Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

All of that was going through my mind as I stood in the telephone kiosk listening to the gaps between the ring tones and surrounded by the smell of stale tobacco. Razluka : ‘Break-up’. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that as a brand-name for cigarettes? It would surely be a winner. A packet of Razluka . Twenty Rusalka . A carton of Rizhsky Voksal .

I imagined her on her way to pick up the phone, holding herself so straight, and, in my mind, I mercilessly dismembered the Procrustean corridor of her lodgings, making it longer and longer to justify the time she was taking to get to the phone and pick up. At long last the fifteen kopecks dropped somewhere inside the call box — or, rather, into the pit of my stomach, like lead weights, as if they were coins from Herod’s ancient kingdom. ‘Hello?’ said a quavery voice. It was her grandmother’s. After a short period of muddle (What? Who? I see. Lida?), I was given to understand that she was away in the Crimea.

I left the phone booth, crossed Pushkin Square, and walked down Gorky Street, on the right-hand side, where young layabouts regularly hung around for hours on end, watching the girls go by. On the front of the Izvestia building, the news board went on streaming. Khrushchev was going on another trip. For some time now papers had been calling him Nikitushka or Nikitinka, affectionate diminutives used for folk heroes like Ilya Muromets and so forth. Every time I’d tried to call Lida ‘Lidushka’ or ‘Lidochka’ she had burst out laughing because I put the stress on the wrong syllable, the last, as if I was speaking Albanian. So, Lida was now at the midpoint of her summer, as I had been at the middle of mine a few days previously, in Dubulti. As I walked on I was overcome with the desire to talk about the weather, about the summer, about anything at all to anyone I could find, even a statue. In front of me stood the huge central post office building. Brigita, the Latvian girl I’d met! Why hadn’t I thought of calling her sooner? I almost ran up the steps to the post office. Brigita had left Dubulti two days before I had. She must be home now in Riga, in one of those comfortable old apartments with a big ceramic stove taking up almost a whole wall and heavy oak furniture. I liked that town — where it would soon be getting cold — with its grey buildings, the turrets that resembled knights’ helmets, its ancient cobbled streets, their names mostly ending with — baum .

I gave the number to an operator and sat on a bench waiting for the call to be put through. Drawling voices announced names of faraway places that I thought had disappeared long ago. Magadan, Astrakhan, and even more legendary cities (apparently, you could call up the whole Golden Horde!), and I felt as if something was being extinguished inside me. I thought it must be from here that Kyuzengesh phoned his desolate tundra late in the afternoon, smoothing it with the low rustle of his voice, promising it who knew what in the twilight hours when sparse flocks of birds flew low overhead in the gloomy not-night and not-day that lasted six full months of the year.

I imagined that Brigita was perhaps still indoors, that she hadn’t gone for a walk in the — baum streets. In the last week of my holiday in Riga the weather had been bad and rain had often forced us to take refuge in cinemas where they were showing films we had already seen, in cafés we’d just left or even in some Protestant church where a service was being held. We’d been several times to Dzintari and to all the other stations with names that reminded me of beauty products, and now the smell of her hair had got mixed up with the smell of her toothpaste and her lips, which she made up only a little, to save them from getting chapped by the sea wind, into a single scent that belonged to all those railway stops.

The operator called my name. I went into a booth and said, ‘Hello! Hello!’ several times. At the other end someone said something in Latvian that, of course, I didn’t understand, while in the next booth a coarse voice was speaking with Samarkand or maybe the Karakum — I recognised the simple sounds of an Eastern tongue. Another voice broke in on my line, in an unknown language, then a burst of interference, and I thought I heard Latvian again, then yet more distant and plaintive voices. Almost losing hope in this transcontinental cackle, I blurted out her name, which was immediately swallowed, shredded, crumbled and ingested by the sand and peat of the marshes, by the taiga and the Northern Lights, leaving on the surface nothing more than a bleak hunger for more names, maybe for my own, with an accompaniment of pitiful sighs. I hung up and stumbled out of the post office. As I cut through the passing crowds I was suddenly afflicted with an unbearable headache that beat against my skull, boom! boom! as if the streets of Riga were thrashing me with the rubber mallets of their — baum, — baum endings.

On Okhotny Ryad the dun-coloured rain-drenched crowd milled between the huge Gosplan building and the Moskva Hotel. You could just about see the outline of the Bolshoi in the distance and, further behind it, in a welter of mauve and blue lights, the older building of the Metropole, the hotel where only foreigners stayed, and where you would also occasionally see a police van carting away prostitutes. I slowed, dithering between a right turn along Kuznetsky Most, a left turn into the narrow and noisy Peredelkinorovka Street, or even going on up to Red Square. Any solitary walker would have taken the first option, but curiously, without knowing why, I went on towards the square that everyone who has never lived in Moscow believes to be the heart of the city. In fact anyone walking in the evening towards Red Square can feel the floods of people in Gorky Street run dry as they approach its shore — the crowds thin out and only a few people push on as far as the ancient esplanade, like the thinning blood of an anaemic trying to make its way to the brain. If the GUM department store facing the Kremlin weren’t there to draw people in, Red Square would surely be one of the most desolate quarters of Moscow.

GUM must still have been open because people were milling about on the pavement in front of it. On the other side of the square, outside the Historical Museum, there wasn’t a soul. I carried on at a leisurely pace and came onto Red Square. Although I passed along Gorky Street pretty much every day and almost as often crossed Sverdlov Square, the Arbat and Tverskoy Boulevard, as well as Dzerzhinsky Square, where the number three trolleybus left for Butyrki, I hardly ever found my way to Red Square, and only on Sundays. Perhaps my disinclination derived from the disappointment I had felt on first seeing the Kremlin’s rust-coloured bastions. There was something unfinished, apathetic and undramatic about those squat brick walls, with their haughty towers poking up here and there. Perhaps I felt like that because I had grown up in a town overlooked by a citadel that was tens of metres high, with towers that were sometimes above the clouds and ramparts from which, even now, a thousand years after they were built, large blocks of stone sometimes came loose and fell to earth, like bolts of lightning, crushing houses and killing people in their path. By contrast, the somnolent, placid walls of the Kremlin gave off a ruddy cheerfulness that sterilised the imagination. No dashing horseman with moonlight glinting on his steel visor would bring any message to the gates of this castle; through its doors had come only ponderous, leather-robed monks from the Novodevichy Monastery, chanting Church Slavonic and surrounded by the false Dmitrys who had woven the fabric of Russian history.

Some of these thoughts whirled in my mind as I walked along the side of the ancient fortress. In the blue-tinted light of the evening the cupolas of St Basil’s looked like the turbans of our own Bektashi preachers or like coloured soap bubbles blown by some gigantic mouth. Slavic myths tell of a terrifying head all alone in the middle of the steppe that puffs out its cheeks to blow the great wind that raises the dust-storm. That wind is so strong that no rider who dares to come before it — even if he keeps as far away as the horizon — can stay on his horse. Every time I read anything about that head I tingled with fright, despite the absence of bloodshed and mystery. But perhaps that was exactly what made me shiver: a fall caused by wind and earth in a vast empty flatness with only that head rising from it. ‘It would be better not to have myths like that!’ Maskiavicius sometimes remarked. ‘It really does belong to steppe and dust. Stunted Slavic divinities… But you Balkan folk have legends of a different class — they’re almost as good as Lithuanian folklore! But what’s the use? Socialist realism forbids us to write about them.’ That was what Maskiavicius used to say, but you couldn’t rely on him. He changed his opinions as often as his shirts.