Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

That was where the lift came to a halt, on the sixth floor. As I opened the door I bumped into Stulpanc who, for no obvious reason, just stood there, stock still, apparently stunned.

‘Denaturalised…’ she echoed. ‘So you’re one of those who’s abandoned his own language?’

‘No, not me. I’m a foreigner.’

Stulpanc fixed his pale eyes on Lida.

‘This Latvian hasn’t yet renounced his own tongue either,’ I whispered in her ear, ‘but they’re working on him.’

‘What a beauty!’ Stulpanc said of Lida, without shifting his gaze.

He was a serious young man and I’d never seen him behave like that before. But that night, drink had got the better of him.

There was a strange excitement in the corridor. You could feel that something was afoot. I thought I could distinguish a group of Karakums huddling somewhere near my room. As Lida and I approached, the group vanished. All I found were the two Shotas emerging from the service staircase and swearing at each other. One was tall and fat-faced, his cheeks even more florid than usual; the other was a short, sly customer, who looked like a ball of wool. Hardship and resentment seemed to have settled in his thick hair, curling and frizzling it into a nest.

Lida took my arm and held it tight.

A sad Asian song came from behind a door. Further down we caught fragments of sentences in languages we’d never heard before.

‘Let’s get out,’ Lida said. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘We’ll go down to the fourth floor. Perhaps they’ve started the outpouring.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Plot-spew! That’s what they call it. On nights like this they tell each other the plots of books they’ll never write. Some of them throw up — that’s why they call these sessions plot-spews.’

‘How can you say such horrible things?’

‘Let’s go downstairs,’ I said. ‘You’ll see for yourself.’

On our way we met Goncharov going up.

‘He’s a government spy,’ I told Lida.

‘From the fifth floor?’

‘What a good memory you’ve got!’

She clutched me tighter. On the fourth floor the outpourings had indeed already begun. In pairs, rarely in threes, my fellows slowly paced from door to door in the ill-lit parts of the corridor, mumbling as they went. Plot-spews were still few but the distraught expressions on their faces made it clear there would soon be plenty.

‘They’ll never write any of the things they’ll tell each other about tonight,’ I explained to Lida. ‘They’ll write other things, often the exact opposite.’

‘That’s why I don’t like writers. How fortunate you are not to be one of them!’ She added, as an afterthought, ‘Please, don’t crack your fingers like that!’

In a muddle, I got out my handkerchief and spat into it.

She looked at me, appalled. ‘What’s come over you? You never do that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That. Spitting like that.’

‘I’ve no idea if I do or I don’t…’ I really didn’t know what had got into me.

‘Why do you live here? Can’t you find somewhere else?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Ladonshchikov is a bastard,’ somebody shouted, leaning on his door.

From the end of the corridor of the women’s floor came sounds of music.

Lida stopped dead. On the floor, at her feet, was a puddle. It looked like vomit and probably was.

‘I’d say that was playwright’s spew,’ I joked.

‘Stop it! Please, let’s get out of here.’

We took the stairs. Maskiavicius, whose nose was bleeding, overtook us. I wanted to say hello but Lida tugged at my sleeve.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked her.

She sighed deeply. ‘What’s the matter with you ?’ she replied. ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head.’

I was on edge. I had an almost irresistible urge to do just about anything or, rather, to undo something. My knees felt out of joint, my elbows felt dislocated, my jaw felt unhinged. I tasted ash.

‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘You’re hurting my arm!’

I jerked my head around to look at her with almost hate-filled eyes. That was why I couldn’t control myself this evening. It was because of her. She was the reason my nerves were in such a state — she and her face, with its halo of solar wisps, her purity and propriety, with the white obelisk of her neck, defying everything around it, including me. Right! I thought, in a moment of lunacy. You’ll soon see what I’m really like! An irresistible desire to hurt her tightened into a ball inside my chest.

‘What is wrong with you?’ Her voice was softer now. She was gazing at me with sympathy, clouded with a bluish haze. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

You’ll soon see, you little witch!

We were on the sixth floor and I was leaning against the lift-cage ironwork. She saw that I was about to tell her something important; she was waiting for it with her mouth half open and what might have been the marks of suffering on her cheeks.

‘Listen!’ I said, in a feeble voice I could barely get past my teeth. Then, my eyes darting around as if I was about to reveal a great secret, I mumbled something half Albanian and half Russian that I didn’t understand myself.

She looked at me serenely. Then, putting a hand on my shoulder, she drew her head close to mine as if she had spotted something barely visible in the depths of my eyes, at the back of my skull. Hoarsely, as if she’d said, ‘From now on you are a diminished man in my eyes, you are a murderer, a member of the Mafia, of the Zionist International, of the Ku Klux Klan,’ she whispered, ‘I’m beginning to believe that you… you too… you are a writer!’

It seemed to me that my answer was just a laugh. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a writer but, unfortunately, not a dead one!’

We stood there for a while just looking each other in the eye.

‘I’d started thinking you were,’ she murmured.

Suddenly I felt that my confession had not been destructive enough and I hastened to finish digging myself into a hole. I told her that if I didn’t get out soon I would start throwing up as the others did, not just in the corridor but from the windows on to passers-by, on to taxis, from the sixth floor, from the top of the Kremlin’s towers, from — from—

Her eyes were popping as she put one hand over her mouth and, with the other, pressed the call button for the lift. Eventually it arrived but only when she closed the door on herself did I grasp that she was leaving. I shook the handle but it was already on its way down. I started running down the stairs, winding round and round the cage inside which Lida was falling, inexorably falling. I spiralled around a void that was a monumental column. I clung to it as though I were an ornament, in classical, Doric, Ionian or Corinthian style, wrapped around Trajan’s column, crisscrossing the bas-relief depictions of battles, armour, blood, and horses with hoofs that trampled my head…

When I got to the bottom the lift’s door was open and it was empty. Lida had gone. I saw Stulpanc pacing up and down the corridor.

‘I saw your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Why was she in such a hurry to get out?’

I mumbled a few incomprehensible syllables.

‘What a fabulous girl!’ he added. ‘You’re a fool to let her go.’

‘If you want her, take her!’

His eyes widened.

What made me rejoice in the satisfaction of revenge? Oh, yes. In saying ‘Take her!’ to Stulpanc, I had maintained the illusion that I was treating her like a harem slave, selling her on. I knew it wasn’t true, that I had no power over her, but the brash way in which I’d offered her to Stulpanc made me feel as if I had.

In fact, the previous year, at a very private party in his room, when we had been drunk, we had swapped partners. It was an episode neither of us liked to recall.