Twilight of the Eastern Gods

CHAPTER THREE

To my left, beyond the window’s double panes, snow was falling noiselessly; to my right, in complete contrast, the dark smudge of Nutfulla Shakenov’s rough, tanned chin, was bent low over his notes. Wet snow slithered intermittently over Tverskoy Boulevard, settling on the trees and empty benches. The letters that Nutfulla Shakenov was writing in his notebook were widely spaced, as if he were bewildered. The professor of aesthetics was lecturing on the eternal unity of life and art. Sometimes the snow seemed to settle on his sentences, giving them a melancholic and meandering cast. He was explaining that art goes hand in hand with life from the moment of birth, when the infant is greeted with song, until death, when funeral music accompanies a man’s last journey to the grave. Drowsy with the heat rising from the radiators, I gazed at the passers-by as they hurried, wrapped up in themselves, along Tverskoy Boulevard and speculated that sometimes art is bound up with the icy snow sweeping people on to Gorky Street, the Garden Ring or the Arbat. It made them put their heads down, hunch their shoulders, and pick tiny grains of ice from their eyelids. ‘Art does not abandon us even after death,’ the lecturer droned on. Even after death, I parroted in my mind. Snow falls on us all even after death, that’s for sure… Nutfulla, beside me, carried on writing his misshapen black letters. In the row in front of mine Antaeus, from Greece, was muttering something to Hieronymus Stulpanc. The two Shotas, sitting beside him, looked horrified. ‘And so, for example,’ the lecturer was saying, ‘some people’s tombs are decorated with sculpture, or simply with an epitaph, a few lines of verse. Art accompanies them even in everlasting sleep…’ He paused, presumably to measure the effect his words had had, which he must have judged insufficient, since he went on: ‘A month ago I went to the Novodevichy monastery. I visit the cemetery there quite often. It was very autumnal. I stopped at the tomb of A. P. Kern, on which Pushkin’s famous lines are carved:

‘Я помню чудное мrновенье

Пеpедо мной явилacь тьІ…

I remember that magical moment

When you appeared before me…’

‘Who was A. P. Corn?’ Taburokov asked.

Taken aback, the lecturer turned to face him. His grey hair looked electric with anger. He opened his mouth several times before he could find his words. As if something was missing.

‘You ought to know the answer, Taburokov,’ he said at last. ‘Every schoolboy knows that poem by heart. It’s one of the most beautiful poems in all the world, and everyone knows that it is dedicated to a young lady with whom Pushkin had had an affair.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Taburokov said.

‘Yes, you do, and don’t forget it.’

‘Pff!’ Taburokov scowled. ‘I can’t remember the name of my first wife yet I’m supposed to remember someone called Anna Corn or Kerr or some such nonsense!’

‘Don’t say such things!’ the lecturer screeched, anger making his voice rasp.

The audience, lulled into torpor by the whiteness of the snow outdoors, the warmth of the radiators inside and a general lack of interest in aesthetics, now woke up. Taburokov — he was bald, had a round, fleshy face and bags under his eyes — kept quiet. Stulpanc used to say that he looked like the bad guy in Chinese movies. He had a point. Taburokov’s ashen scalp, with its greenish tinge, which was visible especially at twilight, looked like a guglet brought out of an archaeological dig, as if at night Taburokov fell not into sleep but into a hole in the ground.

It took several minutes for everyone to quieten down again. The lecturer, despite his irritation, returned to the cemetery of the Novodevichy monastery. I’d been there the previous year and his description was accurate, except that I could no longer recall if the russet leaves on the marble tombs were copper inlays or actual autumn leaves. Among the tombstones I’d noticed that of Stalin’s wife, which had these words carved on it: ‘To my beloved Alliluyeva, J. Stalin’.

As the lecturer carried on, silence settled over the room, perhaps because the topic was tombs and everyone was surely thinking about their own or about their verse being carved on the graves of women they had known, who perhaps didn’t deserve the honour, because in most cases the affairs had consisted principally of disappointments and dubious consequences.

The group had now returned to its slumber. But it was of an unusual kind: it had a crack across it and a great howl ran the whole length of the scar. Snow was falling near to me, but it allowed me only brief escapes from the inner scream that was tearing everything to pieces. Nutfulla Shakenov’s glance — olive-tinted, cloudy and blank at the core — almost touched my right eye. Indeed, his impressive eyebrow came within a whisker of sticking to my forehead, like a leech. Someone nearby sighed. ‘Oh!’ Was it Shogentsukov? No, not him. His face expressed some muffled sorrow. Next to him was Hieronymus Stulpanc, his yellow hair as translucent as a watercolour. Out of the corner of my eye I observed Shogentsukov’s gelatinous visage and thought that it was perhaps not disappointment at losing his job (his ex-prime-ministerial pain, dixit Pogosian) that had wrought havoc on his huge head. The wailing that whirled around inside him, hollowing him out, like a drill, must have had some other root. In fact, everybody’s nerves were somewhat on edge, but no gestures expressed an anxiety whose muteness made it all the more fearsome. It had been floating over us for some days. I’d noticed the first symptoms the previous Friday, when Abdullakhanov had said, ‘Brothers, something’s not right! Shto-to nye to!’ For the rest of the afternoon and evening, people had stalked the corridors, bumping into things and cursing doors they seemed not to have noticed.

As for Taburokov… I suddenly realised why his question about A. P. Kern had been so incongruous. It was the second time he’d asked something like that. The first was just before the big party at which Maskiavicius had injured himself by walking into the glass panel of the main door, and the two Shotas went up to the attic of the Institute, over the ceiling of the seventh floor, to slug it out undisturbed. Just before this monumental drinking session, which was reported all the way up to the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, Taburokov, in a class on the psychology of artistic creation, had suddenly asked who Boris Godunov was, because he’d never heard of him before.

