Twilight of the Eastern Gods

CHAPTER FIVE

A Muscovite artist had just flown back from India, bringing smallpox into the city. He’d caught it at the funeral of a princess in Delhi — imprudently, he had gone too close to the coffin to make a hasty sketch of some of the detail. He died a few days after landing in Moscow; his friends and relatives were expected to end in the same way.

Early one morning, in front of the porter’s lodge at the Institute, a large poster went up, ordering the entire population of the city to be vaccinated, with a list of all the vaccination centres that had been set up. Anyone not following the order within forty-eight hours risked being quarantined.

A knot of people was looking at the poster.

‘Serves us right,’ Kurganov muttered. ‘We’ve got far too cosy with India.’

‘Did the epidemic come from there?’ someone asked.

‘Where else? You don’t think it came from West Germany, do you?’

‘That’s enough, Kolya,’ said his companion, tugging at his sleeve. ‘Time to go and get that vaccination.’

‘Kurganov’s right,’ said Maskiavicius, who had suddenly turned up. ‘We really did get too close to the Indies and Brahmaputras!’ Someone else guffawed. ‘Yes, that’s how it goes. We make up with some people, and pick a fight with others.’

He gave me a sidelong glance, but I didn’t respond. I’d turned to stone as I stood there reading the chilling words on the poster for maybe the tenth time. Inside, I felt something empty taking shape and a contraction somewhere near my diaphragm. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard allusions of that kind in the last few days, but never had I heard one as clear as that.

I was walking down the street in a crowd of people, many of whom were on their way to the vaccination centres, when I caught sight of Maskiavicius again. I put on speed to catch up with him.

‘Maskiavicius,’ I said, taking his elbow. ‘Listen to me. Just now beside the poster you said something, and I thought you meant it for me — or, rather, for my country. If you’ve heard anything, as a good comrade… if you’re aware of what’s going on… I beg you to let me know.’

He turned to me. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, then hastened to add, ‘I was joking.’

‘No, that wasn’t a joke. You’re at liberty to say nothing, but you were not joking.’

‘Yes, I was! It was a joke!’ he said emphatically.

We walked on for a while without saying anything.

‘Well, excuse me, then,’ I said, and walked on faster to put some distance between us.

A few seconds later I smelt his breath over my right shoulder.

‘Wait a moment! You think we’re in every loop, that we’re plotting against you because you’re on your own and a foreigner, not to mention a heap of other reasons.’ After a pause he added, with more feeling, ‘That is what you think, isn’t it?’

It was indeed the case, but as I was offended I didn’t bother to turn my head to reply to him.

‘Listen,’ he went on, in the same tone, ‘you know I’m not like Yuri Goncharov or Ladonshchikov or the fucking Virgins or other such scum of the earth. And you know full well that I’m not particularly fond of Russians. If I knew anything, I’d tell you straight away. I swear I know nothing precise. However… we were at the Aragvy restaurant the other day when a fellow who was there, and who isn’t a friend of yours, said, ‘The soup is hot, but things are cooling down between us and the Albanians.’ I tried more than once to get him to talk but he wouldn’t say anything else. So now do you believe me?’

I said nothing. I wasn’t listening to him. I was just saying over and over to myself, Can this be true?

‘And then, to be honest,’ Maskiavicius went on, leaning on my shoulder, ‘it would be a real stroke of luck if things were to go cold between us and you. Yes, I know, I’m Lithuanian, but don’t make me say any more…’

Suddenly I felt it was all true. On that cold morning, among the flood of pedestrians hurrying to get themselves vaccinated against the dreadful sickness that the funeral of an Indian princess had brought to Moscow, it seemed that all the mist that had shrouded Antaeus’s words about Vukmanović-Tempo coming to Moscow, about Bucharest or the planning subcommittees for the Moscow conference had lifted in a trice.

