Twilight of the Eastern Gods

CHAPTER TWO

Our train came into Moscow in the twilight. It was a very long one. Throughout the day’s journey, sunshine had alternated with heavy showers, and I imagined that some of the carriages were gleaming in the sun’s last rays while others were still wet with rain. The front must now be in the bad-weather zone because I could see raindrops banging against the windows. But this time the train did not emerge into sunshine. Once we had got through the stormy patch, it seemed that night had fallen, dispelling the light of day. On the empty flat lands beyond the blackened panes, twilight and darkness fought it out in silence. The struggle was brief — the bad weather surely helped — and it was soon obvious that all along the track and well beyond it everything had now succumbed to night.

Two or three times I thought we were already in Moscow but it was the twinkling lights of outlying suburbs that tangled in my head until I shook myself free of daydreams.

Over the summer I had sometimes dreamed of Moscow: I was alighting in the capital but had lost my bearings and could not find the city centre. I would stop on a pavement; the traffic lights were out of order, and electric trolleybuses were gliding past, as great stags do in fairy tales. At Yalta, too, as in Riga, I had felt homesick for the city, and I’d gone to the rest-house library to hunt out a contemporary novel with detailed descriptions of the city where I had once lived and where I expected to spend a further period of my life. But the libraries of Yalta and Dubulti had left me wanting. Not a single Soviet novel contained anything like an exact description of Moscow. Even characters who lived there or were visiting always remained in some imaginary street, as I did in my dreams, and almost never turned into Gorky Street, Tverskoy Boulevard, Okhotny Ryad, or the environs of the Metropole Hotel, as if they were frightened of the city centre. And if they did wander into it they seemed stunned: they heard nothing and saw nothing — or, rather, they had eyes and ears only for the Kremlin and its bells. They would flee the centre, as if in panic, and I could feel their terror in the rhythm of the prose, which calmed only when the author took us away from Moscow, perhaps to his remote collective farm where he could squat cross-legged on the floor and describe in minute detail each of the alleyways and squares of his village.

I had tried without success to work out the relationship between the dull anxiety I felt in my dreams about Moscow and the way Soviet writers steered clear of the capital, as if they were sending themselves into exile.

The lights outside the windows were dancing less frantically and I guessed the train had slowed. With a whistle that seemed to run parallel to the tracks, it was pulling into Moscow’s Rizhsky Voksal almost timidly beneath early autumn rain. I put my face to the windowpane hoping to catch a first glimpse of the station’s lights. I sensed a muted illumination rising within me. At long last the concrete platform appeared and, from the first few feet, it looked empty. It slithered along the side of the carriage like a wet, grey snake. I guessed that Lida, to whom I’d sent a telegram a couple of days earlier, had not come to meet me. She has another boyfriend: that was my first thought. No, was the second. She’d been there a while and was waiting for the train to come to a halt before showing herself. She’s got another boy— Stop it! I remembered that the engine’s whistle had announced our arrival: the locomotive had been first into the station and had seen what was happening on the platform before anyone else.

‘Beware the summer!’ a fellow student had said to me just before we parted at the start of the holidays. ‘It has a powerful hold over Russian girls…’

To illustrate his own summer failures, he told me several stories in which stations featured alongside tickets bearing unlucky numbers.

Another boyfriend. Or an abortion… I vaguely remembered that last time she’d asked me to be careful (‘Just this time, only this time!’) but I hadn’t listened.

I stepped down onto the platform with my suitcase. Here and there, bodies entwined, with conjoined heads that resembled oversized seashells. They, too, have spent the summer apart, I thought, but they haven’t forgotten each other.

I plunged into a taxi on the square outside the station and blurted out the address I wanted — Butyrsky Khutor, the Gorky Institute’s student housing block — to the back of the aged driver’s neck. He was wearing a fur hat.

Unlike the Institute’s old two-storey house on Tverskoy Boulevard, the residential hall for undergraduate and graduate students at Butyrsky Khutor was a seven-floor hulk in off-white brick that had already lost its colour, like most recent constructions. Not knowing why, but with some apprehension, I leaned forward so I would spot it in the distance among the other buildings. My face was pressed to the window when its outline emerged and I suddenly became aware of my own anxiety. The block was almost entirely dark. I had expected to see lights on in the windows, but only one was lit, on the sixth or seventh floor, and its faint gleam underscored the air of abandonment the building gave off. I told myself that nobody was back yet from their vacation.

I settled up with the cab driver, got out and walked towards the door, looking up, as if to make doubly sure that the building really was empty. All the floors were dark, but the fourth, the women’s floor, seemed particularly so.

I stopped at the porter’s lodge on the ground floor. It struck me that Auntie Katya wasn’t as welcoming as usual. She seemed to be searching for something in her desk drawer and it crossed my mind that a telegram, bearing bad news, might have come for me from Albania. But in her eyes, through the thick spectacle lenses, I saw not a glimmer of sympathy.

‘You, my boy, and your friend, the other one from Albania,’ she said, ‘you’re to report to the police.’

I frowned. I was about to ask her why when I saw in her face the same question: it had cancelled out her usual bonhomie. ‘Why?’ I asked all the same.

Lida’s abortion flashed through my mind.

‘I don’t know. I heard them say something about your ID documents.’ She pronounced dokumenty with the stress on the second syllable, like all uneducated Russians.

