The Successor

THREE. FOND MEMORIES

The morning would have been like any other if “they” hadn’t turned up so early. But they might as well be here, Suzana thought, as she stuffed her head under the pillow. She had been expecting them for several days. It felt like they had been dragging their feet, that they’d dropped the autopsy and all the rest. So that’s fine, she said to herself as she tried once again to get back to sleep. But something unusual about the noise they were making prompted her to get up instead.

Her brother was standing in the half-light in the middle of the hallway, nervously biting his fingernails. Before she had time to ask him, What’s going on? he nodded toward the bedroom door. A narrow slit of light shone from underneath, unnervingly, like the last time.

A very distinct but muffled noise could be heard coming from the room.

“They’re firing shots in Papa’s bedroom,” the young man whispered in explanation.

“What?” she exclaimed.

“They’re firing a gun. But don’t be afraid.”

“You’re out of your mind!” the young woman replied.

Her brother did not respond. Instead, he stretched his head toward the door, almost losing his balance on his long legs. Suzana realized that his nightshirt must be open, revealing his bare chest; her mind a blank, she tried to do it up, but could not find the buttons.

Then there was another thud, clearly audible in spite of its dull tone. You’re all completely insane! Suzana thought. In her sleep-waking mind, the idea that someone was assassinating her father anew, or rather, murdering his corpse, seemed as plausible as it was insane.

She felt that her brother was about to rush toward the door, and she grabbed his hand tightly.

“Wait!”

They stood side by side, almost glued to each other, in total silence, hearing only each other’s breathing, until the door opened. Against the light that streamed forth from it they could make out the shape of a man hurrying out. He was holding a revolver, without any doubt the one he had just fired.

The young woman felt she was not in a state to ask the question “So what are you doing here?” or even the words “madness” or “horror.” Through the half-open door, on the heels of the man with the gun, came two others, wearing white coats and holding various implements in their hands. Oh no! Suzana groaned to herself. The implements looked as if they had been splashed by blood. Then, to make bad worse, a fourth man emerged, carrying in his outstretched arms a receptacle containing a huge chunk of raw meat.

What a nightmare! Suzana thought as she buried her head on her brother’s shoulder. It was probably only one of those bad dreams she’d been having more and more of lately. She dug her nails into her brother’s hand, but that didn’t help to wake her up at all. “Don’t be afraid,” he kept saying to comfort her. “They’re doing weapons trials.” One of the experts had just explained it all to him. “Do you understand?”

Suzana wasn’t listening. He put his mouth to her ear, to explain the details that were most painful to understand. “They’re conducting tests, to check whether the gunshot could or could not have been heard outside, got it? The trials had to be done by shooting into flesh, in this case a hunk of beef, because a gunshot has a sound like nothing else when it’s fired point-blank.”

Some part of all that was at last making its way into Suzana’s brain.

“Where did you get all these details?” she butted in. “Are you collaborating with them?”

Now it was the young man’s turn to say, “You’re out of your mind!”

For days on end, the two of them had shared their suspicions about this or that member of their clan they thought had been involved in the murder.

The young man put an arm around his sister’s shoulder, to lead her back to her bedroom. She was grateful to him for not having said, So you aren’t satisfied with being the cause of this catastrophe, you also have to get on our nerves with your stupid questions! The bloodied implements that had so scared her a moment ago were there, like all the rest of the setup, for their own good. Thanks to these tests, she and her family might possibly be going back to the life they had known before.

Once she was alone, she passed her right hand over her breast, then her belly, then lower down. The feeling was still very diffuse, but it prompted her to think that she had not made love for five months now. Desire, which she thought she would never feel again, had returned, and it was more insistent than ever.

Five months, she thought. How could that be? She had always thought she could not go more than a week without making love, yet she’d been living like a nun for five months!

The memory of her last stay with Genc, at the villa by the sea, began to unfold in her mind. It had been in mid-September, after the engagement party. It was the end of the season, and the villas all around were closing up one by one. Though it had not been cold, they had made a fire in the hearth. Then they lay down stark naked, something they had recently come to like doing. His desire, and shortly after, her groans, had been unusually intense. Though it was not his habit, he too had moaned a little, sounding like a wounded man.

