The Successor

FOUR. THE FALL

She was almost aware of being once again in a dream. The doorway was low, its lintel overhung with a peaceful, almost drowsy creeper, and she still could not work out why she was there. She put out her hand toward the iron ring, but she thought she heard herself knocking even before she had grasped it. Well now, she thought, although she did not feel any great surprise. It was fear that overcame her instead.

She took one step forward, but the knocking, far from halting, came louder and louder. The thuds were coming from the other side, sounding now far away, now very close. “Diabolical door!” Suzana yelled out loud, and woke up with a start. It was almost the same dream she had had two weeks ago, except that the knocking was now even louder than in her dream …

What’s making them knock like that? she wondered, not without a pang of anxiety. They had the keys and could come and go as they pleased any day of the week.

It was obvious that they could come as they pleased, and they often did. Suzana put the pillow down over her head like a thatch roof and figured she would be able to get back to sleep. The knocking had in fact stopped, but now she could hear feet tramping up the stairs. She also thought she could hear her mother’s voice. Suzana pulled her head out from under the pillow. Yes, that was her mother’s voice. But she wasn’t so much talking as screaming.

The young woman leaped out of bed, but before she got to the door it swung open. The screams seemed to be coming less from her mother’s mouth than from her tousled, long-faded hair. “Wake up, my daughter, they’ve come to evict us! Get up, unhappy daughter!”

Though only half dressed, though the blood had drained from her face, Suzana still managed to grasp the main point. They had two hours maximum to leave the house. A truck was parked outside and was waiting to take them away. Her brother was already racing down the stairs with armfuls of books.

Suzana needed to stay in her bedroom while she tried to get her hands under control. Then she realized it wasn’t her hands that were at fault. It was her brain that was jerking them this way and that. First she believed she should take none of the many objects surrounding her, then she thought on the contrary she should take everything.

The truck had backed up to the residence with its tailgate almost touching the front door. Suzana could not help noticing the license plate as she went up to it with her first load of winter clothes: LU-14 17. That means it’s come from Lushnje, she thought mechanically. Central Albania. The prime area for relegations.

As she went back upstairs, she passed two soldiers carrying furniture down. Her mother was busying herself on the landing on the second floor. Without looking left or right, her brother was running down the stairs a second time. This time he was carrying not just books but also a large package. Maybe his tape recorder. Or else a typewriter.

Suzana puzzled over the half-open drawers where her underwear was kept. With languorous, hesitant gestures, she took out her cotton underclothes, then the sanitary towels her mother had brought back from a trip abroad. As she placed them in her bag, she tried to work out how long her supplies would last. Three months? Four months? She couldn’t be sure.

The voice of her mother on the landing could be heard piercing the air. She was talking to Suzana’s brother. Probably about his books.

The other drawer where her silk things were kept also put Suzana in a quandary. She stretched out her hand, then withdrew it almost in the same movement. Each garment was in a different style and color, but for her they all fell into one of two categories: those that were connected to him, “Number one,” and the others, fewer in number, that she associated with Genc.

She picked up a pair of sky blue panties, the ones she had worn her very first time. It was probably on account of this garment that he had come out with these unforgettable words: “I like expensive women.” She put it back, then picked it up in a bundle with the rest, then in exasperation let go of it. Everything seemed to her to come down to one blinding, unbearable core: For years, in one way or another, what had been required of her was always one and the same thing — to renounce her love. And they always won! She came close to screaming, No! out loud, as her hands hurriedly swept up the whole lot, like a thief.

The door opened behind her back, and she heard her mother saying, “Faster, my girl!”

They always win, she kept on saying to herself as she went down the staircase. She had tried to protect herself, had bleated feeble protests, like a lamb being led to the slaughter, but she had ended up giving in. And now that has to stop! she yelled inwardly. Her sacrifices had been totally in vain. Nobody had even noticed. Except her first man. He who had been destined for the sorry fate that was now hers.