Through her circular glasses her eyes seemed to be asking: So what did you and he get up to over the summer?

‘My papers are all in order,’ I said. ‘And my friend has already gone back to Albania.’

She shrugged her shoulders and returned to scrabbling in her desk drawer. I was expecting her to hand over a packet of letters or newspapers from Albania, but the drawer shut with a sharp click.

‘Don’t I have any mail?’

She shook her head.

I picked up my suitcase and turned away. The lift was out of order. And my room was on the sixth floor. I started walking up the staircase, shifting my case, which was heavy, from hand to hand, wondering why I had to report to the police.

At last I got to the door of my room, opened it and went in, leaving my case in the corridor. I was exhausted. I sat on the bed and hugged my knees. For a moment I felt that all I wanted was to lie on the bed and sleep until that joyless day had been wiped from my memory. However, a few seconds later I did exactly the opposite. I stood up and started to pace up and down. My reel-to-reel tape recorder was on the table, its lid still open from the last time I had played it with Lida. I had recorded music on the tapes, but just then it seemed easier to move the Cyclops’s stone from the door of an ancient tomb and carry out its mummy than to switch on that machine. I don’t know why, but the idea of listening to music in that desert seemed monstrous.

Without stopping to think what I was doing, I opened the door and went out into the corridor. It seemed longer than usual, with its single nightlight gleaming somewhere towards the other end. I stood still for a minute, my mind a blank. The corridor was truly endless: maybe sixty doors opened on to it. No corridor before had played such an important role in my life. I recalled how it looked late at night on noisy Saturdays when young drunks, slumped on the floor, mumbled lunatic verse, or tried to break down self-locking doors that had shut in their faces.

I walked slowly. The flooring, which had been damaged in places, creaked under my feet. The Corridoriad… I felt a quiver of the kind usually set off by a combination of good and bad memories. Five other corridors ran beneath this one, and a seventh above it, and much the same things had happened in each one: people had walked along them, gone into their rooms, come out again, had friends in, swapped literary gossip, consisting of plots and suppositions often much better constructed than their own works; they’d escorted to the lift speechless, smiling and weeping women or girls who, once behind the openwork metal door, resembled caged birds eager to fly away or wild animals stuck in a trap. Sometimes, when a girl was the first to step in, she would slam the door in the face of her companion and, while the lift made its slow descent, he would run down the stairs to catch her arrival. The stairway and the pursuer twisted round the lift shaft like a vine around a monumental column.

I walked on, the floorboards still creaking beneath my feet. The emptiness in the corridor was unbearable. That door was Ladonshchikov’s. Further on I reached Taburokov’s — he was from Central Asia. Then, in sequence, I passed the doors of Hieronymus Stulpanc, from Latvia, Artashez Pogosian, from Armenia, then those of the two Georgians, who were both called Shota (one was a Stalinist, the other anti), Yuri Goncharov — he was Russian — then Kyuzengesh, from the far north; he was a Yakut or maybe even an Eskimo — his face, especially his teeth, were the sad grey colour of the tundra — and spoke disjointed Russian in such a soft voice that it sounded like the rustling of reeds. Every time I encountered him I felt like a lonely wanderer about to sink into marshland. Then came the doors of A. Shogentsukov, from the Caucasus, and Maskiavicius, from Lithuania.

Students on our course filled most of the rooms on the sixth floor. No names were posted on the doors, even though most of the residents were famous writers in their home regions or towns. Some were the chairs of the Writers’ Union in an Autonomous Republic or Region and had been obliged by the burdensome duties of their position or by insidious plots to give up their studies. At long last, after overcoming their adversaries, having accused them of Stalinism, liberalism, bourgeois nationalism, Russophobia, petty nationalism, Zionism, modernism, folklorism, etc., having crushed their literary careers and banned the publication of their works, having hounded them into alcoholism or suicide, or, more simply, having had them deported, that is to say, after having done what had had to be done, they had been inspired to come to the Gorky Institute to complete their literary education. Some were members of the Supreme Soviet of their respective republics and others were prominent figures. One day, in an economics seminar when we were discussing inflation, Shogentsukov had coolly remarked, ‘When I was prime minister I had to deal with a similar problem.’

I was now walking along the dark part of the corridor. I could see hardly anything, except the little bronze plaques that I’m sure they all dreamed of having one day on their shoddily gloss-painted doors: ‘From 1958 to 1960 this room was the home of the celebrated Abdullakhanov’; ‘From 1955 to 1960 this room was the home of…’ Wait! I almost shouted. A pale beam of light could be seen at the base of a nearby door. It was Anatoly Kuznetsov’s. It must have been his window I’d seen lit when I was in the taxi. So Kuznetsov had got back from vacation before me. If anyone had told me a minute before that somebody I knew was inside this seven-storey Sahara I would have rushed to greet him in a frenzy… One word, my brother, one word to people this desert! But suddenly in my mind I could see the eyes of the author of Continuation of a Legend — two slits behind thick lenses — and I lowered the hand I’d raised to knock at his door. I didn’t like the man any more than I liked Yuri Goncharov, whom one of the two Shotas said was the most prominent writer of all the lands watered by the Volga, while the other insisted that he was nothing more than a police informer.