“Anything wrong?” she asked immediately, still panting for breath. Then with a bitter smile she remarked that right after an orgasm partners’ minds always switch back to what they had been worrying about that day.

Genc looked her straight in the eye. “Have you heard anything at all?”

She nodded. Of course she had heard certain rumors that were making the rounds, even inside the Bllok. But she’d told herself they were not as important as they might seem. It’s a well-known fact that engagements always prompt gossip.

He said nothing.

Suzana gently stroked the fluffy edges of his hair. “Even if you won’t admit it, you felt the effect,” he said.

She didn’t deny being annoyed, but not for the reason he supposed.

“It’s not easy for me to explain it to you … It’s connected to a kind of obstacle that’s been bothering me for a long time … Do you understand? … I mean … I so much wanted this thing to happen … more than you can even imagine … and now this is happening — to me?”

“But what has happened to you?” Genc broke in. “You yourself pointed out that wagging tongues are run-of-the-mill in these kinds of circumstances …”

“Of course, that’s the way things are … That doesn’t prevent it from being like a barrier, a disenchantment, I don’t know how to explain it … In something as delicate as love, a mere trifle can sometimes wreck all the joy you feel.”

Out of the corner of his eye he studied her wavy auburn hair, as if he was trying to guess what path the thoughts beneath it were taking. That was something she had said, on that unforgettable day when for the first time they had gotten undressed and lain down together in the same bed. With trembling hands she had taken off her summer dress, then her underclothes. Her eyes were clouded by desire, and she did not notice his hesitation. She was whispering things she never dreamed she would be able to say while stroking him so brazenly … “I love to make love, especially this way, like that … you see? … you put me in such a state” … when she suddenly became aware he was not at ease. “Don’t be afraid, I’m not a virgin,” she whispered, thinking she had guessed the reason for his holding back. “Haven’t been for a long while, you know … Come on, my darling,” she began again, in a throaty plea, offering herself to him even more provocatively, almost exasperatedly, as if she was under the sway of some blind rage, whereas he only turned his head to the side, as if he had been found out. No, he couldn’t do it, he started explaining. It was the first time. It had never happened to him before with anyone else.

She had tried to hang on to the outrage that the words “anyone else” had provoked. Knowing full well she was in the wrong, that she was acting like a spoiled brat, she could not manage to break free of her anger: So, it all went swimmingly with anyone else, but what she got was sweet nothing!

“Listen, will you listen to me” … He tried to explain in straightforward terms that things were not at all as she thought. Not only was that not the reason, it was the opposite of the truth. His incapacity was the direct result of how much he adored her.

She had meant to interrupt him, to say she’d already heard that old refrain. At school dances, boys in her class were as hot as hell when they brushed up against the other girls, but when they had to partner her on the floor, they went stone cold, as if they were bewitched. Their cheeks turned bright red, to be sure, and their hands were unsteady, but not from temptation, as you might first have thought, but rather from the opposite. From the waist down they became limp. Instead of pressing themselves up to her, they kept a safe distance, but went wild a few minutes later when they were up against other girls.

It was more or less what he was trying to tell her himself. The daughter of a top leader aroused desire as well as respect and fear, but it was the last that always overcame the other feelings. All the more so in his case, because of the additional factor of his own background. She heard disconnected fragments of sentences about Genc’s father: a seismologist, studied in Vienna under the monarchy, uncertainty forever hovering over the fate of the family …

She had listened to these paltry excuses with an ironical glint in her eye, for what she could hear herself saying inwardly was like a lament: Why does it have to happen to me? … As her stifled resentment showed no sign of abating, she blurted out harshly a question so sour that she immediately regretted saying it: “Does fear of dictatorship unman you to that extent?”

The young man bit his lip. She had tried to minimize the effect of her words by adding, in a joking tone, “Are we really so terrifying, my father and I? …”

The despair that was written on the boy’s face seemed irremediable. She had taken his hand, bent to kiss it, placed it on her breast, then between her legs. Abandoning all modesty made things easier for her. “Don’t look away,” she said sweetly. “Does it look black and threatening to you? More fearsome, more somber than the dictatorship of the proletariat? Say something, darling!”

