Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

The Shotas had tried but failed to engage the two girls in conversation. I looked around for Antaeus but all I found was the pasty, fish-eyed face of the art history professor. She was a well-known iconographer, and I suddenly realised that, despite the icon-like pallor and flatness of her face, she was still a young woman. I moved closer to her, and she asked me sweetly, ‘Don’t you have your own story to tell?’

I was taken aback. ‘To whom?’

‘To me, of course!’

Her eyes seemed like part of a very old painting, worn away by time.

‘But my story is about dead people,’ I said. ‘My subject—’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

Of course, there was nothing wrong with it. It occurred to me that, with the way she looked, the only subjects anyone would ever want to broach would be macabre.

‘Maybe I’ll tell you later, in Moscow, when we’re back,’ I said.

‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘I can wait.’

I could barely repress a shudder. What exactly was she expecting? I turned to look out of the window but the darkness had swallowed everything. It was completely black outside. A black abyss, with us moving blindly through it. It was nearly six and I thought I would miss my appointment with Lida at the Novoslobodskaya metro station. Oddly, that did not upset me. If only you knew, Lida! I thought placidly. But on the heels of that thought came another: what was it precisely that Lida should know? Nothing. A suburban railway carriage, a wet floor and, trodden into the still only half-melted clumps of snow, stories that would never be written and theatrical scenarios that would never be performed on any stage…

We got to Moscow around seven. Our group made a boisterous entrance at the Gorky Institute. Most of us were swaying on our feet, wearing innocent smiles and burping occasionally.

‘Ah! Here are my lambs, returning to the fold,’ said Auntie Katya, from behind her counter.

Meanwhile, those who had stayed behind at the residence came out into the corridor or opened their doors to welcome the travellers home. But they looked much the same as the returning mob. The vast building was full of grating voices, snatches of song, vodka fumes and the banging of toilet doors. I tramped along corridors on various floors until, in a dark corner, there loomed before me the black shape of a public telephone with the digits on its dial gleaming as white as shark’s teeth. Lida had surely gone home upset and angry. I put fifteen kopecks’ worth of coins into the slot and dialled. ‘Hello!’ she said. Yes, she was cross, but calm. I tried to persuade her it wasn’t my fault, but to judge by her curt and haughty response, she must have been waiting for me to hang up. I told her we could meet at the same place a little later, but she refused. I’d almost lost all hope of seeing her again and felt dreadful.

‘Lida,’ I said, my voice cracking, ‘I really need to see you this evening. If you knew…’

‘If I knew what?’ she asked. Her voice had perked up, grown lighter and sharper in the huge, still midnight space where you think you can hear stars bumping into each other. ‘What?’ she asked again.

‘If you knew how horrible it is here tonight…’

The midnight void settled between us, like the emptiness of a morgue. Then she asked: ‘Are you lonely?’

‘Yes,’ I answered faintly. I would have liked to add words of a kind that has never existed. For a split second I thought I knew some but I didn’t move my lips to say them aloud. I just sighed. It was such a sigh that I imagined that if I didn’t get a grip on myself right now my very soul would be ready to depart my body.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come. Wait for me at the usual place.’

I ran to the trolleybus stop and twenty minutes later I was at the metro station. The escalators spewed out an endless stream of travellers. Their astonishingly fixed heads came out first, then their chests and finally their legs. I felt confused. I was afraid I stank to high heaven of vodka. Sometimes I even imagined I still had my skis on. At last I saw her golden hair appear with its electric sparkle, then her neck, so straight, the memory of which was always accompanied by a kind of pain. In my mind the idea of losing Lida was always associated with a vision of that straight neck alongside someone else’s.

‘Here I am,’ she said, without a smile.

Her inquisitive eyes looked me up and down from head to toe. We’d become strangers. Only when she took off her gloves to pick something off my shoulder, maybe a snowflake, did she seem close again.

We walked for a little while in the wake of the moving crowd.

‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked.

‘No… I mean… only a little,’ I mumbled. ‘You know I don’t like drinking.’

‘So, at your place, is it really as dreadful as you said?’

She wasn’t looking at me.

‘Yes, yes, back there it’s sheer hell.’

She shrugged.

‘Would you like to come and see?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

I felt I wasn’t making myself clear, which made me want to take her there.

We were going past the gloomy walls of Butyrky Prison when she exclaimed: ‘Look! There’s a taxi!’

We hailed it and, without thinking what I was doing, I gave the driver the address of the Gorky Institute hall of residence.

I could see lights twinkling in the building. A knot of tipsy students were talking to each other in front of the porter’s lodge. Auntie Katya had livened up, too. On party nights when residents had been drinking they were usually quite open-handed as well. She was talking with Taburokov and laughing, but when she saw me her face suddenly darkened. Her narrow eyes with their reddish lashes cut through Lida like a knife.

‘Your ID, my girl.’

Lida was flustered. She looked in her bag, then at me. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Haven’t you got some kind of card?’ I whispered. ‘It’s just a formality.’

The old hag never asked for papers from the dozens of girls who came into our residence with their boyfriends. She had only been doing it to me for the last few weeks, undoubtedly because of the police summons.

Lida scrabbled in her handbag again and fished out a card.

‘Ah!’ said Auntie Katya, as she studied it. ‘A Komsomol card. Hm!’

You old witch! I thought. Baba Yaga !

But Kurganov came to my help and asked her outright, ‘Why are you asking for ID from his friends? You never ask anyone else.’

‘You keep your mouth shut!’ Auntie Katya riposted. ‘This is management business.’

Lida’s mood had darkened.

‘Yes, why is she so keen to see the IDs of your friends?’ she asked, as we waited for the lift.

I shrugged.

‘Does she think you’re a suspicious character?’ she pressed.

I still didn’t know what to say so I shrugged again. ‘I’m a foreigner.’

She stared at me for a moment, then looked away. But in her eyes, for an instant, I thought I saw something like compassion. Infinite compassion in a halo of light, quite different from the ordinary human kind. I was well aware that, amid the hostility between males that blanketed everything like winter, Russian girls had the courage to protect foreign guests.

How difficult it is to get into foreign lifts… But we got in. As it slid upwards, the iron fretwork of the shaft allowed glimpses of corridors on various floors, room numbers, faces and necks. I tried to tell Lida about the residence and its inmates. First floor: that’s where the first-year students stay; they’ve not yet committed many literary sins. Second floor: critics, conformist playwrights, whitewashers. Third… circle: dogmatics, arse-lickers and Russian nationalists. Fourth circle: women, liberals, and people disenchanted with socialism. Fifth circle: slanderers and snitches. Sixth circle: denaturalised writers who have abandoned their own language to write in Russian…