Twilight of the Eastern Gods

by Ismail Kadare

  But one minute later I was convinced the opposite was the case. It wasn’t possible that Stulpanc had refrained from trying to get in touch with such a pretty woman. He’d seemed entranced by her. No, no, there was no reason for him to have put off calling her. As for Lida, her letter, the feelings she’d put into it, the Old Russian and all that, wouldn’t have prevented her running off with Stulpanc – quite the opposite, if all she’d written to me was true and if therefore her affection for me, the etymology, the Old Russian and all that such things entailed, had reached the state she had claimed, then of course, once she’d heard about the disaster (because that idiot Stulpanc must surely have told her I was dead), she must have dropped everything to hurry round to see him to find out more. Yes! Yes! I almost cried aloud in despair. He called her and she’s gone out with him on a date! Especially because, on this ice-cold day, all she had to listen to was this unending campaign, which must have made her think about writers and similarly sinister matters. I shouldn’t have let Stulpanc out of my sight on a day like this.

  I was at my wit’s end. I’d spent half an hour shuttling back and forth between my room and the corridor, so I decided to go out to cool off.

  A chilly breeze was whirling snowflakes into spirals under the lamp posts. I got onto a trolleybus that took me to Pushkin Square. Gorky Street looked quite beautiful in the snow. I walked to the Artists’ Café where I’d decided to have dinner. To hell with the pair of them! I thought, in a sudden burst of indifference. The snow, the wind and the street in its winter attire had clarified my feelings. It all seemed simpler now. They were in their own country, they could get married and have children, whereas I was only in transit. In transit seemed a good way to refer to myself in the soggy, soporific season of winter that I had lived through up to this point. In transit, I repeated to myself, and the Russian word vremmeny – ‘provisional’ – merged in my mind with the name of Vukmanović-Tempo. Yes, to hell with them! I ordered a glass of wine, and a little later I came out of the restaurant and went back to the bus stop in a thoroughly good mood.

  *

  The first thing that struck me when I reached the residence was the light streaming from under Stulpanc’s door. I felt a pang in my heart. I no longer had the support of snow-covered open spaces and I almost fainted. I hurried on and pushed into his room without knocking. He was smoking a cigarette. I tried not to speak too quickly.

  ‘So where did you get to, then?’

  Guilt and surprise were combined in the smile that spread across his broad Nordic face. I’d never burst into his room before with a plaintive ‘So where did you get to?’

  ‘Well?’ I added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  He stared at me with pale eyes that seemed not to have enough room in his face. At last he replied, ‘Well, I was out, with her.’

  ‘With Lida?’

  He nodded, without ceasing to stare at me.

  Gently, in heavy silence, something broke inside me. So there you are, I said to myself. I felt a great emptiness. Ideas and words had simply flown. All that was left were a few scraps of language, sounds like um and I see and really. I remembered that whenever I had had an upset of this kind, words had left me just as plant life deserts areas where the climate is too harsh; all I had left were clipped syllables of that sort, as if only they could tolerate the sudden worsening of the climate inside me.

  ‘But you yourself said . . .’ Stulpanc began. He surely meant to say, ‘You palmed her off on me,’ but apparently he found it too direct, or too vulgar, to say outright.

  My mind was a blank and I studied a picture on the wall. It depicted a sight I knew: Sigurd’s castle in Latvia. I’d visited it the previous summer.

  ‘But didn’t you set me up?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  ‘I can see you’ve had a change of heart. But if you like . . .’

  ‘What?’ My voice had gone faint despite all my efforts to make it sound normal.

  ‘If you like . . . though now, of course, the case is closed. Yes! To hell with it!’

  I’d lost the thread. Who or what was supposed to go to hell? Could nothing be salvaged? ‘Did you tell her I was dead?’

  He swallowed, then admitted it. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘I’d hoped you would be kinder!’ Now I knew the truth, words had returned to me. ‘Yes, kinder!’ I repeated, doing my best to laugh as I said it. ‘It’s just like you to pass a death sentence on me!’

  ‘But you asked me to say that! And you went so far as to tell me I should say you had died in a plane crash. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘That really takes the biscuit! I was drunk, for heaven’s sake! Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘Do you think I was sober?’

  I thought, It’s all over now. Now she believes I am dead, it’s all done for. ‘If only you hadn’t killed me off entirely,’ I said, with a flicker of optimism. Just before, when I’d asked him if he’d told Lida of my death, he’d replied, ‘In a manner of speaking . . .’ ‘You could have told her I was only injured . . .’

  Now Stulpanc lost his temper. ‘You need your head examining!’ he shouted. ‘You got me into this. I’ve never played that sort of trick. You’ve turned me into a kind of Chichikov from Dead Souls. I’d never have called the girl if she hadn’t attracted me so . . . so . . . What’s the Russian adverb to express an absolute superlative?’

  ‘Insanely.’

  ‘That’s right! Attracted me so insanely!’

