Twilight of the Eastern Gods

  Old men, who knew there was no point in trying to get to sleep, stayed on the benches until well after dark. As I walked around I could occasionally hear their whispers and coughs or, when they finally got up, the tapping of their sticks as they walked towards the ‘Swedish House’, where the oldest and most distinguished of the residents stayed.

  I would carry on sauntering aimlessly, wondering how almost all of these old men could be famous writers and frequently the dedicatees of each other’s works. Most of the children who ran around noisily in the daytime had had poems and stories dedicated to them by their parents, and you could tell that some of the youngsters had read the works in question. As for the older women, who chatted among themselves for hours every evening after dinner, I knew that quite a few were still stepping out on the pages of some books as good-looking girls in high heels, under the mask of initials such as D.V. or N. or even their first names. The men sometimes appeared beneath the disguise of initials in books written by women, but less often. As a rule, those men had stomach ailments, and in the dining room you could see they were on some special diet or other.

  Some evenings I went to the post office in the hope that the line to Moscow would be open so I could call Lida Snegina. But the telephones were usually busy. You could only be sure of placing a call if you booked it a day in advance.

  Lida was the young woman I had been seeing in Moscow. She’d come with me to the station on the gloomy day I’d left for Riga. Before the train departed, we paced slowly up and down on the rain-wet platform along with many other parting couples, and she’d said, with her eyes averted, that she found it difficult to go around with foreigners, especially foreigners from far-off lands. When I asked her why, she told me about a friend of hers who had got involved with a Belgian who had disappeared overnight, just like that, without even telling her he was going. Of course, she added, ‘It may well be that not all foreigners are the same, but they often bolt without leaving so much as a word.’ At least, that was what she’d heard people say.

  I really ought to have riposted, but only a few moments remained before the train would depart, and the time available was much too short to quarrel and make up. So I had to choose between argument and appeasement. I chose the latter: I swallowed my pride, and declared that in any circumstance, and come what may, I would never slip away, like a thief in the night. I wanted to add that I came from an ancient Balkan land with grandiose legends about the given word, but the time left was disappearing fast and would barely permit a synopsis, let alone the full story of Kostandin and Doruntine’s ghostly ride.

  I liked to walk to the post office and back on my own. It wasn’t a particularly scenic route – in fact, it was rather desolate, with only scraggy reeds, small piles of sand and plump thistles on either side. All the same, that particular path, like some women who, though not beautiful, possess a hidden charm, was conducive to my having new thoughts.

  It was my second holiday at a writers’ retreat and I knew most of the ropes, as well as the oddities of the inmates. The previous winter I had spent some time in Yalta. My room had been next to Paustovsky’s. The lights stayed on in his room until late; we all knew he was writing his memoirs. Whenever I went out into the corridor I encountered the starosta, our course leader at the Institute, Ladonshchikov by name, who was forever watching the light in Paustovsky’s room. Whenever he came across somebody in the hall, he would confide in them with a sigh and the beating of his breast, as if he were reporting the worst news in the world, that the aforementioned Paustovsky was bringing all the Jews back to life in his memoirs. What I remembered of Yalta was uninterrupted rain, games of billiards that I always lost, a few Tatar inscriptions, and the permanent look of jealousy on the utterly insignificant face of Ladonshchikov, despite the solemn air he wore of a man concerned for the fate of the Fatherland. I had hoped that life in the Riga retreat would be less sinister, but what I encountered were some of the people I had seen at Yalta, table-tennis instead of billiards, and intermittent rain, confirming Pushkin’s bon mot about northern summers being caricatures of southern ones. The similarity of faces, conversations and names (the only ones missing were Paustovsky and Ladonshchikov, oddly enough) gave me a sense of constant déjà vu. The life we led there had something sterile about it, like an extract in an anthology. At Yalta, in this rather odd world, I was aware of leading a hybrid existence, where life and death were mixed up and overlapping, as in the ancient Balkan legend I hadn’t managed to recite to Lida Snegina. The idea was imposed on me by the equation I could not help making automatically between the people around me and their doubles – the characters of novels and plays I knew well. An irrepressible and somewhat diabolical desire to compare their words, gestures and even their faces to those of their originals had arisen the previous winter in Yalta, where for the first time I realised that most contemporary Soviet writers virtually never talked about money in their works. It was like a sign. Now, in Riga, I was learning that alongside money there were many other things they did not mention, and reciprocally, many of the topics that filled whole chapters or acts of their works barely impinged on their real lives. The contrast made me constantly uneasy. Besides, there was something abnormal about being cut off from the world like that, and it brought to mind the monstrous beings I had seen preserved in glass jars in the Natural History Museum.

