The Successor

The Successor Read Free Page B

Book: The Successor Read Free
Author: Ismaíl Kadaré
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definitely not if you were trying to present a serious political analysis. And if you did, it would come down to saying that the whole history of the peninsula was no more than a working out of the old legend about the mirror on the wall: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all …”
    The analysts ended up coming back to the main questions, after wearing themselves out in the pursuit of the puzzling issues raised by the beauty contests in the northern highlands — which could be understood either as a symptom of almost prehistoric male vanity, or as an indulgence of homosexuality by Albanian common law, which in other respects was so harsh.
    Responding to repeated comments that it was time to be a bit more serious, the specialists on the Balkan desk came back once again to their other hypothesis, the one marked with a huge question mark: Is the country changing its political line? Obviously, the first thing that occurred to them was to make a connection between the murder of the Successor and some preceding attempt by him to deviate from orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the huge mass of intelligence now reaching them contained not the slightest, not the tiniest, sign that the Successor had ever tried to introduce the minutest change in the political line of the Albanian regime.
    Though it was true that marriage with a member of an ancien régime family could be interpreted in Albania as a sign of relaxation of the class struggle, aside from this fact the Successor was the last person who could be accused of slackness in class warfare. Throughout his long career, he had been a hard-liner at every turn, never a moderate. He had taken on that role long before, and for years people had suspected that when the Guide wanted to impose harsh measures, he first sent the Successor out ahead of him 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 crackpottedness 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 rumors 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 wit’s 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

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