I began to walk slowly down the stairs. At one point I thought I heard muffled voices and stopped to listen. Perhaps Kuznetsov was reading aloud what he’d just been writing. On the landing of the fifth floor I heard the sounds again. It was like a discreet invitation to stop. A resident had apparently gone into one of the rooms that looked onto the inner courtyard. I made my way through the murky half-light of the corridor in the hope that he was someone I knew. Thanks to a glow coming from under a door, I soon discovered which room it was. It was indeed one of those that faced the courtyard but I didn’t know who lived there. This floor was occupied by first-year students — we treated them with a degree of condescension. Despite that, I was about to knock on the door when I heard a voice coming from the room and suddenly remembered it belonged to a Chinese student, Ping, whom, for some unfathomable reason, we called Hundred Flower Bloom. He must have been reading aloud. I recalled his accent and his features and thought a screech-owl speaking Russian would have been easier to understand.

I moved away and carried on down the stairs. The other floors seemed to be dead. In the lobby Auntie Katya’s beady eyes followed me without a trace of goodwill. As I went out I realised I had never needed human warmth more than I did that evening. Even if she were to revert to her former friendliness, to the particular variety of benevolence that most Russian babushkas exhibited towards foreign students, I would never forgive her the coldness she had shown me earlier.

When I got into the street, it had stopped raining. There weren’t many people at the trolleybus stop. I felt a vibration in the overhead wires and then in the distance, as if emerging from a dream, I saw the stately stag coming towards me in the twilight, its antlers held high.

I got off at Pushkin Square. Gorky Street was brightly lit and as busy as ever. The block between the Izvestia newspaper building and the Moskva Hotel — the right-side pavement, especially — was the favoured promenade of the Gorky Institute crowd, perhaps because Herzen’s old house, which had been turned into the Institute, was at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Moscow’s main thoroughfare.

On the façade of the Izvestia building the neon board mentioned an exhibition of some kind and also the name of Richard Nixon. Ah! I thought. So there’s an American exhibition in Sokolniki Park… Other news, from Ukraine and the Urals, and of Khrushchev’s departure on a trip abroad, or his return, was also streaming on the board but the moving letters made me dizzy and I turned away. At Central Cinema they were showing Nights of Cabiria, but I’d seen it in Riga. A crowd had assembled around the entrance.

Without thinking, I turned back to the Izvestia news board. On his arrival at the airport, Nikita Khrushchev had been met by the p r e s i d e n t of the Presidium. But L i d a S n e g i n a had not come to meet me at the Rizhsky Voksal. I felt depressed. On the pavement outside the cinema there was a newsstand and several phone booths. I wasn’t angry with Lida, just sad. I went into one of the booths, inserted a coin, dialled the number and waited. The receiver smelt of tobacco. It occurred to me that perhaps this phone had been used to break off a relationship only a few moments earlier — I couldn’t account for the oppressive, acrid stench in any other way. I was tempted to hang up but I didn’t move, just waited. I forced myself to imagine Lida walking towards the telephone in high heels on a thick carpet (I’ve no idea why), her hair glinting gold and her stiff, straight neck keeping vulgarity at bay. Her hair and her neck, which always seemed to exude an electric fragrance, had struck me when I first saw her at a party with a Georgian man. Before I’d even glimpsed her face, I had learned her hair and neck. People are as recognisable by their necks as they are by their faces, yet in the days and weeks after our first encounter I was astounded by my own inability to memorise anything of her, save her neck. It was delicate and silky, and expressed its owner’s coolness and warmth, in so far as reserve can be called coolness, and passion, warmth.

I don’t know why but as I gazed at it, I felt that that fascinating, swan-like neck was threatened. It was perhaps a result of how my interest in that young woman first arose and perhaps because of all I had seen and heard in the corridors at my hall of residence, but that evening I imagined Lida Snegina’s neck was threatened either by the teeth of loud-mouthed Abdullakhanov or those of the mumbling Kyuzengesh.

All around her reigned the usual hubbub of dancing parties at the Gorky Institute, whose special flavour arose from the contrast between the eternal glory of literature and its living embodiments either stumbling around the dance floor or talking nonsense. Those soirées were only really lively early in the evening when the girls were still entranced by the thought that they would soon meet an actual writer. Their suitors — Goethes, Villons and so forth — were all around them: celebrity was close, just look around. May I introduce my friend Piotr Reutsky? He’s a poet. Have you read ‘Dawn of the Birches’? He wrote it. Really? Yes, indeed, that’s who he is… Over the chatter there hovered, as in a mist, the implication and the illusion that by meeting a writer you might become someone yourself and perhaps earn the right to have your initials at the head of a poem or a story, not to mention, later on, in posthumously published diaries, correspondence, memoirs, archives…

It was still the first half of the party (in the second, the truth would slowly emerge and the girls would begin to cast disdainful glances at their partners, to extricate themselves from their arms and occasionally, as happened to Nutfulla Shakenov, one would slap the face of a man with whom, only two hours earlier, she had dreamed of being entwined on a marble tombstone, her initials beside a line from the poem he would have dedicated to her, ‘I remember our April, April in the icy Karakum…’). So, as I was saying, it was still the pink and jolly part of the evening, yet Lida Snegina was already regarding it with unaffected scorn. She seemed sorry to have come, while one of her girlfriends was beside herself with excitement. ‘It’s odd,’ Lida explained to me later, once we had become better acquainted. ‘She’s an interesting person, but she has an irrational passion for writers. That one over there, he’s a prose writer, isn’t he?’ She nodded towards a man called Kurganov. ‘My friend waited four months for him to publish a story that was supposed to be about her. When the story appeared, it turned out to feature a milkmaid from the Lenin’s Way collective farm! But my friend is quite happy because Kurganov managed to convince her that the milkmaid was a disguise for the true subject, which was her! I’m not sure what I would call that if it happened to me. How about you? Are you a writer as well?’