  We stood there without speaking for a few seconds. I examined the Latvian castle on the wall, trying to summon up some memory of the previous summer I’d spent in Stulpanc’s country, but it was now light years away.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said wearily. ‘How did she take it?’

  He saw that I had calmed down and smiled faintly, without looking at me. ‘She was very upset . . .’ He was staring at the floor, but I kept my eyes on him. ‘Yes, she was very, very upset,’ he repeated. ‘Insanely so.’ I thought, To be pitied by someone, to arouse sympathy in Old Russian . . . ‘She even wept. Yes, she cried a couple of times. I saw tears in her eyes . . .’

  I sighed deeply, trying not to make a sound to prevent Stulpanc noticing I had sighed. I felt strangely relieved. Maybe things were better like this. If they’d been different, perhaps she would never have had a chance to cry over me. Suddenly a vague, lukewarm feeling spread through my chest. My ribs began to soften and bend as if they were in a surrealist painting. One day you will cry over me . . . Two days earlier such a thought would have made me laugh out loud. Ah! She’s crying! Little Lida is upset! Tut-tut! I was making superhuman efforts to hold down a great guffaw accompanied by those clucking noises I found so repellent in other people, but I failed. But far from succeeding in clucking, like the ne’er-do-wells of Gorky Street, I couldn’t even manage to laugh naturally, like an ordinary person. The whole thing seemed more and more primitive to me. I must have been waiting years for someone to shed tears on my behalf. I’d longed for tears with a more terrible thirst than a parched Bedouin in the deserts of Arabia. Over the last two years I’d had relationships with young women who were very free: I’d taken them to the theatre, to cafés, on night trains; we’d danced and kissed and slept together without ever saying, ‘I love you’, because it seemed old-fashioned, and recently we’d gone so far as to replace the word lyublyu (‘I love’) with the word seksyu, and were very proud of our invention. So we’d said a lot of stupid things and done just as many, following our whims from bars to dance halls, and from there, blindly and joyfully, onto a snowy downhill slope. This long pilgrimage through the desert, in gradual stages, without my noticing, but to an unbearable degree, had given me that thirst for a few tears. At last they had been shed. It had taken the intercession of death to bring those tiny blue drops into being.

  ‘What a peculiar fellow you are,’ Stulpanc said.

  So that was it! She liked dead men more than t
he living. And his words of consolation had not been wasted.

  ‘You really are funny,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘At first, when you came in, you looked like a thundercloud, but now you’re almost smiling. Did you know that sudden changes of mood are supposed to be one of the first symptoms of madness?’

  I went on staring him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s quite possible I’m going off my rocker, seeing what I did.’

  The following morning was as gloomy as the ones that preceded it. I’d barely washed when I switched on the radio, automatically. The campaign hadn’t stopped. The diatribes were the same as before but they were now being spoken in a graver tone. You could sense straight away that a new phase of the campaign was being launched that day. There was no doubt that it had been worked out in advance in great detail. The gigantic state propaganda machine never slumbered.

  There was an unusual bustle at the Gorky Institute. The consequences of Sunday’s drinking – puffy cheeks, blotches, bags under the eyes – had been finally wiped from faces that henceforth expressed only sinister harshness.

  After the second period, posters appeared on the walls of all corridors announcing an ultra-important meeting that afternoon. It was rumoured that the most eminent writers of the Soviet Union would attend, and there was even talk that the presidents of the Writers’ Unions of the People’s Republics had been called to Moscow and would probably be there.

  Meanwhile the Institute’s inmates carried on sending statements to the papers and to radio and television stations. Taburokov alone had sent pieces to fourteen different reviews and newspapers; in one he’d even described Pasternak as an enemy of the Arab nation. On the second day of the campaign one hundred and eleven dailies and seventy-four periodicals had published editorials, articles, statements and reports condemning Pasternak. More such pieces were expected in other daily, weekly and fortnightly publications and then in monthly and bi-monthly journals, science magazines, quarterlies, bilingual reviews and so on.

  ‘He ought to make a statement this evening turning down the Nobel,’ Maskiavicius said. ‘If it’s not wrapped up by eight tonight, the campaign will get even nastier.’

  ‘How could it be nastier than it is?’ someone asked.

  ‘Apparently,’ Maskiavicius answered, ‘the patriarch of Soviet letters, Korney Chukovsky, is going to call on him at two this afternoon to try to persuade him.’

  ‘And if he fails?’

  ‘Then we’ll have a big meeting.’

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘I suspect we’ll move to menace, third degree.’

  ‘Where did you learn all that?’

  ‘I know what I know,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t turn down the prize even after the third degree? What happens then? Will there be a fourth degree?’

  Maskiavicius interrupted the speaker. ‘You won’t catch me out as easily as that, mate! I wouldn’t be so careless as to tell you anything about the fourth degree. Sss.’ He whistled. ‘Fourth degree! Hey-hey! Degree number four . . . Hm! Brrr!’ With a diabolical glint in his eye, he turned tail and disappeared into the crowd.

