Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

I was walking down the street in a crowd of people, many of whom were on their way to the vaccination centres, when I caught sight of Maskiavicius again. I put on speed to catch up with him.

‘Maskiavicius,’ I said, taking his elbow. ‘Listen to me. Just now beside the poster you said something, and I thought you meant it for me — or, rather, for my country. If you’ve heard anything, as a good comrade… if you’re aware of what’s going on… I beg you to let me know.’

He turned to me. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, then hastened to add, ‘I was joking.’

‘No, that wasn’t a joke. You’re at liberty to say nothing, but you were not joking.’

‘Yes, I was! It was a joke!’ he said emphatically.

We walked on for a while without saying anything.

‘Well, excuse me, then,’ I said, and walked on faster to put some distance between us.

A few seconds later I smelt his breath over my right shoulder.

‘Wait a moment! You think we’re in every loop, that we’re plotting against you because you’re on your own and a foreigner, not to mention a heap of other reasons.’ After a pause he added, with more feeling, ‘That is what you think, isn’t it?’

It was indeed the case, but as I was offended I didn’t bother to turn my head to reply to him.

‘Listen,’ he went on, in the same tone, ‘you know I’m not like Yuri Goncharov or Ladonshchikov or the fucking Virgins or other such scum of the earth. And you know full well that I’m not particularly fond of Russians. If I knew anything, I’d tell you straight away. I swear I know nothing precise. However… we were at the Aragvy restaurant the other day when a fellow who was there, and who isn’t a friend of yours, said, ‘The soup is hot, but things are cooling down between us and the Albanians.’ I tried more than once to get him to talk but he wouldn’t say anything else. So now do you believe me?’

I said nothing. I wasn’t listening to him. I was just saying over and over to myself, Can this be true?

‘And then, to be honest,’ Maskiavicius went on, leaning on my shoulder, ‘it would be a real stroke of luck if things were to go cold between us and you. Yes, I know, I’m Lithuanian, but don’t make me say any more…’

Suddenly I felt it was all true. On that cold morning, among the flood of pedestrians hurrying to get themselves vaccinated against the dreadful sickness that the funeral of an Indian princess had brought to Moscow, it seemed that all the mist that had shrouded Antaeus’s words about Vukmanović-Tempo coming to Moscow, about Bucharest or the planning subcommittees for the Moscow conference had lifted in a trice.

I could see my breath turning to haze as it left my mouth and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand pieces of crystal. I was neither happy nor sad. I had resumed my state of chronic instability, beyond sadness and gaiety, in this glaucous universe, with its slanted, harsh and twisted light. Relations between my limbs had broken off. All the parts of my body were about to disconnect and reassemble themselves of their own free will in the most unbelievable ways: I might suddenly find I had an eye between my ribs, maybe even both eyes, or my legs attached to my arms, perhaps to make me fly.

As with all things beyond understanding, this metamorphosis possessed a mysterious beauty. A world sensation! Newspaper headlines. General stupefaction. The horror and grandeur of breaking off. I was spread out among them, as if I’d been scattered by a gale. A continuous burning tightness afflicted my throat. Then, as in a dream of flying, I thought I could see the black earth laid out beneath me, with a few chrome-ore freight wagons of the kind I used to notice in the goods station at Durrës on Sundays when I went to the beach with friends, alongside the barrels of bitumen that would sometimes be there when there’d been a hold-up in loading the ships, stacked in terrifying funereal mounds.

None of that did much to calm me, though I maintained an outward icy demeanour. The events of 1956 in Hungary. The Party Conference in Tirana that had taken place then, too, at which, for the first time, the Soviets had been spoken of unkindly…

‘Now pull yourself together!’ Maskiavicius said.

We would have to put up with economic sanctions, maybe a blockade or something worse. The legendary Slavic head would puff out his cheeks to raise a truly hellish wind that would blow all the way to Albania.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Maskiavicius mumbled, standing beside me.

The dreadful round face that seemed to have been born from the steppe merged in my mind with Khrushchev’s.

‘Name, first name, and date of birth,’ a nurse said.

I was standing in front of a table laden with vials and lancets. All around, a constant hubbub of people coming and going. Maskiavicius had vanished.

‘Take off your coat and jacket, please,’ said the nurse. ‘Roll up your shirt sleeve as far as you can.’

Out of the corner of my eye I watched her white fingers rub my upper arm with a cotton swab dipped in medicinal alcohol. Then they gripped a blood lancet and proceeded to make pricks in my skin with as much care as if they were tracing out an ancient pattern.

It occurred to me that the princess’s coffin must have been decorated with really strange designs to have cast such a spell on the painter.

At the site of the butchery I saw blood about to spurt. Then the young woman’s slender fingers placed a patch of damp gauze over the pattern.

‘Don’t roll down your sleeve until the bandage is dry,’ she said.

*

On my way back to the Institute I couldn’t stop turning over in my mind the brief conversation I’d had with Maskiavicius. Posters advising the people of Moscow to get vaccinated were plastered everywhere. Passers-by gathered in groups to read them line by line, nodding or chatting with each other. I stopped a few times at such gatherings in the absurd hope that someone would mention the particularly sunny relations with India and consequently the cooling of friendship with… with a certain country.

Antaeus wasn’t at the residence. Apart from him, I didn’t know anyone I could quiz openly on the subject so I put my overcoat back on and went out again. It was cold. With my mind a blank, I went up Gorky Street on the right-hand side. There, too, the smallpox announcements were posted everywhere. I glanced at them now and again as if I hoped to find something else written on them. Something other than the fact that a painter had brought a dreadful sickness with him on the plane from India.

What means had Vukmanović-Tempo used to get to Moscow, then?

The imposing edifice of the Hotel Moskva stood before me on the opposite side of the street. I scurried over the road and plunged into the foyer. It was completely quiet. In one corner, on the right, there was a stall selling foreign newspapers, particularly from the people’s democracies and Western Communist parties.

‘Have you got Zëri i Popullit ?’ I asked the salesgirl. ‘From Albania,’ I added, after a pause, to make myself clear.

When she held it out to me, I almost snatched it from her hand. I unfolded it in haste, scanning the headlines, the top lines first, then the middle ones, then the less prominent columns. Not a sign.

‘Have you any back issues?’

She gave me a pile and I rifled through them at the same feverish speed. Still nothing.

I bought a dozen newspapers in a variety of languages and was about to sit down in an easy chair to go through them when I noticed that the salesgirl was looking at me suspiciously. I was irritated and went out. Although my fingers were freezing, I started to unfold the papers, sticking initially to making sense of the headlines on the front pages. Two or three people turned to stare at me with curiosity. I went back to the top of the pile. To begin with I just glanced at the front page of each, then at the back page, and then I went through the headlines on the inside pages, but nowhere did I see mention of Albania. How could such a thing have come to pass? I almost shouted. The thousands and millions of Roman and Cyrillic characters, weighing down both sides of my overcoat, like the lead type they were printed from, were deaf and blind. The newspapers I’d bought might as well have been in hieroglyphics. They taught me nothing.