Aha, my little pigeon, I thought, you won’t catch me out so easily! It took no great insight to guess that Lida did not like writers and that she had attached herself to me because I did not look like one. I shook my head and mumbled a few words to the effect that I did something in the cinema, regretting instantly that I hadn’t invented a calling even more distant from literature, such as table-tennis or Egyptology. She asked if I was training as a scriptwriter, but to shield myself from danger I muttered that I was vaguely involved in translating subtitles but, to be honest, I didn’t even do that… At the rate I was going I’d soon have downgraded myself to lighting assistant. At that point the band stopped playing and we parted.

Having asked her for the next dance, I told her I found it amazing that she had so little liking for writers when she was in their lair. She explained that she loved literature but mostly the works of dead authors. As for living writers, well, it was perhaps because she’d known two or three and maybe also because of her friend’s experience, no, she didn’t like them… I thought, It’s the ballad of Doruntine and Kostandin all over again, with the quick and the dead on the same horse! I felt I wanted to tell her the old legend about the promise. But something, I don’t know what, held me back.

Meanwhile her friend beamed as she danced beside us with Kurganov, and I whispered in Lida’s ear that he was surely promising to put her in a novel and make her the deputy chair of the collective farm or a matronly militant heading a delegation from the Autonomous Republic of Belarus at an international peace conference.

Lida laughed, and I reckoned it was now or never that I should ask for her telephone number. The string of six glowing pearls emerged from her whole being, from the curve of her back, her legs, her groin and her breasts, her neck and her lips — half a dozen magical digits with which I could summon her voice from anywhere in the universe. I felt more exhausted than a pearl fisherman and finally, when she and her friend left, escorted by Kurganov, I said to myself, She really was one of the most interesting women I have ever met. I had one reservation: I feared she might be a little cool. However, when I called her a few days later and she answered in a warm, still sleepy voice that she had been waiting for me to ring, I decided my fears were unfounded. She was a medical student and we saw each other frequently throughout April, May and part of June, up to the start of the long vacation. Each time I rang it struck me as odd that some women have hidden inside them a peculiar device that turns their voices from the normal tone to the tone of love, rather like a transformer that turns electricity from 110 to 220 volts, or vice versa.

All of that was going through my mind as I stood in the telephone kiosk listening to the gaps between the ring tones and surrounded by the smell of stale tobacco. Razluka: ‘Break-up’. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that as a brand-name for cigarettes? It would surely be a winner. A packet of Razluka. Twenty Rusalka. A carton of Rizhsky Voksal.

I imagined her on her way to pick up the phone, holding herself so straight, and, in my mind, I mercilessly dismembered the Procrustean corridor of her lodgings, making it longer and longer to justify the time she was taking to get to the phone and pick up. At long last the fifteen kopecks dropped somewhere inside the call box — or, rather, into the pit of my stomach, like lead weights, as if they were coins from Herod’s ancient kingdom. ‘Hello?’ said a quavery voice. It was her grandmother’s. After a short period of muddle (What? Who? I see. Lida?), I was given to understand that she was away in the Crimea.

I left the phone booth, crossed Pushkin Square, and walked down Gorky Street, on the right-hand side, where young layabouts regularly hung around for hours on end, watching the girls go by. On the front of the Izvestia building, the news board went on streaming. Khrushchev was going on another trip. For some time now papers had been calling him Nikitushka or Nikitinka, affectionate diminutives used for folk heroes like Ilya Muromets and so forth. Every time I’d tried to call Lida ‘Lidushka’ or ‘Lidochka’ she had burst out laughing because I put the stress on the wrong syllable, the last, as if I was speaking Albanian. So, Lida was now at the midpoint of her summer, as I had been at the middle of mine a few days previously, in Dubulti. As I walked on I was overcome with the desire to talk about the weather, about the summer, about anything at all to anyone I could find, even a statue. In front of me stood the huge central post office building. Brigita, the Latvian girl I’d met! Why hadn’t I thought of calling her sooner? I almost ran up the steps to the post office. Brigita had left Dubulti two days before I had. She must be home now in Riga, in one of those comfortable old apartments with a big ceramic stove taking up almost a whole wall and heavy oak furniture. I liked that town — where it would soon be getting cold — with its grey buildings, the turrets that resembled knights’ helmets, its ancient cobbled streets, their names mostly ending with — baum.

I gave the number to an operator and sat on a bench waiting for the call to be put through. Drawling voices announced names of faraway places that I thought had disappeared long ago. Magadan, Astrakhan, and even more legendary cities (apparently, you could call up the whole Golden Horde!), and I felt as if something was being extinguished inside me. I thought it must be from here that Kyuzengesh phoned his desolate tundra late in the afternoon, smoothing it with the low rustle of his voice, promising it who knew what in the twilight hours when sparse flocks of birds flew low overhead in the gloomy not-night and not-day that lasted six full months of the year.