  I’d tried a few times to break away from this frozen landscape, which seemed to me more and more like some kind of obsolete monument, but all my efforts came to nothing and brought me back to billiards in Yalta, then to ping-pong at the Riga retreat. In both settings, at the weighty winter billiards and the flimsy summer ping-pong, I only ever lost.

  It was Saturday. As always we were playing in the dim but sufficient light of the evening, and although I was cheered at the prospect of winning the third set after losing the first two, I felt beside me a presence that was both new and familiar.

  It was a kind of ash-blonde smudge that reminded me of Lida’s hair. The impression was so strong that I put off turning as if I wanted to give the stranger enough time to become Lida. In that brief moment I realised that, without knowing it, I had long been yearning for her to come through the sky and across the steppe, as silently as the setting of the moon, to be beside me at the table-tennis table.

  The little ping-pong ball, with its irritating rebound, scraped my right ear, and as I bent down to pick it up I stole a glance at the visitor, who’d not been seen before in the gardens of our writers’ retreat.

  She had come up quietly and stopped amid the keen observers of the table-tennis matches, the people who put the score right when others got it wrong. Let me not make some ridiculous gesture, I thought, since the match seemed to have turned against me irrevocably. The silent ash-blonde smudge among the noisy spectators held me in its sway.

  I dropped and abandoned my bat in disgust. Though I was cross I went towards the stranger and wiped my brow with a handkerchief. I was annoyed at losing three games in a row and I had a feeling someone had fiddled the score. As I wiped my face, I looked at her: she had her hands in her trouser pockets and was gazing at the table with a supercilious pout.

  Night had fallen some time ago, and at the water’s edge the strollers, as if they had lost their faces, had now turned into outlines, but we knew they were the people we had caught on our film an hour earlier.

  My annoyance subsided and I looked more attentively at the wonderful hair of the young newcomer. In this part of the world hair like hers was not uncommon. Sometimes it reminded you of autumn sadness: it was, so to speak, not of this world; it was as if its owner had come from the moon. But this girl’s hair reminded me especially of Lida. One of my Yalta colleagues had tried to persuade me that there was a kind of dog that reacted to such hair with stifled yelping, as if it was greeting the full moon out on the steppe. Subsequently, when I thought back on those words, I became convinced that, however absurd such tall tales might seem, they contained a grain of truth. Obviously it wasn?
??t referring to real dogs howling, but to humans. My Yalta colleague must surely have gone through something like that himself. But it couldn’t be a matter of screaming out loud, it must have been more like a silent, internal yell, arising from an infinite quivering that was on the point of turning into – why not? – a symphony.

  ‘Are you having a dance here tonight?’ the young woman suddenly asked, with a lively turn of her head.

  She had beautiful, serious grey eyes.

  ‘There are never any dances here,’ I replied.

  She smiled tentatively. ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All we have here is fame.’

  She laughed, her eyes on the table, and I was pleased with my witticism, which, though entirely unoriginal, seemed to have had some effect. I’d heard it the day I arrived, from the mouth of a taxi driver, whose licence-plate number had remained fixed in my memory, like so many other superfluous things.