He had not responded. Naked as she was, Suzana got up and walked over to the window. She gazed for a while at the empty beach. The sea was cold and gray. In the far distance you could make out the shape of a woman walking along the water’s edge. Had she not known it was her mother, she would not have recognized her. The long shawl draped over her shoulders made her gait look even more eerie. Suzana could feel a grimace distorting her features. She thought of her mother imagining her daughter’s orgasm. Poor Mama, if only she knew! she sighed to herself. A month ago, when she had told her mother about the boy she had just met, the older woman had shown Suzana a degree of tolerance for the first time in her life. Suzana had laid her heart bare with all her passion. She told her mother about things they had never spoken of before. In plain words, without shame, she spoke about her physical suffering. Since she had broken off … or rather, been forced to break off … with her first love, she had been living in hell. It wasn’t just a matter of emotional suffering, which her mother might have thought a spoiled girl’s luxury, but something else, which no one dared admit to: It had been physical torture. After two years of regular sexual relations, her body had suddenly been obliged to cut itself off from that whole world. She had obeyed her father’s injunction, she had yielded to the argument of force majeure relating to his career. She had been as meek as a lamb in respecting his wishes and in renouncing the most sublime pleasure that this world has to give. But it could not go on forever. She had at last met a boy she liked. Both of them took matters seriously, of course, and intended to get engaged, but she needed to see more of him to get to know him better. For well-known reasons, that seemed impossible: because of the guards, because of the Bllok where they lived, because the Sigurimi kept on her tail whenever she went into town. Only her mother could have the torture suspended. By helping them see each other, discreetly, from time to time. For example, at the villa on the shore, in the off-season … To Suzana’s great surprise, her mother did not say no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those were the last words they spoke to each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her brother’s bedroom door was ajar. She looked in at the table untidily piled high with books. It was here, where no one was allowed to go, that her brother had shut himself up for ages with Aunt Memë.

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

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

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

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

Her brother smiled sourly. He wasn’t too sure what the elders would say on the question of a house going from one owner to another. Aunt Memë had been evasive on that point too. “I’m not at home in the present,” she sighed. “We used to have other customs, like spells and curses; but now there are rituals I can’t make head or tail of. People talk about con-cresses, blinums, and what have you. Ay, ay, ay!”

When Suzana suggested that the new part of the house probably did not yet have any history, seeing that only her engagement party had ever taken place in it when the plaster was barely dry, her brother shook his head in disagreement. He took the view that crimes moved house with people, until they found walls within which they could hide. If the crimes hadn’t been committed within these walls, then they had taken place elsewhere. In the highlands, for instance, during the last war. They called it the War of Liberation, but many people said it had been more like a civil war. In other words, a really dirty dogfight.

“Do you think Papa might have committed any crimes?” Suzana asked, almost wailing.

He didn’t hear the question, or pretended not to.

What he said next made her hair stand on end: A wedding snuffed out long before would suddenly demand what was due to it if talk of a new engagement woke it from slumber. So many engagements had been broken by the so-called class struggle!

“You’re crazy!” she riposted. “Mad and bad.”

He replied that he was neither mad nor bad. But when Suzana burst into tears and protested that she could not bear herself and her engagement being highlighted as the cause of all that had happened, he took her in his arms and stroked her hair at length.

“Let me cry a little longer,” she begged when her brother urged her to stop weeping.

The graying wisps of their mother’s hair that they had seen on the morning of the tragedy, as she screamed at the deceased, so as to be heard throughout the house — “Woe! What have you done to the Party?” — had as it were gotten stuck in their minds for days on end. She was grieving for the Party’s sake, Suzana’s brother whispered in her ear. Not for her own sake. Nor for ours.

Later on, harking back to that scene, it seemed to Suzana that the mystery of their parents’ bond with the Party would forever remain inaccessible to her and her brother. It was a bond stronger than the ties of blood, and by the same token stronger than the knot of marriage.

