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.
‘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.
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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?
Despite all of that, I was still trying to find a pretext for leaving her.
Lida, I thought, you’ll not get a word of adieu out of me. It has to happen as it does in the ballad!
However much I thought about what I would say, I still could not take my eyes off her.
‘Lida, I once told you, in a station, that, whatever comes to pass . . .’
‘Yes?’ she said, lips pursed.
We were outside the Gorky Institute. In the twilight its railings and windows looked
even gloomier. The only light was a dim glow from a ground-floor porthole in the porter’s lodge. I stood still, and as she waited for me to finish my sentence, I turned my head towards the Institute and said, ‘Lida, you go on now, I have something to do here.’
I didn’t say another word, I didn’t tell her to wait for me and I didn’t say adieu. Instead I opened the gate and went into the pitch-dark courtyard. I walked with my hands held out in front of me to avoid stumbling over the marble benches, pale blotches that, in the black of night, looked like tombstones. The gate at the other end of the garden that gave on to Malaya Bronnaya was locked but I had no trouble clambering over it.
I was on the other side, in the cold, dimly lit street, where a few pedestrians hurried past with their heads deep inside their fur collars.
As I walked on, I thought of her standing on Tverskoy Boulevard, facing the sombre railings around the Institute’s garden and waiting in vain for me to come back from that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.
Tirana, 1962–1976
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
MENTIONED IN THE NOVEL
Other named characters are not necessarily fictional
ABDULLAKHANOV, student at the Gorky Institute, 1958–60.
AKHMADULINA, Bella Akhatovna, Russian poet and translator, 1937–2010. Suspended from her course at the Gorky Institute for opposing the persecution of Boris Pasternak. Between 1954 and 1960 she was the wife of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Now recognised as one of the greatest of modern Russian poets.
ARAGON, Louis, French poet, 1897–1982. Well-known in Russia because of his unwavering support of the Communist Party, Aragon was also a major figure in the surrealist movement and subsequently France’s national poet of the Resistance. Husband of Elsa Triolet.
ARBUZOV, Aleksei Nikolaevich, Soviet playwright, 1908– 1986.
BÜRGER, Gottfried August, German writer, 1747–1794. His romantic ballad ‘Lenore’ is based on a widespread folk legend of a man who rises from the dead to take his betrothed on a ride to the other world; it may also have been a source for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Leonore’.