The Successor Read Online Free PDF

that morning and would discover its sequel. Such things had happened before, but rarely, so very rarely. And even when that did happen, there was never any correction. She tried to reconstruct it from memory, but she soon realized that, however hard she tried, she could not bring back its sweetness of tone any more than she could make pink clouds stay longer in the sky. The only thing she could still feel was the bitter taste of regret at the moment of waking. Maybe the reason she so much wanted to return to the dream — if only for a few seconds — was so she could wash away the regret. Except that she was no longer very sure what depressed her the more — that she had not managed to speak to her father, or that she had not had a thought for her fiancé until the very end …
2
    “Let’s do this again,” the minister said in a casual, almost jovial tone of voice.
    His words sounded less like those of a senior official in charge of a crucial autopsy, the most important to have taken place in the history of the Communist State of Albania and maybe in all Albanian history, than like someone saying goodbye to old friends after a sumptuous meal in one of the restaurants in the hills around Tirana’s artificial lake. “The fish is really great here. Let’s do this again, okay?”
    Is this case going to be tied up or not?
    Petrit Gjadri, the forensic pathologist, strode along the Grand Boulevard toward the Hotel Dajti, thinking all the while about the minister’s remark, which grew a tad more inconceivable with every step he took.
    The architect drank in the minister’s words with feverish eyes that could have signified either pathological inquisitiveness or prurient pleasure — the kind of look that spreads like wildfire at the circus or at a fistfight in the market, when spectators or passersby rub their hands as if to say: Let’s see how this turns out!
    Are they both blind, or are they just pretending? the doctor had wondered as he watched them trading jokes like a couple of youngsters.
    As for himself, he recalled quite clearly when he had been officially notified that he would be required to undertake an autopsy of prime importance. On the body of the Successor.
    He had gone deaf for a brief instant. The whole universe had gone silent. Inside him, everything stopped — his heartbeat, his brain, his breathing. Then, as those functions gradually returned, a thought slowly formed in his mind: So that’s how we’ll put an end to this business.
    “This business” was his own life.
    After an autopsy of this kind, the continued existence of the person who carried it out seemed as improbable as evidence of life on the face of the moon.
    In the oppressive silence, broken only by the minister giving instructions, the forensic pathologist, involuntarily as it were, looked back on his career with a strange sense of distance … He had lived an honest life, insofar as that was possible, and it had certainly not been easy, given the risky nature of the profession he pursued. He had always been vulnerable to attack on account of his “semi-bourgeois” family background, but he had escaped the campaign to unmask and denounce the “so-called intellectual circle of the Tirana doctors” — accused of denigrating Soviet life — as he had fortunately only been a student at the time. After that first stroke of luck, he had managed to steer clear of being identified with another group, a coalition of teachers and students who stood accused of making jokes about China’s barefoot doctors, at the time of his country’s idyll with Peking.
    The minister’s words were clear and unemotional, pregnant with ominous promises. One had failed to carry out a procedure that it was obligatory be made on any citizen, and even more so on the Successor: an autopsy.
    The doctor tried to concentrate, but he felt as if that was only muddling his mind even more.
    So the autopsy would be done, the minister went on, despite the delay. The truth