Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘Have you seen Bella?’ he asked.

I shook my head, but it seemed obvious he didn’t give a damn where Bella was.

‘You seen that?’ he questioned, directing his eyes to his right-hand jacket pocket from which a copy of Literaturnaya gazeta was poking out, showing half of Pasternak’s name.

‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ I said.

‘Hee-hee,’ he said, with a triumphant grin. ‘The Nobel… at last!’

You could see straight away that he, too, was one of the disappointed ghosts. He was about to say something more but just then Ira Emelianova passed us, a sad smile hovering in the corners of her eyes and on her lips, as if she was about to burst into tears. She greeted us nervously and Yevtushenko then asked me, ‘You know who this Irochka is?’

I didn’t understand his question.

In a whisper, he added, ‘She’s the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress, a woman called Olga, who’s been divorced three or four times, and is said to be the root of all the misfortunes that have befallen poor Boris Leonidovich.’

He went on talking about their relationship, but I had stopped listening. I’d had only a few hours of troubled sleep over the last two nights, and I was exhausted. By the time I got to the door of my room I was in that strange state when you’re on the verge of sleep — I could feel dreams rising from my limbs, soft and porous, like sponges, and I felt I had only to stretch out my hand to touch or seize them or push them a little further away. I was sufficiently awake to realise that the spongy sensation beneath my belt belonged to the world of dream, and sufficiently asleep to feel it was completely natural, to the point that I was unable to escape from it. In my dreams I was lying in a large bath, and although the art history professor, whose job it was to turn on the hot tap, kept saying, ‘ Ubr jazëk ,’ the water still would not come. Then she declared, ‘We are in the very hammam where Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Lida took a bath, but the aesthetico-ideological nature of a hammam is conditioned in the first place by tuuli unch bll , that is to say by the typical situation… in other words by tuuli zox …’

When I woke, night had fallen almost completely. I stretched out my arm mechanically and switched on the radio. The anti-Pasternak campaign continued. I listened for a while with my hands behind my head. After a feature on a women’s meeting in Irkutsk, they read a statement from Anatoly Kuznetsov. It was the harshest of all those I had heard. My room was now almost totally dark. A few shards of light that had been trapped in the curtains wavered gently over my head. And it’s not even evening yet! I thought. Darkness suited evenings and night, but when it came before the end of the day it depressed me more than anything. I was alone, in the midst of an afternoon that might just as well have been called an after-midnight, with a radio blaring ceaselessly over a landmass of twenty-two million square kilometres. ‘One sixth of the earth drowning in such insults!’ I muttered to myself drowsily.

Then, all of a sudden, I shuddered. My mind now sharpened like a steel dagger, I took the full measure of the infernal machine running full speed ahead. What must it be like to be the target, to be the eye of that whirlwind? I imagined the legendary Slav head puffing out its cheeks in the middle of the steppe. Soviet propaganda was just like it. A few years earlier that head had raised a dust-storm against Stalin, and now, who knew why, it was blowing against its own supporters. What must it be like to be the target of all these attacks? I wondered again. I switched on my bedside lamp. How had it all been set in motion? I had no idea — I couldn’t imagine how it had been achieved. I knew of not a single work of Soviet literature that gave even a fragmentary description of how the machinery of state actually functioned: no insight into meetings of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, or the Politburo, or other more occult authorities. Antaeus and I had talked about it once at the Praga café. He hadn’t come across any either.

But — I thought in my puzzlement — maybe I’m wrong, maybe such works do exist and I just haven’t had an opportunity to read them yet. I recalled that last week Shogentsukov had given me a signed copy of one of his works that had been translated and published in Moscow. Where had I put it? I got up, in a daze, and found it only after I’d emptied all the drawers in my desk. The radio didn’t stop bawling. Shogentsukov, a former prime minister, must surely deal with the problems of the state somewhere or other. Yes, he must! I sat on the edge of my bed and, despite the migraine that was tormenting me, I started to read. The radio suspended its rant and broadcast some music, but even those sounds felt charged with hatred. After thirty minutes I cast the book aside. It was a novella-length idyll among shepherds, pastures and hills. Not only did it contain no mention of the institutions of the state, it did not admit of a single construction in brick or stone. Nothing but gurgling streams, fidelity and flowers, and a few hymns sung of an evening to the glory of the Communist Party of the USSR. Can this really be? I wondered.

On the radio the anti-Pasternak diatribe had resumed. The announcer read out a letter from the people of a region of Qipstap, on the steppe, then a statement by the Tashkent clergy. A sixth of the globe was awash once more under a tidal wave of invective. In recent times so many important events had taken place — there had been so many tragic reversals: whole central committees had been thrown out, factions had fought implacably to gain or retain power, there’d been plots and backstage deals. But none of that, or almost none, showed up on the pages of novels or in the speeches of characters on stage. All you got was the rustling of birch trees — ah! my beloved silver birch! — and in all that literature it was always Sunday, as it had been on the day we were skiing at Peredelkino.

I got up, dressed and went into the corridor. I was at a loose end and just sauntered up and down. The dim bulbs gave off a wan light and now and again you could hear the lift humming. I knocked at Stulpanc’s door a couple of times but there was no answer. Where have they all gone? I wondered. I went back to my room and stood in front of the radio with my arms at my sides, almost standing to attention, as if I’d just heard a sentence handed down by a court. The campaign was still going on. Some statement was being made in elaborately convoluted prose, maybe by the North Sea whaling fleet. Not much later I was in the corridor again, and as I wandered up and down, I found myself in front of Stulpanc’s door more than once. Where has he gone? an inner voice asked. It was buried deep inside me, but I could feel it rising to the surface. As my hand reached out mechanically to knock on Stulpanc’s door for the fourth time I realised that I had been waiting in the corridor for his return. In my muddled mind I tried to imagine where he had gone to hide, but it took me a while to convince myself that it was a useless game, and that it mattered not a jot to me whether Stulpanc was at the bar of the Kavkaz , the editorial offices of Tabak , having lunch with Khrushchev or supping with the Devil himself. The only thing that mattered was that he was not with one particular person — Lida. I couldn’t believe he’d have phoned her so soon and it was even less believable that he’d got a date already. That’s impossible, I said to myself. Stulpanc is a plodder in that department. And then, if she’d written me such a sorrowful letter, it wasn’t so she could fall into someone else’s arms!

But one minute later I was convinced the opposite was the case. It wasn’t possible that Stulpanc had refrained from trying to get in touch with such a pretty woman. He’d seemed entranced by her. No, no, there was no reason for him to have put off calling her. As for Lida, her letter, the feelings she’d put into it, the Old Russian and all that, wouldn’t have prevented her running off with Stulpanc — quite the opposite, if all she’d written to me was true and if therefore her affection for me, the etymology, the Old Russian and all that such things entailed, had reached the state she had claimed, then of course, once she’d heard about the disaster (because that idiot Stulpanc must surely have told her I was dead), she must have dropped everything to hurry round to see him to find out more. Yes! Yes! I almost cried aloud in despair. He called her and she’s gone out with him on a date! Especially because, on this ice-cold day, all she had to listen to was this unending campaign, which must have made her think about writers and similarly sinister matters. I shouldn’t have let Stulpanc out of my sight on a day like this.