The question he asked today was just as bizarre. The first symptoms had appeared on Thursday or earlier, maybe as far back as Tuesday. Gloom had hung over us, a sense of the foreboding and depression that are so well expressed by the heavy sound of the Russian word khandra…

At last the lecture ended. Everyone went into the corridor and put on hats and coats, but nobody ventured outside. People were hovering, as if they were caught in fog, not knowing where the door was, and were watching each other for a signal or a message. At long last the signal came. As sharp as a razor blade and as supple as sunshine finding its way through the clouds, the gleaming word ‘ski’ was heard. It was a password, a code shared by all. Tomorrow, Sunday, skiing at Peredelkino. Of course, skiing, s k i ing. A mad glint lit everyone’s eyes. Abdullakhanov’s close-set squinters. Maskavicius’s too. The Shotas’ four eyes casting their converging glances. The omnipresent photographic eyes of Yuri Goncharov. Even Taburokov and the Karakums uttered the word ‘ski’. Aha! Now I guessed what the code was. The plot was unmasked. They said ‘ski’, but they heard ‘vodka’! Well, then, tomorrow, at Peredelkino… The conspirators carried on exchanging glances. Kyuzengesh’s eyes were veiled by what looked like a thin layer of ice (the frost had set in some time ago in the tundra). The eyes of Antaeus the Greek. Who then proposed, ‘How about a coffee at the Praga?’

The Praga cafe on the Arbat was the only place in Moscow where you could get proper black coffee. They served it in little brass thimbles, and almost everyone in artistic and literary circles was a regular there. But Antaeus and I went to the Praga to satisfy our yearning for Balkan coffee.

We set off along Tverskoy Boulevard. The mix of rain and snow was oppressive.

‘Seems like tomorrow is set to be a real binge!’

‘So it seems.’

Antaeus and I used to spend a lot of time together. After the defeat of the Greek partisans at the Battle of Grammos,^* he’d crossed the border into Albania with some of his comrades and for a time was given medical care in Gjirokastër, my home town. I was then in middle school, and I remember that when I spent nights in the area near the municipal hospital, I used to quake with fear when I heard the moanings of the wounded Greeks. ‘I might even have heard your groans,’ I used to tell Antaeus. He’d been living in Moscow for a while now and spent his time writing; since he’d been sentenced to death in absentia in Greece he had no intention of setting foot in his own land ever again.

‘Tomorrow there’ll be quite a shindig,’ he said, once we were sitting in the café. ‘You remember the last time?’

I nodded, signalling something like, Yes, sure, there’ll be chaos. ‘It’s all because of boredom,’ I said. ‘A kind of collective khandra, don’t you reckon?’

‘It’s affected us as well. We’ve got khandra too,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that so?’

I didn’t know what to say. Though I had broached the subject I wasn’t keen on his going over it again. I trusted him, we’d told each other a lot of things held to be sensitive and yet, I don’t know why, I’d recently become much less open with him on matters of this kind.

‘Antaeus,’ I said, ‘we’ve known each other for ages, yet I’ve never thought of asking you what your real name is.’

He smiled, turned to gaze through the window at the crowd thronging the steps to the Arbat Metro station, then, without looking at me directly and speaking in a muted voice, as if he was referring to something very far away, he uttered his name. Then he turned to me and asked, ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

I shrugged in a gesture that meant approximately, ‘That’s not the point, but…’ To be honest, compared to his nom de guerre, Antaeus, his real name struck me as very plain. It was a perfectly ordinary Greek name with a th sound and several ss in it.

‘I can understand your not liking it,’ he said, as he took off his glasses to wipe the lenses. Like those of any shortsighted person without their glasses, his eyes looked wishy-washy and pale, like his name. ‘You’re not the first person to react in that way to my name. But my pseudonym is a different kettle of fish.’

The waiter brought us the brass thimbles and poured our coffee into them.

‘To tell the truth, I’ve grown unaccustomed to my own name. I’ve spent most of my life under one alias or another.’

‘Have you had many?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, a few… I had to change them frequently, especially when I was underground.’

‘And Antaeus is the latest?’

He shook his head melancholically. ‘I think it’s the last.’ Staring through the window at the station entrance, Antaeus recited his various noms de guerre in a low voice. Almost all were names from classical tragedies, and for a second I saw him covered with tough, sword-proof scales that had come from ancient times to protect his soft, mortal flesh. Perhaps he felt that such anachronistic armour made him safe; perhaps, too, he could hear circling tambourines playing seductive rhythms, aiming to draw him on so he would stick out his head and be struck down… I’d seen how hedgehogs can be deceived by music when they roll up into a ball.

‘The last,’ he repeated, ‘and the unluckiest.’

I knew what he meant: ‘Antaeus’ was the alias he’d been using at the time of the defeat, in 1949.

‘You don’t know what it’s like when a comrade in arms spits on you and you have no right to avenge that spit of shame,’ he said. ‘Antaeus is the name I was using when that happened to me. Did I tell you about it?’

‘No.’

‘“Antaeus, raise your head, raise your head, for God’s sake…” I can still hear the words.’ He brought the thimble to his lips and turned it upside down as if he wanted to empty it, except that there wasn’t a drop of coffee left in it. A trace of the dregs stuck to the edge of his mouth. ‘It happened to me the day after we had crossed the border… The Albanian border,’ he added, after a pause.

‘I recall the first lorries that brought Greek partisans into Gjirokastër.’ I’d interrupted him, in an intentionally casual tone, hoping to lessen the level of drama that always loomed when conversation turned to the defeat of the Greek insurrection.

‘It’s imprinted on my mind,’ he continued, without hearing what I’d said. ‘We were in a mountain gorge, there was constant drizzle, and your soldiers’ helmets were gleaming. We were harassed, muddy and bloodied — most of us were wounded; some were delirious, and as if that weren’t enough, there he was, a terrifying figure, propped up on his crutches, hurling insults at us. Boy, did he give us hell! “Antaeus, raise your head, you faker!”’

‘Who was that?’ I enquired calmly. ‘Who was insulting you?’

