Twilight of the Eastern Gods

by Ismail Kadare

  ‘A three-day stay,’ ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ went on, just behind my neck. ‘The peasant drops in on the peasant . . . Ssh! . . . while the noble Armenian people . . . did I say anything? . . . bask in happiness!’

  I changed my seat so that I wouldn’t hear Pogosian raving in his medley of Russian and Armenian and found myself opposite Shakenov, who was reciting for the benefit of one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ his recently completed ‘The March of the Savings Banks’. Three months previously he had published ‘The March of the Soviet Law Courts’, which had brought him sacks of readers’ letters. ‘All you have to do now,’ Stulpanc had joked, ‘is to write “The March of the Soviet Prisoners”, but you’ve got plenty of time, you never know what might happen.’

  ‘A three-day stay! My God! We’re back to the days of the Russian peasantry. But mum’s the word!’

  Artashez Pogosian had wriggled closer to me again and this time there was no escape. The carriage hummed with whispers and mumbling. I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking. On the way back from Yalta the previous winter, throughout the long train trip across the lush Ukrainian countryside, standing in the slippery corridor of the carriage, which often smelt of vomit, I’d heard endless tales of that kind, all night long, whole chapters of novels, entire acts from plays. But the journey from Peredelkino to Moscow was short and there wasn’t sufficient time.

  The Shotas had tried but failed to engage the two girls in conversation. I looked around for Antaeus but all I found was the pasty, fish-eyed face of the art history professor. She was a well-known iconographer, and I suddenly realised that, despite the icon-like pallor and flatness of her face, she was still a young woman. I moved closer to her, and she asked me sweetly, ‘Don’t you have your own story to tell?’

  I was taken aback. ‘To whom?’

  ‘To me, of course!’

  Her eyes seemed like part of a very old painting, worn away by time.

  ‘But my story is about dead people,’ I said. ‘My subject—’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  Of course, there was nothing wrong with it. It occurred to me that, with the way she looked, the only subjects anyone would ever want to broach would be macabre.

  ‘Maybe I’ll tell you later, in Moscow, when we’re back,’ I said.

  ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘I can wait.’

  I could barely repress a shudder. What exactly was she expecting? I turned to look out of the window but the darkness had swallowed everything. It was completely black outside. A black abyss, with us moving blindly through it. It was nearly six and I thought I would miss my appointment with Lida at the Novoslobodskaya metro station. Oddly, that did not upset me. If only you knew, Lida! I thought placidly. But on the heels of that thought came another: what was it precisely that Lida should know? Nothing. A suburban railway carriage, a wet floor and, trodden into the still only half-melted clumps of snow, stories that would never be written and theatrical scenarios that would never be performed on any stage . . .

  We got to Moscow around seven. Our group made a boisterous entrance at the Gorky Institute. Most of us were swaying on our feet, wearing innocent smiles and burping occasionally.

  ‘Ah! Here are my lambs, returning to the fold,’ said Auntie Katya, from behind her counter.

  Meanwhile, those who had stayed behind at the residence came out into the corridor or opened their doors to welcome the travellers home. But they looked much the same as the returning mob. The vast building was full of grating voices, snatches of song, vodka fumes and the banging of toilet doors. I tramped along corridors on various floors until, in a dark corner, there loomed before me the black shape of a public telephone with the digits on its dial gleaming as white as shark’s teeth. Lida had surely gone home upset and angry. I put fifteen kopecks’ worth of coins into the slot and dialled. ‘Hello!’ she said. Yes, she was cross, but calm. I tried to persuade her it wasn’t my fault, but to judge by her curt and haughty response, she must have been waiting for me to hang up. I told her we could meet at the same place a little later, but she refused. I’d almost lost all hope of seeing her again and felt dreadful.

  ‘Lida,’ I said, my voice cracking, ‘I really need to see you this evening. If you knew . . .’

