsy, the most important to have taken place in the history of the Communist State of Albania and maybe in all Albanian history, than like someone saying goodbye to old friends after a sumptuous meal in one of the restaurants in the hills around Tirana’s artificial lake. “The fish is really great here. Let’s do this again, okay?”

Is this case going to be tied up or not?

Petrit Gjadri, the forensic pathologist, strode along the Grand Boulevard toward the Hotel Dajti, thinking all the while about the minister’s remark, which grew a tad more inconceivable with every step he took.

The architect drank in the minister’s words with feverish eyes that could have signified either pathological inquisitiveness or prurient pleasure — the kind of look that spreads like wildfire at the circus or at a fistfight in the market, when spectators or passersby rub their hands as if to say: Let’s see how this turns out!

Are they both blind, or are they just pretending? the doctor had wondered as he watched them trading jokes like a couple of youngsters.

As for himself, he recalled quite clearly when he had been officially notified that he would be required to undertake an autopsy of prime importance. On the body of the Successor.

He had gone deaf for a brief instant. The whole universe had gone silent. Inside him, everything stopped — his heartbeat, his brain, his breathing. Then, as those functions gradually returned, a thought slowly formed in his mind: So that’s how we’ll put an end to this business.

“This business” was his own life.

After an autopsy of this kind, the continued existence of the person who carried it out seemed as improbable as evidence of life on the face of the moon.

In the oppressive silence, broken only by the minister giving instructions, the forensic pathologist, involuntarily as it were, looked back on his career with a strange sense of distance … He had lived an honest life, insofar as that was possible, and it had certainly not been easy, given the risky nature of the profession he pursued. He had always been vulnerable to attack on account of his “semi-bourgeois” family background, but he had escaped the campaign to unmask and denounce the “so-called intellectual circle of the Tirana doctors” — accused of denigrating Soviet life — as he had fortunately only been a student at the time. After that first stroke of luck, he had managed to steer clear of being identified with another group, a coalition of teachers and students who stood accused of making jokes about China’s barefoot doctors, at the time of his country’s idyll with Peking.

The minister’s words were clear and unemotional, pregnant with ominous promises. One had failed to carry out a procedure that it was obligatory be made on any citizen, and even more so on the Successor: an autopsy.

The doctor tried to concentrate, but he felt as if that was only muddling his mind even more.

So the autopsy would be done, the minister went on, despite the delay. The truth must come out, irrespective of whether it was to any particular person’s taste. The minister’s eyes sparkled with sincere indignation.

At the meeting over the Chinese, sincerity was precisely what had been lacking in the delegates from the Party Committee. They had feigned outrage by pounding the tabletop and making their voices quaver, but it was manifest that their hearts were as cold as damp kindling. All the same, the terror that cold fury can arouse is no less fearful than others — the sort that is accompanied by oohs and aahs. But at the end of the meeting, when they were waiting in petrified fear for the sentences to be declared, the first rumors of the break with Peking began to circulate, and the campaign was stopped in its tracks, as if by magic.

Everything would be done by the rules, the minister went on with unchanging indignation. Apart from the autopsy, there would be a reenactment. A shot would be fired in the bedroom with the weapon that the victim had used. They would then verify whether the noise could be heard outside. In the garden, where the residence’s guards were on duty. On the landing. In the bedrooms where the other family members were sleeping. Everything would be carefully taken down. They would pick a stormy night with weather similar to that of December 14. Shots would be fired with a silencer, then without one.

The doctor’s eyes met the architect’s, without meaning to. What self-destroyer had ever fitted a silencer to the gun he was going to use? But instead of a glimmer of disbelief, what shone in the architect’s eyes was the same feverish euphoria as before.

Did he really understand nothing, or was that just a way of protecting himself?

“We’ll begin with the test with the silencer on,” the minister repeated, but, as if he could read the doctor’s thoughts, he added immediately, “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this whole … business is strictly confidential.”

He was on the verge of saying explicitly that at the end of the story the Successor’s death would be shown to have been murder, that the man would be declared a Martyr of the Revolution, and that all the suspicions that had darkened his name like so many leaden clouds would be blown away there and then. That fact would lead directly to the punishment of those who had brought the Successor down.

“Be that as it may,” the minister went on as he glanced at the doctor with just an ounce of affection, “the key to the whole business is the autopsy.”

