The Successor (16 page)

When at the end of a storm-tossed afternoon I poured my heart out to my wife, she replied with tears in her eyes, “If you are going through such pain, you must be unlike the others.”

Perhaps I am … In what looked like an unending wasteland, she planted the first seed of hope.

At that luncheon with the Successor, alongside humiliation I felt a vague, as yet ill-defined foreboding of fame. Of course I was offended … but at the sovereign’s table. Like my illustrious predecessors who dined with Nero, with the ruler of the Middle Empire, with Stalin, with Kubla Khan. They too had been threatened with relegation.

Later on, when the fear of punishment had subsided and I was back in the studio, I felt not that my hands were even more tied, but the opposite. Something seemed to have been released inside me. That freeing suddenly made me feel I had jumped over the rainbow, a fantasy we had as children when we imagined that was how boys could turn into little girls and girls could become boys.

What I actually felt was that I had taken a step of much greater import: I had escaped from the desert of mediocrity. That was the straw I clutched at, and it kept me afloat.

Absorbed as I was by the beauty of the planned remodeling, I lost track of all those thoughts. Sometimes when I looked over the drawings I said to myself: This is the residence of a Communist sovereign. A private dwelling in a country where collective property is the rule. An androgynous building half built under the monarchy, and half built now. That’s why it had such a foreign look, like something from very far away. Like a dream.

All the same, the royal six-in-hand frequently galloped through my mind. I did my best not to pay it any attention. I owed accounts only to my art. The rest was none of my business.

I was well aware I had taken a dangerous gamble.

I was convinced I was putting up a temple that would be crowned by mourning. As the saying goes, something to die for …

An inner voice urged: If you want to save the master of the house and his relatives, hold back and give in to mediocrity. But the other voice answered back: They’ve got nothing to do with you; art is your vocation, its laws alone you should obey. Even if your art engenders murder, your hands will be clean. There is no art without grieving. Which is precisely what constitutes its somber greatness.

It was at about the same time that I first heard of the underground passageway. To begin with, it prompted a feeling of great relief. So a murder plan had already been around, unconnected to me or my remodeling project. Independently of my proposals, someone had thought that the murderers ought to have a secret passageway available to them, for surreptitious entry into the building. It wasn’t me who had thought of it, it was someone else.

The relief was short-lived. I quickly recalled that the rumor had been reported to me by the Successor’s son. It was probably his own imagination, presumably the fruit of his curious ponderings on the ties between the two leaders. He talked about them in a bizarre way, calling them ties of blood, and he even went so far as to compare the tunnel to an umbilical cord.

However, even if they sprang from an exuberant imagination, these wild suggestions were very pertinent to my plan. It was not by chance that they had arisen at the same time as the remodeling project. However much I tried to keep the rumors at a distance, the tunnel was part of the project. Everything was dependent on it. It would be by my order alone that murderers would use it.
A parancsomra ök gyilkolhatnak
…* At my command they will kill …

These notions buzzed around in my head for days on end. It became something as repetitive as boredom. I had the fate of a whole clan in my hands. All I had to do was to make a mess of the dwelling and the murderers would have to stay crouching in the tunnel for centuries. Otherwise …

The days sped by. The work was nearing completion. The residence was still hidden by scaffolding. It seemed to me that everyone was waiting impatiently for it to be dismantled so as to reveal the new residence.

September was on us, and the leaves began to fall quietly. The scaffolding was taken down at night, a few days before the engagement party. All around, silence reigned.

When on the day of the party, that Sunday afternoon, I crossed the threshold, the other guests were already there. I wasn’t at ease in the glowing atmosphere, joyous and relaxed. Suzana, in her pale dress, seemed the incarnation of harmony and proportion.

*In Hungarian in the original.

Good wishes were on everyone’s lips. May there be only happiness under this roof! Who’s the architect? Ah, so you’re the architect. Congratulations, a thousand congratulations, what a gem!

After my second glass of champagne, I almost screamed out: Talk about whatever you want, but not about this house! We can do without your comments, close your eyes, for pity’s sake!

