Twilight of the Eastern Gods

  ‘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 izbas 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.

  We passed yet more empty dachas: doors and shutters closed, verandas with blackened columns, leafless lilac bushes. A few birds of a species I could not name sang plaintively all around.

  ‘I think Stalin had a dacha a few miles from here, over Kuntsevo way,’ Alla said.

  ‘Stalin? A dacha?’

  She nodded, happy to have aroused my curiosity. ‘Yes, but it must have been abandoned long ago,’ she added.

  Olya, who was walking ahead of us, shouted something about a fox den. My mind was elsewhere and I paid her little attention.

  ‘Over which way, exactly?’

  Alla shrugged. ‘I’m not too sure. Over there, I think.’

  I stared for a minute towards where she was pointing. Bare branches broke up the huge grey lid of the winter sky. ‘Is it a long way?’ I thought I heard her eyelashes fluttering.

  ‘Yes, quite a way . . . but I’m sure it’s been closed up.’

  I could see she was afraid that I would ask to go there. Maybe she was aware of the trees bending over us to enquire menacingly: ‘So what do you want to get up to in that dacha?’

  ‘I would have liked to see it,’ I blurted out in the end.

  ‘Oh, no!’ It was almost a cry of fright. ‘It’s a long way from here, as I told you, and there’s surely nobody there.’

  ‘But that’s exactly the way I want to see it, the way it is nowadays!’ I said.

  Alla blushed slightly. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure . . .’ she went on. ‘Maybe I’m misinformed and the dacha is somewhere else.’

  I noticed her face had got redder. I remembered when I’d gone looking for Zog’s villa at Dubulti. On that occasion it had been the girl I was with who was eager to find it.

  Today it was the opposite.

  It seemed that each of us was curious about the other’s tyrant, but preferred to avoid his or her own.

  ‘All right, have it your way,’ I said.

  The snow crunched under our boots. Olya was out ahead and once again trying to communicate something about a fox den.

  ‘Apparently, he was frightening,’ Alla said, after a while. ‘He lived alone, like a hermit.’

  She must have thought that talking about the dacha being shuttered and Stalin’s asceticism would diminish my interest.

  ‘Yes, that’s what people say,’ she repeated. ‘He lived there on his own, like a hermit.’

  ‘The Revolutionary Monk . . . that’s the nickname his opponents used. Did you know that?’

  She shrugged her shoulders as if she was lost for words.

  One day, I can’t remember where, I heard a drunk saying, ‘Ah! What a wily fox our Nikitoushka is! Khrushchev is a revolutionary fox!’

  Light was fading. Olya suggested we go back before nightfall, or we might lose our way.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alla said. ‘Let’s go home!’

  On the walk back to the dacha the three of us made a game of finding the footprints we’d left in the snow on the way out.

  I could feel the opening of a poem I’d heard recited long before making its way into my mind: ‘What are these clouds forever flying past . . .?’ After a moment I thought, Yes, what are these girls who get mixed up with dead dictators . . .?

  Fleetingly, the twilight splashed broad blue and black stripes over isolated izbas, hollowed-out tree trunks and the roofs of shuttered dachas. Here and there trees shook their crowns and released handfuls of snow that sparkled one last time before disappearing in the half-light, which was gradually acquiring the shade of tarnished silver. We were leaving ever further behind us the murky forest where the Monk and the Fox would continue to watch each other in silence as on the eve of mortal combat.

  When we reached Alla’s parents’ dacha I said it would be better if I carried on to the station without going indoors to take my leave of the others. She agreed.

  The two sisters walked down to the station with me.

  Looking out through the carriage window I saw that Alla’s cheeks had gone crimson again. Olya must have been teasing her about me as I got on to the train. The innocent bites of a harmless insect.

  They waved from the platform as the train set off. I felt worn out. I closed my eyes and sat there for a while, my mind blank. It was a few miles before I even began to hear what the other people in the carriage were saying. They were talking about smallpox.

  ‘They rang twice!’ Auntie Katya called from behind her counter, as she rummaged in her drawer for the piece of paper where she’d jotted down the caller’s name. ‘Ah, here it is. Yes, it was the Albanian Embassy. You have to call them back right away.’

  What could the matter be? I wondered. A vision of a coffin lying thousands of miles away, in my home town, Gjirokastër, arose instantly in my mind. My mother’s? My father’s?

  I pulled my address book out of my pocket and, with clumsy fingers, opened it at A: Antaeus, Alla, Albanian . . .

  As I dialled the number a pit opened in my stomach.

