Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘Was that the third degree?’ I whispered in Maskiavicius’s ear.

He nodded.

‘If he fails to make a decision by eight p.m… ’

All those who spoke after Ladonshchikov supported the proposal, without exception.

It was one of the Shotas’ turn when I realised I hadn’t seen Stulpanc. All around the hall dozens of hands were still being raised.

‘Have you seen Stulpanc?’ I asked Maskiavicius.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘That’s a point. What’s he up to?’

One of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ has just walked on to the stage.

I hadn’t seen Antaeus either.

‘Now it’s the Karakums’ turn,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That should be a laugh!’

It was as clear as daylight: Stulpanc was with Lida Snegina while this was going on…

Now it was Taburokov’s turn.

I told myself that I had never had occasion to wile away a campaign of denunciation in the company of a young woman…

Taburokov must have said something peculiar because the audience was trying to stifle a groan.

Being alone with a girl, I thought, in the course of a campaign or something of that sort, such as an epidemic — now that would most likely stick in your memory for a good long while…

After a couple of first-year women had said their piece, Yuri Goncharov and Abdullakhanov took their turn. Then Anatoly Kuznetsov was called to the podium.

I thought I glimpsed Ira Emelianova’s blonde hair behind Paustovsky. He had Yuri Pankratov and Vania Kharabarov to each side. One was tall and thin and moved his arms stiffly, like a robot; the other was short and looked repulsive.

‘I’m looking at them as well,’ Maskiavicius said, in my ear. ‘You know they’re both spies for Pasternak? They’re here to pick up everything that’s said about him and then they’ll report back to him.’

‘Ah!’ I said, lost for words.

‘Is Yevtushenko going to speak?’ someone asked, from the row behind me.

Where Yevtushenko was concerned, I’d heard people utter every imaginable insult and every imaginable compliment about him.

At this point a member of the panel shouted, ‘Maskiavicius, you have the floor!’

He glanced at me, then stood up and made his way to the podium.

‘As long as we are together, what does it matter if the world is going to ruin…’ I recited the two lines from De Rada automatically in my head. In his novel the lovers meet during an earthquake.

On the stage, speakers came and went. Then a muffled mumble swept through the hall. Pasternak was racing across the tundra: Kyuzengesh was about to hold forth!

Stulpanc and Lida were perhaps listening to it all on the radio, in the corner of some café. They were gazing into each other’s eyes and maybe they were talking about me.

Amplified to a terrifying degree by the loudspeakers, Kyuzengesh’s murmuring now filled the whole hall.

Yes, they must have occasion to talk about me. Did she not like dead writers? Once again we had mounted the same horse: I was the dead and she was the living rider, like the legendary Kostandin and Doruntine. Except that instead of there being two, there were now three of us: the living couple, and the deceased me.

The campaign went on. Nothing was known for certain about the outcome of the Gorky Institute meeting as far as Pasternak’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was concerned. Some people said he had already sent an urgent telegram to Stockholm to decline the prize, others that he was still wavering. In the best-informed circles, they were saying he’d written a moving letter to Khrushchev and that his fate now hung on the First Secretary’s response. But they were also claiming that Khrushchev had been furious with writers for some time, and only a very harsh reply could be expected.

Meanwhile gusts of icy wind bore down on Moscow. Sometimes you could hear them howling as they blew in from some indeterminate point. At Butyrsky Khutor it seemed as if they were coming from Ostankino, but in that corner of town people reckoned they’d been let loose in the centre, near the main squares.

All through the long moan of winter Stulpanc went on seeing Lida. They sometimes talked about me, he said. It sounded macabre. Breaking all the laws of death, he informed me about how mine had occurred. It was against nature for anybody to hear about that, because nobody can ever know such things. But there did exist in this world one being for whom I counted as dead, and so, objectively speaking, some part of me must have passed to the hereafter. And that being, Lida Snegina, was the only person in whom the details of my death were located. Lida was my pyramid and my mausoleum; she was where my sarcophagus lay. Through her, the whole relationship between my being and my nothingness had been turned upside down. And when Stulpanc came back from spending time with her, I felt as if he was returning from the other world, coming down from a higher plane, from an alternative time with newspapers bearing future dates and archives containing information about me that looked like nothing at all, since no one had yet looked at me in the light of my own death.

Sometimes it seemed to me that my death was also being broadcast through Stulpanc’s eyes. On a couple of occasions when he’d looked as if he wanted to talk to me, I’d cut him off: ‘Say no more!’

At one of the anti-Pasternak meetings I’d made the acquaintance of Alla Grachova, a theatre-loving girl with a sense of humour. Every time the radio announcers returned to the subject of Pasternak after a musical broadcast, she would take my hand and say, ‘Let’s go somewhere else!’

But the campaign was all around us and nobody could get free of it. It had winkled its way inside us. When Alla talked about some of her relatives, she told me what they were saying about Pasternak. One of her uncles was the angriest of them all.

‘But you told me he’d made his career since the rise of Khrushchev!’

‘Yes, he’s a Khrushchevite through and through, and a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Stalinist too.’

‘But how can that be possible?’

She looked at me sweetly, as if she didn’t understand what wasn’t possible. I decided to explain it to her in simple terms.

‘Your uncle paints Pasternak as black as coal, right?’ She nodded. ‘And he also heaps insults on Stalin, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Alla, eyes wide.

‘And Pasternak most certainly slings mud at Stalin. In other words, your uncle has the same attitude to Stalin as Pasternak does. Right? Well, then, arithmetically, between your uncle and Pasternak there should not be any incompatibility. Quite the opposite, actually.’

‘Damn!’ she said. ‘I can never get the hang of that kind of thing and I’ve no wish to. We’d said we’d drop the subject. You can’t imagine the goings-on at our place…’

All the same, newspapers, radio and TV carried on campaigning. Doctor… Doctor… The wailing of the transcontinental wind made it seem as if the entire, and now almost entirely snow-covered, Soviet Union was calling out for a man in a white coat. Doctor… Doctor… Sometimes, at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, you could almost hear the deep-throated moaning of an invalid waiting for the arrival from who knew where of a doctor who had so far failed to turn up.

The campaign stopped as suddenly as it had started. One fine morning the radio began broadcasting reports on the achievements of the collective farms in the Urals, about summer retreats, about arts festivals in one or another Soviet republic, about the abundance of the fisheries, about contented young people in the steppe near the Volga — but it uttered not another word about Pasternak.

It was the same in the papers and on TV, in the streets, on the bus and in the corridors of the Institute. Twelve hours earlier the name of Pasternak had come out of people’s mouths with an angry, violent snarl; now it didn’t seem anyone could even get it out properly any more.