‘A penny for your thoughts?’ she asked.
‘Have you read Bürger’s “Lenore”?’ I enquired abruptly.
She shook her head.
‘And Zhukovsky’s “Ludmila”?’
‘Oh, yes. We studied it at school!’
‘It’s the same story,’ I told her. ‘Zhukovsky just translated Bürger’s version.’
‘I remember vaguely our teacher telling us about that,’ she said. ‘Although Russians don’t like to mention that sort of thing.’
She had no great sympathy for Russians and barely hid it.
‘But Bürger didn’t make anything up either,’ I went on. ‘He borrowed the story from others as well and, like Zhukovsky, distorted it.’
‘Bürger was German, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did he borrow it from?’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘From us,’ but held back so I did not resemble those spokesmen for small nations who are forever intent on saying ‘we’ or ‘our people’ with the kind of pride or bluster that makes my heart sink, because even they barely believe what they are saying.
I was cautious about what I had to say next. I explained that the Balkan Peninsula, even though more or less everyone – even the Eskimos! – detests it, was, whether it ruffled you or not, the home of outstanding poetry, the birthplace of many legends and ballads of incomparable beauty. It was one of those, the legend of Death who rises from his grave to keep his word, that had inspired Bürger to write ‘Lenore’, though he had made a pretty dismal job of it. I added that all the Balkan peoples had invented variations on the legend. She should not take me for a chauvinist, but our own version was the most moving and therefore the most beautiful. Even a Greek poet who was on my course in Moscow had agreed with me on that.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘Why might I think the Greek version better?’
‘Because of Homer,’ I said. ‘Because he belongs to them.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But please tell me what the legend says!’
I was expecting her to ask for it. Straight away! I thought. You’ll get to hear it right now! It seemed I just had to tell the story that summer, come what may. If I’d not managed to do it at the station when I was saying farewell to Lida Snegina, it was probably because my brain hadn’t yet processed it well enough to enable me to restore it to perfection. But I felt that the moment had now come. I took a deep breath, summoned my skill with words, concentrated my energy, and launched into an explanation of what it meant for an Albanian mother of nine to marry her only daughter to a man from a faraway place ‘over the seven mountains’. I sensed that my companion was listening to me, but also that the Baltic, that body of foreign water, was helping me along as it lapped that northern shore. The mother didn’t want her daughter to marry so far away, since she knew the girl would never be able to come home for a family wedding or funeral. But her youngest son, Kostandin, made a promise that, whatever came to pass, he would set out and bring his sister home, however far he had to go. So, the mother gave her approval and married Doruntine to a foreign knight. Alas, a harsh winter soon came, with a bloody war; all nine sons fell in battle and the mother was left alone with her grief.
‘I don’t remember any of that!’ my listener exclaimed.
‘Of course not. They cut it all out!’ I said, in a menacing tone, as if Bürger and Zhukovsky were horse thieves.
She couldn’t take her eyes off me now.
‘Kostandin’s grave was nothing but mud,’ I went on, ‘because he had broken the besa. In our land a promise is sacred, and breaking it is the deepest shame that can befall anyone. Do you understand? It’s said that if even an oak tree betrays a secret, its branches will wither and die.’
‘How enchanting!’ she cried.
I went on with my story. One Sunday the mother went as she usually did to visit the nine graves of her sons, lit a candle for the first eight and two candles for her youngest. Then she called to Kostandin: ‘Kostandin, have you forgotten the promise you made to bring my daughter back if there should be a wedding or a funeral?’ And then she did something that Albanian mothers do very rarely indeed: she cursed her dead son. ‘O you who have failed to keep your word, may the earth disgorge you!’ And when night fell . . .
Scarcely had I uttered those words than my companion grasped my hand and exclaimed, ‘How terrible!’ Then, after a pause, as if she wanted to bring the conversation down to earth, she pointed out that none of what I had just told her was to be found in ballads in this part of the world.
‘Don’t mention those thieves to me ever again!’ I blurted out almost angrily. ‘So, when the night was deep and the graveyard lit by the moon, the lid of Kostandin’s tomb rose, and from the grave, his face quite white and his hair a muddy tangle, the Dead Man cursed by his mother came.’
Her hand was shaking but, regardless, I went on, ‘Kostandin rose from his grave, because, as it is said in our land, the given word makes Death step back . . . Do you understand?’
The quivering had moved up from her hands to her shoulders, so I told her then about Kostandin’s moonlit ride to the far country where his sister had married. The young man found Doruntine in the middle of a feast and hoisted her onto his horse to take her back to her mother. On the way she kept asking, ‘Brother, why are you so pale? Why do you have mud in your hair?’ And he replied every time: ‘It’s from weariness and the dirt of the road.’ They rode on together on the horse, the Dead Man and the Living Girl, until they got to the village where their mother lived. Kostandin brought the horse to a standstill outside the church. Behind the surrounding wall, with its iron gate, the church was almost entirely dark. Only the nave was faintly lit. Kostandin said to his sister, ‘You go on. I have something to do here.’ He pushed open the iron gate and went into the graveyard, never to emerge from it again.
I stopped.
‘How gripping!’ she said.
‘Did you really like that version of the legend?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a lot. It’s so different from the one we learned at school!’
‘So don’t mention those wretches to me again!’
We had walked quite a distance as I told the tale and now we could hear a band.