Of course it is, Petit Gjadri thought.

In his heart of hearts, he had always known that one day or another an autopsy would be his undoing.

Do you think your words fill me with joy? he responded inwardly to the minister’s remarks.

Obviously he knew what the score was. In times like these, any given autopsy could be interpreted and then reinterpreted on a whim or a change of wind. The results might be appropriate to the general climate on this day, and not at all acceptable the day after. Barely a few weeks ago, Kano Zhbira, a former member of the Politburo who had committed suicide quite a few years back, had been exhumed from the Martyrs of the Motherland Cemetery. It was his third unearthing! Every tack and turn in the political line exercised its primary effect on human remains, not on the national economy. Zhbira’s posthumous rheumatism — rheumatismus post mortem, a condition that does not yet afflict us — was a better indicator of political change than any analyst’s prediction. Immediately after his suicide (together with rumors that it had been murder, of course) he had been buried with full honors in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, he had been hauled up at the request of the Yugoslavs and transferred to Tirana’s municipal graveyard, signs of anti-Yugoslavianism having been detected in his file. A year later, after the break with Yugoslavia, he was dug up again so as to be put back in his original tomb in the national cemetery — as a herald of anti-Yugoslavianism. His third and most recent unburying, which took his body to the municipal graveyard once again, had been done almost on the sly, but no one yet knew why.

Cawing from above made the doctor raise his eyes. He smiled to himself, thinking that the Greeks must have been quite near the mark in divining political fortunes from patterns made by flocks of birds.

They were all washed up, the three of them, that was for sure. Including the minister, who headed their little group. But like the architect, he did not seem to have grasped the fact, unless the pair of them were putting on an act. Instead, they seemed to find the case entertaining; far from hiding this, they went in for larks and japes as if they were not a government minister and a senior architect but a couple of merrymakers. When it was over, before parting, they had a few words in private, then vanished together into the basement of the residence.

The doctor immediately put them out of his mind in order to concentrate his thoughts on the autopsy. That it was, at the very least, an autopsy of the first magnitude was not much consolation to him, but on the other hand he could have ended up like his colleague Ndré Pjetergega. A Gypsy from Brraka had lain in wait for him behind his door and, with a shout of, “Doctor? Bastard! Are you the one who said my daughter was pregnant?” he had beaten him to death.

The yellowing leaves in the park on the other side of the Grand Boulevard made him sigh. God knows why, but the refrain of an old homosexual lament, which he’d heard years before in Shkodër, kept running through his mind:

They say two candles were lit

At the Vizier’s yesterday.

Holy Virgin, for Sulçabeg we pray:

His throat a razor has slit.

In the corridor of the Successor’s residence, the doctor was suddenly seized by the vision of the young woman in a nightdress revealing the shape of her delicate, quivering limbs. It was her engagement, it was she herself who lay at the root of her father’s tragedy. And therefore at the root of a tragedy that would be their common lot.

As he was stepping inside the Hotel Dajti, a question began to form unobtrusively and gradually in his mind. Why had he, Petrit Gjadri, been chosen to perform this prestigious autopsy? But henceforth he should not try to answer that or any other question. He was under a stay of execution, and he had to try to use the time remaining to good effect. The coffee he was going to enjoy in a hotel set aside for the exclusive use of foreigners and members of the nomenklatura — a place he would have dared to enter previously only in quite exceptional circumstances — would be just a foretaste of the higher serenity that was slowly spreading through his being. The kind of freedom that humans call “the peace of the grave,” without really appreciating it insofar as they usually experience it only as they die, had, in this particular case, become available to him a little ahead of time.

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.

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 can’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.

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.

Thousands of the inhabitants of the capital felt the same disturbance, identical to what had been felt some time previously by Politburo members on the morning of December 14. In living memory, no one could recall such a brutal stop being put to the working of the clock. Because of this interruption, the twelve hours that had elapsed, most of them night hours topped with the beginning of sunrise, had been completely swallowed up. It had thus been a sudden Tuesday, though endowed with a secret dose of clemency that Monday had given it. The Guide’s soft and at times almost liquid voice, coming close to a gurgle, cut through total silence. He addressed the Successor by his first name, as he had in the past: “And now, when you have had time to think again during the night, I am absolutely certain that when we gather again tomorrow in this same room, you will have an even clearer understanding of your mistake and you will at last be with us once again, with your comrades who love you, and as precious to the Party as you have ever been.”

