Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

‘At seven?’ she repeated.

‘Yes.’

I’ll have time to saddle my horse, I thought. That cold stone slab metamorphosed into a steed…

I waited for her as I used to at the old entrance to Novoslobodskaya metro station. From far away I saw her coming towards me in the crowd of pedestrians, with her blonde halo and her special way of walking, which seemed to have changed very slightly. You could see she was worried from the slight trembling in her knees, shoulders and neck.

I popped out from behind a pillar. ‘Lida!’

I had realised she might be frightened by seeing me. As she told me on our walk, she had made up her mind not to let it show but, despite that, she jumped.

I smiled and gave her my hand. The station lighting made her seem paler, and she had slight bags under her eyes, which added to her charm yet made her seem more distant.

But it was she who said to me, still in the polite form of address, ‘You’re really pale. Are you ill?’

‘Yes.’

We looked at each other. Her eyes were blank. Her sadness and fear seemed to have flowed to their edges, like the waters of a lake blown ashore.

Without saying anything, we forged a path through the throng of travellers coming and going at the metro exit. I got the impression a couple of times that she was glancing at my hair to see if there wasn’t a trace of the earth of a grave on it. Good thing I’d told the legend of Kostandin and Doruntine only to that Latvian girl from Riga, last summer, at Dubulti, more than a century ago.

We went along Chekhov Street. At last, when we were abreast of the Izvestia building, she took my arm. World news was streaming in lights on the front, high up, at the level of the top floor. No mention of Albania. Her shoulder seemed to transmit a muffled sob to my own.

We’d crossed Pushkin Square and were on Gorky Street. The cafés were closed. We were galloping hazily across windows lit by the falling light of the late afternoon, just like the Quick and the Dead of the legend, sitting astride the same horse. I had a temperature. A side-effect of vaccination, most likely.

‘Did you miss me?’ she blurted out, without warning.

I jumped as though I’d been startled from sleep. She’d gone back to using the affectionate ты form of address, and on top of that the word ‘missed’ seemed pregnant with danger.

Ah, yes! I started to muse. You were missing me to the point of suffocation. Years of separation with no hope, no word, not even a carrier bird to bring me a note… It had been a desert, the desert of Yemen…

In a shop window I noticed packets of coffee labelled ‘Yemen’. ‘Far away in Arabia,’ I said, ‘there’s a bridge, the Bridge of Mecca…’

She was listening to me, apparently enthralled.

If she asks which woman he took for his wife

Tell her, Lady Snegina from the land of ice

‘Your hands are burning,’ she said. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, it must the vaccination.’

I wanted to ask her about Stulpanc, but he seemed as far away and as foreign as a bird.

The corners of the quarantine notices were beginning to peel off, as posters always do in winter.

‘When I heard your voice on the phone I thought my heart was about to stop.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Nobody has yet rung up from the Other Side.’

She tried to laugh. ‘Not even the pharaohs!’

I felt her hand tighten on my arm, which I could take for a sign of increasing intimacy or as the need to check there was a real arm and not just bones inside my jacket sleeve.

‘Your letter…’ I started to say.

‘Oh! Did you get it, then?’

I’d have liked to say something more about Stulpanc, but he seemed to have drifted even further away. Her shoulder nudged mine once again as if to transmit a secret message.

‘Let’s go to your place,’ she muttered, leaning even closer to me.

Her shoulders must have been red hot under her sweater. But her eyes remained as blank as ever.

If she asks which horse he took as his mount

Tell her it was the tram to Butyrsky Khutor

‘But it’s quarantined, like everywhere else. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Oh, yes, smallpox…’

Her sidelong glance scalded my forehead.

Better go to your place, I thought. It would feel more forgiving in her bedroom. She would undress slowly, and before we made love I would study each part of her body carefully, as if I wanted to find out what had changed during my absence.

I suddenly remembered the embassy’s instructions about relationships with Russian girls. I thought the three yellow chandeliers of the reception room were about to come loose and fall right on top of me. I tried to cry out, ‘What have I done?’ and the chandeliers, as if they had heard my protest, began to hoist themselves back up, getting smaller and smaller until they were no bigger in my mind’s eye than ladybirds. The same scenario repeated itself several times.

Well, what had I done? I felt a hot flush run through my temples and my forehead. I’d been thoughtless enough to call her and try to resurrect an affair that was truly dead and buried. I’d done something really stupid and, what was more, to no purpose. Now I had to beat the retreat.

I consoled myself with the thought that I hadn’t committed any great crime. I’d come out to see her just to keep my word.

‘You look like death warmed up!’ she said.

I didn’t reply. We were now sauntering like a pair of lost souls amid the rushing crowd of Muscovites, with their heads snug in fur collars and hoods. I guessed all of them bore, like an emblem or a seal on the invitation to a macabre entertainment, the mark of the vaccination.

My temperature made my head throb. My mind was a muddle and I would not have been surprised if she’d asked me, ‘Why is there soil in your hair?’ I’d made her a promise, I said again to myself. I gave her my word last summer, and maybe well before that, a thousand years ago. In any case our night ride will soon be over, I thought, as we came towards Tverskoy Boulevard. I had to leave her, but I was unable to find the flimsiest reason to do so. Even if I could not tell her the actual truth, I still did not want to lie to her. The bottom line was that I had phoned her.

‘You’re not well,’ she said. ‘It’s plain to see. Why did you come out?’

‘I’d given you my word.’

Now I only had to shake the soil from my hair.

‘I gave you my word,’ I repeated, moving my head closer to her hair. ‘I gave it to you long ago, in the age of the great ballads.’

She stared at me. It was clear that she thought I was delirious. I was tempted to say, ‘You can’t understand, your people have other ballads, other gods…’

She did not take her eyes off me. Suddenly before my mind’s eye the current Soviet leadership appeared, looking as if they had been flattened by their fur hats, standing side by side on the podium in Red Square. They were visible only from the waist up, which made them seem even more squat and obese than they were. The stunted gods of the socialist camp! The Scythian steppe gods about to puff out their fearsome cheeks to blow my country off the face of the earth!

‘You’re boiling hot!’ Lida said to me. ‘You should have stayed indoors.’

She was right: I shouldn’t have gone out. But I had given my word. All because of the old legend. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind for the last few months. Was it just by chance? Surely not.

The gods of the steppe were as stuck in my mind as if they had been glued to the top table at a meeting of the Presidium. With their fur bonnets, half-Asiatic cheeks and sly eyes. No, the resurgence of the Ballad of the Given Word was no mere coincidence. Called forth by treacherous times it had come back from the brink of extinction. By the climate of treachery I’d been aware of for months. It’s cold in Russia, my friend. A treacherous climate… Who’d prompted those words in my mind?