But it was too late. The assassins had already taken up their quarters, underneath, in the dark, lower down than even the foundations of the house.
A parancsot nem lehet megtagadni
… The order could not be countermanded …

A final glimmer of hope lit my heart when I saw the Guide’s blank stare. Though he was trying hard to mask them, the first signs of blindness were apparent. He can’t see a thing, I thought, he’s in no position to make anything out at all clearly. In spite of myself, I imagined him prowling around the house with shuffling gait feeling the walls with his hands, as the blind do in order to form an idea of things or people. But touch does not allow you to tell the beautiful from the ugly.

That’s what I was thinking until the hope I nurtured was dashed to the ground as I saw the look of his wife standing at his side. Her narrowed, sarcastic eyes were scrutinizing everything, down to the smallest detail. I thought: It would have been better if his were still the seeing eyes, not hers. I never found out what happened right after the ceremony, when the Guide left with his wife.

Khaany mori zurgaan
… He didn’t need a six-in-hand or a coach. It was not a long way from one house to the other, from the Guide’s to the Successor’s. But it was far enough.

Mediums and masters of the occult, you know the mysteries and the paths that lead to them. Nonetheless I say to you again, for the thousandth time: Leave me in peace! Even if I wanted, I could not give you what you seek. It is not transmissible, not because of any whim on my part, nor because of any incompetence on yours, but because it is so by its very nature.

I am other. What’s more, I am not whole. I have no grave, and I am lacking half my skull. I have been exhumed so often — lugged here and there, flung unceremoniously into sacks and plastic bags with lumps of earth and shingle — that part of me has gone missing. But that’s a mere detail. Even if I were whole, even if I had been embalmed and preserved in a marble tomb, you would not get anything out of me besides fog and chaos.

I am other in a different sense. I am of infinite otherness, such that each link in my otherness engenders another kind of otherness, which in turn engenders another, and so on, which prevents all understanding between us.

I was the
Pasardhës
. He who comes next. But nextness was not a question of distance, such as the two paces I had to leave between us when standing behind the Guide as we paraded onto the platform or stood on the rostrum. Nor was it a chronological nextness, referring to the years I would reign after him. No, it was a much more complicated business.

We are a race apart, and we can only understand each other. But we are so few in number that amid the dark turmoil of this world above which human souls swirl, it is only rarely, extremely rarely — once every thousand years, maybe every ten thousand? — that we ever come across one of our own.

Thus, one summer’s night, I saw a scorched silhouette fleeing all alone, and thought I glimpsed my opposite number Lin Biao, the designated successor of Mao Tse-tung. But it can’t have been him, apparently, as he didn’t return my greeting. Or perhaps he didn’t recognize me, because you can’t argue that someone graced as I am with only half a head is more recognizable than a burnt-out skeleton.

I was really sorry to miss that opportunity to exchange a few words with a colleague. To tell each other about our respective enigmas, or at least to share feelings about our fates: Have you seen what they’ve done to us! My need was so strong that I turned my head, but meanwhile it had become impossible to pinpoint him in the celestial vault. My only solace was the thought that the opportunity to meet again would perhaps recur in the next two or twelve thousand years.

To him, a man of my own kind, I could have told the story of what happened to me; but no way can I tell you. For unlike the language that serves for us to talk to one another, a language allowing our kind to communicate with yours has not yet been invented on earth, and never will be.

That’s why we can never agree on any subject. That’s why the suspicions that beset me on that night of December 13 remain vivid and topical despite Albania’s subsequent transformation. We could have more easily imagined the ground changing place with the sky than we could have foreseen the country’s turnaround. But in the end, Albania did turn. However, despite that upheaval my puzzle, or rather, the double enigma of the Guide and myself, remains unresolved. Nothing has helped to solve it: the opening of the archives, the belated autopsies, the identification of my remains, clairvoyants from Alaska, the Kremlin, and the Accursed Mountains, even Mossad — no thing or person has made a dent in the shield that protects our secret.

The same questions will not stop nagging through the ages. What happened on the night of December 13? What caused the Successor to fall? Who pulled the trigger?

