Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

We bade them farewell and left. It was rather cool outside. In the dark the shoreline was barely visible. My companion put her arm in mine and we set off in a random direction, as before, except our pace was slower now and the crunching of the sand seemed louder in the deeper silence all around. We walked on without speaking, and it occurred to me that we had now turned into one of the silhouettes that at the writers’ retreat we captured in our snapshots of the sunset.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. Wherever you want.’

‘I prefer not to know where I’m going. I like walking aimlessly, like this.’

I told her I also liked wandering with no destination in mind. Then we fell silent and could again hear the dull crunch of our footfalls on the sand. We didn’t know which way we were going. It wouldn’t have been hard to find our bearings and make our way towards our respective lodgings, but it amused us not to do so and, as it turned out, we were going in the opposite direction.

‘Apart from your king, have any other Albanians come to this country on holiday?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘I hope not,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to be the only Albanian who’s been here, apart from your king.’

She said the words ‘apart from your king’ in an intimate tone, as if the king and I were two knights-in-waiting on this deserted beach, one of whom she had deigned to favour.

‘Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if you were the only two Albanians ever to have spent a holiday here?’ she added, soon after.

‘I can’t say,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t see that as particularly unlikely.’

‘I see!’ she said. ‘You think it’s more interesting to know that “When sunsets were blue” was dedicated to an old lady with a weight problem?’

I didn’t know what to say and began to laugh. She was getting her own back. I’ve lost it, I thought. A fat lady and an ex-king must surely be enough to ruin a date. Damn you, King, why did you trip me up again?

Then, as if she had been reading my thoughts, she said: ‘Do you really think I’ve got any sympathy for monarchs? To tell the truth, I think they’re all pathetic old men destined to have their heads cut off.’

I burst out laughing again.

‘Like in period films…’ I said, but stopped for fear of upsetting her.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Our king was young, rough and sly, nothing like a pathetic old man.’

My words had no apparent effect on her.

‘Was he good-looking?’ she asked, after a while.

So that was what she wanted to know! ‘No,’ I said. ‘He had a hooked nose and liked Oriental singing.’

‘You sound like you’re jealous!’

We laughed, and I admitted that the monarch had actually been a very handsome man.

‘Really?’ she cried, and we were laughing again. Then we stopped talking for quite a while, with her leaning on my arm, and I felt like whistling a tune. But the shadow of the ex-king fell on us, just as Fadeyev’s had walked beside us earlier.

At one point we heard a muffled clatter in the distance, then a light — maybe the headlamp of a locomotive — threw a pale beam from far away. Probably it reminded her of the legend I’d told her because she mumbled something about it. I asked her which part of my tale she’d liked most. She replied that it was the point when Kostandin stopped at the cemetery gate and said to his sister, ‘You go on. I have something to do here.’

‘I don’t know how to explain this… It’s something everybody might have felt in some form or another… Even though it doesn’t seem to have any connection with reality… How can I say…’

‘You mean that it expresses universal pain, like all great art?’

‘“You go on. I have something to do here.” Oh! It’s both terrible and magnificent!’

It occurred to me again that it was perhaps the right time to tell her the other legend, the one about the man walled into the bridge.

‘“You go on. I have something to do here,”’ she repeated softly, as if to herself. ‘Yes, it does express something like universal pain, doesn’t it? As if all people on earth… I don’t know how to put it… well, that everybody has their share of that pain… With some left over, so to speak, for the moon and the stars…’

We held forth for a while on the universality of great art. On reflection, I reckoned it was better not to tell her the second legend: it might weaken the impact of the first.

As we chatted about art that was great or even just ordinary, we found we had got to a small station.

‘It’s the last train,’ she said, as we paced up and down the empty platform, our footsteps echoing on the concrete. The imposing, almost empty green train soon pulled into the station and screeched to a halt in front of us. Perhaps it was the one whose headlamp we had seen shining in the distance. The doors opened but nobody got off. A second later, as the carriages juddered into movement again, my companion suddenly grabbed my arm and yelled, ‘Come on! Let’s get on!’ and rushed towards a door. I followed. She was brighter now than she’d been all evening. Her eyes were aflame as we went into an empty compartment, with dim lighting that made the long bench seats seem even more deserted.

We went into the corridor and stared at the thick night through the window.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘No idea!’ she answered. ‘I really don’t know. All I know is that we’re going somewhere!’

I didn’t care where we were going either, and I was happy to be alone with her that night on an almost empty train.

‘If the villa is in this direction, I’d like to get off to see the place where your king spent his holidays, at his old estate.’

I smiled, but she insisted, so I gave in to avoid a quarrel. She was almost too entrancing when she was stubborn. Anyway, there’s nothing more exasperating than having a row in an enclosed space like a railway compartment, where you can’t just leave your partner in the hope she’ll call you back or run after you to make up, the ritual of lovers since time immemorial. I yielded, but we realised we were travelling in a direction we did not know: stations came and went at such short intervals and were so like each other that it soon became impossible to tell them apart. Nonetheless, each time the train stopped at a station we tried to make out its name in the hope it would turn out to be the one we were looking for. My companion and I remained standing in the corridor and I thought how pretty she was. There was nobody at any of the stations, and the departures and arrivals boards looked rather sad without a single traveller to look at them.

‘We don’t have any tickets,’ I said.

‘That’s hardly a worry! At this time of night there’s no ticket inspector.’

I began to whistle. She smiled at me. We were staring at each other, and had she not also glanced at the station names we would have missed ours. Suddenly she clapped her hands and shouted a name. The train stopped and we jumped out. A few seconds later it moved off again, rattling away into the black night. Silence fell once more on the deserted platform where we stood alone.

‘So, we did get on the right train, after all,’ she said, pointing to the sign with the station’s name.

‘Makes no difference to me!’ I said. That’s true, I thought. Evenings at the residence are so mortally dull that the further away I can get, the happier I shall be.

‘It does to me,’ she retorted. ‘I want to see your king’s villa.’

‘How are we going to find it?’ I asked

‘I don’t know. But I think we’ll manage.’

We crossed the tracks and walked towards the beach. Again she put her arm in mine and I felt the weight of her body. The beach was entirely empty. Through the darkness you could just make out the gloomy outlines of the buildings on the seafront. There were no lights on anywhere. All you could hear was the swell of the sea, which made it feel even lonelier.