‘Hang on, didn’t I ever tell you his name?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘He was a comrade in arms, an old militant who’d been wounded more than once and been put right abroad, on your side, in fact, at Gjirokastër. On his last stay in hospital he’d had both legs amputated, and though he was an invalid and only half alive he’d come to wait for us at the border, beneath a cliff, a few metres from the place where, after crossing into Albanian territory, we surrendered our weapons. He swore at us because we’d been beaten. Boy, did he insult us! He called us cowards, deserters, namby-pambies, fools. His hair, face and clothes were soaking but his tears were mixed with the rain. Only his voice gave away that he was sobbing. We were marching with our heads down and his harsh words struck sidelong blows on our wounds. Strangely, nobody answered him back. Our fighters marched on without turning their heads to either side. He recognised me: “Antaeus, raise your head!” he yelled, anger, tears and hurt breaking his voice. Like everyone else, I cast down my weapons and carried on. I could see nothing but I heard him shouting again, “Antaeus, raise your head, you fraud!” From the side he was waving a rake or some other implement that seemed to be directed at my eyes. In the end I did raise my head, and that was when he spat on me. I walked on, moving further away from him as he carried on bawling and jigging about on his crutches, like he was being crucified, in the rain, a rain I’ll never forget…’ For the third time Antaeus sipped at his empty cup. ‘So that’s how it was!’ he said, with a tap of his finger on the table top.

‘Yes, those were grandiose and terrible events.’

‘And now I give lectures, go to conferences, write theory…’

‘Things have calmed down more or less everywhere,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Have you noticed our embarrassment when we hear people talk about the epic spirit of the old revolutionary struggle? We’re like schoolboys when their parents come up from the provinces to visit them, wearing old-fashioned greatcoats.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘It’s like the alias business,’ I went on. ‘If you ever took on another clandestine job, I don’t think you’d look to the tragedies for a new pseudonym—’

Smiling, he interrupted: ‘Do you mean I’d take one from a comedy? Go on being ironic! I’ve got a thick skin, I can take it. When all’s said and done, I’m a defeated man.’

In the few words he’d just spoken, I saw a suggestion of vulnerability, and shouted, ‘It’s impossible to have a conversation with you any more! You’re always so prickly!’

In fact this was the first time he had seemed to take offence, and we had never quarrelled before.

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘I’m on edge, over-sensitive. Anyway, take no notice. Please, go on. What were you saying about pseudonyms?’

‘Let’s talk about something else.’

He laughed. ‘I can guess what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You see an ex-militant who’s now a peaceable Muscovite. With a fur collar on his coat and a pair of bedroom slippers, Antaeus has become the very model of the petit-bourgeois. What a character! Am I right?’

‘Typical characters arise in typical situations. Isn’t that what Engels said?’ I joked.

‘True, in typical circumstances… In typical circumstances,’ he said again, nodding. ‘Yes, of course, with baby fox fur and slippers as soft as the southern breeze on his bedside rug…’ He looked around for his coffee cup, but the waiter had already cleared it away.

‘So my aliases are just stage names!’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Be honest: isn’t that what you think of me?’

I’d actually said that as a general observation, not directly about him. I’d never thought about the matter at any length. It was just that in the atmosphere of the lives we led, ancient and legendary names, like Prometheus, Antaeus and so on, didn’t sit well with the activists I’d encountered at the Soviet Writers’ Retreat. At most they might use aliases from opera or, if it had to be a classical reference, then perhaps Dionysus…

I laid that out quite bluntly while insisting that my observations did not apply to him, he didn’t have to believe me but I wouldn’t waste my breath on telling lies, especially as I’d have to do it in Russian, which would be tiring. He was at liberty to believe me or not, that was up to him, but that was what I thought and it would be a good idea to put an end to the discussion.

He was intelligent. He understood I meant what I said. He put his somewhat sallow hand on mine, and said, ‘I believe you.’

‘It’s like the titles of Soviet politicians,’ I said, following my train of thought. ‘They used to be called People’s Commissars, and in those days it sounded right, didn’t it? Then, for whatever reason, they were turned into ministers, like everywhere else. Nowadays if you tried calling them People’s Commissars it would sound so peculiar.’

‘If they wanted to be called People’s Commissars, they’d have to start by being the commissars of the people!’

I pretended not to have heard and looked out through the window. An intermission was taking place at the cinema next to the metro station.

My conversation with Antaeus lurched on clumsily, like a caged bird beating its wings in the café until one of us managed to open the door and let it fly off to the southeastern corner of Europe, which was home to us both. We started talking about things that had happened to us when Antaeus was a teenager and I was a child. He told me about the severed heads of Greek partisans that our enemies had kept in refrigerators to show to people, and I told him what I’d heard about the severed heads of rebellious pashas that were displayed in a stone niche in Istanbul, to dampen separatist aspirations.

‘That’s the way large aggressor nations always behave,’ he said. ‘Scare the people! Horrify them! Terrorise them mercilessly! But, tell me, what was that niche called?’

‘Ibret-taşι: Let it be a lesson!’

‘Hm.’ He nodded, as a sardonic smile spread across his face. ‘You share a naval base with the Soviets, don’t you?’

‘Yes — Pasha Liman.’

‘Another Turkish name!’

Conversation drifted back to the Albanian-Greek border, to rain, winter, hail and shame.

‘On the march towards Albania,’ he said, ‘we didn’t know whether you would defend us or not. There were rumours that Tito would hand over men from our side. But you stuck to your ancient besa… Besa,’ he whispered. ‘I know that Albanian word. I heard it in Athens, when I was a student. One day it will come into every language in the world.’ He stopped talking and swept his hand over the table, as if he were wiping it clean. ‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s drop the subject. Tomorrow I shall drink like a character from an opera!’

I laughed heartily.

‘Tomorrow everyone is going to get drunk. We’re all at the end of our tethers…’

‘Hanging over us all is a black cloud of discouragement,’ he said, lowering his voice on the last words as if he already regretted having uttered them.

A cloud of discouragement… I looked through the window at the people streaming into the cinema. Most were young, holding hands or arm in arm, and all of a sudden I was overcome with joy at the memory of Lida Snegina. We’d met again since her return from Crimea and we’d been back to Neskuchny Sad, as well as to the bar on the thirteenth floor of the Peking Hotel, which had a view over all of Moscow and our other old haunts. The following day, a Sunday, we were due to meet at Novoslobodskaya metro station, and suddenly, at the table where we’d just been talking about khandra, thinking of Lida, I was overcome by a wave of sentimental gratitude for the metro trains that ran day and night, for overground trains, ticket-sellers, taxis that were always there to help if you were running late, and for all the other means of transport that allowed us to see each other. The warmth I experienced was such that I felt a bit of an imposter at a table where we had talked of painful things. I was about to tell Antaeus that at six thirty the next day I had an appointment with a wonderful woman at a station, but just then, without looking at me and still staring at the street, he mumbled, ‘Raise your head, you faker!’

