Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

There was an unusual bustle at the Gorky Institute. The consequences of Sunday’s drinking — puffy cheeks, blotches, bags under the eyes — had been finally wiped from faces that henceforth expressed only sinister harshness.

After the second period, posters appeared on the walls of all corridors announcing an ultra-important meeting that afternoon. It was rumoured that the most eminent writers of the Soviet Union would attend, and there was even talk that the presidents of the Writers’ Unions of the People’s Republics had been called to Moscow and would probably be there.

Meanwhile the Institute’s inmates carried on sending statements to the papers and to radio and television stations. Taburokov alone had sent pieces to fourteen different reviews and newspapers; in one he’d even described Pasternak as an enemy of the Arab nation. On the second day of the campaign one hundred and eleven dailies and seventy-four periodicals had published editorials, articles, statements and reports condemning Pasternak. More such pieces were expected in other daily, weekly and fortnightly publications and then in monthly and bi-monthly journals, science magazines, quarterlies, bilingual reviews and so on.

‘He ought to make a statement this evening turning down the Nobel,’ Maskiavicius said. ‘If it’s not wrapped up by eight tonight, the campaign will get even nastier.’

‘How could it be nastier than it is?’ someone asked.

‘Apparently,’ Maskiavicius answered, ‘the patriarch of Soviet letters, Korney Chukovsky, is going to call on him at two this afternoon to try to persuade him.’

‘And if he fails?’

‘Then we’ll have a big meeting.’

‘To what purpose?’

‘I suspect we’ll move to menace, third degree.’

‘Where did you learn all that?’

‘I know what I know,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That’s all.’

‘But what if he doesn’t turn down the prize even after the third degree? What happens then? Will there be a fourth degree?’

Maskiavicius interrupted the speaker. ‘You won’t catch me out as easily as that, mate! I wouldn’t be so careless as to tell you anything about the fourth degree. Sss.’ He whistled. ‘Fourth degree! Hey-hey! Degree number four… Hm! Brrr!’ With a diabolical glint in his eye, he turned tail and disappeared into the crowd.

The meeting was held in the auditorium on the first floor of the Institute. Almost all the seats were taken when I went in. It was already twilight outside and the feeble light that trickled through the tall bay windows seemed to form an alloy with the bronze chandeliers that hadn’t yet been switched on, though I didn’t know why. The room was packed and virtually silent. The scraping of a chair and words whispered into neighbours’ ears could not dent the empire of silence. On the contrary: the occasional sounds of creaking seats and muffled gossip made the atmosphere only more leaden.

I was standing at the entrance, unsure what to do, when I noticed people waving at me. It was the two Shotas, Maskiavicius and Kurganov, who were almost sitting in each other’s laps. I forged a path between the rows of seats, and my fellow students huddled even closer together to make just enough room for me. In the row in front of us were the Karakums and somewhere to the side I thought I could see one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’.

‘How are you?’ someone asked me quietly.

I shrugged. The mood was such that you didn’t have the slightest wish to answer anything about yourself. In that drab room you felt as though you could speak only about generalities, and only through the use of impersonal verbs, if possible in a chorus, as in some ancient drama.

I looked around at the participants. Apart from the students and teachers of the Institute, there were many known faces. The front rows were almost completely filled with literary mediocrities. They were just as I had always seen them, always present and totally invulnerable, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the front rank, stepping up to glorify Stalin before anyone else, and to drop him in favour of Khrushchev; they were quite capable of deserting Khrushchev for some other First Secretary.

Right at the back, in a corner, in the middle of a group that remained obscure, I thought I could make out Paustovsky. Was it a group of the silent opposition or of Jewish writers? I couldn’t see them clearly enough. It was getting ever darker in the room. At long last someone thought of switching on the lights. The candelabra immediately banished the weak daylight and filled the hall with a light that reminded me of Ladonshchikov — a brightness tainted with anxiety. The first thing the light revealed was the long table of the Presidium, decked out in red velvet. The porcelain vases at each end and the bouquet in the middle made it look like an elongated catafalque. I recalled the wallpaper on the walls of the empty apartment where I had read a few pages of Doctor Zhivago . It was no coincidence that its pattern had made me think of the lid of a sarcophagus.

‘What does the third degree consist of?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Is that what we’re about to see?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. It depends on Chukovsky, who’s gaga already.’

‘I meant to ask, what exactly has he done?’

‘Nothing, apparently. Around two he went to Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino, but it seems he forgot why he was there. So he drank a cup of tea, and then had a nap on the sofa.’

I was just about to guffaw, but at that moment a kind of shiver ran through the room. The meeting’s Presidium had come on to the stage to take their seats at the long table with its crimson drapery. The first were already sitting down while others, who were still in the audience, were lining up and creeping forward in waves, like a snake. Their whispered names circulated among us. They’d been summoned from here and there; most were old, some had been publishing trilogies for forty years; if my memory serves me right, five had published novels with titles that contained the word ‘earth’, and two had gone blind. My mind went back to Korney Chukovksy’s fateful siesta, but I couldn’t manage to laugh about it.

‘Comrades, we are gathered here today…’

The opening speaker was Seriogin, director of the Gorky Institute. His eyes, as always, had a sinister and malicious glint. To his right sat Druzin, representing the governing body of the Writers’ Union. His hair was snow white, but his massive head and thrusting jaw seemed so fierce and warlike that it was hard to believe the white hair was real.

‘We are gathered here to censure, to…’

Seriogin’s voice contained the same proportion of malice and gall as his eyes, the stripes on his suit and even his hands, one of which had been replaced by a black rubber prosthesis. The first time I saw him I supposed he’d lost his hand in the war, but Maskiavicius told me that Seriogin’s hand had slowly withered of its own accord in the course of the third Five-year Plan…

Seriogin’s speech was a short one. Then Druzin rose. His contribution was no more drawn out; what he said didn’t match his white hair. As always, everything about him jutted like his chin.

‘Now for the fireworks!’ Maskiavicius said, once Druzin had sat down.

Indeed, at that point dozens of hands were raised to request the floor. From the outset it was clear that, as was customary in such circumstances, the Presidium’s selection of speakers sought to maintain some kind of balance between generations, nationalities and regions, as well as between undeclared literary groupings.

Ladonshchikov was among the first allowed to speak. In a special voice that was both gloomy and booming (a Party voice, in Maskiavicius’s phrase), in a voice that his lungs could only ever produce on occasions of this kind, Ladonshchikov made the proposal to his silent listeners that Pasternak be expelled from the Soviet Union.