Suzana felt tears streaming down her cheeks. Cold and salty-tasting, like the tears of any woman with hands made dirty by housework, they just kept on flowing. The kind of tears she would no doubt shed henceforth on a towpath or behind a bush as a local farm worker did up his fly.

“Faster!” her mother shouted again as she walked over to the truck with a portrait. “You’ll have plenty of time to cry later on!”

The soldiers weren’t accustomed to this kind of work and loaded the furniture clumsily. The tall mirrors sent back oblique reflections every time they were jolted. They had presumably witnessed the eviction of their former owner, and had been waiting their turn for years.

“Careful, soldier!” her mother commanded in an ever more tinny voice. “Wedge some cardboard underneath so it doesn’t shift around too much!”

Dimwit! thought Suzana. Her mother was bustling around the truck, keeping hold of the portrait with both hands. That was when Suzana saw that it was a portrait of the Guide. “Insane!” she muttered under her breath.

Her brother followed behind with a great pile of things. “There’s no room left,” one of the soldiers said. The truck driver and the two plainclothesmen supervising the loading looked at their watches from time to time. The uniformed policemen kept their distance. A bunch of onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk opposite, to watch the free show.

“Come on, time for you to get in,” the driver said, pointing to the back of the truck. “Make a bit of room for them,” he said to the soldiers.

Her brother stretched his long legs and climbed in first. Suzana felt her knees buckling. “Give the old lady a hand,” someone said. With deathly eyes, Suzana’s mother stared at the soldiers in turn, unwilling to let go of the portrait. Her son jumped down, roughly took the picture from her, and pulled her up into the vehicle. Suzana bowed her head.

All of a sudden they were enveloped in the regular rumble and throb of the engine, and the two women, who had been quiet so far, burst into sobs. The young man stared at them as if he could not recall who they were.

The truck was still laboring across Albania’s central highlands while the event was already being talked about in all the cafés of the capital.

The shock that people registered seemed to be of a very particular kind. It masqueraded as a precursor of things to come, but clearly it was actually the final jolt in a whole series of upsets. Briefly astounded, people went on to rediscover a feeling they had almost forgotten. Initially diffuse, it grew ever more identifiable, despite the fog surrounding it, and it became apparent in due course that what had first looked like blankness, weariness, and a kind of lethargy was in fact the expression of relief. In other circumstances, the word “plot” would have aroused terror, but on this occasion it was on the verge of being treated as good news. As they went around repeating that word, people came to realize how much they had been tired out by its not having been uttered all winter long.

So there really had been a plot, or a conspiracy, to use the other term, and people not involved in it had no reason to be afraid.

No one was unaware of where campaigns that began with the thin end of the wedge ended up. They might start with a few apparently indulgent relegations for liberal ideas in the cultural field, or for foreign influence, or for new artistic trends … Then there would be a meeting at the National Theater. Then a firing squad on some empty lot on the outskirts of Tirana.

Whereas this time there was an open announcement that the issue was a conspiracy. In other words, a putsch planned by the Successor, an attempt to overthrow the Guide. Which presumably meant he had had loyal henchmen and supporters, secret codes, weapons, and staging posts. The Successor would not have done himself in for nothing, would he now, seeing how many times he’d mocked at suicide. So the word “plot” was as reassuring as could be. That is, for people who didn’t have bees in their bonnets. That’s what separated the guilty from the innocent as cleanly as a knife cuts butter. In past times, nobody ever felt certain of anything. You thought you were as white as snow, and then, without even knowing what you had done, you found you had been subjected to foreign influences. Or that you had been contaminated despite yourself by the wind of liberalism. It wasn’t by chance they called them winds of ill fortune — you could get caught out by a diabolical draft anyplace you stood. But this time you couldn’t get picked on and blamed, for instance, for making love to your wife incorrectly — in a decadent manner, as they used to say. But could you call that a plot against the state? Come off it, you know what you can do with that kind of nonsense. Decadent behavior was rightly so called; it wasn’t very savory, to be sure; it was extremely unhealthy for all and certainly unworthy of a Communist, not to mention an official, but you had to face facts: No way could things like that constitute a plot!