I pretended I hadn’t heard and looked towards the metro station exit. I thought of Lida approaching our rendezvous the next day with the light step of any girl on her way to meet a boy, her eyes at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ground, all alone amid the passers-by, five minutes late, her steps rustling with anxiety and desire.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re perfectly right.’

I looked at him, puzzled. I hadn’t grasped what he was talking about.

‘A character out of comic opera,’ he resumed, after a short pause. ‘And yet…’

I still had no idea what he was talking about. ‘And yet what?’

He stared at me intently. Ancient Athenian, I thought, why won’t you tell me what you know?

‘There’s going to be a meeting in Bucharest,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine who’s a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Party passed the information to me. You’re not in the loop?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No!’

And it was true: I knew nothing about any meetings coming up in Bucharest or Warsaw. But if I’d heard about them I don’t think I’d have been whispering and making such a drama of it as he was. There were gatherings of that kind almost every month in one or other of the socialist capitals.

‘Apparently, here in Moscow as well,’ he went on, in the same near-whisper, ‘there’s going to be a conference alongside the festivities for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’

‘Really?’

‘And it’s already a while since they appointed the central committee and the preparatory subcommittees — the political subcommittee, the economic and cultural subcommittee…’

What subcommittees? Why did hearing about them make me shiver?

‘Ah! You don’t know anything. You didn’t know that Vukmanović-Tempo has just been in Moscow as well, did you?’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’

I was on the point of telling him what Maskiavicius had told me two days earlier about the alternately smiling and scowling faces of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung that had been shown on posters after their meeting a few weeks earlier in the airport at Beijing, but thought better of it. What’s the point? I thought. It’s probably just gossip.

He seemed about to tell me something else, or maybe not. He paused, then said, ‘Tomorrow we shall drink.’

‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I repeated.

While we were in the café we said the word ‘tomorrow’ many times in a particular way, almost with a kind of relief. Occasionally it seemed to me — and maybe to Antaeus as well — that we were piling into it, as into a dustbin, all our unexpressed thoughts, all our hopes, our flaws and our mutual suspicions.

*

Sometimes Sunday seemed so palpable to me that I almost believed it was embossed and in colour. I could even feel it moving and sliding away under our skis, beneath our feet. I felt as if in this endlessly white and undulating area it had always been Sunday, since the time of the tsars and even further back, that it had been Sunday since the year 1407 or 1007. How many times had Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and even savage Tuesdays come close? They’d prowled around silently in the hope of getting on to the plateau — to no avail. They eventually understood there was no easy way in for them and had discreetly withdrawn from an area where Sunday had reigned supreme for centuries.

Grey izbas dotted the landscape beneath a uniform sky about which I had written a hendecasyllabic line some time before: The formless sky is like an idiot’s brain. In Russian translation it sounded even more grisly:

Бeзфopмeннoe нeъo кaк мoзг тулици

Yнылый дoждь зaливaeт улицы

I’d been harshly criticised for it in the poetry seminar.

The day was rushing away beneath my feet. Among the hummocks of snow, people with odd fixtures on their skis came and went, then dropped in at the Writers’ Club and reappeared with greater ease in their movements, having downed a dram without even taking off their skis.

In fact, with a few exceptions, nobody knew how to ski properly, but none of us ever took our skis off. Taburokov even tried to go to the toilet with his on.

They all looked drunk. But it wasn’t just the vodka. They were under the influence of the uninterrupted sky, the sadness of the horizontal beams of the izbas, and the snow, which made it so easy to laugh (Kurganov said that only in snow can people laugh one hundred per cent, especially if their feet are strapped into skis).

We spent the whole day going round in unending circles, with the hissing sound of skiers lost on the piste, disappearing then reappearing from behind mounds of snow, like ungainly ghosts.

At twilight the intoxication increased. But that was only the beginning. The tacit understanding was that everything would happen ‘at our place’, the hall of residence at Butyrsky Khutor.

Night fell, and our noisy party set off for the railway station, full of expectation and foreboding. The floor of the carriage was soon dotted with clumps of snow. As we got on, passengers stared at us, their curiosity tinged with disapproval. There were women from the outlying regions with knapsacks in their laps, a girl and a boy with colourless hair, clenched fists and hooligans’ scars on their rough cheeks. The latest fashion among teenage ruffians was to put blades between their knuckles so even the slightest blow would draw blood.

The train juddered into motion. The familiar landscape slid backwards at an increasing rate. My idea of an everlasting Sunday vanished. No, at Peredelkino it was never Sunday or Thursday, it was only ever today. Eternally now. Sunday was what we had brought to it, like roast lamb to a picnic, like the savages had brought Friday to Robinson Crusoe’s island. We’d brought our Moscow Sunday so we could cope with it in peace, between the izbas and the sky, far from other human eyes.

Now everything was over and dusk had fallen. Small suburban stations rushed past. Alcoholic fumes befuddled our sense of proportion. Outside in the snowy landscape we glimpsed people wrapped from head to toe in angora houpelandes, as if they had just walked out of a Russian folktale. A group of young people got on. With them were two girls, pink with cold, who gazed at everything as if they were under the influence. The Shotas stared at them.

‘Simpatiaga,’ one of the girls said, referring to a Shota.

I’d never heard the suffix — iaga added to the Russian word for ‘nice’: it usually expressed disdain or referred to ugliness.

Behind me I heard ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ saying to Abdullakhanov: ‘You understand, Khrushchev spent three days in the country as Sholokhov’s house-guest…’

Abdullakhanov clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Tut-tut. If anyone else had told me I wouldn’t have believed it, but since it comes from you, I’ll take you at your word.’

‘But it’s serious!’ Pogosian retorted. ‘I heard it on the radio.’