“In the highlands …,” she repeated after him. Atrocities must have been committed up there. And that peculiar bond must have been forged there too.

The nature of such a bond was presumably still little understood, because it was too new. Unlike religious allegiances, it was in competition with the ties of clan and family, because it too was a tie of blood — but with a difference. It wasn’t based on inner blood, the blood in your veins, identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand years, according to genetics, but on the other kind, on outer blood. That’s to say, on the blood of others, blood they had drunk-enly spilled in the name of Doctrine.

Whenever their conversation drifted toward topics of this kind Suzana put her hand to her brother’s mouth. “Please don’t speak of such things, put them out of your mind!” But in spite of herself, she went over it again and again. Inner blood, outer blood …

She turned around on hearing the front door creak on its hinges. It was her brother. “Tirana is awash with rumors!” he said, still out of breath. “Apparently, Papa is going to be rehabilitated!”

“Hold on, tell me everything, from the beginning!”

They sat down in the little lounge on the second floor and lit cigarettes. People everywhere were now saying that no autopsy had been carried out earlier not by oversight but intentionally. They were going so far as to mention names of probable culprits. Suspect number one was Adrian Hasobeu.

“What good news!” Suzana said, and jumped up to give her brother a kiss. She realized almost immediately that, as a result of her morning caresses, she must have left her blouse unbuttoned.

He lit another cigarette and puffed at it energetically, as if he was gasping for air. He was staring at a fixed point on the ceiling, his pupils immobile.

“What’s wrong?” she inquired gently. “You were going to say something, and now you seem to have fallen into deep thought.”

He smiled at her vaguely.

“Nothing wrong … I just wanted to say that from now on we should be prepared.” “Prepared for what?”

“Don’t you remember Aunt Memë’s final piece of advice? — ‘Be prepared, know your words.’“

“Know what we will say … You mean, about the night of December 13? But we’ve already told them everything we know!”

“The old woman wasn’t referring to the investigators.”

“What did she mean, then?”

His breathing became labored.

“She meant Papa. Know what you are going to say to him when he appears before you. That’s what she was talking about.”

“Are you trying to scare the living daylights out of me?” Suzana complained.

“There’s no reason for you to be afraid. The old woman’s mind works the same way as people’s did two thousand years ago. For the ancients, encounters with the dead were unavoidable. It didn’t matter so much where the encounter took place — it could be in a dream, in the hereafter, or in our own conscience …”

“I dreamt of him twice, but wasn’t able to speak to him.”

“One day you will. You, me, Mama, we all need to know what we will say to him.”

He took his time trying to describe, in the least lugubrious terms possible, the wasteland that, in the imagination of the Ancients, separated this world from the shadow world. Where, as on some station platform or in an airport arrivals hall, the dead by the thousands stand around in little groups waiting for their nearest and dearest. Some are overwhelmed with longing to clasp in their arms those from whom they have been separated, but there are others who with somber and resentful visage display their wounds, waiting for an explanation. As they hold open the gashes in their bodies, so they turn the pages of law books, gospels, proclamations, the Kanun, autopsy reports, and ancient hymns.

Suzana lightly touched the back of her brother’s hand. “Brother dearest, that’s enough of such horrors! Don’t we have enough crosses to bear in this world?”

But he shook his head. One day they would appear before their father, and they had to know what they would tell him. “You first of all,” he said, turning to Suzana, “you, the most innocent of us all! The purest! Trampled on more than anyone else. If ever he dared …”

“No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to speak about it anymore. I’ve forgiven him.”

“I’ll take you at your word,” he replied. “Your encounter with him might turn out to be just a nostalgic embrace. You might even be able to do without words. But things will be different for Mama.”

Suzana did not raise her eyes.

“‘You, my wife, you who couldn’t get a wink of sleep for three whole months, how do you account for having sunk into deep slumber on the very night of December 13?’ He’s bound to ask that. And I must say I can’t imagine what she’ll reply. What pills will she claim to have taken? What medical prescription will serve as her defense?”

