Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

And it was true: I knew nothing about any meetings coming up in Bucharest or Warsaw. But if I’d heard about them I don’t think I’d have been whispering and making such a drama of it as he was. There were gatherings of that kind almost every month in one or other of the socialist capitals.

‘Apparently, here in Moscow as well,’ he went on, in the same near-whisper, ‘there’s going to be a conference alongside the festivities for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’

‘Really?’

‘And it’s already a while since they appointed the central committee and the preparatory subcommittees — the political subcommittee, the economic and cultural subcommittee…’

What subcommittees? Why did hearing about them make me shiver?

‘Ah! You don’t know anything. You didn’t know that Vukmanović-Tempo has just been in Moscow as well, did you?’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’

I was on the point of telling him what Maskiavicius had told me two days earlier about the alternately smiling and scowling faces of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung that had been shown on posters after their meeting a few weeks earlier in the airport at Beijing, but thought better of it. What’s the point? I thought. It’s probably just gossip.

He seemed about to tell me something else, or maybe not. He paused, then said, ‘Tomorrow we shall drink.’

‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I repeated.

While we were in the café we said the word ‘tomorrow’ many times in a particular way, almost with a kind of relief. Occasionally it seemed to me — and maybe to Antaeus as well — that we were piling into it, as into a dustbin, all our unexpressed thoughts, all our hopes, our flaws and our mutual suspicions.

*

Sometimes Sunday seemed so palpable to me that I almost believed it was embossed and in colour. I could even feel it moving and sliding away under our skis, beneath our feet. I felt as if in this endlessly white and undulating area it had always been Sunday, since the time of the tsars and even further back, that it had been Sunday since the year 1407 or 1007. How many times had Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and even savage Tuesdays come close? They’d prowled around silently in the hope of getting on to the plateau — to no avail. They eventually understood there was no easy way in for them and had discreetly withdrawn from an area where Sunday had reigned supreme for centuries.

Grey izba s dotted the landscape beneath a uniform sky about which I had written a hendecasyllabic line some time before: The formless sky is like an idiot’s brain. In Russian translation it sounded even more grisly:

Бeзфopмeннoe нeъo кaк мoзг тулици

Yнылый дoждь зaливaeт улицы

I’d been harshly criticised for it in the poetry seminar.

The day was rushing away beneath my feet. Among the hummocks of snow, people with odd fixtures on their skis came and went, then dropped in at the Writers’ Club and reappeared with greater ease in their movements, having downed a dram without even taking off their skis.

In fact, with a few exceptions, nobody knew how to ski properly, but none of us ever took our skis off. Taburokov even tried to go to the toilet with his on.

They all looked drunk. But it wasn’t just the vodka. They were under the influence of the uninterrupted sky, the sadness of the horizontal beams of the izba s, and the snow, which made it so easy to laugh (Kurganov said that only in snow can people laugh one hundred per cent, especially if their feet are strapped into skis).

We spent the whole day going round in unending circles, with the hissing sound of skiers lost on the piste , disappearing then reappearing from behind mounds of snow, like ungainly ghosts.

At twilight the intoxication increased. But that was only the beginning. The tacit understanding was that everything would happen ‘at our place’, the hall of residence at Butyrsky Khutor.

Night fell, and our noisy party set off for the railway station, full of expectation and foreboding. The floor of the carriage was soon dotted with clumps of snow. As we got on, passengers stared at us, their curiosity tinged with disapproval. There were women from the outlying regions with knapsacks in their laps, a girl and a boy with colourless hair, clenched fists and hooligans’ scars on their rough cheeks. The latest fashion among teenage ruffians was to put blades between their knuckles so even the slightest blow would draw blood.

The train juddered into motion. The familiar landscape slid backwards at an increasing rate. My idea of an everlasting Sunday vanished. No, at Peredelkino it was never Sunday or Thursday, it was only ever today. Eternally now. Sunday was what we had brought to it, like roast lamb to a picnic, like the savages had brought Friday to Robinson Crusoe’s island. We’d brought our Moscow Sunday so we could cope with it in peace, between the izba s and the sky, far from other human eyes.

Now everything was over and dusk had fallen. Small suburban stations rushed past. Alcoholic fumes befuddled our sense of proportion. Outside in the snowy landscape we glimpsed people wrapped from head to toe in angora houpelandes, as if they had just walked out of a Russian folktale. A group of young people got on. With them were two girls, pink with cold, who gazed at everything as if they were under the influence. The Shotas stared at them.

‘Simpatiaga ,’ one of the girls said, referring to a Shota.

I’d never heard the suffix — iaga added to the Russian word for ‘nice’: it usually expressed disdain or referred to ugliness.

Behind me I heard ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ saying to Abdullakhanov: ‘You understand, Khrushchev spent three days in the country as Sholokhov’s house-guest…’

Abdullakhanov clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Tut-tut. If anyone else had told me I wouldn’t have believed it, but since it comes from you, I’ll take you at your word.’

‘But it’s serious!’ Pogosian retorted. ‘I heard it on the radio.’

‘Ha! On the radio! On the radio!’ Abdullakhanov repeated, nodding so vigorously that it seemed he was banging his head against the window.

Further down the carriage, Taburokov was standing still but was shaken, at regular intervals, by hiccups, which made him roll his eyes, as if he was watching an insect fluttering at the end of his nose.

‘A three-day stay,’ ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ went on, just behind my neck. ‘The peasant drops in on the peasant… Ssh!… while the noble Armenian people… did I say anything?… bask in happiness!’

I changed my seat so that I wouldn’t hear Pogosian raving in his medley of Russian and Armenian and found myself opposite Shakenov, who was reciting for the benefit of one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ his recently completed ‘The March of the Savings Banks’. Three months previously he had published ‘The March of the Soviet Law Courts’, which had brought him sacks of readers’ letters. ‘All you have to do now,’ Stulpanc had joked, ‘is to write “The March of the Soviet Prisoners”, but you’ve got plenty of time, you never know what might happen.’

‘A three-day stay! My God! We’re back to the days of the Russian peasantry. But mum’s the word!’

Artashez Pogosian had wriggled closer to me again and this time there was no escape. The carriage hummed with whispers and mumbling. I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking. On the way back from Yalta the previous winter, throughout the long train trip across the lush Ukrainian countryside, standing in the slippery corridor of the carriage, which often smelt of vomit, I’d heard endless tales of that kind, all night long, whole chapters of novels, entire acts from plays. But the journey from Peredelkino to Moscow was short and there wasn’t sufficient time.