I imagined that Brigita was perhaps still indoors, that she hadn’t gone for a walk in the — baum streets. In the last week of my holiday in Riga the weather had been bad and rain had often forced us to take refuge in cinemas where they were showing films we had already seen, in cafés we’d just left or even in some Protestant church where a service was being held. We’d been several times to Dzintari and to all the other stations with names that reminded me of beauty products, and now the smell of her hair had got mixed up with the smell of her toothpaste and her lips, which she made up only a little, to save them from getting chapped by the sea wind, into a single scent that belonged to all those railway stops.

The operator called my name. I went into a booth and said, ‘Hello! Hello!’ several times. At the other end someone said something in Latvian that, of course, I didn’t understand, while in the next booth a coarse voice was speaking with Samarkand or maybe the Karakum — I recognised the simple sounds of an Eastern tongue. Another voice broke in on my line, in an unknown language, then a burst of interference, and I thought I heard Latvian again, then yet more distant and plaintive voices. Almost losing hope in this transcontinental cackle, I blurted out her name, which was immediately swallowed, shredded, crumbled and ingested by the sand and peat of the marshes, by the taiga and the Northern Lights, leaving on the surface nothing more than a bleak hunger for more names, maybe for my own, with an accompaniment of pitiful sighs. I hung up and stumbled out of the post office. As I cut through the passing crowds I was suddenly afflicted with an unbearable headache that beat against my skull, boom! boom! as if the streets of Riga were thrashing me with the rubber mallets of their — baum, — baum endings.

On Okhotny Ryad the dun-coloured rain-drenched crowd milled between the huge Gosplan building and the Moskva Hotel. You could just about see the outline of the Bolshoi in the distance and, further behind it, in a welter of mauve and blue lights, the older building of the Metropole, the hotel where only foreigners stayed, and where you would also occasionally see a police van carting away prostitutes. I slowed, dithering between a right turn along Kuznetsky Most, a left turn into the narrow and noisy Peredelkinorovka Street, or even going on up to Red Square. Any solitary walker would have taken the first option, but curiously, without knowing why, I went on towards the square that everyone who has never lived in Moscow believes to be the heart of the city. In fact anyone walking in the evening towards Red Square can feel the floods of people in Gorky Street run dry as they approach its shore — the crowds thin out and only a few people push on as far as the ancient esplanade, like the thinning blood of an anaemic trying to make its way to the brain. If the GUM department store facing the Kremlin weren’t there to draw people in, Red Square would surely be one of the most desolate quarters of Moscow.

GUM must still have been open because people were milling about on the pavement in front of it. On the other side of the square, outside the Historical Museum, there wasn’t a soul. I carried on at a leisurely pace and came onto Red Square. Although I passed along Gorky Street pretty much every day and almost as often crossed Sverdlov Square, the Arbat and Tverskoy Boulevard, as well as Dzerzhinsky Square, where the number three trolleybus left for Butyrki, I hardly ever found my way to Red Square, and only on Sundays. Perhaps my disinclination derived from the disappointment I had felt on first seeing the Kremlin’s rust-coloured bastions. There was something unfinished, apathetic and undramatic about those squat brick walls, with their haughty towers poking up here and there. Perhaps I felt like that because I had grown up in a town overlooked by a citadel that was tens of metres high, with towers that were sometimes above the clouds and ramparts from which, even now, a thousand years after they were built, large blocks of stone sometimes came loose and fell to earth, like bolts of lightning, crushing houses and killing people in their path. By contrast, the somnolent, placid walls of the Kremlin gave off a ruddy cheerfulness that sterilised the imagination. No dashing horseman with moonlight glinting on his steel visor would bring any message to the gates of this castle; through its doors had come only ponderous, leather-robed monks from the Novodevichy Monastery, chanting Church Slavonic and surrounded by the false Dmitrys who had woven the fabric of Russian history.

Some of these thoughts whirled in my mind as I walked along the side of the ancient fortress. In the blue-tinted light of the evening the cupolas of St Basil’s looked like the turbans of our own Bektashi preachers or like coloured soap bubbles blown by some gigantic mouth. Slavic myths tell of a terrifying head all alone in the middle of the steppe that puffs out its cheeks to blow the great wind that raises the dust-storm. That wind is so strong that no rider who dares to come before it — even if he keeps as far away as the horizon — can stay on his horse. Every time I read anything about that head I tingled with fright, despite the absence of bloodshed and mystery. But perhaps that was exactly what made me shiver: a fall caused by wind and earth in a vast empty flatness with only that head rising from it. ‘It would be better not to have myths like that!’ Maskiavicius sometimes remarked. ‘It really does belong to steppe and dust. Stunted Slavic divinities… But you Balkan folk have legends of a different class — they’re almost as good as Lithuanian folklore! But what’s the use? Socialist realism forbids us to write about them.’ That was what Maskiavicius used to say, but you couldn’t rely on him. He changed his opinions as often as his shirts.