The latest news that reached the city’s ears at nightfall only made the day’s rumors more plausible. In late afternoon, the Successor’s tomb had been demolished and his mortal remains bundled up with the planks from his coffin and the soil around it, put in a plastic bag, and removed to an unknown location.

To judge by the way these facts were reported, something seemed to have affected people’s linguistic abilities … Some kind of petrifaction of language had condensed their stories, and this in turn curiously served to make them more precise. The soil-stained tarp that had been used to carry off the Successor’s remains probably revived memories of snatches of ancient epics, parts of which had been dropped from school textbooks as a result of campaigns to eradicate medieval mysticism from the national curriculum.

When, two days later, the Communists assembled once again in fourteen of the city’s halls to listen to a speech by the Guide, the last winter winds sweeping down from the hills seemed to bring with them some ill-remembered scenes from the past … In the Yellow Valleys, the fourteen lords of Jutbine foregathered within the walls of their fourteen towers …

The astonishment that had arisen on the previous occasion was provoked once again by the wording on the invitations. The same tape recorder was to be seen on the same small table with its vase of flowers. The Guide’s voice was weary and almost off-hand, which spread a sense of menace more effectively than ranting would have. He now hardly bothered to hide the imminence of his own demise; time was too short to waste it on unnecessary words.

So what had happened had been a conspiracy. The most heinous in the whole history of Albania. The most terrifying. Pressured by foreign sponsors, the Successor, the instigator of said conspiracy, had been cornered into making a desperate move — to sacrifice his own daughter. That was the only way he could signal that he was intent on dropping the class struggle and initiating a change of line. He had thrown his own daughter into the maw of the class enemy so as to make his own preference clear to all.

Fear glazed the eyes of everyone listening to the Guide’s explanation. The country’s history was full of examples of clans who had sacrificed their daughters for the sake of the nation. The celebrated Nora of Kel-mend had gone to the tent of the Turkish commanderin-chief not to give herself to him, but to slay him. Whereas he, the Successor, had pushed his daughter into the enemy’s clutches for the opposite reason.

Had the wedding taken place, it would have sounded the death knell of Albania.

Silence fell after these final words. The continued humming of the tape recorder made it seem even deeper, so much so that people began to think that they would soon be able to hear the thoughts that were buzzing around in each other’s heads. They stayed riveted to their chairs until someone walked quickly and stiffly onto the platform and switched the machine off.

The fourteen halls of Tirana were full again a week later. Although the same number of invitations had been sent out as on the previous occasion, the halls seemed particularly crowded this time. The impression that shadows had slipped in between the seats was presumably due to what was coming out of the tape recorder. It was broadcasting the answers given to the interrogators by the Successor’s wife, son, and daughter. The most serious accusation was made by the wife. Unlike his mother, the son insisted he had not been aware of his father’s goings-on, save for a letter he had posted at his father’s request during a trip to Rome, which had aroused his curiosity at the time and which, moreover, still puzzled him. As for the daughter, she spoke only about her broken engagement. Her speech, which was confused and broken up by bursts of sobbing, made it sound as though she was not talking about one engagement, but about two, both of which had been shattered for reasons connected to her father’s career.

The judge interrupted her in an attempt to get some clarity about the earlier affair, but his question actually made things even murkier. No, her father had not encouraged her, quite the contrary, he had been against her first love insofar as it might be disadvantageous to his career, though from a different angle.

“Our information is that this man, your first sweetheart, was from a Communist family and worked as a journalist at National Television. Is that correct?” “Yes,” the young woman concurred. “In other words,” the judge went on, “your boyfriend had socialist credentials, and that was enough to make your father stop him ever darkening his doorway.”

Suzana’s breathing grew faster, distorting her words now and then. The judge reiterated his question, saying that as far as he could see her father had in mind to reserve his daughter’s hand for a damaging political marriage, but all she could reply, between two sobs, was: “I don’t know!”

