Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I left the pile of papers where I’d found them, next to the vodka bottle, the tin and the wrapping paper. Then, having cast a last glance over the depressing still-life, I switched off the light and went out.

The only place left for me to go now was my room. I was worn out and lay down on my bed, but although I tried hard, I managed to reach only the outer rim of the Valley of Sleep, the colourless, soundless foothills far removed from the picturesque heartland of my dreams. I could hear the crackling of the current in the overhead wires when trolleybuses pulled into the stop. Those fairytale stags wanted to take me to the centre of town but they were quite lost as they swam about in the sky, their antlers pronging the clouds, while beneath their bellies lay nameless winding grey streets waiting for us to crash into them.

*

Three days later the graduates and teaching staff of the Gorky Institute’s two degree courses started coming back. The great house awoke. The first from our class to arrive was Ladonshchikov, his stagy smile expressing his satisfaction with himself and with the fine running order of the great Soviet Union. His cheeks bore a permanent blush, as if they were lit by some kind of fever, suggesting both the high pomp of a plenary session and emotion spilling over from meetings with his readers and superannuated heroines of Soviet Labour, and an eager Party spirit holding his bureaucratic eminence in check. Similarly, his putty-coloured raincoat, tailored to look almost like a uniform, was cheerful and modest at the same time. If you looked at him closely, especially when he was saying, ‘So that’s how it is, comrades’ — Vot tak, tovarishchi — you might well think that his face had provided the model for all the directives from the leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers about matters concerning the positive hero and maybe even for a number of the decisions that had been taken on the issue. Ladonshchikov’s face brought all those tedious questions to mind. He let his Soviet smile fall in only one circumstance: when the topic was Jews. He would turn into another man: his movements would go out of synch, the relative quantities of optimism and pessimism expressed on his face would be inverted, and phrases like Vot tak, tovarishchi made way for different and often vulgar ones. But all the same, on those rare occasions, even though what he said was repulsive, he seemed more human, because the stench of manure and pig shit he gave off was at least real. I’d seen him in that state several times last winter in Yalta when he was spying at Paustovsky’s window. But at times like that one of the Shotas used to say, ‘No, don’t be scared of Ladonshchikov!’ In his view it was when he was in that sort of a state that Ladonshchikov became harmless. It was the pink, pompous smiling state that made him dangerous: that was when he could have you sent to Butyrky Prison with a click of his fingers, as he had done a year ago to two of his colleagues. Shota’s words returned to me every time I came out of the metro station at Novoslobodskaya Street and walked past the endless reddish walls of the prison.

The two Shotas came back together that day. Over the holidays they had squabbled many times in cafés in Tbilisi and cursed each other roundly; then, most bizarrely, they had ended up in the same writers’ retreat, had argued and thrown insults at each other, one accusing the other of being glued to his heels, and vice versa, then had decided to give up on holidays and leave for who knew where; although there were hosts of trains every day from Georgia to Moscow, they had ended up travelling not only on the same service but in the same carriage!

The next day Hieronymus Stulpanc and Maskiavicius, our fellow students from the Baltic, turned up, both tipsy; next came the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ (that’s what we called the girls on our course, though only one was from Belarus). The Karakums, as we referred to those from Central Asia, all turned up around midnight, blind drunk, with Taburokov in tow. He’d been flailing about, trying to force his way into the Israeli Embassy because he wanted to have a word — just a word — with the Jewish ambassador to salve his conscience. So the bastard would not be able to claim afterwards that Taburokov hadn’t warned him in time, as his writer’s conscience required him to, and that he’d already changed alphabet three times, yes, he had, and all that that came with, and he didn’t really care anyway, and as a matter of fact he’d be happy to piss in the Jordan, however sacred it was. And that wouldn’t do us any harm either, because we’ve strangled all the Volgas and Olgas in their cradles, along with their alphabets, because we had Cyril and Methodius and the glorious Soviet sandpit and the one and indivisible— Brrr! It’s freezing in here!

Artashez Pogosian, nicknamed ‘The Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ because he identified with them all at the drop of a hat, apparently delighted to have dumped his wife, swept in with the other students from the Caucasus. They were all drunk, except Shogentsukov, who had come on his own on a later train, and turned up looking slightly drained, his face exhibiting what Pogosian jokingly called his post-prime-ministerial melancholy.

That same day saw the Moldovans come in, as well as the Russians from Siberia and Central Russia, including Yuri Goncharov (nicknamed ‘Yuri Donoschik’ by one of the Shotas, who thought he was a government sneak); then came the Jews, the Tatars and the Ukrainians, the only ones who came by plane. The next day Kyuzengesh arrived in the afternoon, looking quite grey, the last of the group. As was his habit, he shut himself away in his room and did not emerge for forty-eight hours. Stulpanc, who occupied the room next door, said that he always did that when he came back from the tundra because he found it hard to readjust to twenty-four-hour days. It was a serious problem for writers from those parts, Stulpanc went on. Can you imagine living your whole life in six-month-long days and nights, and then being required to divide your time into artificial chunks when you sit down to write? For instance, Kyuzengesh couldn’t write ‘Next morning he left’ because ‘next morning’ for him meant in six months’ time. Or again, when a writer from the tundra set down ‘Night fell’, he was recording something that happened so rarely it would have the same effect as ‘The third Five-year Plan has been launched’ or ‘War has broken out’. ‘Our comrades from the tundra have a problem,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘One night Kyuzengesh said something to me but he spoke so softly I couldn’t understand anything. But he was definitely complaining about all that. I reckon someone ought to look in detail at the time factor in the writing of our friends from the tundra. It’s got real potential, even if it comes close to the kind of modernism people say that French fellow Proust fell into when he made time go round in circles. Socialist realism needs to be studied in its impact on the Arctic plains, don’t you agree?’

‘Stulpanc, you really don’t know what you’re saying,’ Nutfulla Shakenov broke in. ‘You’re trying to tell me about that decadent Procrustes, or whatever his name is, but do you realise that in all the tundra and the taiga put together, in an area of three million square kilometres and then some, there is one, and only one, writer and that’s Kyuzengesh? Do we really need a literary theory just for him?’

We all thought that was ominous and grandiose at the same time. To be lord and master in a space more than six times the size of Europe! To be the tundra’s own grey consciousness!

There were crowds of people in the corridors of Herzen’s old two-storey house and outside it, in the garden with the iron railings and two gates, the main one on Tverskoy Boulevard and the other at the rear giving on to Malaya Bronnaya. Nowhere else in the world could so many dreams of eternal glory be crowded into such a small space. Often, when you looked at all those ordinary faces in profile — some fresh and alert, most of them drawn and unkempt — you might guess that several were already turning into marble or bronze. That became obvious when, around dusk and especially when they were drunk, a one-armed fourth-year student and Nutfulla Shakenov, with his partly destroyed nose, resembled statues dug clumsily out of the ground by an archaeologist.