‘Ha! On the radio! On the radio!’ Abdullakhanov repeated, nodding so vigorously that it seemed he was banging his head against the window.

Further down the carriage, Taburokov was standing still but was shaken, at regular intervals, by hiccups, which made him roll his eyes, as if he was watching an insect fluttering at the end of his nose.

‘A three-day stay,’ ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ went on, just behind my neck. ‘The peasant drops in on the peasant… Ssh!… while the noble Armenian people… did I say anything?… bask in happiness!’

I changed my seat so that I wouldn’t hear Pogosian raving in his medley of Russian and Armenian and found myself opposite Shakenov, who was reciting for the benefit of one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ his recently completed ‘The March of the Savings Banks’. Three months previously he had published ‘The March of the Soviet Law Courts’, which had brought him sacks of readers’ letters. ‘All you have to do now,’ Stulpanc had joked, ‘is to write “The March of the Soviet Prisoners”, but you’ve got plenty of time, you never know what might happen.’

‘A three-day stay! My God! We’re back to the days of the Russian peasantry. But mum’s the word!’

Artashez Pogosian had wriggled closer to me again and this time there was no escape. The carriage hummed with whispers and mumbling. I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking. On the way back from Yalta the previous winter, throughout the long train trip across the lush Ukrainian countryside, standing in the slippery corridor of the carriage, which often smelt of vomit, I’d heard endless tales of that kind, all night long, whole chapters of novels, entire acts from plays. But the journey from Peredelkino to Moscow was short and there wasn’t sufficient time.

The Shotas had tried but failed to engage the two girls in conversation. I looked around for Antaeus but all I found was the pasty, fish-eyed face of the art history professor. She was a well-known iconographer, and I suddenly realised that, despite the icon-like pallor and flatness of her face, she was still a young woman. I moved closer to her, and she asked me sweetly, ‘Don’t you have your own story to tell?’

I was taken aback. ‘To whom?’

‘To me, of course!’

Her eyes seemed like part of a very old painting, worn away by time.

‘But my story is about dead people,’ I said. ‘My subject—’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

Of course, there was nothing wrong with it. It occurred to me that, with the way she looked, the only subjects anyone would ever want to broach would be macabre.

‘Maybe I’ll tell you later, in Moscow, when we’re back,’ I said.

‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘I can wait.’

I could barely repress a shudder. What exactly was she expecting? I turned to look out of the window but the darkness had swallowed everything. It was completely black outside. A black abyss, with us moving blindly through it. It was nearly six and I thought I would miss my appointment with Lida at the Novoslobodskaya metro station. Oddly, that did not upset me. If only you knew, Lida! I thought placidly. But on the heels of that thought came another: what was it precisely that Lida should know? Nothing. A suburban railway carriage, a wet floor and, trodden into the still only half-melted clumps of snow, stories that would never be written and theatrical scenarios that would never be performed on any stage…

We got to Moscow around seven. Our group made a boisterous entrance at the Gorky Institute. Most of us were swaying on our feet, wearing innocent smiles and burping occasionally.

‘Ah! Here are my lambs, returning to the fold,’ said Auntie Katya, from behind her counter.

Meanwhile, those who had stayed behind at the residence came out into the corridor or opened their doors to welcome the travellers home. But they looked much the same as the returning mob. The vast building was full of grating voices, snatches of song, vodka fumes and the banging of toilet doors. I tramped along corridors on various floors until, in a dark corner, there loomed before me the black shape of a public telephone with the digits on its dial gleaming as white as shark’s teeth. Lida had surely gone home upset and angry. I put fifteen kopecks’ worth of coins into the slot and dialled. ‘Hello!’ she said. Yes, she was cross, but calm. I tried to persuade her it wasn’t my fault, but to judge by her curt and haughty response, she must have been waiting for me to hang up. I told her we could meet at the same place a little later, but she refused. I’d almost lost all hope of seeing her again and felt dreadful.

‘Lida,’ I said, my voice cracking, ‘I really need to see you this evening. If you knew…’

‘If I knew what?’ she asked. Her voice had perked up, grown lighter and sharper in the huge, still midnight space where you think you can hear stars bumping into each other. ‘What?’ she asked again.

‘If you knew how horrible it is here tonight…’

The midnight void settled between us, like the emptiness of a morgue. Then she asked: ‘Are you lonely?’

‘Yes,’ I answered faintly. I would have liked to add words of a kind that has never existed. For a split second I thought I knew some but I didn’t move my lips to say them aloud. I just sighed. It was such a sigh that I imagined that if I didn’t get a grip on myself right now my very soul would be ready to depart my body.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come. Wait for me at the usual place.’

I ran to the trolleybus stop and twenty minutes later I was at the metro station. The escalators spewed out an endless stream of travellers. Their astonishingly fixed heads came out first, then their chests and finally their legs. I felt confused. I was afraid I stank to high heaven of vodka. Sometimes I even imagined I still had my skis on. At last I saw her golden hair appear with its electric sparkle, then her neck, so straight, the memory of which was always accompanied by a kind of pain. In my mind the idea of losing Lida was always associated with a vision of that straight neck alongside someone else’s.

‘Here I am,’ she said, without a smile.

Her inquisitive eyes looked me up and down from head to toe. We’d become strangers. Only when she took off her gloves to pick something off my shoulder, maybe a snowflake, did she seem close again.

We walked for a little while in the wake of the moving crowd.

‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked.

‘No… I mean… only a little,’ I mumbled. ‘You know I don’t like drinking.’

‘So, at your place, is it really as dreadful as you said?’

She wasn’t looking at me.

‘Yes, yes, back there it’s sheer hell.’

She shrugged.

‘Would you like to come and see?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

I felt I wasn’t making myself clear, which made me want to take her there.

We were going past the gloomy walls of Butyrky Prison when she exclaimed: ‘Look! There’s a taxi!’

We hailed it and, without thinking what I was doing, I gave the driver the address of the Gorky Institute hall of residence.

I could see lights twinkling in the building. A knot of tipsy students were talking to each other in front of the porter’s lodge. Auntie Katya had livened up, too. On party nights when residents had been drinking they were usually quite open-handed as well. She was talking with Taburokov and laughing, but when she saw me her face suddenly darkened. Her narrow eyes with their reddish lashes cut through Lida like a knife.