The morrow had come for everyone, except for the Successor. So it had been laid down that these words would never be heard by their addressee. The extension of the plenum — this delay that had prompted the Guide to say, “All the comrades on the Politburo have expressed themselves, now it’s my turn to speak, but since it’s so late, I think it’s preferable for me to leave my speech until tomorrow morning” — had therefore turned out to be fatal for the Successor.

The adjournment, that isthmus of time between Monday and Tuesday, the furrow that the Successor had been unable to stride over, had tipped him into the abyss. Everybody had been present at his pardon except the man pardoned.

People in the meeting halls began by stages to feel a great sadness. How was it that a man who had put up with anxieties and irritations throughout that unending fall had been unable to endure one more night of worry? Why had he been in such a hurry?

The Guide’s voice droned on in tones no less merciful, and at times it even almost broke into a lament. Members of the audience stole glances at each other: Ah, what things the Successor had missed!

But the wave of regret was suddenly crossed by a kind of glacial current. How far could such feelings go? The suspicion that had been nagging at them all morning reasserted itself. There was something very unnatural about all this. The words they were hearing were from the Monday, when the Successor was still alive, but they had not been spoken until the Tuesday, when he was no more than a cadaver. Breaking the rule of the passage of time, the past had been made present. The day before, the day after. It was enough to make them all feel lost.

In the course of the afternoon, people’s feelings of bewilderment evaporated. They were seized instead by unusual agitation as they recalled the main lines of the story: the Successor’s mistake, the atypical nature of the announcement of his death, the absence of a day of mourning, the rumors about that famous silhouette, the suspicions. Then, as if that had not been enough, now they had to cope with a permutation between Monday and Tuesday. That really took the cake! A cramp in time was, it seemed, something that a capital was least able to tolerate.

“Albania continues to live with the unsolved mystery of the Successor,” was the more or less standard sentence at the start of reports now finding their way into intelligence agencies around the world.

Given the two long-familiar hypotheses — murder or suicide — supporters of the second alternative still wondered: Why was he killed, and by whom? It was logical to expect that the answer to one of the questions would help to solve the other. To date, however, there was no sign of any answers whatsoever.

Meanwhile, an Icelandic medium, who had taken a second stab at the mystery of the Successor, had finally managed to get somewhere with it. The deep sounds of the dead man’s death rattle reached him as through a winter squall. Among those sounds had been heard something about the night of December 13, and also about a woman, or more precisely about two women, either one of whom excluded the other for the good reason that the presence of one of these women made the presence of the other abnormal, and in fact impossible. Between the Successor and these two women there was some sort of debt or arrears, which could equally well be interpreted as a request, a promise, or even a threat. The medium’s explanations, written up very oddly, aside from the passages in German and Latin, raised knowing smiles in intelligence agencies. To believe that the enigma of the Successor might be wrapped up in a story of rival women showed a profound misunderstanding of the Communist universe. To the Icelander’s great despair, that was pretty much all the response he got from intelligence analysts.

At the same moment, more than a thousand miles away, at the place where the events had occurred, the Guide’s speech that had been delivered right after the announcement of the death now plunged the Albanian capital into a frenzy of guesswork. Nonetheless, through the fog of supposition, you could possibly theorize that the case might be reopened, and perhaps that the Successor might even be rehabilitated: There was that autopsy carried out rather late in the day, then there was this new inquiry into the circumstances of the death, alongside rumors that if they had not been officially prompted were probably being actively tolerated (such as the one about the “shadow” slipping into the residence under cover of darkness, or the one about the two men glimpsed by a housekeeper as they accompanied the Successor down to the basement, or alternatively manhandled his corpse down the steps), and so on and so forth.

If the new investigation was intended to bring back to the fore the supposition of murder, then the Successor would probably end up as a Martyr of the Revolution, the victim of assasination by a group of evil conspirators — an extremely common scenario in Communist countries.

One of the new analysts advanced the idea that it was likely the Successor would wander ad aeternam from one hypothesis to another like a damned soul wandering through the circles of Dante’s inferno. The last words of the sentence — beginning “like a damned soul” and ending with “Dante’s inferno” — were subsequently erased from the report by the writer, who wanted to hold them in reserve for future use, maybe in his memoirs.