  ‘If I knew what?’ she asked. Her voice had perked up, grown lighter and sharper in the huge, still midnight space where you think you can hear stars bumping into each other. ‘What?’ she asked again.

  ‘If you knew how horrible it is here tonight . . .’

  The midnight void settled between us, like the emptiness of a morgue. Then she asked: ‘Are you lonely?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered faintly. I would have liked to add words of a kind that has never existed. For a split second I thought I knew some but I didn’t move my lips to say them aloud. I just sighed. It was such a sigh that I imagined that if I didn’t get a grip on myself right now my very soul would be ready to depart my body.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come. Wait for me at the usual place.’

  I ran to the trolleybus stop and twenty minutes later I was at the metro station. The escalators spewed out an endless stream of travellers. Their astonishingly fixed heads came out first, then their chests and finally their legs. I felt confused. I was afraid I stank to high heaven of vodka. Sometimes I even imagined I still had my skis on. At last I saw her golden hair appear with its electric sparkle, then her neck, so straight, the memory of which was always accompanied by a kind of pain. In my mind the idea of losing Lida was always associated with a vision of that straight neck alongside someone else’s.

  ‘Here I am,’ she said, without a smile.

  Her inquisitive eyes looked me up and down from head to toe. We’d become strangers. Only when she took off her gloves to pick something off my shoulder, maybe a snowflake, did she seem close again.

  We walked for a little while in the wake of the moving crowd.

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked.

  ‘No . . . I mean . . . only a little,’ I mumbled. ‘You know I don’t like drinking.’

  ‘So, at your place, is it really as dreadful as you said?’

  She wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Yes, yes, back there it’s sheer hell.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Would you like to come and see?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I felt I wasn’t making myself clear, which made me want to take her there.

  We were going past the gloomy walls of Butyrky Prison when she exclaimed: ‘Look! There’s a taxi!’

  We hailed it and, without thinking what I was doing, I gave the driver the address of the Gorky Institute hall of residence.

  I could see lights twinkling in the building. A knot of tipsy students were talking to each other in front of the porter’s lodge. Auntie Katya had livened up, too. On party nights when residents had been drinking they were usually quite open-handed as well. She was talking with Taburokov and laughing, but when she saw me her face suddenly darkened. Her narrow eyes with their reddish lashes cut through Lida like a knife.

  ‘Your ID, my girl.’

  Lida was flustered. She looked in her bag, then at me. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Haven’t you got some kind of card?’ I whispered. ‘It’s just a formality.’

  The old hag never asked for papers from the dozens of girls who came into our residence with their boyfriends. She had only been doing it to me for the last few weeks, undoubtedly because of the police summons.

  Lida scrabbled in her handbag again and fished out a card.

  ‘Ah!’ said Auntie Katya, as she studied it. ‘A Komsomol card. Hm!’

  You old witch! I thought. Baba Yaga!

  But Kurganov came to my help and asked her outright, ‘Why are you asking for ID from his friends? Y
ou never ask anyone else.’

  ‘You keep your mouth shut!’ Auntie Katya riposted. ‘This is management business.’

  Lida’s mood had darkened.

  ‘Yes, why is she so keen to see the IDs of your friends?’ she asked, as we waited for the lift.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Does she think you’re a suspicious character?’ she pressed.

  I still didn’t know what to say so I shrugged again. ‘I’m a foreigner.’

  She stared at me for a moment, then looked away. But in her eyes, for an instant, I thought I saw something like compassion. Infinite compassion in a halo of light, quite different from the ordinary human kind. I was well aware that, amid the hostility between males that blanketed everything like winter, Russian girls had the courage to protect foreign guests.

