Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

At the moment it seemed to be the liberals’ turn to feel the whip.

‘Doctor Zhivago was published in the West three years ago,’ Antaeus went on. ‘At the time none of those guys even mentioned it. But now he’s got the Nobel Prize they’re obliged to take a stand.’

‘By chance, I read a few pages of it,’ I said.

‘Really? How?’

‘Part of a typescript I found in an empty apartment. But I didn’t know what book it was.’

‘Don’t breathe a word of it to anybody. You could get into serious trouble over nothing.’

All around us the crowd of students was buzzing with talk.

‘So what are they going to do with Pasternak now?’ somebody asked.

‘Who knows? Maybe he’ll be deported.’

‘What?’

‘I said, maybe they’ll send him away, rusticate him. Remember, Ovid was exiled to Romania…’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’

‘Do you think they really are capable of doing such a thing?’ I asked Antaeus.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘To Romania,’ somebody we couldn’t see repeated. ‘Like Ovid…’

‘Apparently they’re having talks right now. It’s a peculiar argument… but I don’t know the details.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask any questions!’

The whole trouble comes from Romania, I thought, collapsing with fatigue. It’s no coincidence that the previous evening I had thought of Trajan’s column. I could still feel the bruises on my skull from the hoofs of the Roman and Dacian horsemen. ‘What about Vukmanović-Tempo? Has he left Moscow?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Antaeus replied. ‘Maybe he’s still here.’

The bell rang for the last lecture and the courtyard emptied. Only a few shreds remained of a newspaper that somebody must have used as wrapping. On the separate pieces you could see groups of capital letters spelling out RNAK, VAG, then ZHIV, STERN and PAST.

The campaign against Boris Pasternak had started twenty-four hours ago and was being conducted with great intensity throughout the Soviet Union. On the radio from five a.m. until midnight, on television, in newspapers and magazines and even in children’s comics, the renegade writer was being spattered with venom. As was customary in cases of this kind, the bristling statements of Soviet literati were regurgitated by workers and collective farmers. Newspapers apologised for being able to publish only a minute proportion of the tens of thousands of letters and telegrams pouring in from the four corners of the Soviet lands. Among them were expressions of outrage from oil drillers, drama students, Orthodox priests, Bolshoi ballerinas, mountain climbers, atomic physicists, beekeepers, Caspian Sea salt-rakers, reformed mystics, the mute, and so forth. On the front page of Literaturnaya gazeta they’d printed statements by Shakenov and Ladonshchikov, among others. Most of the students on our course had also sent in statements and expected to see them in print in due course. One of them was Taburokov, who still believed that the Nobel Prize was awarded by the American government in cahoots with the Jewish lobby in New York. Another was Maskiavicius, even though he’d told me the previous day that Pasternak, despite his turpitude, was worth a hundred times more than any of the other runts of Soviet literature.

I had just come out of the last lecture when he told me there was a letter waiting for me in the porter’s lodge. I recognised Lida’s handwriting on the envelope. As I opened it I realised I had never before opened a letter with so much feeling. It had been mailed that same morning and it began without any preamble:

Since we met I’ve always liked you but I’ve never been completely in love with you. The day before yesterday I loved you, I couldn’t say why. Perhaps love came through compassion. In Old Russian, the words for ‘to love’ and ‘to sympathise’ used to be the same, then they split apart. That evening you looked so distraught that it broke my heart. In my memory that evening is a nightmare. It hardly matters that we have broken up. I would just like you to remember me kindly. As for me, I will remember that night with horror and with compassion (love). Lida Snegina

PS All day yesterday the radio went on and on about a writer who committed betrayal and I thought of you. L.

I folded it rapidly and stuffed it into my pocket. I was beside myself, not because of the letter but at the thought of what I had done after Lida and I had parted. Ha! I thought. Now you’re showing sympathy by delving into etymology and Church Slavonic. I was in a temper and it occurred to me that nobody could tell which of us was more to be pitied. Then, in a tangled skein, Stulpanc came to my mind, the way I’d handed Lida over to him as if we’d been at a slave market. In parallel, or like a substratum, I thought that it was all a diversion, an illusion of revenge and, looking at things in simple terms, mere nastiness on my part.

I was pacing up and down the courtyard like a madman, looking out for Stulpanc. I hadn’t seen him since that crazy conversation. At one point I’d been tempted to call a halt to it and tell him the whole thing had been a joke, but then I remembered I had given him Lida’s telephone number, which anchored it to reality. Two or three times I told myself that he had surely forgotten the episode, especially because he had been drunk at the time and had probably dropped the piece of paper with the phone number on it somewhere in the corridor. But each time I managed to reassure myself, doubts beset me again.

Suddenly I caught sight of him from behind, standing placidly at the Institute door, amid a group of students talking among themselves as they made for the trolleybus stop. I followed them at a distance of twenty yards or so. I just had to get into the same carriage as they did.

The trolleybus was half empty and I found a place near the rear window. Now and again I looked at Stulpanc’s open, honest face from the corner of my eye. I was torn. Should I go up to him or not? I was vaguely afraid that my appearance would remind him of the accursed words we had spoken, and that perhaps he had not forgotten them entirely.

The trolleybus gradually filled. Now that I could no longer see Stulpanc I stopped torturing myself. I would not have been able to get to him now even if I’d wanted to. At one point, I’m not sure how, I caught sight of his golden, perfectly brushed hair and, in a flash, I thought I’d done the right thing in handing Lida over to him, rather than to Abdullakhanov or the two Shotas. Then I told myself once more that the whole thing had been a bad joke he must have forgotten by now and that in a few days’ time I would call Lida and we would make up as we had in the past.

Through the rear window I gazed at the street that led to Butyrsky Khutor, which looked more miserable than ever. Stulpanc got off with four or five others at the stop near to Novoslobodskaya metro station, which surprised me. I watched them cross the road and walk towards the great reddish walls of Butyrky Prison, and it came back to me: they were going to see one of their friends, someone called Kolya Krasnikov. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison because some time earlier, when Tito was visiting Moscow, he’d shouted at a meeting, ‘Long live the Tito-Ranković Clique!’ They’d asked me to go with them, and as I was curious to see the inside of a Soviet prison, I nearly said yes. But then I remembered I was a foreigner, and also the police summons, so I said no.

The trolleybus was now packed. Squeezed up against the rear window, I uttered two or three of those little sighs that the sight of a street in winter sometimes arouses. I was dead tired.

At the front door of the residence stood a tall man, boyishly skinny with colourless hair and a cigarette stuck between his lips, like the ones you don’t actually smoke. It was Zhenya Yevtushenko.