The rest of the girl’s story — of her tearful pleading that failed to soften her father’s heart — could just as well have been about her first love cut brutally short, as about her later engagement, which had been speeded up with a sinister end in view — as was only now becoming clear.

What a cynic that man was! the Party veterans muttered as they left the hall. He offered up his daughter like a lamb — so imagine where he could have led Albania! The country had been really very fortunate in escaping a Successor of that ilk.

As they chatted along these lines, some of the oldest stalwarts nursed private hopes that the Guide would in the end pick a Successor worthy of the name. Many others weren’t at all sure that a man deserving to stand that close to the Guide could ever be found. The best that might be done would be to appoint an acting Successor, so to speak, a kind of ante-Successor, if such a title could legitimately be used.

In that case, someone piped up, it was no secret that the only plausible candidate for the post was Adrian Hasobeu. The others nodded. That was obvious. Hadn’t he long been thought of as a silent opponent of the Successor? He’d even been suspected of…

As they got nearer home, their expressions softened, and when their families set eyes on them they breathed a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, the cleaners who were clearing up the meeting halls, opening doors and windows to let in some air, were surprised by the odd smell that filled the place. It was different from the odor of feet, sheep-wax, and sour milk they had encountered after the assembly of top-ranking herders. It was another smell, one that had been getting more common recently. It was the smell bodies make when they are afraid.

Adrian Hasobeu was aware that his name was now on everybody’s lips. But whereas rumors of that kind would have kept him awake all night long in days gone by, they now produced quite the opposite effect.

Everything had changed in a flash when the Guide, after tergiversating unendingly throughout the spring, which had been a dark season for Adrian Hasobeu, had reached his decision and denounced the Successor for treason.

Never before in his whole existence had he felt such relief. The slackening of the tension in his limbs and of all that coursed through his lungs, his blood vessels, and his brow made him realize that a part of his being that he had believed dead, but which had in fact only been sleeping, was coming back to life, as if it was slowly emerging from a static bank of fog.

Several members of his clan had gathered under his roof. Near silence reigned over their solemn presence. They said nothing, but gazed with shared affection at his drawn features. The eldest of his uncles was the only one to put his arms around him, before breaking down in tears.

After lunch, when he told them, “I’m going to take a short rest,” the same caring glances fell upon him, alongside muttered have-a-good-nap-have-a-good-rest-sweet-sister-souls.

From his bedroom he lent an ear to the murmurs that his absence had probably revived. It lulled him to a sleep more delicious than any he had known before.

When he woke up, he knew at once that they were still in the house. They were probably even more transported by joy than he was, just as in March, when the house had been almost entirely empty, they had probably been even more distraught than he had been. He didn’t feel the slightest resentment for their having abandoned him at that time. He had even strongly advised them to act that way. “It would be better if you didn’t show your faces here until things have been cleaned up.”

The clarification took its time. Complications arose from the first morning after the Successor’s death. His wife had been the first to grill him: “What do you say to the rumors people are spreading about you?”

He didn’t answer. A long silence followed, then his wife returned to the attack: Even supposing he had really been over there … at his house … around midnight … why should it have been divulged? Who had spotted him? In short, why had the gossip not been stopped?

He raised his eyes, with a bitter smile on his lips, but his wife didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “I know what you’re going to say — that you can’t put a stop to gossip. But you know as well as I do that you can!”

Indeed he knew. Despite that, this first phase, oddly enough, left him cold. At the end of the day, he had gotten the better of his perfidious rival. Even the suspicion that he had liquidated the Successor somewhat ahead of time served to show only that he’d been excessively eager. It was a well-known fact that, in this kind of case, overeagerness earned not only a reprimand, but also a degree of respect. The mere existence of the suspicion had suddenly enhanced his stature in the eyes of others. Because of it, his promotion to a higher position now seemed only a matter of course. The rumor that he might even be picked to fill the Successor’s shoes sprang from the same kind of reasoning.

