The Successor. Ismail Kadare

as a kind of herald. Then, if the measure once taken seemed excessive, the Successor was ready and willing to take the blame, allowing the Guide to play the role of moderator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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