  How difficult it is to get into foreign lifts . . . But we got in. As it slid upwards, the iron fretwork of the shaft allowed glimpses of corridors on various floors, room numbers, faces and necks. I tried to tell Lida about the residence and its inmates. First floor: that’s where the first-year students stay; they’ve not yet committed many literary sins. Second floor: critics, conformist playwrights, whitewashers. Third . . . circle: dogmatics, arse-lickers and Russian nationalists. Fourth circle: women, liberals, and people disenchanted with socialism. Fifth circle: slanderers and snitches. Sixth circle: denaturalised writers who have abandoned their own language to write in Russian . . .

  That was where the lift came to a halt, on the sixth floor. As I opened the door I bumped into Stulpanc who, for no obvious reason, just stood there, stock still, apparently stunned.

  ‘Denaturalised . . .’ she echoed. ‘So you’re one of those who’s abandoned his own language?’

  ‘No, not me. I’m a foreigner.’

  Stulpanc fixed his pale eyes on Lida.

  ‘This Latvian hasn’t yet renounced his own tongue either,’ I whispered in her ear, ‘but they’re working on him.’

  ‘What a beauty!’ Stulpanc said of Lida, without shifting his gaze.

  He was a serious young man and I’d never seen him behave like that before. But that night, drink had got the better of him.

  There was a strange excitement in the corridor. You could feel that something was afoot. I thought I could distinguish a group of Karakums huddling somewhere near my room. As Lida and I approached, the group vanished. All I found were the two Shotas emerging from the service staircase and swearing at each other. One was tall and fat-faced, his cheeks even more florid than usual; the other was a short, sly customer, who looked like a ball of wool. Hardship and resentment seemed to have settled in his thick hair, curling and frizzling it into a nest.

  Lida took my arm and held it tight.

  A sad Asian song came from behind a door. Further down we caught fragments of sentences in languages we’d never heard before.

  ‘Let’s get out,’ Lida said. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘We’ll go down to the fourth floor. Perhaps they’ve started the outpouring.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Plot-spew! That’s what they call it. On nights like this they tell each other the plots of books they’ll never write. Some of them throw up – that’s why they call these sessions plot-spews.’

  ‘How can you say such horrible things?’

  ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ I said. ‘You’ll see for yourself.’

  On our way we met Goncharov going up.

  ‘He’s a government spy,’ I told Lida.

  ‘From the fifth floor?’

  ‘What a good memory you’ve got!’

  She clutched me tighter. On the fourth floor the outpourings had indeed already begun. In pairs, rarely in threes, my fellows slowly paced from door to door in the ill-lit parts of the corridor, mumbling as they went. Plot-spews were still few but the distraught expressions on their faces made it clear there would soon be plenty.

  ‘They’ll never write any of the things they’ll tell each other about tonight,’ I explained to Lida. ‘They’ll write other things, often the exact opposite.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t like writers. How fortunate you are not to be one of them!’ She added, as an afterthought, ‘Please, don’t crack your fingers like that!’

  In a muddle, I got out my handkerchief and spat into it.

  She looked at me, appalled. ‘What’s come over you? You never do that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That. Spitting like that.’

  ‘I’ve no idea if I do or I don’t . . .’ I really didn’t know what had got into me.

  ‘Why do you live here? Can’t you find somewhere else?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘Ladonshchikov is a bastard,’ somebody shouted, leaning on his door.

  From the end of the corridor of the women’s floor came sounds of music.

  Lida stopped dead. On the floor, at her feet, was a puddle. It looked like vomit and probably was.

  ‘I’d say that was playwright’s spew,’ I joked.

  ‘Stop it! Please, let’s get out of here.’

  We took the stairs. Maskiavicius, whose nose was bleeding, overtook us. I wanted to say hello but Lida tugged at my sleeve.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked her.

  She sighed deeply. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she replied. ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head.’

  I was on edge. I had an almost irresistible urge to do just about anything or, rather, to undo something. My knees felt out of joint, my elbows felt dislocated, my jaw felt unhinged. I tasted ash.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘You’re hurting my arm!’

