Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I settled up with the cab driver, got out and walked towards the door, looking up, as if to make doubly sure that the building really was empty. All the floors were dark, but the fourth, the women’s floor, seemed particularly so.

I stopped at the porter’s lodge on the ground floor. It struck me that Auntie Katya wasn’t as welcoming as usual. She seemed to be searching for something in her desk drawer and it crossed my mind that a telegram, bearing bad news, might have come for me from Albania. But in her eyes, through the thick spectacle lenses, I saw not a glimmer of sympathy.

‘You, my boy, and your friend, the other one from Albania,’ she said, ‘you’re to report to the police.’

I frowned. I was about to ask her why when I saw in her face the same question: it had cancelled out her usual bonhomie. ‘Why?’ I asked all the same.

Lida’s abortion flashed through my mind.

‘I don’t know. I heard them say something about your ID documents.’ She pronounced dokumenty with the stress on the second syllable, like all uneducated Russians.

Through her circular glasses her eyes seemed to be asking: So what did you and he get up to over the summer?

‘My papers are all in order,’ I said. ‘And my friend has already gone back to Albania.’

She shrugged her shoulders and returned to scrabbling in her desk drawer. I was expecting her to hand over a packet of letters or newspapers from Albania, but the drawer shut with a sharp click.

‘Don’t I have any mail?’

She shook her head.

I picked up my suitcase and turned away. The lift was out of order. And my room was on the sixth floor. I started walking up the staircase, shifting my case, which was heavy, from hand to hand, wondering why I had to report to the police.

At last I got to the door of my room, opened it and went in, leaving my case in the corridor. I was exhausted. I sat on the bed and hugged my knees. For a moment I felt that all I wanted was to lie on the bed and sleep until that joyless day had been wiped from my memory. However, a few seconds later I did exactly the opposite. I stood up and started to pace up and down. My reel-to-reel tape recorder was on the table, its lid still open from the last time I had played it with Lida. I had recorded music on the tapes, but just then it seemed easier to move the Cyclops’s stone from the door of an ancient tomb and carry out its mummy than to switch on that machine. I don’t know why, but the idea of listening to music in that desert seemed monstrous.

Without stopping to think what I was doing, I opened the door and went out into the corridor. It seemed longer than usual, with its single nightlight gleaming somewhere towards the other end. I stood still for a minute, my mind a blank. The corridor was truly endless: maybe sixty doors opened on to it. No corridor before had played such an important role in my life. I recalled how it looked late at night on noisy Saturdays when young drunks, slumped on the floor, mumbled lunatic verse, or tried to break down self-locking doors that had shut in their faces.

I walked slowly. The flooring, which had been damaged in places, creaked under my feet. The Corridoriad… I felt a quiver of the kind usually set off by a combination of good and bad memories. Five other corridors ran beneath this one, and a seventh above it, and much the same things had happened in each one: people had walked along them, gone into their rooms, come out again, had friends in, swapped literary gossip, consisting of plots and suppositions often much better constructed than their own works; they’d escorted to the lift speechless, smiling and weeping women or girls who, once behind the openwork metal door, resembled caged birds eager to fly away or wild animals stuck in a trap. Sometimes, when a girl was the first to step in, she would slam the door in the face of her companion and, while the lift made its slow descent, he would run down the stairs to catch her arrival. The stairway and the pursuer twisted round the lift shaft like a vine around a monumental column.

I walked on, the floorboards still creaking beneath my feet. The emptiness in the corridor was unbearable. That door was Ladonshchikov’s. Further on I reached Taburokov’s — he was from Central Asia. Then, in sequence, I passed the doors of Hieronymus Stulpanc, from Latvia, Artashez Pogosian, from Armenia, then those of the two Georgians, who were both called Shota (one was a Stalinist, the other anti), Yuri Goncharov — he was Russian — then Kyuzengesh, from the far north; he was a Yakut or maybe even an Eskimo — his face, especially his teeth, were the sad grey colour of the tundra — and spoke disjointed Russian in such a soft voice that it sounded like the rustling of reeds. Every time I encountered him I felt like a lonely wanderer about to sink into marshland. Then came the doors of A. Shogentsukov, from the Caucasus, and Maskiavicius, from Lithuania.

Students on our course filled most of the rooms on the sixth floor. No names were posted on the doors, even though most of the residents were famous writers in their home regions or towns. Some were the chairs of the Writers’ Union in an Autonomous Republic or Region and had been obliged by the burdensome duties of their position or by insidious plots to give up their studies. At long last, after overcoming their adversaries, having accused them of Stalinism, liberalism, bourgeois nationalism, Russophobia, petty nationalism, Zionism, modernism, folklorism, etc., having crushed their literary careers and banned the publication of their works, having hounded them into alcoholism or suicide, or, more simply, having had them deported, that is to say, after having done what had had to be done, they had been inspired to come to the Gorky Institute to complete their literary education. Some were members of the Supreme Soviet of their respective republics and others were prominent figures. One day, in an economics seminar when we were discussing inflation, Shogentsukov had coolly remarked, ‘When I was prime minister I had to deal with a similar problem.’

I was now walking along the dark part of the corridor. I could see hardly anything, except the little bronze plaques that I’m sure they all dreamed of having one day on their shoddily gloss-painted doors: ‘From 1958 to 1960 this room was the home of the celebrated Abdullakhanov’; ‘From 1955 to 1960 this room was the home of…’ Wait! I almost shouted. A pale beam of light could be seen at the base of a nearby door. It was Anatoly Kuznetsov’s. It must have been his window I’d seen lit when I was in the taxi. So Kuznetsov had got back from vacation before me. If anyone had told me a minute before that somebody I knew was inside this seven-storey Sahara I would have rushed to greet him in a frenzy… One word, my brother, one word to people this desert! But suddenly in my mind I could see the eyes of the author of Continuation of a Legend — two slits behind thick lenses — and I lowered the hand I’d raised to knock at his door. I didn’t like the man any more than I liked Yuri Goncharov, whom one of the two Shotas said was the most prominent writer of all the lands watered by the Volga, while the other insisted that he was nothing more than a police informer.

I began to walk slowly down the stairs. At one point I thought I heard muffled voices and stopped to listen. Perhaps Kuznetsov was reading aloud what he’d just been writing. On the landing of the fifth floor I heard the sounds again. It was like a discreet invitation to stop. A resident had apparently gone into one of the rooms that looked onto the inner courtyard. I made my way through the murky half-light of the corridor in the hope that he was someone I knew. Thanks to a glow coming from under a door, I soon discovered which room it was. It was indeed one of those that faced the courtyard but I didn’t know who lived there. This floor was occupied by first-year students — we treated them with a degree of condescension. Despite that, I was about to knock on the door when I heard a voice coming from the room and suddenly remembered it belonged to a Chinese student, Ping, whom, for some unfathomable reason, we called Hundred Flower Bloom. He must have been reading aloud. I recalled his accent and his features and thought a screech-owl speaking Russian would have been easier to understand.