  ‘Hello, is that the embassy?’ I asked in Albanian.

  ‘Yes,’ said a calm voice.

  ‘You called,’ I said, and gave my name.

  ‘Correct. About a meeting this evening. You must be here at the embassy at six.’

  Ice-cold sweat covered my brow. For a second, my eye caught Auntie Katya’s suspicious glance.

  The main reception room at the embassy was packed. Students, most of them men, were talking quietly to each other in groups of two or three. The three candelabra, which had been brought down a little lower than the last time I was there, or so I thought, cast a yellow glare. A large bronze-framed portrait of Enver Hoxha filled almost a whole wall. Nobody knew why we had been summoned with such haste.

  At six, the counsellor came into the room. He was wearing a black suit, and perhaps it was the contrast of his white shirt that made his face seem paler than it had been the last time I had seen him.

  With him was a man I had never seen before and who had probably just come in from Tirana.

  The first few sentences of his speech, before he even got to the subject, told me that the rumours about a cooling between Albania and
the Soviet Union were true. He stressed that relations between the two countries had been and remained good, but there were nonetheless internal and external forces intent on damaging them. So we students had to be vigilant not to provide pretexts for provocation from whatever quarter. To that end we were urged to limit, as far as we could, all relations with Muscovites for the time being. ‘I mean especially young female Muscovites . . .’ he added. My heart sank, not so much from what the counsellor had just said but from his having said it without a shadow of a smile. It was obvious that we all expected him to smile, as he had done on all earlier occasions when urging us to behave impeccably with Russian girls. Such sentences were always followed by a silence full of suggestive thoughts, such as: we’re perfectly aware of what you get up to but don’t make them pregnant . . . This time his face was stony. ‘You will therefore have to stop dating them,’ he went on, in what sounded to me like a weary voice. He spoke for two more minutes, stressing that relations between the two countries were good, telling us not to be unnecessarily alarmed, and especially not to mention any of this to anyone.

  ‘Well, there you are, young men, that’s why I called you all in,’ he concluded smoothly. ‘I don’t think you need any further explanation. Have a good evening.’

  It was one of the most peculiar meetings I ever had occasion to attend.

  A rumour flew round that all the close relatives of the painter who had caught smallpox had fallen ill. The airport workers who had been on the site when the Air India flight had landed were all under close medical observation. People said that if there was a fatality beyond the painter’s immediate circle, the whole of Moscow would be quarantined.

  It was Saturday, when the most tiresome lectures were given. To amuse myself I watched people coming and going along Tverskoy. If the building had been set facing just slightly more towards the north I would have been able to see the statue of Pushkin and the doors of Central Cinema, where there was always a long queue. But I couldn’t actually see either, and Tverskoy was as sad as any boulevard in winter.

  The lectures were nearly over but I wasn’t excited. The other students were steering clear of me. But that wasn’t what irritated me most. What I found unbearable was that they spent their time staring at me but looked away as soon as our eyes met. It drove me mad, irrespective of whether they were venomous (as were Yuri Goncharov’s and Ladonshchikov’s) or sympathetic (such as Pogosian’s, otherwise known as the ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’). The ‘Belarusian Virgins’ looked at me with suspicion. Shogentsukov and the two Shotas did so with curiosity, and others, such as Stulpanc, Maskiavicius and a couple of generally unruffled Russians, with secret sympathy. The Karakums stared at me uninterruptedly, their faces expressing consternation; as for Kyuzengesh, he put on a show of indifference tinged with sadness. The only one who treated me normally, as before, was Antaeus. ‘You’d have to be stupid not to see that you’re going to be hit by a dreadful hurricane,’ he’d told me, two days previously. ‘Everyone thinks this cyclone will wipe you off the face of the earth, but I’ve been to your country and know the Balkan lands fairly well, and I know you’ll stick it out . . .’ That was the first time I did not feel I needed to question him further. Balkan lands, I said to myself, as if I had just rediscovered something forgotten and buried deeply inside me . . . And let nobody forget that we no longer live in an age when they can put our heads into that famous stone niche! ‘Let it be a lesson’: isn’t that the motto? The red-brown walls of the Kremlin flashed before my mind’s eye. Was it possible that someone was thinking of carving a new Niche of Shame in them? ‘The time has come,’ Antaeus went on. ‘Your hour is nigh!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He looked at me pensively for a moment, then said, ‘One day we talked about the besa, do you recall? Well, the time has come for the besa to confront perfidy.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was waiting for him to add something to what he had just said. And then it came: ‘We belong to the Homeric camp! Let nobody ever forget it!’