  ‘Are you from abroad?’ the girl asked again.

  ‘Yes.’

  She stared at me curiously. ‘Your accent gives you away,’ she said. ‘I don’t speak perfect Russian myself, but I can tell a foreign accent.’ She told me that she’d been among her own folk forty-eight hours before; that she was staying in a villa right beside our retreat; and that she was bored. However, she seemed surprised when I confided that I came from a distant country and was therefore much more bored than she was. She had never set eyes on an Albanian before. What was more, she had always imagined they were darker than Georgians, that they all had hooked noses and were keen on the kind of Oriental chanting she hated.

  ‘Wherever did you get those ideas?’ I asked rather crossly.

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s an impression I got from the exhibition you held last year at Riga.’

  ‘Hm,’ I muttered. I wanted to drop the subject.

  I’d noticed more than once that ordinary Soviet citizens were much given to comparing foreigners from other socialist countries to the natives of their own sixteen republics. If you were very blond, they would say you were like a Lithuanian or an Estonian; if you had a curved nose they would think you had a Georgian look; if you had sad eyes, you must be Armenian, and so on. Some even thought that Turkey was a province of Azerbaijan that had been left on the wrong side of the border by a quirk of history. And on one sad afternoon a tipsy Belarusian tried to convince me that Armenians were really Muslims: they pretended to be Christians only to enrage the Azeris, and it was high time to sort things out down there . . .

  ‘Have you been to Riga?’ she asked me. ‘What did you think of it?’

  I told her I liked that sort of town.

  ‘Isn’t it too grey for you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And what are your cities like?’

  ‘White,’ I replied, without thinking.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I’ve always dreamed of seeing white cities.’

  I could easily have told her our towns were blue – as I once had to a gullible Ukrainian girl at Yalta last winter – but she was too attractive, and I was beginning to watch my step. She was listening to me with an odd expression, half attentive and half haughty, as she stared blankly into the distance with a smile that seemed to be a response to something happening at least twenty metres away.

  We chatted for quite some time, leaning on the wooden balustrade, while the others created a commotion around the ping-pong table, getting the score wrong and squabbling over it, as if the stake really mattered.

  ‘Do you see that fat lady with a shawl, talking angrily to her son over there?’ I said.

  ‘The one with grey hair?’

  ‘Yes. She’s the dedicatee of the famous poem that begins “When sunsets were blue, quite blue . . .”’

  ‘Really? And how do you know?’

  I told her where I had got the information. But instead of being glad in the slightest degree to pick up a morsel of literary gossip, she pouted. ‘Why did you tell me that with a sort of satisfaction, almost cynically?’

  ‘Cynically?’ I protested. To be honest, I’d been glad that the old lady had provided me with a topic of conversation, but never had I thought I would be accused of gloating over a woman’s ageing.

  My first instinct was for self-justification, but then I thought that, in cases of this kind, attempts at explanation can only give rise to yet more misunderstandings. So I decided to say nothing.

  Her face had resumed its expression of supercilious indifference.

  We said nothing for several minutes, and as time ticked by we were steadily and very rapidly becoming strangers once again.

  Damn that fat old woman! I thought. Why ever did she cross my path? Now this girl is going to go away and she’ll leave without even saying goodnight. And I really don’t want her to leave! Half an hour ago I hadn’t even known she existed, but now her departure would be like an eclipse of the moon. I didn’t understand why I felt so anxious, but it was undoubtedly connected to the wearisome sameness of vacation days spent among initialled individuals dotted around like statues on plinths, and with the spiritual disarray I had been suffering for some time. At last a living being had turned up in the museum! What was more, the visitor’s hair and smooth neck were amazingly reminiscent of Lida Snegina’s.

  The ping-pong ball bounced around like a little devil and its weightless vacuity obliterated all possibility of thought. Silence between us persisted beyond endurance and I repeated in my mind: There it is! She’s going to leave and I’ll be all alone in this archive dump.