‘Your ID, my girl.’

Lida was flustered. She looked in her bag, then at me. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Haven’t you got some kind of card?’ I whispered. ‘It’s just a formality.’

The old hag never asked for papers from the dozens of girls who came into our residence with their boyfriends. She had only been doing it to me for the last few weeks, undoubtedly because of the police summons.

Lida scrabbled in her handbag again and fished out a card.

‘Ah!’ said Auntie Katya, as she studied it. ‘A Komsomol card. Hm!’

You old witch! I thought. Baba Yaga!

But Kurganov came to my help and asked her outright, ‘Why are you asking for ID from his friends? You never ask anyone else.’

‘You keep your mouth shut!’ Auntie Katya riposted. ‘This is management business.’

Lida’s mood had darkened.

‘Yes, why is she so keen to see the IDs of your friends?’ she asked, as we waited for the lift.

I shrugged.

‘Does she think you’re a suspicious character?’ she pressed.

I still didn’t know what to say so I shrugged again. ‘I’m a foreigner.’

She stared at me for a moment, then looked away. But in her eyes, for an instant, I thought I saw something like compassion. Infinite compassion in a halo of light, quite different from the ordinary human kind. I was well aware that, amid the hostility between males that blanketed everything like winter, Russian girls had the courage to protect foreign guests.

How difficult it is to get into foreign lifts… But we got in. As it slid upwards, the iron fretwork of the shaft allowed glimpses of corridors on various floors, room numbers, faces and necks. I tried to tell Lida about the residence and its inmates. First floor: that’s where the first-year students stay; they’ve not yet committed many literary sins. Second floor: critics, conformist playwrights, whitewashers. Third… circle: dogmatics, arse-lickers and Russian nationalists. Fourth circle: women, liberals, and people disenchanted with socialism. Fifth circle: slanderers and snitches. Sixth circle: denaturalised writers who have abandoned their own language to write in Russian…

That was where the lift came to a halt, on the sixth floor. As I opened the door I bumped into Stulpanc who, for no obvious reason, just stood there, stock still, apparently stunned.

‘Denaturalised…’ she echoed. ‘So you’re one of those who’s abandoned his own language?’

‘No, not me. I’m a foreigner.’

Stulpanc fixed his pale eyes on Lida.

‘This Latvian hasn’t yet renounced his own tongue either,’ I whispered in her ear, ‘but they’re working on him.’

‘What a beauty!’ Stulpanc said of Lida, without shifting his gaze.

He was a serious young man and I’d never seen him behave like that before. But that night, drink had got the better of him.

There was a strange excitement in the corridor. You could feel that something was afoot. I thought I could distinguish a group of Karakums huddling somewhere near my room. As Lida and I approached, the group vanished. All I found were the two Shotas emerging from the service staircase and swearing at each other. One was tall and fat-faced, his cheeks even more florid than usual; the other was a short, sly customer, who looked like a ball of wool. Hardship and resentment seemed to have settled in his thick hair, curling and frizzling it into a nest.

Lida took my arm and held it tight.

A sad Asian song came from behind a door. Further down we caught fragments of sentences in languages we’d never heard before.

‘Let’s get out,’ Lida said. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘We’ll go down to the fourth floor. Perhaps they’ve started the outpouring.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Plot-spew! That’s what they call it. On nights like this they tell each other the plots of books they’ll never write. Some of them throw up — that’s why they call these sessions plot-spews.’

‘How can you say such horrible things?’

‘Let’s go downstairs,’ I said. ‘You’ll see for yourself.’

On our way we met Goncharov going up.

‘He’s a government spy,’ I told Lida.

‘From the fifth floor?’

‘What a good memory you’ve got!’

She clutched me tighter. On the fourth floor the outpourings had indeed already begun. In pairs, rarely in threes, my fellows slowly paced from door to door in the ill-lit parts of the corridor, mumbling as they went. Plot-spews were still few but the distraught expressions on their faces made it clear there would soon be plenty.

‘They’ll never write any of the things they’ll tell each other about tonight,’ I explained to Lida. ‘They’ll write other things, often the exact opposite.’

‘That’s why I don’t like writers. How fortunate you are not to be one of them!’ She added, as an afterthought, ‘Please, don’t crack your fingers like that!’

In a muddle, I got out my handkerchief and spat into it.

She looked at me, appalled. ‘What’s come over you? You never do that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That. Spitting like that.’

‘I’ve no idea if I do or I don’t…’ I really didn’t know what had got into me.

‘Why do you live here? Can’t you find somewhere else?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Ladonshchikov is a bastard,’ somebody shouted, leaning on his door.

From the end of the corridor of the women’s floor came sounds of music.

Lida stopped dead. On the floor, at her feet, was a puddle. It looked like vomit and probably was.

‘I’d say that was playwright’s spew,’ I joked.

‘Stop it! Please, let’s get out of here.’

We took the stairs. Maskiavicius, whose nose was bleeding, overtook us. I wanted to say hello but Lida tugged at my sleeve.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked her.

She sighed deeply. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she replied. ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head.’

I was on edge. I had an almost irresistible urge to do just about anything or, rather, to undo something. My knees felt out of joint, my elbows felt dislocated, my jaw felt unhinged. I tasted ash.

‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘You’re hurting my arm!’

I jerked my head around to look at her with almost hate-filled eyes. That was why I couldn’t control myself this evening. It was because of her. She was the reason my nerves were in such a state — she and her face, with its halo of solar wisps, her purity and propriety, with the white obelisk of her neck, defying everything around it, including me. Right! I thought, in a moment of lunacy. You’ll soon see what I’m really like! An irresistible desire to hurt her tightened into a ball inside my chest.

‘What is wrong with you?’ Her voice was softer now. She was gazing at me with sympathy, clouded with a bluish haze. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

You’ll soon see, you little witch!

We were on the sixth floor and I was leaning against the lift-cage ironwork. She saw that I was about to tell her something important; she was waiting for it with her mouth half open and what might have been the marks of suffering on her cheeks.

