The Successor Read Free Page A

and the Successor stood side by side on the platform. In contrast to previous occasions, when the two had been seen smiling and chatting with each other, this year the Guide stood stock-still. Not only did he not utter a word to the Successor, but, as if to make his scorn doubly clear, he turned twice to say something to the person standing on his other side — the minister of the interior.
    From one end of the country to the other, people were dumbfounded by what they saw happening before their eyes. The benighted engagement had long been broken off, but no reward, not even a sign of clemency, had yet been granted the Successor for the action he had taken. On the contrary, everything seemed to suggest that the Guide was only growing angrier.
    It was the first time people had seen what almost amounted to a public display of things that in the old days could have had you convicted of malicious gossip seeking to undermine Party unity. The militant Party members were racked with worry. They would rise at dawn after sleepless nights, with bloodshot eyes, aching muscles, and coated tongues, turn to their graying wives and share with them what could not be broached in any bar: Could a forty-year-old comradeship be scrapped just like that?
    The optimists among them looked forward to the next parade, hoping that, if things would not be completely resolved by then, at least some slight improvement might be visible. And when the next parade day came, and not only had nothing mended, but the chill was even icier, they felt a great weight on their chest and, sighing with anxiety, barely managed to articulate the words “Woe betide us!”
    Toward the end of November, a tentative rumor had it that the whole business would come to an end at the winter break. Oddly enough, it gained greater acceptance than other stories, perhaps because it invoked the calendar and the natural cycle of the seasons. The red banners and bunting on the stands, the speeches and brass bands broadcast by the citywide loudspeaker system, would give way to whistling winds, to blankets of fog, and to the rumble of thunder, which had not changed in a thousand years.
    And if the first week of December had always been labeled “taciturn,” this year it seemed doubly, triply speechless. It was this silence that was broken by the gunshot that put an end to the life of the Successor. A fully muffled shot, moreover, a shot not heard outside the residence, or even inside its walls. As if the gun had been fired from beyond the grave.
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    The Albania files had come to give their users such troubles that, even if they did not admit it to themselves, their desire to see the short-term upheaval in the country settle down, and to see those files once again gathering dust, became almost noticeable.
    Alas, for the time being, there was no point even dreaming of such a thing. On the contrary, those brown folders got heavier by the day. Everyone realized that the material piling up inside them was contradictory and incoherent, to such a degree that even the most persistent analysts ended up making the same gesture of despair as everyone else and declaring, with arms thrown wide: The only way you can get a grip on a place overcome by paranoia is by becoming a little paranoid yourself.
    Their superiors in the agencies seemed to think otherwise. They scribbled spindly question marks over words and phrases like “hereditary Balkan lunacy,” “whim,” “delusion,” “symptomatic brain damage from iodine deficiency,” and so forth. A leader’s envy of his successor, envy taken to the point of murdering him, was such a common event in every place and period that it could not itself provide a key to understanding the Balkan malady. You could call to mind some of the customs of Albanian mountain tribes — for instance, their male beauty contests that were often followed by the killing of the winner, for reasons of envy, obviously — if you were writing a literary essay, but