The Successor by Ismaíl Kadaré

told, since earliest childhood, that before being requisitioned by the new government, the house had belonged to the pianist who played the first waltz at the royal wedding. So even if the pianist had had blood on his hands, it would not concern them at all.
    Her brother smiled sourly. He wasn’t too sure what the elders would say on the question of a house going from one owner to another. Aunt Memë had been evasive on that point too. “I’m not at home in the present,” she sighed. “We used to have other customs, like spells and curses; but now there are rituals I can’t make head or tail of. People talk about con-cresses, blinums, and what have you. Ay, ay, ay!”
    When Suzana suggested that the new part of the house probably did not yet have any history, seeing that only her engagement party had ever taken place in it when the plaster was barely dry, her brother shook his head in disagreement. He took the view that crimes moved house with people, until they found walls within which they could hide. If the crimes hadn’t been committed within these walls, then they had taken place elsewhere. In the highlands, for instance, during the last war. They called it the War of Liberation, but many people said it had been more like a civil war. In other words, a really dirty dogfight.
    “Do you think Papa might have committed any crimes?” Suzana asked, almost wailing.
    He didn’t hear the question, or pretended not to.
    What he said next made her hair stand on end: A wedding snuffed out long before would suddenly demand what was due to it if talk of a new engagement woke it from slumber. So many engagements had been broken by the so-called class struggle!
    “You’re crazy!” she riposted. “Mad and bad.”
    He replied that he was neither mad nor bad. But when Suzana burst into tears and protested that she could not bear herself and her engagement being highlighted as the cause of all that had happened, he took her in his arms and stroked her hair at length.
    “Let me cry a little longer,” she begged when her brother urged her to stop weeping.
    The graying wisps of their mother’s hair that they had seen on the morning of the tragedy, as she screamed at the deceased, so as to be heard throughout the house — “Woe! What have you done to the Party?” — had as it were gotten stuck in their minds for days on end. She was grieving for the Party’s sake, Suzana’s brother whispered in her ear. Not for her own sake. Nor for ours.
    Later on, harking back to that scene, it seemed to Suzana that the mystery of their parents’ bond with the Party would forever remain inaccessible to her and her brother. It was a bond stronger than the ties of blood, and by the same token stronger than the knot of marriage.
    “In the highlands …,” she repeated after him. Atrocities must have been committed up there. And that peculiar bond must have been forged there too.
    The nature of such a bond was presumably still little understood, because it was too new. Unlike religious allegiances, it was in competition with the ties of clan and family, because it too was a tie of blood — but with a difference. It wasn’t based on inner blood, the blood in your veins, identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand years, according to genetics, but on the other kind, on outer blood. That’s to say, on the blood of others, blood they had drunk-enly spilled in the name of Doctrine.
    Whenever their conversation drifted toward topics of this kind Suzana put her hand to her brother’s mouth. “Please don’t speak of such things, put them out of your mind!” But in spite of herself, she went over it again and again. Inner blood, outer blood …
    She turned around on hearing the front door creak on its hinges. It was her brother. “Tirana is awash with rumors!” he said, still out of breath. “Apparently, Papa is going to be rehabilitated!”
    “Hold on, tell me everything, from the beginning!”
    They sat down in the