I crossed the square and walked along the pavement outside GUM, as far as the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, raised on a plinth originally used as an executioner’s block. From that corner the Kremlin walls looked even more peaceful. A muddled voice in my head told me that castles weren’t more or less Macbethical or Buddhistical solely by virtue of the grey or red colouring of their walls or their more or less mysterious shapes, but from the fret-work-like appearance of their turrets. The same voice also told me that, behind its casual ruddy face, this half-European and half-Asiatic castle soon would, or maybe already did, contain a great mystery. The block where heads had been severed was still there, not far from the walls, like a moon hovering over the horizon.

I suddenly remembered the police summons that Auntie Katya had handed me, then almost told myself aloud that I was exhausted and ought to get back to the hall of residence.

It was still just as empty and dark as it had been when I had gone out, and I wondered where I could go to kill time that night, even for an hour: to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s or Chinese Ping’s? I didn’t really want to be with either of them and felt I would prefer to be alone in my room. I began climbing towards the sixth floor. I recalled the monastic silence of the corridors in the Writers’ Residence in Yalta, with Ladonshchikov’s furtive footfalls on the carpeted floor, and Valentin, Paustovsky’s driver, who told us one day, between two hiccups, his eyes glazed from drink, that he was being tormented by the writer’s wife, a harridan who was wrecking his life, and that if he was still driving that car it was out of loyalty to Konstantin Paustovsky: if it hadn’t been for him he wouldn’t have stayed a minute longer in the job — he’d rather drive a pig lorry, a manure truck or a hearse than set eyes on that woman’s snout again. But there was nothing Konstantin could do about it, he went on, when he had calmed down. She had been a present to Paustovsky from that carrot-haired pig called Arbuzov — that guy who wrote plays with which he, Valentin, wouldn’t deign to wipe his arse, seeing as Arbuzov could never rise above Konstantin Georgevich, and had failed to bring down Paustovsky with insults and had not managed to poison him or have him deported or infect him with a contagious disease. The worst Arbuzov could do to Paustovsky was to palm off his own ghastly wife on him. When he got to that point in his tale Valentin usually looked round to see if there was still any benighted soul who did not know that Paustovsky’s current wife had previously been married to Arbuzov. He had landed him with the woman, Valentin would go on, once he had made certain everyone was in the know, and ruined his life, because otherwise Konstantin Georgevich, not that fuckwit Fedin, would be president of the Writers’ Union, and Valentin would be driving not Paustovsky’s blue Volga saloon but a luxury Zim limousine and would be getting three hundred roubles a month more in wages.

I don’t know why I kept going over Valentin’s monologues. I tried to turn my mind to other things but curiously it kept coming back to Valentin. Was it because I had previously heard those soliloquies in other empty corridors on nights that were just as boring and far away from everybody else? I should have got out of the corridor if I wanted to silence the whispering inside me. Run away, yes — but where to? I no longer felt like shutting myself away in my room. I had Lida’s voice on one of my tapes. She lay there as if she were in a long, magical coffin, without body or hair, just her voice. No! Keep me away from that tape recorder. And suddenly, as my whole being sought a place to escape and forget, I remembered the left wing of the huge building. It was almost always empty and served as a reservoir of rooms that might be allocated to teachers from the Gorky Institute, or to house guests of the Writers’ Union, or as temporary digs for writers who had walked out on their wives and didn’t know where else to go. Some evenings when I’d had a bit to drink I used to enjoy visiting that deserted wing. I had a key to one of the empty apartments. In a way it was my second home, a second silent, secret abode. ‘Want to come to my dacha?’ I once asked Lida Snegina, during a lively party, and dragged her by the hand into the dark corridors of the left wing. She was fascinated by that uninhabited suite on whose walls and ceilings the distant headlights of cars left translucent streaks, like those of garden snails.

Let loneliness cure loneliness, I thought, as I went through my pockets looking for the key. Once I had found it I trekked over to the left wing. The floorboards creaked softly beneath my feet. I found the door, opened it and went inside. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The walls hadn’t changed, the floral paper with its green background reminding me of funerals. I went into one of the rooms and stood there for a minute, my hands in my pockets, as if I had frozen. I went to the door to the other room in the suite, but as soon as I had turned on the light, I really did freeze: someone had sullied my sanctuary. I was dumbfounded. My eyes lighted on a corner of the room where there lay an empty bottle, a tin of food, and an object I could not make out. I stepped two paces forward and noticed that next to the bottle there was a torn piece of wrapping paper that must have been used for something greasy. Further on lay a few sheets of paper. I bent down. It was typescript, with closely spaced lines. Nothing else. It looked as if the intruder had come here to drink vodka and read the pages, which perhaps he hadn’t liked because he had left them behind with the remnants of his meal. For a second I thought he was going to come back, jerk open the door and take me by surprise. But the leftovers in the tin had dried out. I knelt down to gather up the typed sheets. There must have been two or three hundred. At first glance the characteristic lay-out of Russian dialogue told me I was holding a literary work. The beginning — possibly the first half (with the title page, obviously) — was missing. The page numbering went from 304 to 514. I was about to put the script back on the floor, but my eyes automatically began to run across the top sheet, which was the opening of a Chapter 31:

‘Zhivago, Zhivago,’ Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his coach, to which they had just passed. ‘From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow…’

I jumped forty or forty-five pages and landed on this sentence:

He analyses and interprets Dostoevsky’s Possessed and The Communist Manifesto with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me…

I would have read on, but a handful of pages slipped from my grasp, and as I bent down to gather them, I lost my place in the typescript. I hurriedly leafed through the rest of the work and only stopped on the very last sheet to read the line where the text broke off:

Outside it was snowing. Wind shovelled the snow everywhere. It was falling more and more thickly, more densely, as if in pursuit of something, and Yuri Andreyevich looked out of the window at it as if it wasn’t snow but…

What is this? I wondered. I had thought at first it might have been left behind by whoever had been drinking in the room, but as I recalled the phrase about Dostoyevsky and The Communist Manifesto it struck me it might be a forbidden work circulating from hand to hand. Such things had become quite common in recent times. Three months before, late one night, or maybe just before dawn, Maskiavicius had knocked on my door — or, rather, collapsed in front of it in a state of complete inebriation — and when I opened it he had shoved a handful of typescript sheets towards me and slurred, ‘Take this and read what he said, this guy, that’s right, it’s Dante Tvardovsky, oops, I mean Marguerite, sorry, I meant to say Aleksandr Alighieri…’ It had taken me all of fifteen minutes to work out that the pages contained a banned poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky called ‘Vasily Tyorkin in the Other World’.

I left the pile of papers where I’d found them, next to the vodka bottle, the tin and the wrapping paper. Then, having cast a last glance over the depressing still-life, I switched off the light and went out.

The only place left for me to go now was my room. I was worn out and lay down on my bed, but although I tried hard, I managed to reach only the outer rim of the Valley of Sleep, the colourless, soundless foothills far removed from the picturesque heartland of my dreams. I could hear the crackling of the current in the overhead wires when trolleybuses pulled into the stop. Those fairytale stags wanted to take me to the centre of town but they were quite lost as they swam about in the sky, their antlers pronging the clouds, while beneath their bellies lay nameless winding grey streets waiting for us to crash into them.

*

Three days later the graduates and teaching staff of the Gorky Institute’s two degree courses started coming back. The great house awoke. The first from our class to arrive was Ladonshchikov, his stagy smile expressing his satisfaction with himself and with the fine running order of the great Soviet Union. His cheeks bore a permanent blush, as if they were lit by some kind of fever, suggesting both the high pomp of a plenary session and emotion spilling over from meetings with his readers and superannuated heroines of Soviet Labour, and an eager Party spirit holding his bureaucratic eminence in check. Similarly, his putty-coloured raincoat, tailored to look almost like a uniform, was cheerful and modest at the same time. If you looked at him closely, especially when he was saying, ‘So that’s how it is, comrades’ — Vot tak, tovarishchi — you might well think that his face had provided the model for all the directives from the leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers about matters concerning the positive hero and maybe even for a number of the decisions that had been taken on the issue. Ladonshchikov’s face brought all those tedious questions to mind. He let his Soviet smile fall in only one circumstance: when the topic was Jews. He would turn into another man: his movements would go out of synch, the relative quantities of optimism and pessimism expressed on his face would be inverted, and phrases like Vot tak, tovarishchi made way for different and often vulgar ones. But all the same, on those rare occasions, even though what he said was repulsive, he seemed more human, because the stench of manure and pig shit he gave off was at least real. I’d seen him in that state several times last winter in Yalta when he was spying at Paustovsky’s window. But at times like that one of the Shotas used to say, ‘No, don’t be scared of Ladonshchikov!’ In his view it was when he was in that sort of a state that Ladonshchikov became harmless. It was the pink, pompous smiling state that made him dangerous: that was when he could have you sent to Butyrky Prison with a click of his fingers, as he had done a year ago to two of his colleagues. Shota’s words returned to me every time I came out of the metro station at Novoslobodskaya Street and walked past the endless reddish walls of the prison.

The two Shotas came back together that day. Over the holidays they had squabbled many times in cafés in Tbilisi and cursed each other roundly; then, most bizarrely, they had ended up in the same writers’ retreat, had argued and thrown insults at each other, one accusing the other of being glued to his heels, and vice versa, then had decided to give up on holidays and leave for who knew where; although there were hosts of trains every day from Georgia to Moscow, they had ended up travelling not only on the same service but in the same carriage!

The next day Hieronymus Stulpanc and Maskiavicius, our fellow students from the Baltic, turned up, both tipsy; next came the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ (that’s what we called the girls on our course, though only one was from Belarus). The Karakums, as we referred to those from Central Asia, all turned up around midnight, blind drunk, with Taburokov in tow. He’d been flailing about, trying to force his way into the Israeli Embassy because he wanted to have a word — just a word — with the Jewish ambassador to salve his conscience. So the bastard would not be able to claim afterwards that Taburokov hadn’t warned him in time, as his writer’s conscience required him to, and that he’d already changed alphabet three times, yes, he had, and all that that came with, and he didn’t really care anyway, and as a matter of fact he’d be happy to piss in the Jordan, however sacred it was. And that wouldn’t do us any harm either, because we’ve strangled all the Volgas and Olgas in their cradles, along with their alphabets, because we had Cyril and Methodius and the glorious Soviet sandpit and the one and indivisible— Brrr! It’s freezing in here!

Artashez Pogosian, nicknamed ‘The Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ because he identified with them all at the drop of a hat, apparently delighted to have dumped his wife, swept in with the other students from the Caucasus. They were all drunk, except Shogentsukov, who had come on his own on a later train, and turned up looking slightly drained, his face exhibiting what Pogosian jokingly called his post-prime-ministerial melancholy.

