Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘Nina, do you remember when they called them out on red alert that night?’ the young widow said, to Alla’s mother. ‘They’d just got home from a mission, but they had to go back on duty all the same. I had a sudden dark premonition…’

All of the women, those who were still widows and those who had remarried, began to reminisce about their long evenings and nights of waiting, their grim forebodings and their brief conversations over the garden fence.

Alla’s father’s plane had been surrounded by a squadron of Junkers and disappeared.

‘Poor boy,’ Alla’s grandmother repeated, from time to time. ‘Those vultures tore him to pieces. In the dark, all alone, up there, in the sky…’

All alone, in the dark… Those words hid something. They were like a bolted door in my way. I combed through my mind seeking desperately to resuscitate a memory. All aloooone , in the daaaark .

Suddenly it came to me. It was an old song someone had sung long ago at a wedding I’d attended:

I set out for Ioannina

In the dark, on my oooown

Just me and black Haxhi

In the dark, on my oooown

Every time I heard the words I heard them differently. Sometimes I thought it was ‘just me and arabaxhi [the coachman]’ and at other times it seemed more like ‘just me and arap Haxhi [black Haxhi]’, which I found even more sinister.

I shuddered. The thick of night, the road and black Haxhi, the servant. I couldn’t remember the rest. I think the traveller was attacked by highwaymen:

They cut me up with their knives

In the dark, on my oooown

I thought there could not be a sadder song about loneliness in the whole wide world.

‘Nina, do you remember September the twelfth?’ said the woman sitting next to her.

Wide-eyed and attentive, Alla’s uncle was listening to the women’s lively talk. The other men had taken on a look that was half guilty and half annoyed, presumably because it was not particularly pleasant for them to hear their wives talking with so much feeling about their first husbands.

As people were no longer paying any attention to us, Alla and I took the opportunity to slip away. Olya, Alla’s younger sister, stuck to our heels.

‘We’ll all go for a walk in the forest together,’ Alla told her. ‘Only you’re going to leave us alone for a minute. We’ve got something else to do first…’

Without waiting for a response from her sister, she took my hand and pulled me towards her bedroom…

The countryside, still half covered with snow, was silent. We’d been walking for more than an hour. Olya was with us part of the way and in front for the rest, because she liked to be the first to find the path we would take. A slim girl with delicate limbs and a supple neck, she had the same crystalline voice as her sister, Alla. From afar she pointed out a half-frozen pond, a derelict izba , and a half-rotted beam that someone had dragged out there, God knew why. We pretended to be interested in everything she told us, and she ran off happily to make new discoveries.

We came across a few uninhabited dacha s with their shutters closed and, less frequently, an izba . Alla reckoned we were probably on the outskirts of a village.

‘Hey!’ Olya shouted from the distance. ‘There’s a cemetery!’

It was a village graveyard surrounded by a fence, or at least the remains of one. Most of the wooden crosses were broken or crooked, just as I had always imagined them from the masterpieces of Russian literature. By each grave there was a rudimentary bench made from two planks nailed to short stakes hammered into the ground. That was where the relatives of the deceased would sit when they came to the cemetery on Sundays or on the departed’s name-day. Like the crosses, the wooden benches were black with age and rotting away. Nothing could have been sadder to see.

‘There must be a church somewhere nearby,’ Alla said. That was all that was missing from this deserted landscape: a village church with an Old Russian prayer book in the Old Slavonic that had seemed to be pursing me for a while. I suddenly felt sure I had gone past this cemetery last year. But maybe I was mistaken: the suburbs of Moscow are so similar to each other that you can easily mistake one for another. Or else I’d come here at the start of autumn when everything was golden and copper-coloured, streaked with the dust that reminded me of antiques shops.

I’d forgotten which station we’d got off at: all my memory retained was the magical gilding of the leaves contrasting with the black of the izba s, the carpet of dead leaves — the essence of autumn — and the birch trees with their spotted trunks, bare patches revealed by the peeling bark that were so bright and shiny that they reminded me of how village swells had once used mirrors to make spots of sunlight play on girls’ windows.

I’d been with Stulpanc, Kurganov and a poet who worked in a publisher’s office. We’d felt intoxicated as we’d tramped through what the glorious Russian autumn had turned to gold and laid on the ground but we couldn’t understand why the two or three peasants standing on the thresholds of their izba s were glaring at us in such a sombre manner. We’d also seen three very aged women, one of them knitting; in their eyes shone the murky gleam of fear mixed with an unknowable measure of resignation. Puzzled by their attitude, we asked a few questions and learned that a nineteen-year-old girl had been stabbed to death in the area a month earlier. She was called Tonia Michelson and was certainly the prettiest young woman in the Moscow suburbs. She’d been killed by hooligans, not far from the suburban station, on the tra-a-a-cks… An aged country-woman wearing a headscarf (like all old Russian women) told us the story, her emotions and toothless gums turning her voice into a thin trickle of sound.

‘They killed her for nothing, for nothing!’ she said, and each ‘for nothing’ was like another stab to the heart.

Everything about her story was so raw and terrible that it made you want to double up to fill the pit it left in your stomach. The death of Tonia Michelson, a pretty girl of nineteen, seemed even more sinister told in a slow drawl from a toothless mouth.

Hooligans had come out from Moscow to see one of their mates. They’d been drinking, then played cards and decided that the loser’s forfeit would be to bump off the last girl on the last train back to town. It was a vicious game that had been spreading in recent times. They gambled on the lives of complete strangers — the last customer at the supermarket, the first person to get off the trolleybus, or whoever was sitting in seat seventeen on row nineteen in a cinema.

‘So it’s like I told you, for nothing,’ the old woman said, for the third time.

If she’d said ‘for nothing’ a fourth time, I think I would have screamed, ‘Stop!’

The pain that the unknown Tonia Michelson had prompted was visible everywhere. It had managed to superimpose itself on the landscape, soiling it with bloodstains that would not vanish for at least a century. No geological upheaval could have left a greater mark on those parts than the grief of Tonia Michelson’s death.

I wanted to tell Alla about it, but something stopped me, maybe just that we were not in that part of the Moscow suburbs. And, anyway, everything was covered with snow now — and snow seemed to require one to forget, at least until spring.

We went further into the thinning woods. Through the trees we could make out distant izba s on the forest edge. The birches were frozen, and their dormant shoots made bumps in the blistered bark that resembled infected pimples. The lighter streaks on their trunks now gave off only a dull gleam, as if the village swells’ mirrors had suddenly been covered with dust.