Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘Jounalla hanelle avuksi ,’ he replied.

I’d never heard the sound of his voice before. As he carried on speaking I tried to hang on to the wall so that I didn’t sink into the mud. Although he had always seemed placid and slightly bemused, he was now talking harshly, if still at low volume. His anger was easier to see than to hear. You could read the fury in his crooked teeth — they looked like whitish blobs emitting words of death, or small tombstones half buried in a muddy pit. I turned my back on him and found myself once again in the sixth-floor corridor where the denaturalised group was now thoroughly mixed up and speaking all its dead and dying languages simultaneously. It was a dreadful nightmare. Their greasy faces distorted by drink and sweat, and streaked with dried tears, they were hoarsely espousing the languages they had rejected, beating their breasts, sobbing and swearing they would never forget them, they would speak them in their dreams; they were castigating themselves for having abandoned their languages, their mother tongues, for having left them at home to the mercy of mountains or deserts so they could take up with that hag of a stepmother, Russian.

I was struck dumb. I’d never imagined I would witness repentance on such a grand scale. ‘ Meilla ubr ,’ I said, I’ve no idea why.

They wittered on. In the word soup of already dead and gravely sick languages, a few Russian expressions floated to the surface. They cropped up like lost islands in the dark ocean of a collective subconscious. ‘I can see my language before me, like a ghost!’ one kept screaming, as if he had just woken up in fright. Frulldjek, frulldjek hain. Ikunlukut uha olalla . Fuck off. Ah onc kllxg buhu. Meit aham , without a horse or so much as a farewell. This autumn, tuuli lakamata . O star! Vulldiz, et, hakr bil , O my language!

You won’t be able to say I did it! Oh, stop dangling your blood-stained suffixes over me!

Stop! I thought. I stuffed my fingers into my ears, struggled to make my way through the group and eventually got to my room. I flung myself straight on to my bed without taking my hands from my ears. What kind of country is this? And why am I in it? I couldn’t think further than that. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. My chest went into a kind of convulsion once or twice, but it was a dry sob. * After the end of the Second World War, Communist partisans engaged in armed struggle for the control of Greece. They were finally defeated in September 1949 at a battle in the Grammos region.

‘Doctor, Doctor, help me! I’m feeling very bad… Ah! Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago… The bastard!’

What’s happening? I wondered, in my sleep, as I snuggled deeper under my blankets. Who’s calling for a doctor and how did he get into my room? My mind was still befuddled from the previous night and I wasn’t up to understanding anything much. Someone was feeling ill, doubtless because of last night’s drunken binge. Maybe it was Stulpanc, or one of the Karakums, asking for a doctor to help. To hell with them! I thought. I’m not a doctor and they’ve no reason to yell at me through the keyhole like that. I stuffed a loose corner of blanket into my ear and tried to get back to sleep, but it didn’t work. Someone went on calling for help, moaning and uttering indirect threats. You really should go to hell, I thought. You drank like a fish all night, and now you want help? I stuffed my head between the pillows and tried to go to sleep but I could feel the voice calling me, obstinately and evenly. What makes him think I’m a doctor? I wondered in my half-awake state. ‘Doctor, Doctor!’ Enough! After a night like that, I could really do without this! I threw off my bedclothes and listened hard. It was a strange voice, which took a couple of seconds to shake itself free of the aural fog that had shrouded it in my half-conscious mind. It emerged different — unadorned, firm, inhuman: ‘… the bourgeoisie’s nefarious aims, this infamous anti-Soviet work. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is the expression of…’

Only then did I realise I had forgotten to switch off my radio when I’d gone to bed. I tried to raise myself to hear it better but my head was still too leaden. The announcer was going on angrily about some novel about a doctor. Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago… Where had I seen or heard that name before? Oh, yes! In the empty apartment, of course: still-life with sardine tin and typescript. The announcer was probably fulminating against that very script. At first I felt like laughing: a typescript and an empty vodka bottle! Were they really worth air time on Radio Moscow so early in the morning?

‘… a provocative and odious action of the international bourgeoisie. The award of the Nobel Prize to this reactionary novel…’

I whistled. This was serious. A novel called Doctor Zhivago had bagged the Nobel. It had to be a bad novel. A very bad one! Appalling, even!

I held my neck stiff, as if it had been screwed to the pillow, to listen to the rest of the broadcast. It was a gloomy morning. A greyish light strained to get through the double-glazed windows and barely allowed me to make out what was in the room. It was grey and drab, save for the dimly lit rectangle of the radio, whence emanated words that were just as sombre and sticky: ‘… the peoples of the Soviet Union… indignant… libellous… scurrilous… This counter-revolutionary novel… our magnificent Soviet reality… dragged through the mud…’

Could those typed pages beside the bottle and empty tin really contain all those abominations? I’d held them in my hand without suspecting a thing. But who had written them? I thought I’d heard the name Boris Pasternak. I put out an ear. Yes, that was it. Now his name was being repeated every three to four seconds. How odd. I’d seen Pasternak less than two months previously on a walk in the woods around Peredelkino. We’d left the village and Maskiavicius had pointed out Pasternak’s dacha to me. It was a large two-storey cottage with big bay windows on the ground floor. ‘Look, there he is!’ Maskiavicius had said, a few moments later, pointing to the grounds of the villa. I’d gone up to the fence. At ‘heart-pouring’ times I’d often heard his name mentioned — with admiration from some, but hatred from others — and I was curious to see him, a few feet away from me, digging the garden outside his dacha . He was wearing a very plain cap and boots and, with his strong jaw, he looked like the vice-president of a collective farm.

‘Assuming the role of an agent of the international bourgeoisie, Boris Pasternak…’

A Nobel Prize didn’t seem compatible in my eyes with the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he’d obviously bought from the store at the nearest kolkhoz …

I got up, dressed, and went into the corridor. In the half-light I could see people dotted around, but they were almost unrecognisable with their swollen eyes, and they seemed to find it hard to recognise anyone else. It was half past eight and most of the residents were still asleep. I was tempted to go back to the empty suite to have another look at that accursed typescript, but I thought better of it straight away. Why should I get into an extra tangle with the KGB now that I was sure Auntie Katya had been ordered to demand the papers of anyone visiting me? The communal bathrooms where we washed every morning were deserted. The cleaners had dealt with the vomit, and not a trace of it remained: everything was clean and cold. I took a look at myself in the mirror. I had big bags under my eyes, my right eye was swollen, as if I’d broken a blood vessel, and my complexion was earthen. If Lida had seen me she would have believed I really was dead! Immediately I felt a needle stuck into my heart: Lida in the lift… Trajan’s column… her telephone number handed over to Stulpanc… What a fool! I said to myself. I must be the king of cretins to do that!