  The Homeric camp! I said to myself. It was true. When Lida Snegina and I had started our affair I had amazed her by talking about the river that flows near to my home town. ‘Lida,’ I said, ‘did you know I’ve swum in the Acheron, the river of the Underworld?’

  She’d thought I was joking. ‘But you’re still alive,’ she said teasingly. ‘How did you manage to come back?’

  Then I explained that I meant it seriously: one of the two notorious mythical rivers passed near to Gjirokastër and the last time I had been there on a trip with friends we’d come across hydrologists on strange boats made of blue plastic, struggling against the river’s swells and eddies. We asked them what they were doing and they said they were surveying the river’s flow for a planned hydroelectric installation. My story enchanted Lida.

  Now she must be convinced that I really had crossed the Acheron and that I would never come back from over there.

  The lecture came to an end. As we left the hall, Antaeus passed close by and whispered, ‘Have you heard that Enver Hoxha is going to come to Moscow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah. So maybe the rumour is wrong.’

  In the courtyard I noticed Ping smiling at me two or three times. What’s got into him? I wondered. It was an insistent, glacial smile. Antaeus, who apparently noticed what the Chinese was doing and also my anxiety, leaned over my shoulder. ‘It seems that once you’ve finished squabbling with all the countries in the socialist camp, you’ll become China’s darling . . .’

  ‘Really? Honestly, I don’t know a thing. All I do know . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  The Chinese was still staring at me.

  As I walked across the yard I suddenly felt a great wind coming over my right shoulder. ‘Solitary demons that split open the sky!’ I turned and saw the student from the Altai region. He’d lost weight and his eyes had mauve bags under them.

  ‘Where have you been hiding?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages!’

  He said, ‘Solitary demons of the socialist camp . . . ‘

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That I messed up. I failed to copy you in any way. Demons that you are!’

  He walked alongside me for a few paces. ‘Is it true that German women have their opening set попepëк, horizontally, instead of vertically? Kurganov told me so. Oh! I would love to lose my virginity with a German woman like that . . .’

  ‘You and your virginity can get lost!’

  ‘Pardon me, demon. I forgot: you have other worries.’

  At the railing I saw a familiar face.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I think someone’s waiting for me.’

  It was Alla Grachova. She smiled at me. ‘You see, I was waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Mama, Grandma, Olya and I are leaving for the dacha this afternoon. We’re going to spend tonight and tomorrow out there—’ She broke off. ‘But what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look washed out.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got a pain . . . in my ear. It’s almost unbearable.’

  ‘What a pity! Mama and Grandma told me to ask you to come along, and it made me so happy! Especially as my uncle won’t be around.’

  ‘Yes, it is a pity,’ I said, in a positively icy tone. ‘Please pass on my thanks. I’m truly sorry I can’t come.’

  She looked me up and down sadly. ‘Are you in such a hurry?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Alla, I’m really sorry I can’t accept. It was so nice at your family’s place.’

  ‘You weren’t too bored last time?’

  ‘No, not at all. Quite the opposite – you were wonderful . . .’

  She was trying to smile but something stopped her.

  We shook hands at the bus stop and parted. On the way back to the residence at Butyrsky Khutor, I remembered what Antaeus had said: ‘Enver Hoxha is coming to Moscow.’ The windows of the bus were frosted. I felt worn ou
t. I wondered what such a midwinter journey might mean.

  Quarantine was declared the following afternoon. Apparently someone not related to the painter had died of smallpox.

  The city was too spread out for us to know exactly what was going on at the airports, railway stations and all other points of access to the capital. What affected us most was the closing of cinemas, theatres, skating rinks, art museums and department stores, and especially the ban on outsiders entering student boarding houses and hostels.

  Dozens of young men and women had met up outside the entrance to the Gorky Institute in the faint hope that they would be allowed in to visit.

  ‘Now you’re really deprived,’ said Dalya Eipsteks, a Jewish student from Vilnius, to Maskiavicius and me. ‘Like it or not, you’ll have to make do with us!’

  Short and not pretty, but with a Parisian je ne sais quoi in her sly and lively eyes, Dalya peered at us through her spectacles.

  ‘Humph,’ Maskiavicius said crossly. After three months’ strenuous courtship he’d at last persuaded one of his girlfriends to come to his room, and the quarantine had thwarted his plans. ‘Humph! Sleeping with you would be like sleeping with Klara Zetkin!’

  She came out with something in Lithuanian that Maskiavicius said meant ‘boor’, but I was sure it was much more vulgar than that.

  ‘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?