The Successor by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online

walled up! Shut up for all eternity …”
    “That’s the literal truth. Don’t get excited, it’s about something else. One day …”
    The woman gripped his hand as all of a sudden her mind went back to the words of the old Muslim prayer.
    He told her everything, in stark, cold, and unusually precise terms. One day, not long after the Successor’s son had revealed the existence of the door, he had gone back down to the basement. His own accursed curiosity had driven him to it. So he had gone back down and looked for the door in the dingy gloom. He spent a while going over it with his hands, like a blind man, until he was sure of what he had half guessed already.
That
door could be opened from only one side — from
His
side. On that other side, there had to be bolts and locks, because on this side, the Successor’s side, there was absolutely nothing!
    “I don’t understand,” his wife butted in. “Is that all there is to your mystery?”
    The architect smiled sourly. How could she not understand? The greatest mysteries are like child’s play. The Guide and his people could get into the Successor’s place whenever they wanted. Be it at dawn or on the stroke of midnight. But the Successor could not. Worse still: The Successor had no way of preventing the door from being opened. He wasn’t supposed to. He didn’t have the right to. Most likely that was what the agreement between them said.
    At last the penny dropped. For a moment she was dumbstruck. “So the murderers could have gone that way at their leisure …?” she finally managed to articulate. “Do you realize what a catastrophe you have just unearthed, you poor man?”
    “Of course I do,” he replied. “That’s why I didn’t mention it earlier. God be my witness of the torture I endured to keep it secret. It would have been easier to nurse a black hole in my heart. Now that I’ve told you, I feel a burden has lifted from my chest.”
    His wife began stroking him again.
    “My poor boy,” she murmured.
    “That door,” the architect resumed, “had oneway hinges, like the gates of the hereafter.”
    The woman put her arms around him. It was time for them to forget. Now that he had spat out the poison, there was nothing for them to do except to swear they would never speak of it again. Not even in a wasteland where not a breath of life stirred. Because even places like that could send an echo of such a secret. Like in the story of the barber who one day cut the hair of a lord of bygone days …
    “Wasn’t that aristocrat called Gjork Golem?” he queried. “Tell me the story again, please.”
    So she began to tell the tale, like she used to, speaking very quietly, as if she were humming a lullaby. With half-closed eyes, the architect imagined the wasteland and the barber coming across it, his face drawn and weary. The secret he had discovered when cutting the lord’s hair was too terrible even to think about. The lord’s threat had been of the same order — enough to send shivers up and down your spine. “If you repeat a single word about what you discovered when you were cutting my hair, you wretch, your life will not be worth a penny.” But the barber could not imagine anything strong enough to keep him from revealing what he had seen: two tiny horns right at the back of the lord’s head, at the top of his nape. Which was why he was wandering over the desolate moor in winter looking for the remotest spot possible where he could relieve himself of it by speaking it out loud. He stopped at an abandoned well, hidden by a few reeds waving in the wind, and squatting over it he spoke these words:
    Hark my words else I’ll hold my tongue
Gjork Golem’s eyes may be dull and blear
But the back of his head is yet more drear
There’s two little horns where men have none …
    Then he went back to his village, feeling much relieved, and believing that now he had gotten the secret out of himself it would no longer torment him at home or in the