Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I moved away and carried on down the stairs. The other floors seemed to be dead. In the lobby Auntie Katya’s beady eyes followed me without a trace of goodwill. As I went out I realised I had never needed human warmth more than I did that evening. Even if she were to revert to her former friendliness, to the particular variety of benevolence that most Russian babushkas exhibited towards foreign students, I would never forgive her the coldness she had shown me earlier.

When I got into the street, it had stopped raining. There weren’t many people at the trolleybus stop. I felt a vibration in the overhead wires and then in the distance, as if emerging from a dream, I saw the stately stag coming towards me in the twilight, its antlers held high.

I got off at Pushkin Square. Gorky Street was brightly lit and as busy as ever. The block between the Izvestia newspaper building and the Moskva Hotel — the right-side pavement, especially — was the favoured promenade of the Gorky Institute crowd, perhaps because Herzen’s old house, which had been turned into the Institute, was at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Moscow’s main thoroughfare.

On the façade of the Izvestia building the neon board mentioned an exhibition of some kind and also the name of Richard Nixon. Ah! I thought. So there’s an American exhibition in Sokolniki Park… Other news, from Ukraine and the Urals, and of Khrushchev’s departure on a trip abroad, or his return, was also streaming on the board but the moving letters made me dizzy and I turned away. At Central Cinema they were showing Nights of Cabiria , but I’d seen it in Riga. A crowd had assembled around the entrance.

Without thinking, I turned back to the Izvestia news board. On his arrival at the airport, Nikita Khrushchev had been met by the p r e s i d e n t of the Presidium. But L i d a S n e g i n a had not come to meet me at the Rizhsky Voksal. I felt depressed. On the pavement outside the cinema there was a newsstand and several phone booths. I wasn’t angry with Lida, just sad. I went into one of the booths, inserted a coin, dialled the number and waited. The receiver smelt of tobacco. It occurred to me that perhaps this phone had been used to break off a relationship only a few moments earlier — I couldn’t account for the oppressive, acrid stench in any other way. I was tempted to hang up but I didn’t move, just waited. I forced myself to imagine Lida walking towards the telephone in high heels on a thick carpet (I’ve no idea why), her hair glinting gold and her stiff, straight neck keeping vulgarity at bay. Her hair and her neck, which always seemed to exude an electric fragrance, had struck me when I first saw her at a party with a Georgian man. Before I’d even glimpsed her face, I had learned her hair and neck. People are as recognisable by their necks as they are by their faces, yet in the days and weeks after our first encounter I was astounded by my own inability to memorise anything of her, save her neck. It was delicate and silky, and expressed its owner’s coolness and warmth, in so far as reserve can be called coolness, and passion, warmth.

I don’t know why but as I gazed at it, I felt that that fascinating, swan-like neck was threatened. It was perhaps a result of how my interest in that young woman first arose and perhaps because of all I had seen and heard in the corridors at my hall of residence, but that evening I imagined Lida Snegina’s neck was threatened either by the teeth of loud-mouthed Abdullakhanov or those of the mumbling Kyuzengesh.

All around her reigned the usual hubbub of dancing parties at the Gorky Institute, whose special flavour arose from the contrast between the eternal glory of literature and its living embodiments either stumbling around the dance floor or talking nonsense. Those soirées were only really lively early in the evening when the girls were still entranced by the thought that they would soon meet an actual writer. Their suitors — Goethes, Villons and so forth — were all around them: celebrity was close, just look around. May I introduce my friend Piotr Reutsky? He’s a poet. Have you read ‘Dawn of the Birches’? He wrote it. Really? Yes, indeed, that’s who he is… Over the chatter there hovered, as in a mist, the implication and the illusion that by meeting a writer you might become someone yourself and perhaps earn the right to have your initials at the head of a poem or a story, not to mention, later on, in posthumously published diaries, correspondence, memoirs, archives…

It was still the first half of the party (in the second, the truth would slowly emerge and the girls would begin to cast disdainful glances at their partners, to extricate themselves from their arms and occasionally, as happened to Nutfulla Shakenov, one would slap the face of a man with whom, only two hours earlier, she had dreamed of being entwined on a marble tombstone, her initials beside a line from the poem he would have dedicated to her, ‘I remember our April, April in the icy Karakum…’). So, as I was saying, it was still the pink and jolly part of the evening, yet Lida Snegina was already regarding it with unaffected scorn. She seemed sorry to have come, while one of her girlfriends was beside herself with excitement. ‘It’s odd,’ Lida explained to me later, once we had become better acquainted. ‘She’s an interesting person, but she has an irrational passion for writers. That one over there, he’s a prose writer, isn’t he?’ She nodded towards a man called Kurganov. ‘My friend waited four months for him to publish a story that was supposed to be about her. When the story appeared, it turned out to feature a milkmaid from the Lenin’s Way collective farm! But my friend is quite happy because Kurganov managed to convince her that the milkmaid was a disguise for the true subject, which was her! I’m not sure what I would call that if it happened to me. How about you? Are you a writer as well?’

Aha, my little pigeon, I thought, you won’t catch me out so easily! It took no great insight to guess that Lida did not like writers and that she had attached herself to me because I did not look like one. I shook my head and mumbled a few words to the effect that I did something in the cinema, regretting instantly that I hadn’t invented a calling even more distant from literature, such as table-tennis or Egyptology. She asked if I was training as a scriptwriter, but to shield myself from danger I muttered that I was vaguely involved in translating subtitles but, to be honest, I didn’t even do that… At the rate I was going I’d soon have downgraded myself to lighting assistant. At that point the band stopped playing and we parted.

Having asked her for the next dance, I told her I found it amazing that she had so little liking for writers when she was in their lair. She explained that she loved literature but mostly the works of dead authors. As for living writers, well, it was perhaps because she’d known two or three and maybe also because of her friend’s experience, no, she didn’t like them… I thought, It’s the ballad of Doruntine and Kostandin all over again, with the quick and the dead on the same horse! I felt I wanted to tell her the old legend about the promise. But something, I don’t know what, held me back.

Meanwhile her friend beamed as she danced beside us with Kurganov, and I whispered in Lida’s ear that he was surely promising to put her in a novel and make her the deputy chair of the collective farm or a matronly militant heading a delegation from the Autonomous Republic of Belarus at an international peace conference.

Lida laughed, and I reckoned it was now or never that I should ask for her telephone number. The string of six glowing pearls emerged from her whole being, from the curve of her back, her legs, her groin and her breasts, her neck and her lips — half a dozen magical digits with which I could summon her voice from anywhere in the universe. I felt more exhausted than a pearl fisherman and finally, when she and her friend left, escorted by Kurganov, I said to myself, She really was one of the most interesting women I have ever met. I had one reservation: I feared she might be a little cool. However, when I called her a few days later and she answered in a warm, still sleepy voice that she had been waiting for me to ring, I decided my fears were unfounded. She was a medical student and we saw each other frequently throughout April, May and part of June, up to the start of the long vacation. Each time I rang it struck me as odd that some women have hidden inside them a peculiar device that turns their voices from the normal tone to the tone of love, rather like a transformer that turns electricity from 110 to 220 volts, or vice versa.