A Tomb of One’s Own : FICTION : THE PYRAMID, <i> By Ismail Kadare</i> .<i> Translated from Albanian into French by Jusuf Vrioni and from French into English by David Bellos (Arcade Publishing: $19.95; 176 pp.)</i>

When he became Egypt’s pharaoh 4,600 years ago, Cheops hinted to his scandalized courtiers that he, unlike his predecessors, might not build a pyramid. It is the opening irony in Ismail Kadare’s mordant political parable (Cheops’ Great Pyramid is 480 feet high and covers 12 acres). Only the opening one, though.

“The Pyramid” is an iron mille-feuille: multilayered, finely honed and lethal. Advance from Page 1 to Page 16, for example. Cheops having been persuaded to change his mind, his architects are in a storm of agonizing calculations. Nothing so huge has ever been built and every proposed variant implies an entire refiguring. Outside the palace there has not been a word spoken nor a shovelful of earth moved, only fearful rumors.

Yet heavily laden chariots arrive one day from the whip factories in Thebes. The manufacturers had required no orders. They knew that royal rumors always end with a use for whips.

Kadare is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression. An Albanian who lived under Enver Hoxha--possibly the harshest Communist dictator of our time--he is an expatriate in France and increasingly honored in the world of literature.

He writes in a dimension different from the prophetic realism of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, and darker and perhaps narrower than the prophetic fantasy of Franz Kafka. His tyrants are not just Stalins or Hitlers, but Stalins and Hitlers asleep. They dream of their subjects. In Kadare’s books the dreamer, the dream and the dreamed-of drift upon slow, commingling currents.

One of his finest novels, in fact, is “The Palace of Dreams.” Its central image is a labyrinthian structure in which the dreams of the sultan’s subjects are recorded nightly and then examined for signs of disaffection. The novel becomes something richer and more encompassing than a political fable. It transmutes the mad rigors of power into the battles the human soul fights with itself.

“The Pyramid” is a shard from the same dark vision, though drier in spirit and somewhat sketchier. It too uses an edifice as its symbol. (For Kadare the tyrannies of power and fate do not so much oppress us as house us.) Here, though, it is not a teeming palace but a dead tomb. Although the nightmare is lodged in the finished structure, it is mainly played out in the process of building it.

What changes Cheops’ mind? After frenetic research, his scribes and priests come up with two arguments, one the skin, the other the core. The first is theological. With its massive grounded base and soaring pointed summit, the pyramid connects pharaoh’s kingdom with the heavens; without it, not only he but the entire realm would collapse, priests and scribes included.

Then there is the core. In times of prosperity, Cheops’ ministers argue, the citizenry loses its dread, and dread’s intimate need to worship and obey. It takes a crisis to compel these things and what greater crisis can there be than a colossal, decades-long project that will exhaust the national wealth, enslave the population and end up not only useless but needing to be started all over again? It is a monstrous reason of state, specific to this particular fable but resonating down through history to the present day. (An invisible shadow--could it be a B-2 Stealth bomber?--flits over the great pyramid.)

Like Kafka, Kadare has the gift of writing parables of great weight in the lightest of tones. He does not force disquiet: It emerges almost as a byproduct of the engaging attentiveness with which he recounts the planning and building of his pyramid. (That this delicacy survives the double process of rendering Albanian into French and French into English is a tribute to the skill of the translators; in the first instance, Jusuf Vrioni, in the second, David Bellos, who is also the graceful translator of the difficult French writer, Georges Perec.)

After the rumors and the whips, the command goes out. Some Egyptians are exhilarated--a form of war-fever--others, appalled. Nobody is spared; hundreds of thousands are conscripted for what will take 20 years to complete. Ambassadors send out coded messages and the Pharaonic spies decode them. The Sumerian envoy hires carts to transport the clay tablets he writes on, the spies arrange for the carts to be “accidentally” overturned.

New quarries are prospected; the reports devise the peculiar metaphors that national mobilizations tend to produce. In this case they are sexy: a quarry is “rounded,” “chubby,” or “fertile.” Great clouds of dust are thrown up by the quarrying, the road-building and the vast land-leveling needed to lay the first blocks. It is a symbolic haze as well--nobody knows what the details will be, or the cost, or the years and manpower that will be required.

A conspiracy is produced, a handy device to strike terror and confusion. Thousands are executed and finally Cheops asks his chief priest when attention can be shifted from the interrogations back to the pyramid. “But interrogation is also part of the pyramid, Majesty,” the architect replies. Not long after, with construction begun, a second conspiracy will be alleged; the chief priest and any number of high officials will lose their own lives.

Uncounted other lives will be lost in the building. Kadare’s account mimics the terrifying lightness of the despotic mind. He chattily recounts the toll of each of a dozen stones; six or seven deaths mark a “good” stone, 15 or 16 a “bad” one. Two sculptors’ legs are caught under number 11,379; the sculptors, not the legs, are amputated. The legless men plunge 100 feet to their death, the legs are carefully scraped out to ensure the evenness of the stone course. Bit by bit the focus shifts from the building to the builder. As the pyramid rises, Cheops grows moody. Workers and architects had been executed for slowness; then a rumor goes around that the slowness has been ordered by Cheops; the workers speed up and are executed for that.

The point, of course, is that Cheops is constructing his tomb: Inherent in the completion of the pyramid is his own death. The chief magician points out that this is true of everyone--our lives and labor all strive graveward. Cheops momentarily considers interring the magician in the pyramid instead of himself, but he desists. Ostensibly the despot, he is as caught in the machinery as his subjects. For Kadare, despotism is more than an individual human act, it is a universal poison in humanity’s bloodstream.