  I jerked my head around to look at her with almost hate-filled eyes. That was why I couldn’t control myself this evening. It was because of her. She was the reason my nerves were in such a state – she and her face, with its halo of solar wisps, her purity and propriety, with the white obelisk of her neck, defying everything around it, including me. Right! I thought, in a moment of lunacy. You’ll soon see what I’m really like! An irresistible desire to hurt her tightened into a ball inside my chest.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ Her voice was softer now. She was gazing at me with sympathy, clouded with a bluish haze. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

  You’ll soon see, you little witch!

  We were on the sixth floor and I was leaning against the lift-cage ironwork. She saw that I was about to tell her something important; she was waiting for it with her mouth half open and what might have been the marks of suffering on her cheeks.

  ‘Listen!’ I said, in a feeble voice I could barely get past my teeth. Then, my eyes darting around as if I was about to reveal a great secret, I mumbled something half Albanian and half Russian that I didn’t understand myself.

  She looked at me serenely. Then, putting a hand on my shoulder, she drew her head close to mine as if she had spotted something barely visible in the depths of my eyes, at the back of my skull. Hoarsely, as if she’d said, ‘From now on you are a diminished man in my eyes, you are a murderer, a member of the Mafia, of the Zionist International, of the Ku Klux Klan,’ she whispered, ‘I’m beginning to believe that you . . . you too . . . you are a writer!’

  It seemed to me that my answer was just a laugh. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a writer but, unfortunately, not a dead one!’

  We stood there for a while just looking each other in the eye.

  ‘I’d started thinking you were,’ she murmured.

  Suddenly I felt that my confession had not been destructive enough and I hastened to finish digging myself into a hole. I told her that if I didn’t get out soon I would start throwing up as the others did, not just in the corridor but from the windows on to passers-by, on to taxis, from the sixth floor, from the top of the Kremlin’s towers, from – from—

  Her eyes were popping as she put one hand over her mouth and, with the other, pressed the call button for the lift. Eventually it arrived but only when she closed the do
or on herself did I grasp that she was leaving. I shook the handle but it was already on its way down. I started running down the stairs, winding round and round the cage inside which Lida was falling, inexorably falling. I spiralled around a void that was a monumental column. I clung to it as though I were an ornament, in classical, Doric, Ionian or Corinthian style, wrapped around Trajan’s column, crisscrossing the bas-relief depictions of battles, armour, blood, and horses with hoofs that trampled my head . . .

  When I got to the bottom the lift’s door was open and it was empty. Lida had gone. I saw Stulpanc pacing up and down the corridor.

  ‘I saw your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Why was she in such a hurry to get out?’

  I mumbled a few incomprehensible syllables.

  ‘What a fabulous girl!’ he added. ‘You’re a fool to let her go.’

  ‘If you want her, take her!’

  His eyes widened.

  What made me rejoice in the satisfaction of revenge? Oh, yes. In saying ‘Take her!’ to Stulpanc, I had maintained the illusion that I was treating her like a harem slave, selling her on. I knew it wasn’t true, that I had no power over her, but the brash way in which I’d offered her to Stulpanc made me feel as if I had.

  In fact, the previous year, at a very private party in his room, when we had been drunk, we had swapped partners. It was an episode neither of us liked to recall.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ I repeated. ‘I’m serious. Over to you.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Stulpanc. ‘Tell me more . . .’

  ‘There’s no deal involved,’ I told him. ‘She’s a present.’

  Absurdly, I felt relieved.

  ‘But how am I going to—’

  ‘Look, here’s her phone number,’ I said, fishing a piece of paper out of my pocket. ‘Call her some evening and tell her I’ve left or gone mad or— Wait . . . say I’m dead! Do you hear? Tell her I died in a plane crash.’

  The idea that if she believed I was dead she would think of me with affection, perhaps even love, flashed through my mind and something softened in my chest.

  Stulpanc stared at me, astonished. ‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘I don’t like the way you’re behaving.’ And he gave me back the scrap of paper with her phone number.