There was a long pause. But when he resumed in a barely audible undertone, as if afraid to awaken her, and said, “As for me, it will be even harder …” Suzana’s weary eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

“Don’t be afraid!” the young man commanded. “It’s got nothing to do with what you’re thinking. It’s going to be hard for me for a quite different reason.”

He bit his nails as he spoke. Suzana found it difficult to guess what he was getting at. It surely would be hard for him, no doubt about that. There could be nothing more awkward for a son confronted with a father displaying his bloodstained shirt not to promise to reclaim the blood debt, but to declare the opposite: “Stop waving that shirt about. You are my father — I cannot blame you for what you have done, but I have to tell you that I shall not reclaim your blood.”

“Dearest heart,” she mumbled to herself, “why do you torture yourself with abominations like that?”

Then, looking like death warmed over, he explained, as if he was talking to himself, why even if the opportunity arose he would not avenge his father’s spilled blood. As he’d already told her on a previous occasion, his father’s blood was different from blood that had been spilled, it flowed in a different direction, belonged to a different group. Just as their mother’s breasts were different. His father, his mother, his blood, her milk, were ruled by different laws. In parades, in songs, and everywhere they had lauded “The Light of the Party,” they had chanted “The Party is our Mother.” Soon people would be clamoring praise for “The Milk of the Party! The Teats of the Party! The Genitals of the Party!” That was actually how it had all begun in the very earliest Communist cells, where activists (male and female) slept (or did not sleep) together not by human custom, but in accordance with the prescriptions of Doctrine.

His tone grew ever more acerbic as he spoke, but Suzana could not find an opportunity to butt in and soothe her brother.

That’s how the whole business they did not want to recall must have started. After seizing power, and after they had spawned their own offspring, they turned the other way.

He laughed a bitter laugh.

“They brought us into the world, but you have to realize that that gives us only provisional status. When the hour of duty sounds, they won’t hesitate to trample us into the ground if the Party requires it. Like they already trampled on you. As they would have trampled on me, if the Doctrine had called for it.”

Suzana finally managed to get a word in. “Dearest heart, please, please stop this!”

“Let me finish,” he said in a deathly tone. “I’m not just saying all this. In this room, right here, my own father threatened me personally: ‘You are my flesh and blood, but you need to know that if you were ever to betray the Party, I would clap you in irons and turn the key with my own hands.’ And by the look in his eye I could see he really meant it. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He would have done what Abraham did three thousand years ago, when God asked him to sacrifice his own son.”

Suzana held her head in her hands. As she’d become accustomed to nightmares, now she was just waiting for the sound of her brother’s voice to come to an end. But he kept on coming back to the new genetics, which encouraged sons to sell their fathers, fathers to sell their sons, wives to sell their husbands … Which is why they had understood nothing about what happened while they were sleeping as deeply as if they’d suffered a stroke, on that night of December 13.

Suzana rose at long last and went into the bathroom. She splashed some cold water on her face. Curiously, the dreadful things her brother had been telling her these past days washed off her as easily as her early-morning nightmares.

Once back in her bedroom, she paused in front of the mirror. She looked over her makeup equipment with tears welling in her eyes. The lipstick seemed to have dried in the tube from long disuse. She wetted it slightly before putting some on. It came out in a color that looked peculiar, almost treacherous. If her brother had still been beside her, God knows what ghoulish comment he would have made about it.

You must try to think about something else, she told herself. As for that shady old hag Aunt Memë, she’s welcome back if she brings a good omen, but if not, good riddance!

You must try to think about other things, she reiterated. Maybe ordinary life will come back in the end. Life as under the old genetics, as her brother would say. Maybe all the others would line up in her father’s train to take their leave of this world. A whole generation, all the people who had come down from the highlands in a halo of mystery with a blanket over their shoulders, as they’d been told in school, the whole lot of them would vanish into the mist whence they came.

Oh Lord, make them disappear, let life become livable again! Until the time came for the encounter, down there, in that wasteland where they would have been waiting for many a long year.

She conjured up a picture of herself standing in that desolate place, watching a man with a body all tattered and torn coming toward her from the far distance to take her in.