I felt astonishingly unburdened by having at last told the story of Kostandin and Doruntine. As I was glad she had liked it, I was tempted to tell her the other great Albanian legend, the one about the man who was buried alive in the pillar of a bridge, but I held back for fear of overdoing the folklore.
We were walking towards the source of the music and soon we found ourselves in front of a restaurant’s illuminated sign.
‘The Lido,’ I read aloud. ‘Shall we go in?’
‘Wait’, she said. ‘It must be expensive. And I don’t like the look of it.’
I stuck my hands into my pockets and pulled out all the change I had. ‘I’ve got a hundred and ten roubles. Maybe that’ll be enough.’
‘No, no. I really don’t like the look of this place. Let’s go somewhere else.’
I knew my resources wouldn’t be adequate for the Lido, so I didn’t insist.
Further on we heard more music. We wandered towards another place where a dance night had been organised by the veterans’ and workers’ holiday resorts. Nobody stopped us at the door. We went in. People were dancing. Others sat drinking at tables set around the dance floor. In the lamplight my companion looked even prettier and we found nothing better to do than to dance. There was a lot of noise. Now and again customers who were drunk were shown the door. In an environment where we were both outsiders, we felt closer to each other. She was serious yet casual, which I liked. We went up to the bar and ordered two brandies. She had style, and drank with confident movements. At a nearby table three middle-aged men were talking in Latvian. They looked at us inquisitively, and one of them, the oldest, asked my companion a question. I didn’t understand a word of the language, but I grasped that he wanted to know what nationality we
were. Obviously they’d guessed I was a foreigner, and when she answered them, they showed some interest, smiled at me, and one got up to fetch two more chairs.
So, we made their acquaintance. They were veterans of the Russian Revolution, and we started a conversation, my girlfriend acting as interpreter. All three seemed relatively well informed about Albania but they had never met an Albanian before. They kept repeating that they were very happy to have the opportunity of meeting me. I was pleased that at least they didn’t imagine every Albanian had a bulbous nose and a Zapata moustache. However, for some reason they thought we were all plump and round, which my own figure certainly did not bear out.
‘Are you two engaged?’ the oldest of them asked.
We shook our heads, then looked at each other, and from that point on she seemed even closer to me, for we were now connected by a small secret, our first, that these three men didn’t know we had only just met or that we were still using the formal ‚˚ to say ‘you’ to each other.
They’d been soldiers in a Latvian regiment that had had the task of defending the Kremlin after the Revolution. I’d heard a lot about the ‘Latvian Guards’, as they were called. A few days before, I’d seen the impressive cemetery in Riga, with its hundreds of graves laid out in straight lines beneath a huge fresco showing Nordic horses and horsemen leaning over the dead. It hadn’t occurred to me then that I would ever meet survivors of that regiment, let alone sit down at their table with a girl and share a drink.
Now and then they spoke to me in Russian, but it was very odd Russian. I guessed if you learned a language in a fortress of the Bolshevik Revolution, subjected to alerts and White Russian plots, kept at your post by hatred of the old regime, it was bound to turn out rather strangely.
‘Did you know,’ one asked, ‘that near here, on the Riga coast, at Kemeri, if memory serves me right, one of your kings bought a villa and lived in it for a few months?’
‘An Albanian monarch?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I remember reading it in a newspaper, in 1939 or 1940, I think.’
‘We’ve only ever had one king,’ I said. ‘He was called Zog.’
‘I don’t recall the name, but I remember very well that he was King of Albania.’
‘How odd,’ I said, feeling the irritation that arises when you bump into a tiresome acquaintance in some foreign land. His two friends were also aware that an Albanian royal had bought a beach villa at Kemeri. The girl’s curiosity was aroused and she began talking to them excitedly.
‘Oh! So it’s true!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘How interesting!’
For the first time that night I thought I saw her face go dreamy, and I scowled. Ahmet Zog, I said inwardly, why did you have to come all this way to mess things up for me?
‘Are you upset?’ she asked. ‘Does it annoy you to know that he came here?’
‘Oh! I don’t really care. I never had much interest in him anyway!’
‘Well, well. You’re full of yourself, aren’t you?’ she riposted.
Oh dear! I thought. Now she thinks I’m jealous of the old king. To be honest, I had felt slightly jarred when her eyes, which had been grey and serious up to that point, had lit up at the mention of the former sovereign. I tried to hide my feelings from her by addressing myself mainly to the three veterans: ‘He must have come here after he fled. He had a lot of enemies and was very cautious. Maybe he thought this was far enough away from Albania.’
‘Oh, yes, it is a long way,’ one man said.
If only this conversation were over, I thought. We raised our glasses and toasted each of us in turn, starting with my girlfriend. They were tipsy. They said they would like to see us dance, and as we moved around the floor they watched us with kindly eyes and smiled at us from time to time.
My girlfriend realised how late it was and said we should leave. We had a last drink with the three Latvians. Then, as we were preparing to go the veterans put their heads together and, apparently in my honour, began to sing very softly ‘Avanti popolo’. There was a lot of noise, and they were singing softly in their slightly hoarse baritone voices. Maybe they thought it was an Albanian song, or perhaps they knew it was Italian but sang it anyway, because I came from a faraway country next door to where the song was from, or perhaps it was the only foreign song they knew and they were singing it simply because I was a foreigner. I refrained from filling them in, and didn’t ask them to explain, because none of it mattered, but I stayed to listen to the familiar tune and lyrics, which they mangled, except for the word rivoluzione, which they transformed into revolutiones, with the typically Latvian -es ending.
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.