Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

The corridors were crammed mostly with first-year students. They appeared drunk, and had a euphoric glow, as if they had been pumped full of gamma rays, while their pallor was graced with a layer of perspiration that was as becoming as it was permanent. A boy with sparkling, close-set eyes wove among them — a slim, handsome lad who had come from the Altai mountains. He moved from one group to another, getting into conversation with some, saying whatever flashed into his mind, then taking off to talk to another knot of people. ‘What a splendid pair of trousers!’ he exclaimed to me. ‘Where did you get them?’ His wide eyes became even more entrancing. ‘Where did you find them?’ I told him, curtly, because I was rather cross that he should use familiar forms of language with me when I was his senior. He noticed my irritation, bowed two or three times, his hand on his chest in apology, and said he would henceforth adopt a more formal tone, would speak to me in the third or fourth person, if it existed, but that I should not take offence: he came from the highlands of the Altai where men were more frank and open than they were anywhere else. ‘You, you,’ he kept saying with a smile, because it was the only word of English he knew, and I told him he’d pronounced it as if it was an Albanian word. That was when he twigged I was from Albania, and declared passionately that he would wear only Albanian trousers in future because they were the most stylish in the world. Then he asked if I could give him the pattern, and blurted out that he wanted everything he had to be perfect, that he would write perfect works, that within the next month he would meet the prettiest girl in Moscow and have an affair with her. ‘I am a virgin,’ he went on, in breathless excitement, ‘and, like the Altai mountains with their sublime peaks, I insist on losing my virginity to the most inaccessible girl in the capital!’ He carried on talking with unaltered fervour, but instead of blushing he grew even paler. ‘That is how it is! I have to manage this at any cost, because if I don’t, I don’t know what I will do. How lucky I am to make your acquaintance. Oh! Sorry, to make your acquaintance, sir . I’ll begin with the trousers. A man who hasn’t got the right kind of trousers doesn’t deserve any favours from life. I only like things that are perfect because I’m from the Altai and up there everything is noble, pure and eternal. I can’t have a fling with an ordinary girl. She’ll be either the most beautiful or there’ll be nobody…’

‘Well,’ I replied, entertained, ‘it’ll be very hard to get everything, so to speak, up to the same height as the Altai.’

He broke in energetically, ‘No, sir, you’ll never persuade me of that. You’ve got the best trousers in Moscow, so please tell me where I can find the most attractive girl in town!’

I smiled and was about to tell him that he would never find what he was after, even with the help of the KGB, but his eyes latched on to mine, like a cat’s, and he seemed to expect that I was about to tell him the name and address of Sleeping Beauty and maybe her telephone number too.

To my left, beyond the window’s double panes, snow was falling noiselessly; to my right, in complete contrast, the dark smudge of Nutfulla Shakenov’s rough, tanned chin, was bent low over his notes. Wet snow slithered intermittently over Tverskoy Boulevard, settling on the trees and empty benches. The letters that Nutfulla Shakenov was writing in his notebook were widely spaced, as if he were bewildered. The professor of aesthetics was lecturing on the eternal unity of life and art. Sometimes the snow seemed to settle on his sentences, giving them a melancholic and meandering cast. He was explaining that art goes hand in hand with life from the moment of birth, when the infant is greeted with song, until death, when funeral music accompanies a man’s last journey to the grave. Drowsy with the heat rising from the radiators, I gazed at the passers-by as they hurried, wrapped up in themselves, along Tverskoy Boulevard and speculated that sometimes art is bound up with the icy snow sweeping people on to Gorky Street, the Garden Ring or the Arbat. It made them put their heads down, hunch their shoulders, and pick tiny grains of ice from their eyelids. ‘Art does not abandon us even after death,’ the lecturer droned on. Even after death, I parroted in my mind. Snow falls on us all even after death, that’s for sure… Nutfulla, beside me, carried on writing his misshapen black letters. In the row in front of mine Antaeus, from Greece, was muttering something to Hieronymus Stulpanc. The two Shotas, sitting beside him, looked horrified. ‘And so, for example,’ the lecturer was saying, ‘some people’s tombs are decorated with sculpture, or simply with an epitaph, a few lines of verse. Art accompanies them even in everlasting sleep…’ He paused, presumably to measure the effect his words had had, which he must have judged insufficient, since he went on: ‘A month ago I went to the Novodevichy monastery. I visit the cemetery there quite often. It was very autumnal. I stopped at the tomb of A. P. Kern, on which Pushkin’s famous lines are carved:

‘Я помню чудное мrновенье

Пеpедо мной явилacь тьІ…

I remember that magical moment

When you appeared before me…’

‘Who was A. P. Corn?’ Taburokov asked.

Taken aback, the lecturer turned to face him. His grey hair looked electric with anger. He opened his mouth several times before he could find his words. As if something was missing.

‘You ought to know the answer, Taburokov,’ he said at last. ‘Every schoolboy knows that poem by heart. It’s one of the most beautiful poems in all the world, and everyone knows that it is dedicated to a young lady with whom Pushkin had had an affair.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Taburokov said.

‘Yes, you do, and don’t forget it.’

‘Pff!’ Taburokov scowled. ‘I can’t remember the name of my first wife yet I’m supposed to remember someone called Anna Corn or Kerr or some such nonsense!’

‘Don’t say such things!’ the lecturer screeched, anger making his voice rasp.

The audience, lulled into torpor by the whiteness of the snow outdoors, the warmth of the radiators inside and a general lack of interest in aesthetics, now woke up. Taburokov — he was bald, had a round, fleshy face and bags under his eyes — kept quiet. Stulpanc used to say that he looked like the bad guy in Chinese movies. He had a point. Taburokov’s ashen scalp, with its greenish tinge, which was visible especially at twilight, looked like a guglet brought out of an archaeological dig, as if at night Taburokov fell not into sleep but into a hole in the ground.

It took several minutes for everyone to quieten down again. The lecturer, despite his irritation, returned to the cemetery of the Novodevichy monastery. I’d been there the previous year and his description was accurate, except that I could no longer recall if the russet leaves on the marble tombs were copper inlays or actual autumn leaves. Among the tombstones I’d noticed that of Stalin’s wife, which had these words carved on it: ‘To my beloved Alliluyeva, J. Stalin’.

As the lecturer carried on, silence settled over the room, perhaps because the topic was tombs and everyone was surely thinking about their own or about their verse being carved on the graves of women they had known, who perhaps didn’t deserve the honour, because in most cases the affairs had consisted principally of disappointments and dubious consequences.

The group had now returned to its slumber. But it was of an unusual kind: it had a crack across it and a great howl ran the whole length of the scar. Snow was falling near to me, but it allowed me only brief escapes from the inner scream that was tearing everything to pieces. Nutfulla Shakenov’s glance — olive-tinted, cloudy and blank at the core — almost touched my right eye. Indeed, his impressive eyebrow came within a whisker of sticking to my forehead, like a leech. Someone nearby sighed. ‘Oh!’ Was it Shogentsukov? No, not him. His face expressed some muffled sorrow. Next to him was Hieronymus Stulpanc, his yellow hair as translucent as a watercolour. Out of the corner of my eye I observed Shogentsukov’s gelatinous visage and thought that it was perhaps not disappointment at losing his job (his ex-prime-ministerial pain, dixit Pogosian) that had wrought havoc on his huge head. The wailing that whirled around inside him, hollowing him out, like a drill, must have had some other root. In fact, everybody’s nerves were somewhat on edge, but no gestures expressed an anxiety whose muteness made it all the more fearsome. It had been floating over us for some days. I’d noticed the first symptoms the previous Friday, when Abdullakhanov had said, ‘Brothers, something’s not right! Shto-to nye to!’ For the rest of the afternoon and evening, people had stalked the corridors, bumping into things and cursing doors they seemed not to have noticed.