Things only started to turn the wrong way in March, with news of the autopsy. The scalpels and tongs used to section the Successor’s cadaver would have caused him less agony than the fragmentary speculations he heard from all quarters. The autopsy wouldn’t have been ordered if there hadn’t been doubts. Its results could turn things upside down. The Successor’s sudden return in the shape of a martyr could easily cast his rival into the abyss.

The same questions preyed on Adrian Hasobeu’s mind from the moment he got up to his going to bed: Why was no one taking his defense? Why was the Guide not giving him any support?

The latter’s eyes appeared to recognize him no longer. It was apparently the last benefit that the onset of total blindness could give him. But as he went over in his mind his last meeting with the Guide, Adrian Hasobeu still could not see what mistake he had made.

… The Politburo meeting seemed to go on forever, on that late afternoon of December 13. The Successor was answering questions with ever sparser sentences. Sometimes he left a pause, as if waiting for the end of some inaudible translation. His eyes remained fixed on the typescript of his self-criticism, on which every now and again he penciled annotations.

All of a sudden, the Guide took his fob watch out of the pocket of his black jacket. He kept looking at it as the secretary sitting next to him whispered something in his ear, presumably what time the watch said.

The room froze and waited.

“I think it’s getting late,” the Guide had declared. His eyes were trained on the place where the Successor was sitting. “I propose that we put your self-criticism off until tomorrow …”

In the ever deeper silence, most of those present who had attended a similar meeting years before probably recalled the very same sentence being said at more or less the same time of day: “It is getting late; I suggest we leave your self-criticism, Comrade Zhbira, until the morning.” Not a muscle twitched on Kano Zhbira’s livid face, as if the death mask that would be placed over it the next day, after his suicide, had already begun to turn it into rock.

“Well, then,” the Guide resumed, still gazing toward where he thought the Successor was seated. His voice was weary, almost gentle, after such a long day. “As for you, try to get a proper night’s sleep, so as to be in good shape for your speech tomorrow. And the rest of you too.”

The pallor that had not left the Successor’s face was the same, still recognizable color. Adrian Hasobeu felt his body relax, as if the Guide’s wishes for a good night’s rest affected him first and foremost. The vague impression that it would once again be at night … a transitional night … yes, like the last time … on a calendrical quirk that only the blind man could control and which cropped up each time the latter invoked the passage of time … that idea made him go weak in the knees in anticipation.

He went home in the same half-dead state. He was just getting into bed when he was called to the telephone. The Guide was waiting for him in his office. The old man’s eyes were cloudy and his diction even more so. “I have something like a bad intuition about what might happen tonight,” he had told him. That’s why he had called him in. “You’re the only person I trust.” What he was asking Hasobeu to do was not very clear. The more he tried to concentrate, the hazier it got. He was supposed to go over to the other man’s place. Try to find out what was going on there … “Only you can do it.”

No help shone from the Guide’s dark brown pupils. Only the inscrutable opacity of blind eyes. Twice he thought the Guide was going to give him something, perhaps the keys to that underground passageway, if it really existed. But nothing of the sort occurred. No keys, and no further explanation. He just kept on repeating, “You’re the only person I trust.” He regurgitated his other assertions as well: He had to go over there on foot, around midnight; when the guards recognized him, he shouldn’t worry, he was a minister, it was okay for him to inspect the duty squad in the thick of night … not to mention the other … then he was to return … he, the Guide, would be waiting up for him, eagerly …

Adrian Hasobeu did not once dare to interrupt him, and obeyed his instruction: “Now, go.” He went. He waited at home for midnight to come, then went out again, alone, on foot, by a side door, wearing his black oilskin cape. The night was dark and wet, cut asunder by lightning at irregular intervals. It was a special night, a night of transition, and he stepped through it as through a nightmare.

From afar he made out the Successor’s bedroom. It was the only one on that side of the house that was lit. When he pushed back his cape, the guards recognized him. He paced up and down around the house like a man in a fever, peering at each of the doors as if he still hoped that one of them would suddenly open …

A few minutes later, Hasobeu was back in the Guide’s office. The Prijs had indeed waited up. He even made to move toward Hasobeu.