  The meeting was held in the auditorium on the first floor of the Institute. Almost all the seats were taken when I went in. It was already twilight outside and the feeble light that trickled through the tall bay windows seemed to form an alloy with the bronze chandeliers that hadn’t yet been switched on, though I didn’t know why. The room was packed and virtually silent. The scraping of a chair and words whispered into neighbours’ ears could not dent the empire of silence. On the contrary: the occasional sounds of creaking seats and muffled gossip made the atmosphere only more leaden.

  I was standing at the entrance, unsure what to do, when I noticed people waving at me. It was the two Shotas, Maskiavicius and Kurganov, who were almost sitting in each other’s laps. I forged a path between the rows of seats, and my fellow students huddled even closer together to make just enough room for me. In the row in front of us were the Karakums and somewhere to the side I thought I could see one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’.

  ‘How are you?’ someone asked me quietly.

  I shrugged. The mood was such that you didn’t have the slightest wish to answer anything about yourself. In that drab room you felt as though you could speak only about generalities, and only through the use of impersonal verbs, if possible in a chorus, as in some ancient drama.

  I looked around at the participants. Apart from the students and teachers of the Institute, there were many known faces. The front rows were almost completely filled with literary mediocrities. They were just as I had always seen them, always present and totally invulnerable, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the front rank, stepping up to glorify Stalin before anyone else, and to drop him in favour of Khrushchev; they were quite capable of deserting Khrushchev for some other First Secretary.

  Right at the back, in a corner, in the middle of a group that remained obscure, I thought I could make out Paustovsky. Was it a group of the silent opposition or of Jewish writers? I couldn’t see them clearly enough. It was getting ever darker in the room. At long last someone thought of switching on the lights. The candelabra immediately banished the weak daylight and filled the hall with a light that reminded me of Ladonshchikov – a brightness tainted with anxiety. The first thing the light revealed was the long table of the Presidium, decked out in red velvet. The porcelain vases at each end and the bouquet in the middle made it look like an elongated catafalque. I recalled the wallpaper on the walls of the empty apartment where I had read a few pages of Doctor Zhivago. It was no coincidence that its pattern had made me think of the lid of a sarcophagus.

  ‘What does the third degree consist of?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Is that what we’re about to see?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. It depends on Chukovsky, who’s gaga already.’

  ‘I meant to ask, what exactly has he done?’

  ‘Nothing, apparently. Around two he went to Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino, but it seems he forgot why he was there. So he drank a cup of tea, and then had a nap on the sofa.’

  I was just about to guffaw, but at that moment a kind of shiver ran through the room. The meeting’s Presidium had come on to the stage to take their seats at the long table with its crimson drapery. The first were already sitting down while others, who were still in the audience, were lining up and creeping forward in waves, like a snake. Their whispered names circulated among us. They’d been summoned from here and there; most were old, some had been publishing trilogies for forty years; if my memory serves me right, five had published novels with titles that contained the word ‘earth’, and two had gone blind. My mind went back to Korney Chukovksy’s fateful siesta, but I couldn’t manage to laugh about it.

  ‘Comrades, we are gathered here today . . .’

  The opening speaker was Seriogin, director of the Gorky Institute. His eyes, as always, had a sinister and malicious glint. To his right sat Druzin, representing the governing body of the Writers’ Union. His hair was snow white, but his massive head and thrusting jaw seemed so fierce and warlike that it was hard to believe the white hair was real.

  ‘We are gathered here to censure, to . . .’

  Seriogin’s voice contained the same proportion of malice and gall as his eyes, the stripes on his suit and even his hands, one of which had been replaced by a black rubber prosthesis. The first time I saw him I supposed he’d lost his hand in the war, but Maskiavicius told me that Seriogin’s hand had slowly withered of its own accord in the course of the third Five-year Plan . . .

  Seriogin’s speech was a short one. Then Druzin rose. His contribution was no more drawn out; what he said didn’t match his white hair. As always, everything about him jutted like his chin.

  ‘Now for the fireworks!’ Maskiavicius said, once Druzin had sat down.

  Indeed, at that point dozens of hands were raised to request the floor. From the outset it was
clear that, as was customary in such circumstances, the Presidium’s selection of speakers sought to maintain some kind of balance between generations, nationalities and regions, as well as between undeclared literary groupings.

  Ladonshchikov was among the first allowed to speak. In a special voice that was both gloomy and booming (a Party voice, in Maskiavicius’s phrase), in a voice that his lungs could only ever produce on occasions of this kind, Ladonshchikov made the proposal to his silent listeners that Pasternak be expelled from the Soviet Union.

  ‘Was that the third degree?’ I whispered in Maskiavicius’s ear.

  He nodded.

  ‘If he fails to make a decision by eight p.m. . . .’