That same day saw the Moldovans come in, as well as the Russians from Siberia and Central Russia, including Yuri Goncharov (nicknamed ‘Yuri Donoschik’ by one of the Shotas, who thought he was a government sneak); then came the Jews, the Tatars and the Ukrainians, the only ones who came by plane. The next day Kyuzengesh arrived in the afternoon, looking quite grey, the last of the group. As was his habit, he shut himself away in his room and did not emerge for forty-eight hours. Stulpanc, who occupied the room next door, said that he always did that when he came back from the tundra because he found it hard to readjust to twenty-four-hour days. It was a serious problem for writers from those parts, Stulpanc went on. Can you imagine living your whole life in six-month-long days and nights, and then being required to divide your time into artificial chunks when you sit down to write? For instance, Kyuzengesh couldn’t write ‘Next morning he left’ because ‘next morning’ for him meant in six months’ time. Or again, when a writer from the tundra set down ‘Night fell’, he was recording something that happened so rarely it would have the same effect as ‘The third Five-year Plan has been launched’ or ‘War has broken out’. ‘Our comrades from the tundra have a problem,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘One night Kyuzengesh said something to me but he spoke so softly I couldn’t understand anything. But he was definitely complaining about all that. I reckon someone ought to look in detail at the time factor in the writing of our friends from the tundra. It’s got real potential, even if it comes close to the kind of modernism people say that French fellow Proust fell into when he made time go round in circles. Socialist realism needs to be studied in its impact on the Arctic plains, don’t you agree?’

‘Stulpanc, you really don’t know what you’re saying,’ Nutfulla Shakenov broke in. ‘You’re trying to tell me about that decadent Procrustes, or whatever his name is, but do you realise that in all the tundra and the taiga put together, in an area of three million square kilometres and then some, there is one, and only one, writer and that’s Kyuzengesh? Do we really need a literary theory just for him?’

We all thought that was ominous and grandiose at the same time. To be lord and master in a space more than six times the size of Europe! To be the tundra’s own grey consciousness!

There were crowds of people in the corridors of Herzen’s old two-storey house and outside it, in the garden with the iron railings and two gates, the main one on Tverskoy Boulevard and the other at the rear giving on to Malaya Bronnaya. Nowhere else in the world could so many dreams of eternal glory be crowded into such a small space. Often, when you looked at all those ordinary faces in profile — some fresh and alert, most of them drawn and unkempt — you might guess that several were already turning into marble or bronze. That became obvious when, around dusk and especially when they were drunk, a one-armed fourth-year student and Nutfulla Shakenov, with his partly destroyed nose, resembled statues dug clumsily out of the ground by an archaeologist.

The corridors were crammed mostly with first-year students. They appeared drunk, and had a euphoric glow, as if they had been pumped full of gamma rays, while their pallor was graced with a layer of perspiration that was as becoming as it was permanent. A boy with sparkling, close-set eyes wove among them — a slim, handsome lad who had come from the Altai mountains. He moved from one group to another, getting into conversation with some, saying whatever flashed into his mind, then taking off to talk to another knot of people. ‘What a splendid pair of trousers!’ he exclaimed to me. ‘Where did you get them?’ His wide eyes became even more entrancing. ‘Where did you find them?’ I told him, curtly, because I was rather cross that he should use familiar forms of language with me when I was his senior. He noticed my irritation, bowed two or three times, his hand on his chest in apology, and said he would henceforth adopt a more formal tone, would speak to me in the third or fourth person, if it existed, but that I should not take offence: he came from the highlands of the Altai where men were more frank and open than they were anywhere else. ‘You, you,’ he kept saying with a smile, because it was the only word of English he knew, and I told him he’d pronounced it as if it was an Albanian word. That was when he twigged I was from Albania, and declared passionately that he would wear only Albanian trousers in future because they were the most stylish in the world. Then he asked if I could give him the pattern, and blurted out that he wanted everything he had to be perfect, that he would write perfect works, that within the next month he would meet the prettiest girl in Moscow and have an affair with her. ‘I am a virgin,’ he went on, in breathless excitement, ‘and, like the Altai mountains with their sublime peaks, I insist on losing my virginity to the most inaccessible girl in the capital!’ He carried on talking with unaltered fervour, but instead of blushing he grew even paler. ‘That is how it is! I have to manage this at any cost, because if I don’t, I don’t know what I will do. How lucky I am to make your acquaintance. Oh! Sorry, to make your acquaintance, sir. I’ll begin with the trousers. A man who hasn’t got the right kind of trousers doesn’t deserve any favours from life. I only like things that are perfect because I’m from the Altai and up there everything is noble, pure and eternal. I can’t have a fling with an ordinary girl. She’ll be either the most beautiful or there’ll be nobody…’

‘Well,’ I replied, entertained, ‘it’ll be very hard to get everything, so to speak, up to the same height as the Altai.’

He broke in energetically, ‘No, sir, you’ll never persuade me of that. You’ve got the best trousers in Moscow, so please tell me where I can find the most attractive girl in town!’

I smiled and was about to tell him that he would never find what he was after, even with the help of the KGB, but his eyes latched on to mine, like a cat’s, and he seemed to expect that I was about to tell him the name and address of Sleeping Beauty and maybe her telephone number too.