The Successor by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

be afraid!” the young man commanded. “It’s got nothing to do with what you’re thinking. It’s going to be hard for me for a quite different reason.”
    He bit his nails as he spoke. Suzana found it difficult to guess what he was getting at. It surely would be hard for him, no doubt about that. There could be nothing more awkward for a son confronted with a father displaying his bloodstained shirt not to promise to reclaim the blood debt, but to declare the opposite: “Stop waving that shirt about. You are my father — I cannot blame you for what you have done, but I have to tell you that I shall not reclaim your blood.”
    “Dearest heart,” she mumbled to herself, “why do you torture yourself with abominations like that?”
    Then, looking like death warmed over, he explained, as if he was talking to himself, why even if the opportunity arose he would not avenge his father’s spilled blood. As he’d already told her on a previous occasion, his father’s blood was different from blood that had been spilled, it flowed in a different direction, belonged to a different group. Just as their mother’s breasts were different. His father, his mother, his blood, her milk, were ruled by different laws. In parades, in songs, and everywhere they had lauded “The Light of the Party,” they had chanted “The Party is our Mother.” Soon people would be clamoring praise for “The Milk of the Party! The Teats of the Party! The Genitals of the Party!” That was actually how it had all begun in the very earliest Communist cells, where activists (male and female) slept (or did not sleep) together not by human custom, but in accordance with the prescriptions of Doctrine.
    His tone grew ever more acerbic as he spoke, but Suzana could not find an opportunity to butt in and soothe her brother.
    That’s how the whole business they did not want to recall must have started. After seizing power, and after they had spawned their own offspring, they turned the other way.
    He laughed a bitter laugh.
    “They brought us into the world, but you have to realize that that gives us only provisional status. When the hour of duty sounds, they won’t hesitate to trample us into the ground if the Party requires it. Like they already trampled on you. As they would have trampled on me, if the Doctrine had called for it.”
    Suzana finally managed to get a word in. “Dearest heart, please, please stop this!”
    “Let me finish,” he said in a deathly tone. “I’m not just saying all this. In this room, right here, my own father threatened me personally: ‘You are my flesh and blood, but you need to know that if you were ever to betray the Party, I would clap you in irons and turn the key with my own hands.’ And by the look in his eye I could see he really meant it. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He would have done what Abraham did three thousand years ago, when God asked him to sacrifice his own son.”
    Suzana held her head in her hands. As she’d become accustomed to nightmares, now she was just waiting for the sound of her brother’s voice to come to an end. But he kept on coming back to the new genetics, which encouraged sons to sell their fathers, fathers to sell their sons, wives to sell their husbands … Which is why they had understood nothing about what happened while they were sleeping as deeply as if they’d suffered a stroke, on that night of December 13.
    Suzana rose at long last and went into the bathroom. She splashed some cold water on her face. Curiously, the dreadful things her brother had been telling her these past days washed off her as easily as her early-morning nightmares.
    Once back in her bedroom, she paused in front of the mirror. She looked over her makeup equipment with tears welling in her eyes. The lipstick seemed to have dried in the tube from long disuse. She wetted it slightly before putting some on. It came out in a color that looked peculiar, almost treacherous. If her brother had