“Did you do it?” he asked, with unmasked impatience.

Adrian Hasobeu nodded.

Himself stared at Hasobeu’s hands as if trying to make out spots of blood on his skin. His gaze was so powerful that it made the minister want to hide his hands behind his back.

All the doors were bolted on the inside.

He wasn’t absolutely certain he had said exactly that. Himself said, “Now I can sleep peacefully.”

Outside, on the path, it was raining harder than ever. Adrian Hasobeu thought he was on his way home, but his feet took him in another direction. When he glimpsed the Successor’s bedroom from afar once more, he understood. That’s when he took the revolver from the inside pocket in his oilskin and fitted the silencer onto the barrel.

Early next morning, the four telephones in the house rang incessantly. When he arrived at the Successor’s residence, he found the state prosecutor had gotten there first. His eyes crossed the puffy, insomniac, and desolate gaze of the bereaved wife, and he almost choked on the question: “Who moved the body? I meant to say, has the body been moved?”

He had put such effort into imagining every detail that the sight of the corpse gone cold now seemed quite familiar to him.

At the Politburo meeting, which began an hour later, he sought but failed to catch the Guide’s eye. What did Himself actually believe? The question nagged at him unrelentingly all that morning, and came back to haunt him even more later on, during that unending week of the autopsy. His last conversation with the leader, the one he’d had with him around midnight on December 13, appeared henceforth like a hallucination. It seemed to have either no sense at all, or far too much. It must have been then that the thread broke. From the moment when, after leaving the Guide, his steps took him back to the Successor’s residence, he had the palpable feeling that something needed to be put right. And that was probably where things had gotten all tangled up.

Perhaps, like half the population of Tirana, the Guide took him for the killer. Or did he suspect that his minister had intended to commit murder, but hadn’t managed to do so, seeing as someone else got his bullet in first? Or that the Successor had beaten both his assassins to the wire by pulling the trigger on himself?

What would he not have given to know even just half the surmises in the mind of Himself! Now and again, those surmises would disperse almost instantaneously, like a flock of crows taking fright and leaving a solitary bird in the empty lot they had just abandoned. Shouldn’t that crow be put down too, because of everything it was now the only bird to know? That was Adrian Hasobeu’s initial hypothesis, elemental in its simplicity, but which he did not find too hard to put aside precisely because it was so simple. It was too ordinary, too well-known to remain part of the Guide’s set of mental tools.

No! he said to bolster himself, despite his weariness, and not quite knowing to whom he was really talking. Maybe the Guide did suspect him of having committed murder, especially if he had been told of Hasobeu’s second visit to the Successor’s house. Or maybe, short of suspecting him of murder, he thought Hasobeu had prompted the suicide … that he had gone there to try to corner the man … or that he hadn’t gone over there at all. The threads had begun to unravel, but Hasobeu himself could no longer clearly see what was true and what was false in such a complicated imbroglio.

On several occasions, he came close to writing a letter to the man Himself. He was prepared to assume responsibility for all possible and imaginable crimes — murder, incitement to self-destruction, etcetera — if that could be of use to the Cause. The first lines of his letters provided him with a sense of relief, but then he was overcome with a sense of defeat. He realized with alarm that he had not known how to interpret his signs. In fact, the Guide had never been very forthcoming, as, for instance, in the Kano Zhbira affair: each time the body was exhumed, the current winners were cut down, until the next unburying brought down their successors too.

The wall of inscrutability had gotten even thicker these past few years. His increasingly poor eyesight seemed to give him perceptions that no one else could fathom. Such impenetrable fog that nobody knew what to believe.

Despite knowing all this, in his fit of gloom Adrian Hasobeu felt like shouting out loud: Why was it me that he had to send over there on the night of December 13? To set me up as a murderer, if a murderer should be needed? At times, he thought there could be no other way of accounting for it. The Successor’s death had worn two masks, but one of them would have to be chosen in the end. “If you didn’t do it,” his wife told him, “there’s no reason why you should bear the brunt.” He left a long pause, but when his wife repeated her question once again, he replied: Neither she nor anyone else would ever understand the first thing about it all.