They would embrace, clasping each other clumsily as her father tried to avoid her lipstick and she tried not to be touched by the blood on his shirt — but what would she find to say to him after so many years apart?

Words rose to her lips but then slipped away again.

She felt as if she was whirling around and around. It was probably spring fever, the feeling produced by an accumulation of happiness that made her bones feel like jelly.

Her legs took her quite naturally toward the bed. Before letting herself doze, she made a last but fairly casual attempt to find the words she might say to her father on the banks of the funereal river. Father, sir, you didn’t trust me, and it’s through me that misfortune befell you.

A large part of the day was spent in that way, between her bed and her dressing table.

Several times as she went past the telephone she picked up the receiver because she imagined, though she didn’t know why, that after being cut off for so long this line would be the first to be reconnected.

Night was falling when she caught sight of her brother through the window; he was marching up and down the garden like a man possessed. As if all the rest had not been enough, the poor boy was still finding new suspicions to torment himself with. It seemed to her that since Aunt Memë’s visit they were gnawing at him even more painfully.

Aunt Memë … she mused, almost in slow motion. If it really was she …

She ran down the stairs and up to the small gate, where she waited for her brother to be in earshot before sharing her doubts with him. He listened to her patiently, then, instead of saying, “What’s all this nonsense?” or “You call me a lunatic, but look at you!” he whispered by way of reply that the same suspicion had occurred to him, but he’d not mentioned it because he didn’t want to frighten her.

“But what would be so awful about it, anyway?” Suzana answered, putting on a casual tone that wilted even before she had finished speaking. The worst possibility was that a self-proclaimed aunt had come knocking at their door … It’s the sort of thing that can happen, especially if … especially if … they were in the situation they were in.

Sure, such things did happen, her brother mumbled. But his suspicion was of another kind. Years before — he remembered the occasion clearly — a bereavement telegram had lain around the house without anybody taking any notice of it. Because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Papa and Mama were spending all their time at endless, stressful meetings, so neither of them bothered about the telegram. As he’d only just learned to read at the time, he had a pretty vague memory of what it said. It was the first time he had ever slit open a telegram announcing someone’s death. When Aunt Memë had showed up the other day, he’d suddenly had a vision of the thick black line around the edges of that telegram and of the compressed wording that, he thought he recalled, had reported her death.

Suzana’s knees nearly gave way. “Are you saying a dead woman came to our door? Are you trying to frighten me to death? Answer me: Is that what you want?”

“Sissy!” he retorted. “Do the departed scare you to death? What do you think you are? What do you think all of our kind are? We’re the walking dead. Ghosts who scare the daylights out of decent folk. Yes, that’s what we are! Ghosts!”

“Oh no,” Suzana pleaded, “don’t say that. Dearest heart, please don’t say such things. Just this morning you were so full of hope, and I was too. What’s happened to you?”

He said he was sorry. He hadn’t changed. Nor had he had any bad news. It was just his nerves giving way.

He smoothed down her hair and uttered words of comfort, words of hope. All the signs remained as favorable as before. Even the appearance of Aunt Memë wasn’t necessarily a bad omen. Whether the old woman was really a Sigurimi officer in disguise or a shadow that had gotten out of a country graveyard, she was altogether preferable to the nothingness that had been their lot up to then, to that deathly hush unbroken by any knock on the door, a door as silent as the stone lid of a burial chamber.

Suzana calmed down and went back inside. In the corridor she thought she heard her mother’s bedroom door being slowly pulled closed. She had the impression that her mother had been looking very worried recently whenever she caught sight of Suzana and her brother deep in conversation.

She awoke on the stroke of midnight. She got up to make a complete tour of the house, a recent habit. An ice-pale moon shone through the windowpanes. To her great surprise, the door to the first-floor lounge looked as if it was ajar. She hurried toward it. Yes, it was. Probably the investigators had left it like that in the morning. It was the first time they had forgotten to close that door since December. But maybe it was no accident. Maybe it was the result of the general change in the atmosphere.

