Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I was at my wit’s end. I’d spent half an hour shuttling back and forth between my room and the corridor, so I decided to go out to cool off.

A chilly breeze was whirling snowflakes into spirals under the lamp posts. I got onto a trolleybus that took me to Pushkin Square. Gorky Street looked quite beautiful in the snow. I walked to the Artists’ Café where I’d decided to have dinner. To hell with the pair of them! I thought, in a sudden burst of indifference. The snow, the wind and the street in its winter attire had clarified my feelings. It all seemed simpler now. They were in their own country, they could get married and have children, whereas I was only in transit. In transit seemed a good way to refer to myself in the soggy, soporific season of winter that I had lived through up to this point. In transit , I repeated to myself, and the Russian word vremmeny — ‘provisional’ — merged in my mind with the name of Vukmanović-Tempo. Yes, to hell with them! I ordered a glass of wine, and a little later I came out of the restaurant and went back to the bus stop in a thoroughly good mood.

*

The first thing that struck me when I reached the residence was the light streaming from under Stulpanc’s door. I felt a pang in my heart. I no longer had the support of snow-covered open spaces and I almost fainted. I hurried on and pushed into his room without knocking. He was smoking a cigarette. I tried not to speak too quickly.

‘So where did you get to, then?’

Guilt and surprise were combined in the smile that spread across his broad Nordic face. I’d never burst into his room before with a plaintive ‘So where did you get to?’

‘Well?’ I added.

‘What?’

‘Where were you?’

He stared at me with pale eyes that seemed not to have enough room in his face. At last he replied, ‘Well, I was out, with her.’

‘With Lida?’

He nodded, without ceasing to stare at me.

Gently, in heavy silence, something broke inside me. So there you are, I said to myself. I felt a great emptiness. Ideas and words had simply flown. All that was left were a few scraps of language, sounds like um and I see and really . I remembered that whenever I had had an upset of this kind, words had left me just as plant life deserts areas where the climate is too harsh; all I had left were clipped syllables of that sort, as if only they could tolerate the sudden worsening of the climate inside me.

‘But you yourself said…’ Stulpanc began. He surely meant to say, ‘You palmed her off on me,’ but apparently he found it too direct, or too vulgar, to say outright.

My mind was a blank and I studied a picture on the wall. It depicted a sight I knew: Sigurd’s castle in Latvia. I’d visited it the previous summer.

‘But didn’t you set me up?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘I can see you’ve had a change of heart. But if you like…’

‘What?’ My voice had gone faint despite all my efforts to make it sound normal.

‘If you like… though now, of course, the case is closed. Yes! To hell with it!’

I’d lost the thread. Who or what was supposed to go to hell? Could nothing be salvaged? ‘Did you tell her I was dead?’

He swallowed, then admitted it. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘I’d hoped you would be kinder!’ Now I knew the truth, words had returned to me. ‘Yes, kinder!’ I repeated, doing my best to laugh as I said it. ‘It’s just like you to pass a death sentence on me!’

‘But you asked me to say that! And you went so far as to tell me I should say you had died in a plane crash. Don’t you remember?’

‘That really takes the biscuit! I was drunk, for heaven’s sake! Didn’t you notice?’

‘Do you think I was sober?’

I thought, It’s all over now. Now she believes I am dead, it’s all done for. ‘If only you hadn’t killed me off entirely,’ I said, with a flicker of optimism. Just before, when I’d asked him if he’d told Lida of my death, he’d replied, ‘In a manner of speaking…’ ‘You could have told her I was only injured…’

Now Stulpanc lost his temper. ‘You need your head examining!’ he shouted. ‘You got me into this. I’ve never played that sort of trick. You’ve turned me into a kind of Chichikov from Dead Souls . I’d never have called the girl if she hadn’t attracted me so… so… What’s the Russian adverb to express an absolute superlative?’

‘Insanely.’

‘That’s right! Attracted me so insanely!’

We stood there without speaking for a few seconds. I examined the Latvian castle on the wall, trying to summon up some memory of the previous summer I’d spent in Stulpanc’s country, but it was now light years away.

‘All right, all right,’ I said wearily. ‘How did she take it?’

He saw that I had calmed down and smiled faintly, without looking at me. ‘She was very upset…’ He was staring at the floor, but I kept my eyes on him. ‘Yes, she was very, very upset,’ he repeated. ‘Insanely so.’ I thought, To be pitied by someone, to arouse sympathy in Old Russian… ‘She even wept. Yes, she cried a couple of times. I saw tears in her eyes…’

I sighed deeply, trying not to make a sound to prevent Stulpanc noticing I had sighed. I felt strangely relieved. Maybe things were better like this. If they’d been different, perhaps she would never have had a chance to cry over me. Suddenly a vague, lukewarm feeling spread through my chest. My ribs began to soften and bend as if they were in a surrealist painting. One day you will cry over me… Two days earlier such a thought would have made me laugh out loud. Ah! She’s crying! Little Lida is upset! Tut-tut! I was making superhuman efforts to hold down a great guffaw accompanied by those clucking noises I found so repellent in other people, but I failed. But far from succeeding in clucking, like the ne’er-do-wells of Gorky Street, I couldn’t even manage to laugh naturally, like an ordinary person. The whole thing seemed more and more primitive to me. I must have been waiting years for someone to shed tears on my behalf. I’d longed for tears with a more terrible thirst than a parched Bedouin in the deserts of Arabia. Over the last two years I’d had relationships with young women who were very free: I’d taken them to the theatre, to cafés, on night trains; we’d danced and kissed and slept together without ever saying, ‘I love you’, because it seemed old-fashioned, and recently we’d gone so far as to replace the word lyublyu (‘I love’) with the word seksyu , and were very proud of our invention. So we’d said a lot of stupid things and done just as many, following our whims from bars to dance halls, and from there, blindly and joyfully, onto a snowy downhill slope. This long pilgrimage through the desert, in gradual stages, without my noticing, but to an unbearable degree, had given me that thirst for a few tears. At last they had been shed. It had taken the intercession of death to bring those tiny blue drops into being.

‘What a peculiar fellow you are,’ Stulpanc said.

So that was it! She liked dead men more than the living. And his words of consolation had not been wasted.

‘You really are funny,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘At first, when you came in, you looked like a thundercloud, but now you’re almost smiling. Did you know that sudden changes of mood are supposed to be one of the first symptoms of madness?’

I went on staring him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s quite possible I’m going off my rocker, seeing what I did.’

The following morning was as gloomy as the ones that preceded it. I’d barely washed when I switched on the radio, automatically. The campaign hadn’t stopped. The diatribes were the same as before but they were now being spoken in a graver tone. You could sense straight away that a new phase of the campaign was being launched that day. There was no doubt that it had been worked out in advance in great detail. The gigantic state propaganda machine never slumbered.