Something he had recently discovered lay at the root of the incomprehensibility he was referring to. Suspicions were by far the most cherished attributes of the mind of a guide. They formed as it were a pack of hounds, to play with and relax at lonely times. But if anyone dare get too close, beware!

His wife bowed her head while he, feeling almost a sense of relief, tried to explain. It was because the Guide, as far as he could grasp, expected no explanation to be forthcoming that he, Adrian Hasobeu, had refrained from offering any. What he had meant to say by remaining silent was to indicate that he was prepared to accept his fate, or, in other words, that his fate would be whatever the Guide so desired. If you need to brand me as a criminal, then so be it, my Lord! Or whatever else. The choice is yours.

The rumblings of his tribe reached his ears from the main room, and brought him even greater comfort. Above the low hum he could make out little noises as of snaps or muffled clicks, which, oddly enough, far from irritating him, aroused faint nostalgia.

When he got up and opened the door to the main room, he immediately understood why. In the kitchen, on the other side of the hall, his three sisters, together with the servants, were rolling puff pastry. “You look surprised, cousin,” one of the visitors said to him. “Could you have forgotten that the day after tomorrow is your birthday?”

One of his sisters, with flour up to her elbows, greeted him with a kiss. “Did you have a good rest, dear heart? We’re in the middle of making a baklava like you’ve never tasted before.”

Still in the haze of sleep, he looked on at the layers of pristine pastry piled as high as he remembered on days before weddings in the big house back in the village. He had completely forgotten the date of his birthday, like so much else in the course of that sinister winter.

He asked for a glass of water, then turned back to gaze greedily at those layers of pastry, as if he could never have his fill of the sight of them.

Adrian Hasobeu’s birthday ought to have marked the very summit of his career, but a few hours of the day were all that was needed to finish him off.

A first, almost imperceptible eddy, faint as a fluttering of wings, arose at about eleven o’clock. Almost the entire government and the majority of the Politburo were in attendance. The Prijs was expected any minute. He usually came to this sort of event at about this time. Symptoms included a kind of withdrawal of people to the corners of the room, flagging conversations, and eyes that returned almost in spite of themselves to keep watch on the main door. Even the glasses and bottles seemed to be holding their sparkle back. Adrian Hasobeu was making a superhuman effort not to watch the clock. But the time was plain to see wherever you looked. For the expression on all his guests’ faces resembled nothing in the world so much as the round dials of a clock!

Are you all so worried on my behalf? he thought with a touch of bitterness. But he saw immediately that he was being unfair to them. They were all his people, and he would bring them down with him when he fell.

By noon the partygoers’ whispering had become incomprehensible and their meaning could only be guessed at.

Though he had already been petrified, so to speak, he still managed to summon up the thought that there was still time for a letter or a telegram to come. There was no written rule that said the Guide always had to attend in person. He couldn’t remember when, but it had happened before, he was sure of that, all the more so in view of the ever-declining state of His health.

When they took their places at table for the meal, there was an unexpected excitement in the air. The appropriate toasts were proposed, and he managed to keep up appearances. It was only during the last course, when he tried to enjoy the baklava, that the food stuck in his throat. His sister’s words came back to his mind, in disorder: a baklava such as … a baklava like … He tried to put the thought out of his mind but did not succeed. Of such a baklava he had indeed never before partaken, nor had any of his relatives.

After coffee, the guests hung around. He was eager to see the house empty and almost wanted to yell out loud: What are you waiting for, can’t you see you’re not wanted here anymore?

An unhealthy knot made of strands of blind rancor and of unreleased imprecations like: Are you standing around so as to get a better view of my fall? combined with the superstitious idea that maybe he was waiting for the floor to be cleared before making his entry, was bringing his mind to a complete standstill.

Dumdfoundedness followed his bout of exasperation. In his prostration, he suddenly saw the naked and implacable notion rise up before him that not only would the Guide not come, but that there would be no letter and no greetings telegram either. Nor would he even call on the telephone.