Her hand went toward the light switch, but pulled back. There were guards outside who were probably spying on every movement inside the house. Anyway, there was no need to switch on the light. Moonlight streamed into the room, making it look as if it was full of mist. Tears came into her eyes. The room was as unreal as it was in her imagination. Unbearably convincing morsels of the memory of her engagement party sprang up before her eyes. By the marble mantelpiece, her fiancé sipping champagne with two of his comrades. A little farther away, with his back turned, was her father in his dark suit. Then a newcomer, holding a bunch of red flowers, at the head of a merry group. Flashbulbs crackled. Someone saying, “But where is Suzana?” — then, once again, she saw the architect, weeping with emotion. Then everyone going stiff, and voices whispering, “The Prijs! The Guide is coming!” Then as soon as he had come into the room, everything went rigid again, but this time it was with the brittleness of glass, sparkling all the more brightly for the complete silence that fell on the party.

“Didn’t I tell you he was almost blind?” Suzana jerked her head to the side as if to shake off the secret her brother was telling her.

Despite the efforts he made to hide it, the Guide’s blindness was obvious from his every movement. Even his voice seemed affected by his infirmity. “My best wishes! May the happy couple prosper and multiply!” had been said in his deep-throated tone as he looked around for the betrothed. Suzana stood stock-still, unable to decide whether it was easier to bear a clouded gaze than one that was too piercing.

Before he left, the Guide had embraced her father again. They must have been having a heartfelt conversation, as they seemed unable to part from each other; they both seemed to be swaying on their feet together, waving like reeds caught in a gust of wind. When finally they let each other go, Suzana noticed that there were teardrops in the blind man’s eyes; but just as she was pondering how all eyes secrete the same kind of tears, her mother’s high-pitched voice broke in with a “Would you like a tour of the house?”

Every time Suzana had thought back on it she felt the same malaise about the Guide’s slow progress toward the antechamber.

She now followed the same route. In the milky light of the moon, the lounge looked enchanted. The finest room in the house: That’s what all their family and friends who’d been to visit recently had said. Whereas her brother, looking at the room from the doorway on the eve of her engagement party, had answered her question — “Doesn’t it look wonderful?” — with, “Sure it does. Maybe more than it should.”

Suzana hastened to join the tour group as if she had been prodded. The Guide’s overlong black cloak partly muffled the irregular sound of his footsteps. Suzana could hear her mother’s harsh voice, sharp as a cleaver, doing the honors: “And here is the antechamber; everyone agrees it is the best room in the house.” What’s gotten into you, Mama? Suzana murmured to herself. Her eyes suddenly met the architect’s. They were like burning coals, and it seemed astonishing to Suzana that their jet-black hue made them even more incandescent than if they had been flaming red. Alongside the sparkle and the anxiety caused in turn by the hope of flattery and the fear of deprecatory remarks, there was something else in those eyes that moved between both emotions and diluted them.

As always, her mother’s thin and steely voice managed, most oddly, to break through the general hubbub. She was explaining how the lights in the lounge were controlled by a special kind of switch that was the first of its kind in Albania. “Not that, Mama!” her daughter quaked once more. But the Guide had stopped in front of the switch that the mistress of the house was pointing out to him. The black cloak that up to then had masked his fumbling steps could not now hide his groping hands. He moved closer to the wall, and, in movements characteristic of the poorly sighted, felt for the switch with his hand. Silence had suddenly fallen all around, but when he had managed to turn on the light and make it brighter, he laughed out loud. He turned the switch further, until the light was at maximum strength, then laughed again, ha-ha-ha, as if he’d just found a toy that pleased him. Everyone laughed with him, and the game went on until he began to turn the dimmer down. As the brightness dwindled, little by little everything began to freeze, to go lifeless, until all the many lamps in the room went dark.

Each time she thought back on that turning out of the lights, which had amused the company at the time, she felt overcome with anxiety. Sometimes it seemed to her as if that had been the precise moment when the wind had turned.

Suzana felt worn out again and silently went out of the lounge. Her anxiety seemed to be nearing its end. Such great inner turmoil was only a symptom of its imminent lifting. Among other signs, that the lounge and its antechamber, which had been under seal for so long, were now left open confirmed that the end was nigh.