That night … Ah, how impossible it is to explain anything about it! The night, to begin with. Was there a night of December 13? Hard to say. I was lying on my bed, drifting toward sleep, waiting for my wife to bring me another cup of chamomile tea. Now and again she wandered toward the window as if trying to spy something outside in the dark. I was half asleep, and in my mind I was already in the assembly room where I was to appear the next day, answering the same questions. The place I would be a few hours later, but not in flesh and blood, only in spirit. They were discussing me as if I were still alive, with the Guide barely succeeding in holding back his tears: And now that you are back among us after this terrible shock, dear Comrade Successor, make yourself vital to the Party once again!

When I was already in the morgue, they behaved as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no night of December 13, but instead, a different set of events, a kind of parallel sequence, some unnatural cut-and-paste of the day before and the day after that stopped time flowing between them. Or made it flow in reverse.

Anyone one else would have found this reversal bizarre. But not I. It was part of my being, in its essence as well as its outward form.

My life in no way resembled human living. Such cases are often called “a dog’s life.” It was worse than that. It was a Successor’s life. I was he who would come after. Preassigned to fill the Guide’s shoes. Which was how he reminded us all, but himself first of all, that one day he would not be there anymore, whereas I would go on existing.

Some days, the thought of it terrified me. I wondered how he could bear it himself. How could he tolerate my being there, how could he tolerate all the others who had accepted the pact? Why didn’t he rise up and shout: What on earth makes you think the future course of events can be known with such certainty? Why are we looking to the grave to order current affairs? Was it so exceptional for mortals to die in defiance of the established order? Why in his case, or rather in both our cases, was this order to be treated as the bottom line, at any price?

At times when I felt less tense with anxiety, I was sorry for the man. I swooned with the affection that his generosity inspired. I was prepared to throw myself at his feet and implore him:
Prijs
, if you have the slightest misgiving, take the title away from me, yes, take back the title! Sometimes I went even further and told him in my heart: Ask what you will, we are all prepared to lay down our lives for you. Gives us an opportunity to show these are not just vain words. And this time let me have the first turn. At the dark hour, when death is nigh, give me your leave to take the final step and, by quitting my place and my mortal coil, to stare death in the eye by laying down my life on your behalf.

I knew I meant it. Maybe even more than I should have, as on that April night when we were hanging around together on the balcony after dining. We’d been discussing events of the past, in particular when we’d broken off certain relations. We’d got on to the falling out with China when, taking a deep breath, he blurted out that it was rumored than Lin Biao, Mao’s successor, hadn’t been a traitor and certainly hadn’t been burned to a crisp in the airplane in which he was trying to escape — but that Mao had had him to dinner and then had him killed when the meal was over.

I have no idea how long I stood there like a statue! All I know is that each split second that passed seemed unbearable, because of all the dangerous conversation topics we could have touched on, that was by the far the worst. Unthinkingly I came out with a “You never know …” Just to make matters worse, I went on to say that I didn’t believe he was guilty any more than I thought him innocent.

He stared at me with deep feeling. Then he got up from the sofa and came over to put his arm around me. His chest was heaving with sobs as he murmured softly, “You are the most loyal, the most faithful among the faithful.” His cheek wet with tears pressed against mine, but suddenly a question seared my heart. What was all this weeping about? Had I not deceived myself? Had I not sealed my fate with my own words? Was he in fact mourning me before my departure?

That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I kept harping on his sobs and tears, which seemed to have only one explanation: He had been moved by my sincerity. I had said what I thought without imagining that my own suspicion of treason on the part of the Chinese successor could amount to an unwitting confession of a similar sentiment buried deep inside my unconscious mind. I talked myself down in that way but a contrary thought sprang up in immediate response: Hadn’t I gone too far with sincerity? Hadn’t I hoisted myself on my own petard? For days on end I tried to make out what he really thought of me, but I never picked up the slightest sequel to that after-dinner talk. I guessed he must have forgotten it. His brain needed to lose ballast, just like anyone else’s. I came to understand, only a little too late, that I was wrong. He never forgot anything.