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national cemetery — as a herald of anti-Yugoslavianism. His third and most recent unburying, which took his body to the municipal graveyard once again, had been done almost on the sly, but no one yet knew why.
    Cawing from above made the doctor raise his eyes. He smiled to himself, thinking that the Greeks must have been quite near the mark in divining political fortunes from patterns made by flocks of birds.
    They were all washed up, the three of them, that was for sure. Including the minister, who headed their little group. But like the architect, he did not seem to have grasped the fact, unless the pair of them were putting on an act. Instead, they seemed to find the case entertaining; far from hiding this, they went in for larks and japes as if they were not a government minister and a senior architect but a couple of merrymakers. When it was over, before parting, they had a few words in private, then vanished together into the basement of the residence.
    The doctor immediately put them out of his mind in order to concentrate his thoughts on the autopsy. That it was, at the very least, an autopsy of the first magnitude was not much consolation to him, but on the other hand he could have ended up like his colleague Ndré Pjetergega. A Gypsy from Brraka had lain in wait for him behind his door and, with a shout of, “Doctor? Bastard! Are you the one who said my daughter was pregnant?” he had beaten him to death.
    The yellowing leaves in the park on the other side of the Grand Boulevard made him sigh. God knows why, but the refrain of an old homosexual lament, which he’d heard years before in Shkodër, kept running through his mind:
    They say two candles were lit
At the Vizier’s yesterday.
Holy Virgin, for Sulçabeg we pray:
His throat a razor has slit.
    In the corridor of the Successor’s residence, the doctor was suddenly seized by the vision of the young woman in a nightdress revealing the shape of her delicate, quivering limbs. It was her engagement, it was she herself who lay at the root of her father’s tragedy. And therefore at the root of a tragedy that would be their common lot.
    As he was stepping inside the Hotel Dajti, a question began to form unobtrusively and gradually in his mind. Why had he, Petrit Gjadri, been chosen to perform this prestigious autopsy? But henceforth he should not try to answer that or any other question. He was under a stay of execution, and he had to try to use the time remaining to good effect. The coffee he was going to enjoy in a hotel set aside for the exclusive use of foreigners and members of the nomenklatura — a place he would have dared to enter previously only in quite exceptional circumstances — would be just a foretaste of the higher serenity that was slowly spreading through his being. The kind of freedom that humans call “the peace of the grave,” without really appreciating it insofar as they usually experience it only as they die, had, in this particular case, become available to him a little ahead of time.
    He strode purposefully toward a table without even glancing at the customers at the bar. With an icy stare he turned to the waiter and asked almost casually for a double shot.
3
    Six hundred feet away, the architect was hurrying home, with his chin buried in the upturned collar of his coat. His wife had been more adamant than ever: “As soon as you’re done, you come straight back. No café, no club, no ‘just ran into whatsisname.’ Is that clear? I’ll be waiting for you in fear and trembling. Can’t you imagine? Our lives, the lives of our children, everything depends on what happens today, doesn’t it?”
    The architect looked at his watch. After the forensic pathologist had left the room, as he himself was about to bid the minister goodbye with a handshake, the politician had whispered to him, “Stay a while longer!”
    Putting an arm around his shoulder, the way leaders do when wishing to indicate a degree of goodwill toward intellectuals,