‘Listen!’ I said, in a feeble voice I could barely get past my teeth. Then, my eyes darting around as if I was about to reveal a great secret, I mumbled something half Albanian and half Russian that I didn’t understand myself.

She looked at me serenely. Then, putting a hand on my shoulder, she drew her head close to mine as if she had spotted something barely visible in the depths of my eyes, at the back of my skull. Hoarsely, as if she’d said, ‘From now on you are a diminished man in my eyes, you are a murderer, a member of the Mafia, of the Zionist International, of the Ku Klux Klan,’ she whispered, ‘I’m beginning to believe that you… you too… you are a writer!’

It seemed to me that my answer was just a laugh. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a writer but, unfortunately, not a dead one!’

We stood there for a while just looking each other in the eye.

‘I’d started thinking you were,’ she murmured.

Suddenly I felt that my confession had not been destructive enough and I hastened to finish digging myself into a hole. I told her that if I didn’t get out soon I would start throwing up as the others did, not just in the corridor but from the windows on to passers-by, on to taxis, from the sixth floor, from the top of the Kremlin’s towers, from — from—

Her eyes were popping as she put one hand over her mouth and, with the other, pressed the call button for the lift. Eventually it arrived but only when she closed the door on herself did I grasp that she was leaving. I shook the handle but it was already on its way down. I started running down the stairs, winding round and round the cage inside which Lida was falling, inexorably falling. I spiralled around a void that was a monumental column. I clung to it as though I were an ornament, in classical, Doric, Ionian or Corinthian style, wrapped around Trajan’s column, crisscrossing the bas-relief depictions of battles, armour, blood, and horses with hoofs that trampled my head…

When I got to the bottom the lift’s door was open and it was empty. Lida had gone. I saw Stulpanc pacing up and down the corridor.

‘I saw your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Why was she in such a hurry to get out?’

I mumbled a few incomprehensible syllables.

‘What a fabulous girl!’ he added. ‘You’re a fool to let her go.’

‘If you want her, take her!’

His eyes widened.

What made me rejoice in the satisfaction of revenge? Oh, yes. In saying ‘Take her!’ to Stulpanc, I had maintained the illusion that I was treating her like a harem slave, selling her on. I knew it wasn’t true, that I had no power over her, but the brash way in which I’d offered her to Stulpanc made me feel as if I had.

In fact, the previous year, at a very private party in his room, when we had been drunk, we had swapped partners. It was an episode neither of us liked to recall.

‘She’s all yours,’ I repeated. ‘I’m serious. Over to you.’

‘Hang on,’ said Stulpanc. ‘Tell me more…’

‘There’s no deal involved,’ I told him. ‘She’s a present.’

Absurdly, I felt relieved.

‘But how am I going to—’

‘Look, here’s her phone number,’ I said, fishing a piece of paper out of my pocket. ‘Call her some evening and tell her I’ve left or gone mad or— Wait… say I’m dead! Do you hear? Tell her I died in a plane crash.’

The idea that if she believed I was dead she would think of me with affection, perhaps even love, flashed through my mind and something softened in my chest.

Stulpanc stared at me, astonished. ‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘I don’t like the way you’re behaving.’ And he gave me back the scrap of paper with her phone number.

‘Go on!’ I said. ‘I’ve lost her anyway. I’d rather it was you who laid her next instead of an Eskimo or some Uzbek pimp.’

I turned my back and made for the stairs. There was dancing on one of the lower floors. My last words to Stulpanc had been entirely sincere. Through a glass door I could see the outlines of couples dancing. Now and again I thought of Lida walking alone across Moscow. It’s cold outside, I thought, as I got to the Russian-nationalist floor. It’s pitch black out there and the streets are full of Tatars… And now you’re writing ballads!

On the fourth floor I fell in with the disenchanted, who were whispering to each other as they paced up and down, two by two. Maybe it was the narrowness of the corridor that made them seem taller than they were in the Institute’s lecture theatres. But maybe the disenchanted always seem taller than they are… Fragments of scenes and synopses, spoken in more or less muffled tones, reached my ears, sometimes the left, at others the right. Themes ranged from limping party secretaries who stole piglets from the collective farm, fake ministers, decrepit and dim-witted generals, and Politburo members who spied on each other and buried a proportion of their pay under izba floors against a rainy day. Some stories portrayed top officials’ luxurious dachas, their drinking parties and bribes, and their offspring dancing in the nude. Others dealt with uprisings, if not with real insurrections in various parts of the country; they spoke of hushed-up massacres, the growth of religious sects, deportation, prisons and crimes, the monstrous difference in pay between workers, the supposed ‘masters of the land’, and the leading cadres of the Party and state, ‘the people’s servants’. ‘A Hundred to One is the title of my play,’ said a voice. ‘Maybe you think I’m telling a story about a Soviet soldier fighting off a hundred Germans, a revolutionary overcoming a hundred Tsarists, or a Korean versus a hundred Americans. No, my sweet, there’s nothing of the sort in my play. A hundred to one means that the salary of one character is a hundred times higher than that of another, and what’s most amazing about it is that they’re both positive characters!’

‘Ha-ha-ha!’ said his interlocutor.

‘Yes, yes, my play ends just like that, with a laugh,’ the playwright replied. ‘My low-paid character starts giggling, ha-ha-ha! The whole company bursts out laughing, ha-haha! and the laughter spreads to the audience and from the audience it ignites the whole wintry city. And then all that’s left for Piotr Ivanovich is a wee stretch of time in our cosy little prison at Butyrky!’

‘Ha-ha!’ said the other.

‘Yuri Goncharov!’ someone said. In the blink of an eye, the novels, plays and poems metamorphosed. The tall, sturdy Party Secretary gives his jacket to a comrade feeling the cold; the Party committee delegate, seen in Act I of version A distilling vodka illegally, now forgets to draw his pay, forgets even to have dinner because he is so absorbed by world revolution; insurrections are transformed into art fairs on collective farms, massacres recast as prize-giving ceremonies; youngsters who danced naked in dachas now volunteer to upturn the virgin soil. Whereupon the disenchanted all began to throw up…

I turned and plunged blindly into the other part of the corridor where the women lived. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. Outside one door I thought I recognised the ‘Belarusian Virgins’, and a little further on, the haughty expression and eternal cigarette of their antithesis, Bella Akhmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s wife. She was in her fourth year. With a complexion that was milk-white, despite her Tatar ancestry and good health, she exuded impending maternity, which she never mentioned in her poetry. Each time I met her on the stairs, I could not help thinking of the efforts she must have made to be dressed always at the height of fashion.