  But she didn’t go. She carried on watching the table-tennis, with distance and disdain. The light reflected by her ash-blonde hair continued to fall on me, like an accidental sunset, and my mind wandered back to the howls or, rather, to the canine symphony I’d been told about in Yalta last winter. At one point I was tempted to drop her there and then, but I thought better of it: women in those parts were like that and, anyway, compared to easy-going Moscow women, girls from anywhere else in the world seem sour.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I asked bluntly.

  ‘Where to?’ she answered, without turning her head.

  ‘That way. Maybe there’s somewhere further on that we can dance.’

  She didn’t reply but started walking towards the shore. I followed her. Sand scrunched beneath our feet. She still had her hands in her pockets, and now her mauve blouse looked black.

  The sea stretched out on our left-hand side; on the right, the black outlines of pines and, further away, rest houses and the little stations on the electric train line were scattered about. Here and there through the trees you could see tiny churches with spires higher than any I had seen before. I’d been struggling for a while to find a topic of conversation, and as I tried, I couldn’t help fondly recalling the image of the Ukrainian girl in Yalta who had not only lapped up the most outlandish stories but responded to any nonsense you fed her by throwing her arms gaily around your neck.

  But the silence between us grew heavier, and I had almost lost hope of establishing a dialogue when suddenly she asked me about Fadeyev. I couldn’t have wished for a more suitable question, and when I told her that in Moscow I passed his apartment every day she uttered an ‘Ah!’

  ‘There are a lot of rumours about his suicide,’ she said, and then, after a pause, went on. ‘You’re from the capital and perhaps you heard more about it than we did.’

  ‘Of course.’

  In Moscow literary circles I had indeed heard a lot of talk about the suicide. I shared with her the most interesting pieces of gossip that were going around. She listened without responding. Suddenly it occurred to me to tell her about Fadeyev’s treatment in the Kremlin hospital. It was a sad story I’d heard one evening after dinner in a Moscow suburb. It was the writer’s very last attempt at getting cured. The method was to have him imbibe vodka in increasing doses day by day until his whole organism rejected it in disgust. Every morning, in the silent corridors of the hospital, there could be seen a man
of considerable height dressed in an inmate’s gown moving along like a sleepwalker, with unfocused eyes and unfocused mind, blind drunk, mistaking doors for people and people for objects. In little groups, hiding at the ends of the corridor or behind the doors, nurses whispered, ‘Today we gave him three hundred cl, tomorrow we’ll increase the dose,’ and they watched him with curiosity. Some felt sorry for the man; others felt the satisfaction of ordinary people when they see a great man brought low; they were really curious to see the pride of Soviet literature turned into an unrecognisable wreck, his skull now filled with nothing but alcoholic haze.

  I tried to make my story as true to life as possible and thought I had succeeded because when I finished my legs were as wobbly as if I were drunk too. She put her arm in mine and leaned on me ever so slightly.

  ‘But why? Why?’ she asked softly.

  I was expecting the question and answered, with a shrug, that I had no idea. Yes, indeed, why in spite of everything had he killed himself the day after his discharge?

  We walked on for a long time without saying anything. I felt my mind going numb. It had wandered back once more to the folk ballad with its legendary horse ridden simultaneously by the Quick and the Dead.

  ‘It’s such a sad story,’ she said. ‘Let’s change the subject.’

  I nodded agreement and we put an end to the conversation. We remembered we were looking for a place where there was music, then realised we had wandered a long way from my residence. The empty beach stretched for ever beside the water where, from time to time, something seemed to be stirring in the darkness. It was the flickering phosphorescence of the waves. On our other side, through the pines, we could see shapes that were white and oblong, like stone belfries. A train whistled somewhere in the distance. My mind went back to Lida seeing me off on the train at Rizhsky Voksal, the Moscow terminus, and to the legend I’d not managed to recite to her.