Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘I really have no luck at all,’ Maskiavicius moaned. ‘I’m jinxed!’

At the porter’s lodge a few couples were trying to bribe Auntie Katya. But they couldn’t get in. What were Lida and Stulpanc up to? In what frozen parks were they trysting? In which cafés?

Maskiavicius continued to rant, half in Russian and half in Lithuanian, about the quarantine, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that clown in a paper hat who looked more like a chef than a prime minister.

On the second day of quarantine, on the seven floors of the residence, there began what was only to be expected: a drinking bout. It was of a different kind from those that had come before: an understated, ‘lugubrious and Eurasian’ piss-up, as Dalya Eipsteks liked to say. That was probably because of the short supply of women. Their absence was noticeable everywhere, from the table and in the sound of voices, to quarrels and punch-ups. Now that girls could not be brought in because of the quarantine, we realised that their presence had previously served as a kind of permanent regulator. They’d cleaned the air, stopped it souring, prevented it rotting. Without them, words, gestures, songs and the rest quickly went downhill. Even the blood oozing from bruised noses seemed different, more viscous and blacker, without the vermilion hue that only the disturbing presence of womenfolk seemed able to confer on it in such circumstances.

For hours on end they drank, mumbled and had fights almost silently, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, in bits of corridor lit by forty-watt bulbs made even dimmer by a coat of dust.

One night in one of these gloomy recesses I found myself face to face with Yuri Goncharov. He seemed to be barricaded behind the checkerboard pattern of his suit, as if he were standing behind the railings of hatred.

‘What’s your Enver Hoxha trying to do?’ he hissed, through his teeth. ‘He wouldn’t be trying to play the smart Alec, would he? Ha-ha-ha!’

I was struck dumb. I was quite unable to focus my mind and formulate a riposte. My mouth felt as if it was opening into the void. A sharp stab of anger pierced my ribcage. Finally my mouth uttered mechanically a word that my brain did not control. Even before I heard myself say it I could see its effect reflected in Goncharov’s face.

‘Доносчик! Snitch!’

Goncharov flinched. A venomous grin of the kind that betrays extreme resentment spread across his face. He brought his hand up to his jaw as if he needed to hold it in place — it must have hurt him as much as, if not more than, it did me to get the word out. Then he said, ‘Have you ever seen János Kádár’s hands on television? Tell me, have you?

I didn’t answer.

‘Ha-ha-ha! You really should take a look. Haven’t you seen his fingers without nails?’

I still said nothing. Goncharov’s face was close up to mine.

‘He tried to scratch Russia’s face with his nails. So we tore them out! Got that? Ha-ha-ha!’

Dorian Gray, I thought. I wanted to slash that picture with a knife! As it had the first time, my mouth opened automatically and repeated, ‘Snitch!’

He burped out an ‘Ooh’, as if he was bringing up something from his stomach, and a second later neither he nor I was there.

The drinking continued. Afternoons were defiled with sausage, vodka and cheap tobacco. There was nothing but moaning and demands to be heard along the corridors. Now and again you could hear something like a drum beating slowly — that was Abdullakhanov banging his head against the wall again.

The sky was overcast. Even the snow had stopped falling. It seemed we would have to be content for ever more with the old snow that was heaped in piles on the pavements and at the roadside.

It was an afternoon at half mast that could have been from a page torn out of the last diary in the world. From the window of my room I looked out on the roofs of the housing blocks laid out one after another. I thought of the municipal apartments where, in the shared kitchens, neighbourly hatred had settled like a film on the blackened base of the cooking pots and on gas hobs covered with grease and grime.

And on top of all that, quarantine. In Russian the disease was called ‘black pox’, чëpнaя оспa. All over Moscow.

I was overcome with nostalgia to the point of paralysis; it swept away everything else. I burned with fever and the next minute I was shivering with cold. On my right shoulder, where they’d done a tattoo imitating the Asian sarcophagus of an Indian princess, I could feel a constant itch. That was where a weakened bacillus of the pox, isolated from its horde, had been tamed, overcome, trapped by civilisation, and was in the process of giving up the ghost.

Black pox, I repeated in my mind, unable to tear myself away from the window. The pox… How would I get through this evening, then the next evening, then the one after that? The dull, staccato thud of Abdullakhanov’s cranium a short distance away no longer seemed quite so abnormal.

Lida! I am not as you imagine me! I suddenly thought. I’d leaned my head against the freezing windowpane, and in the condensation my breath made on it, I wrote her telephone number. Well, I thought, it’s ruined between us, obliterated, as if by a wall of fog. Even if the quarantine were lifted as suddenly as it had been decreed, we two would be as before, two frozen, haunted shadows lost in a grey mist. Then as soon the airports reopened I would leave Russia with the other students from Albania on the first plane to Tirana. But I had promised her that, whatever happened, I would say farewell to her in person. I had given her my word… and I came from the country where nobody, wherever he may be on this earth or under it, goes back on their word.

The idea of calling her came to me quite calmly, as icily as everything else, without a flaw, brooking no objection. I paused before the phone booth in the corridor beneath the pale light of a forty-watt moon, just like in the ancient ballad. Then I almost said it aloud: The hour has come, Kostandin! Raise the lid of your tomb!

The dial rotated with difficulty as if it had been made of stone.

‘Hello?’

Her voice came to me as through a filter of quarantine and mourning.

‘Is that you, Lida?’

‘…’

‘Lida!’

‘…’

‘Hello! Lida, can you hear me? It’s me…’

‘Yes, sure,’ she said faintly, almost inaudibly, ‘but you…’

‘Yes, it is really me — it was a misunderstanding, I know, I know… Hello?’

I could hear her gasping for breath.

‘You… alive?’

‘Of course I am, since I’m phoning you.’

She had used the formal вы to say ‘you’ but, strangely, it sounded natural to me.

‘Lida… I…’

‘Oh! Wait a minute…’

Time to regain her composure. She didn’t say so, but I guessed. To be honest, I probably needed to readjust as much as she did. I heard her breathing awkwardly again. Then she said, ‘I’m listening…’

I tried to speak very casually, inventing something about a misunderstanding, an air disaster that turned out to be not a catastrophe at all, just a scare, and so forth.

I picked up a note of doubt in the way she was breathing. At last I managed to say to her, ‘Would you like us to get together at seven, at the usual place? Everything’s so boring, these days.’

I was about to ask her whether the quarantine affected her quarter of the town as well, but then I remembered that the measure was universal.

‘The usual place?’ she asked. ‘Where do you mean?’

‘Well, at the Novoslobodskaya metro station, of course, by the old entrance, like we always used to.’

‘Oh! Of course…’

Apparently she was still unsure, while I remained incapable of finding a way of proving to her from a distance that I was not a ghost.