‘Bon akşam, Bella,’ I muttered, through my teeth.

‘… akşam,’ she breathed, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.

Nobody knew who had invented this half-French, half-Turkish ‘good evening’, but almost everyone had adopted it. Akşam, I repeated inwardly without ceasing to gaze at Bella’s pale face, sadness rippling across it, like waves on a pond. Melancholy clung to the mascara on her eyelashes and spread over the Saharan expanse of the shimmering, moon-like powder on her neck. Akşam, I thought. What a majestic word! This evening is truly an akşam. It’s not an Abend or a soir or a Beчep, but an akşam. Let akşam reign on the frozen steppes of Russia, on the phone lines of the night shift, in the cities and collective farms, over the memories of the civil war, over snow, guns and the soviets of the sixteen republics. Akşam be upon the vastest state in the world!

That was when I saw our professor of art history. She was standing at the very end of the corridor, almost glued to the wall, and her eyes were trained on me.

‘I’m still waiting,’ said the icon, barely audible.

I stopped in my tracks and glared at my boots.

‘You promised me a plot,’ the wall-bound voice went on. ‘A plot with death in it.’

I moved a step nearer. Her face was close to mine now. She had pale skin and unhealthy pink blotches on both cheeks. ‘With death in it,’ I repeated, as if I had heard my own sentence read out. I leaned even nearer and, very gently, not even putting my hand on her unflinching shoulders, I kissed her on the lips. Then I drew my head back in the same measured way, as if expecting the human mural to crumble and bury me in its rubble. I took a few steps backwards. Then, without a pause, I turned on my heels and ran down the corridor.

‘Oh, those bloody Chinese!’ I heard someone say, as he peered through the keyhole of Ping’s door. ‘Come on, Hundred Flower Bloom, or Hundred Nettles, whatever your name is! You there, you inside, open up! I’ve got something to tell you…’ Not a sound came from within.

‘Ladonshchikov is a turd!’ another voice wailed, but I didn’t turn to see whose it was. I ran up the stairs four by four and was gasping for breath by the time I got to the sixth floor. The first person I fell upon was Taburokov. With his wispy black hair rising from his sweaty scalp, like fumes from the flame of a gas hob, he came towards me like an apparition in blue. ‘Nkell gox avahl uhr,’ he said threateningly, but I evaded him and went past.

‘A Mongolian has jumped out of a window on the fifth floor,’ someone said. ‘Call Emergency!’

Despite the dim lighting there was muffled excitement along the corridor. Denaturalised writers were coming and going in disarray amid suppressed quarrelling. Now and again dull thuds could be heard. Boom! Boom! That must have been Abdullakhanov banging his head against the wall, as he usually did after more than two hours’ drinking. Nearby I heard mumbling: ‘Hran, xingeth frull ckellfirau hie.’ It came from the Karakums, advancing in a squad from the depths of the corridor. They were speaking their own half-dead language and their words whistled past me, like a sandstorm desiccated by the desert sun. ‘Auhr, auhr, nkr ub…’ I wanted to get out, to get away from the dust that was already grating on my teeth and coating me with its namelessness. I fell, my friends, I fell, krauhl ah rk meit! On the other side of the bridge at Mecca… Fortunately I found myself at the opening of the unlit corridor that led on my right towards the empty suite, and I plunged into it. As I went along it in a state of bewilderment I heard a noise that sounded like the rustling of reeds against a gurgle of water. I thought my feet were sinking into mud, my legs were unsteady, I was about to be swallowed by soggy tundra. Kyuzengesh had sprung up beside me. ‘Bon akşam,’ I whispered.

‘Jounalla hanelle avuksi,’ he replied.

I’d never heard the sound of his voice before. As he carried on speaking I tried to hang on to the wall so that I didn’t sink into the mud. Although he had always seemed placid and slightly bemused, he was now talking harshly, if still at low volume. His anger was easier to see than to hear. You could read the fury in his crooked teeth — they looked like whitish blobs emitting words of death, or small tombstones half buried in a muddy pit. I turned my back on him and found myself once again in the sixth-floor corridor where the denaturalised group was now thoroughly mixed up and speaking all its dead and dying languages simultaneously. It was a dreadful nightmare. Their greasy faces distorted by drink and sweat, and streaked with dried tears, they were hoarsely espousing the languages they had rejected, beating their breasts, sobbing and swearing they would never forget them, they would speak them in their dreams; they were castigating themselves for having abandoned their languages, their mother tongues, for having left them at home to the mercy of mountains or deserts so they could take up with that hag of a stepmother, Russian.

I was struck dumb. I’d never imagined I would witness repentance on such a grand scale. ‘Meilla ubr,’ I said, I’ve no idea why.

They wittered on. In the word soup of already dead and gravely sick languages, a few Russian expressions floated to the surface. They cropped up like lost islands in the dark ocean of a collective subconscious. ‘I can see my language before me, like a ghost!’ one kept screaming, as if he had just woken up in fright. Frulldjek, frulldjek hain. Ikunlukut uha olalla. Fuck off. Ah onc kllxg buhu. Meit aham, without a horse or so much as a farewell. This autumn, tuuli lakamata. O star! Vulldiz, et, hakr bil, O my language!

You won’t be able to say I did it! Oh, stop dangling your blood-stained suffixes over me!

Stop! I thought. I stuffed my fingers into my ears, struggled to make my way through the group and eventually got to my room. I flung myself straight on to my bed without taking my hands from my ears. What kind of country is this? And why am I in it? I couldn’t think further than that. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. My chest went into a kind of convulsion once or twice, but it was a dry sob. * After the end of the Second World War, Communist partisans engaged in armed struggle for the control of Greece. They were finally defeated in September 1949 at a battle in the Grammos region.