The Successor by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online Page A

tavern. However, not long after, a passing herder stopped at the same place and cut a reed to make himself a pipe to play. He trimmed it deftly, as shepherds know how, then made the seven air holes, and finally put it to his lips to try it out. Imagine his surprise when, instead of playing the herder’s usual tune, the reed pipe spoke this rhyme:
    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 …
    What an extraordinary story, he kept saying to himself, while his wife whispered in his ear that now he had spat out the poison he would feel calmer and wouldn’t even think anymore about that accursed door. Anyway … anyway, if perchance, like the barber, he felt the urge to unburden himself to some well, he could use her own well. Had he not told her that it was darker and more mysterious than any other?
    He did what she suggested. But from deep inside his wife’s body, and although the sound was quite muffled, he could make out: “Hark my words … else I’ll hold my tongue … one way only … is that door hung!”
    Terror stopped him from laughing. Then their mutterings drowned in the one’s then the other’s groaning, until silence returned.
    His wife thought he had dropped off to sleep, but then he started mumbling again. All over Tirana people who suspected the Successor’s suicide of being a murder in disguise kept whispering the same question: Who could have killed him? They were besieged with all kinds of surmises, but nobody had a clue who the real murderer could be.
    “Go to sleep now,” she insisted. “Forget all about it. You’re exhausted.”
    “I will, I will, but I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve gotten one last thing off my chest. It is the absolutely last thing, believe me! — and so utterly secret that there really can be nothing more.”
    “Oh no,” moaned his wife. “I don’t want to hear any more!”
    “It really is the last, I promise you. The very last. Then there’ll be nothing but calm water.”
    She seemed to acquiesce, as she said nothing more. He brought his lips close to her ear and then blurted out, “The murderer, the man everyone is looking for but will never find, is … me!”
    Only with great effort did the architect’s wife keep from bursting into tears.
    “You think I’ve gone mad? You don’t believe me?”
    His eyes were cold and blank. She had never seen them look like that before.
    “So you too don’t want to believe me,” he continued flatly. His eyes were clouding over with anger, whereas she felt as though the world were falling apart irremediably.
    She leaned over, kissed him tenderly, and whispered in his ear, “Of course I believe you, dearest. If you didn’t do it, then who else could have?”
    He took her hand, brought it to his lips with gratitude, and promptly fell asleep.
    She propped herself up on her elbow and gazed for a long while at his emaciated face, on which a strange mask of serenity seemed to have been laid.
4
    The temperature in the Albanian capital had fallen to an unexpected low. Many had not realized that it was late March, or else had forgotten the old saying according to which the third month often asks its brother February to lend it three bitter days, to chill the bones of whoever offends it.
    With their collars turned up to keep out the cold, the people who scurried along to the meetings they had been summoned to attend in one or another of the fourteen main halls in the city had other things to worry about. They knew they had to take part in meetings of great moment related to the death of the Successor, but they felt utterly unable to guess what else might lie in store.
    Those same people had been astonished that morning when, in their various offices, they had slit open their envelope and seen on the invitation that the customary hierarchy of assembly rooms had been completely disregarded. The