Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I crossed the square and walked along the pavement outside GUM, as far as the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, raised on a plinth originally used as an executioner’s block. From that corner the Kremlin walls looked even more peaceful. A muddled voice in my head told me that castles weren’t more or less Macbethical or Buddhistical solely by virtue of the grey or red colouring of their walls or their more or less mysterious shapes, but from the fret-work-like appearance of their turrets. The same voice also told me that, behind its casual ruddy face, this half-European and half-Asiatic castle soon would, or maybe already did, contain a great mystery. The block where heads had been severed was still there, not far from the walls, like a moon hovering over the horizon.

I suddenly remembered the police summons that Auntie Katya had handed me, then almost told myself aloud that I was exhausted and ought to get back to the hall of residence.

It was still just as empty and dark as it had been when I had gone out, and I wondered where I could go to kill time that night, even for an hour: to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s or Chinese Ping’s? I didn’t really want to be with either of them and felt I would prefer to be alone in my room. I began climbing towards the sixth floor. I recalled the monastic silence of the corridors in the Writers’ Residence in Yalta, with Ladonshchikov’s furtive footfalls on the carpeted floor, and Valentin, Paustovsky’s driver, who told us one day, between two hiccups, his eyes glazed from drink, that he was being tormented by the writer’s wife, a harridan who was wrecking his life, and that if he was still driving that car it was out of loyalty to Konstantin Paustovsky: if it hadn’t been for him he wouldn’t have stayed a minute longer in the job — he’d rather drive a pig lorry, a manure truck or a hearse than set eyes on that woman’s snout again. But there was nothing Konstantin could do about it, he went on, when he had calmed down. She had been a present to Paustovsky from that carrot-haired pig called Arbuzov — that guy who wrote plays with which he, Valentin, wouldn’t deign to wipe his arse, seeing as Arbuzov could never rise above Konstantin Georgevich, and had failed to bring down Paustovsky with insults and had not managed to poison him or have him deported or infect him with a contagious disease. The worst Arbuzov could do to Paustovsky was to palm off his own ghastly wife on him. When he got to that point in his tale Valentin usually looked round to see if there was still any benighted soul who did not know that Paustovsky’s current wife had previously been married to Arbuzov. He had landed him with the woman, Valentin would go on, once he had made certain everyone was in the know, and ruined his life, because otherwise Konstantin Georgevich, not that fuckwit Fedin, would be president of the Writers’ Union, and Valentin would be driving not Paustovsky’s blue Volga saloon but a luxury Zim limousine and would be getting three hundred roubles a month more in wages.

I don’t know why I kept going over Valentin’s monologues. I tried to turn my mind to other things but curiously it kept coming back to Valentin. Was it because I had previously heard those soliloquies in other empty corridors on nights that were just as boring and far away from everybody else? I should have got out of the corridor if I wanted to silence the whispering inside me. Run away, yes — but where to? I no longer felt like shutting myself away in my room. I had Lida’s voice on one of my tapes. She lay there as if she were in a long, magical coffin, without body or hair, just her voice. No! Keep me away from that tape recorder. And suddenly, as my whole being sought a place to escape and forget, I remembered the left wing of the huge building. It was almost always empty and served as a reservoir of rooms that might be allocated to teachers from the Gorky Institute, or to house guests of the Writers’ Union, or as temporary digs for writers who had walked out on their wives and didn’t know where else to go. Some evenings when I’d had a bit to drink I used to enjoy visiting that deserted wing. I had a key to one of the empty apartments. In a way it was my second home, a second silent, secret abode. ‘Want to come to my dacha ?’ I once asked Lida Snegina, during a lively party, and dragged her by the hand into the dark corridors of the left wing. She was fascinated by that uninhabited suite on whose walls and ceilings the distant headlights of cars left translucent streaks, like those of garden snails.

Let loneliness cure loneliness, I thought, as I went through my pockets looking for the key. Once I had found it I trekked over to the left wing. The floorboards creaked softly beneath my feet. I found the door, opened it and went inside. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The walls hadn’t changed, the floral paper with its green background reminding me of funerals. I went into one of the rooms and stood there for a minute, my hands in my pockets, as if I had frozen. I went to the door to the other room in the suite, but as soon as I had turned on the light, I really did freeze: someone had sullied my sanctuary. I was dumbfounded. My eyes lighted on a corner of the room where there lay an empty bottle, a tin of food, and an object I could not make out. I stepped two paces forward and noticed that next to the bottle there was a torn piece of wrapping paper that must have been used for something greasy. Further on lay a few sheets of paper. I bent down. It was typescript, with closely spaced lines. Nothing else. It looked as if the intruder had come here to drink vodka and read the pages, which perhaps he hadn’t liked because he had left them behind with the remnants of his meal. For a second I thought he was going to come back, jerk open the door and take me by surprise. But the leftovers in the tin had dried out. I knelt down to gather up the typed sheets. There must have been two or three hundred. At first glance the characteristic lay-out of Russian dialogue told me I was holding a literary work. The beginning — possibly the first half (with the title page, obviously) — was missing. The page numbering went from 304 to 514. I was about to put the script back on the floor, but my eyes automatically began to run across the top sheet, which was the opening of a Chapter 31:

‘Zhivago, Zhivago,’ Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his coach, to which they had just passed. ‘From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow…’

I jumped forty or forty-five pages and landed on this sentence:

He analyses and interprets Dostoevsky’s Possessed and The Communist Manifesto with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me…

I would have read on, but a handful of pages slipped from my grasp, and as I bent down to gather them, I lost my place in the typescript. I hurriedly leafed through the rest of the work and only stopped on the very last sheet to read the line where the text broke off:

Outside it was snowing. Wind shovelled the snow everywhere. It was falling more and more thickly, more densely, as if in pursuit of something, and Yuri Andreyevich looked out of the window at it as if it wasn’t snow but…

What is this? I wondered. I had thought at first it might have been left behind by whoever had been drinking in the room, but as I recalled the phrase about Dostoyevsky and The Communist Manifesto it struck me it might be a forbidden work circulating from hand to hand. Such things had become quite common in recent times. Three months before, late one night, or maybe just before dawn, Maskiavicius had knocked on my door — or, rather, collapsed in front of it in a state of complete inebriation — and when I opened it he had shoved a handful of typescript sheets towards me and slurred, ‘Take this and read what he said, this guy, that’s right, it’s Dante Tvardovsky, oops, I mean Marguerite, sorry, I meant to say Aleksandr Alighieri…’ It had taken me all of fifteen minutes to work out that the pages contained a banned poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky called ‘Vasily Tyorkin in the Other World’.