The sum of it was harsh enough, but an hour later, when the first shades of dusk spread across the garden, the Guide’s absence no longer seemed at all surprising. On the contrary, what now seemed crazy was to nurse the slightest hope that Himself would turn up. And it was not just the Guide’s presence, but the idea of a birthday card, a greetings telegram, or even a phone call now looked like the idle dreams of a schoolkid. He realized that very soon the downward slide of his despair would be so steep as to make him amazed they hadn’t already come to take him away.

After a short interval, the guests had begun to return in numbers. As before, bringing cakes and wine as well as bouquets. The maddest procession you could think of. Weren’t they aware there was nothing more that could be done? Except maybe to bring flowers, as they alone could be used at funerals as well as birthdays.

What was even more unbearable than their being here were the birthday wishes. On two occasions he couldn’t even understand what they were saying and blurted out, “What was that?” “May you rise ever upward!” they intoned by way of reply.

Try to look your best, his wife whispered in his ear as she pretended to come up to draw the curtains.

He turned to look at the French windows that opened onto the garden. Light was fading fast. It was years since Himself had been out so late in the day.

He encountered his wife in the hall once again. She said, “Listen, I never managed to understand why you went back … the second time … to that place.”

He looked her in the eye, at length. So, though she was putting on a good front, she too was thinking only of that.

“Why did I go back?” he answered in a ghostly voice. “You won’t believe me, but I tell you I have no idea.”

His wife, completely distraught, shook her head. “Haven’t you had enough of keeping all these secrets? You’ve spent your whole life with them!”

He too shook his head, to contradict her. “I have no secrets from you, my wife.”

He began softly, almost inaudibly, then suddenly his voice broke into a raging and inhuman bawl: “You really want to know what I did that night? I did nothing! Got that? The doors were bolted from the inside.”

“Get hold of yourself,” she urged.

He was gasping for breath.

“All the same, you must have been expecting something when you were standing outside the residence,” she went on, in a calmer voice.

“I don’t know what I was expecting. Of course, I was expecting something … Maybe a signal from inside. Or something like that … Perhaps it was supposed to be that way … Perhaps I had to wait for a sign … Maybe I was mistaken …”

“A sign from whom?”

Nothing was that simple … From someone who had been prevented from giving it … At least, that was my impression … But at no point was there any sign at all …

“But that’s dreadful!” his wife moaned. “Waiting for a sign you know nothing about … not knowing the why or the wherefore …”

“That’s where I made the wrong move. I failed to pick up the right wavelength … What he said to me that night was so unclear. And what he told me later, when I got back to his office, was even murkier. As if he had already gone to sleep …”

“That’s the worst of our misfortune,” his wife blurted out. “Even when he’s asleep he treats you like a plaything. But you and your kind, you don’t even see it! Wide awake and as blind as bats!”

He would have liked to tell her that she had probably hit upon his real secret: how to keep people on a string while fast asleep.

“Go circulate and talk to the guests,” she said. “We’ve been alone too long.”

“Are they still there? For God’s sake get rid of them for me! Tell them the party’s over. Say anything you like as long as it gets them out, and the doors closed!”

Six hundred feet away, in the large room he had been using as an office for a while, the Guide, facing the wide bay window, was listening to a secretary reporting on what could be seen going on in the garden that overlooked the rear of the presidential residence.

The last glimmer of daylight made the few trees that had been planted here and there seem to be moving off into the distance. Soon darkness would spread all over, and the dead leaves falling from the trees would no longer be seen at all.

He asked the secretary if the sky was overcast, then he wanted to know if the junket at the Hasobeus house was still in full swing.

The secretary satisfied both requests: some clouds, and the party had just come to an end.

He must have figured it out, he thought. Now he’ll need at least a week to recover.

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

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

An old ditty from his hometown came back to mind:

Those yarns you told

Were lies too bold;

Then for this fall

You promised me all …

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

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

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

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

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