I could see my breath turning to haze as it left my mouth and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand pieces of crystal. I was neither happy nor sad. I had resumed my state of chronic instability, beyond sadness and gaiety, in this glaucous universe, with its slanted, harsh and twisted light. Relations between my limbs had broken off. All the parts of my body were about to disconnect and reassemble themselves of their own free will in the most unbelievable ways: I might suddenly find I had an eye between my ribs, maybe even both eyes, or my legs attached to my arms, perhaps to make me fly.

As with all things beyond understanding, this metamorphosis possessed a mysterious beauty. A world sensation! Newspaper headlines. General stupefaction. The horror and grandeur of breaking off. I was spread out among them, as if I’d been scattered by a gale. A continuous burning tightness afflicted my throat. Then, as in a dream of flying, I thought I could see the black earth laid out beneath me, with a few chrome-ore freight wagons of the kind I used to notice in the goods station at Durrës on Sundays when I went to the beach with friends, alongside the barrels of bitumen that would sometimes be there when there’d been a hold-up in loading the ships, stacked in terrifying funereal mounds.

None of that did much to calm me, though I maintained an outward icy demeanour. The events of 1956 in Hungary. The Party Conference in Tirana that had taken place then, too, at which, for the first time, the Soviets had been spoken of unkindly…

‘Now pull yourself together!’ Maskiavicius said.

We would have to put up with economic sanctions, maybe a blockade or something worse. The legendary Slavic head would puff out his cheeks to raise a truly hellish wind that would blow all the way to Albania.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Maskiavicius mumbled, standing beside me.

The dreadful round face that seemed to have been born from the steppe merged in my mind with Khrushchev’s.

‘Name, first name, and date of birth,’ a nurse said.

I was standing in front of a table laden with vials and lancets. All around, a constant hubbub of people coming and going. Maskiavicius had vanished.

‘Take off your coat and jacket, please,’ said the nurse. ‘Roll up your shirt sleeve as far as you can.’

Out of the corner of my eye I watched her white fingers rub my upper arm with a cotton swab dipped in medicinal alcohol. Then they gripped a blood lancet and proceeded to make pricks in my skin with as much care as if they were tracing out an ancient pattern.

It occurred to me that the princess’s coffin must have been decorated with really strange designs to have cast such a spell on the painter.

At the site of the butchery I saw blood about to spurt. Then the young woman’s slender fingers placed a patch of damp gauze over the pattern.

‘Don’t roll down your sleeve until the bandage is dry,’ she said.

*

On my way back to the Institute I couldn’t stop turning over in my mind the brief conversation I’d had with Maskiavicius. Posters advising the people of Moscow to get vaccinated were plastered everywhere. Passers-by gathered in groups to read them line by line, nodding or chatting with each other. I stopped a few times at such gatherings in the absurd hope that someone would mention the particularly sunny relations with India and consequently the cooling of friendship with… with a certain country.

Antaeus wasn’t at the residence. Apart from him, I didn’t know anyone I could quiz openly on the subject so I put my overcoat back on and went out again. It was cold. With my mind a blank, I went up Gorky Street on the right-hand side. There, too, the smallpox announcements were posted everywhere. I glanced at them now and again as if I hoped to find something else written on them. Something other than the fact that a painter had brought a dreadful sickness with him on the plane from India.

What means had Vukmanović-Tempo used to get to Moscow, then?

The imposing edifice of the Hotel Moskva stood before me on the opposite side of the street. I scurried over the road and plunged into the foyer. It was completely quiet. In one corner, on the right, there was a stall selling foreign newspapers, particularly from the people’s democracies and Western Communist parties.

‘Have you got Zëri i Popullit?’ I asked the salesgirl. ‘From Albania,’ I added, after a pause, to make myself clear.

When she held it out to me, I almost snatched it from her hand. I unfolded it in haste, scanning the headlines, the top lines first, then the middle ones, then the less prominent columns. Not a sign.

‘Have you any back issues?’

She gave me a pile and I rifled through them at the same feverish speed. Still nothing.

I bought a dozen newspapers in a variety of languages and was about to sit down in an easy chair to go through them when I noticed that the salesgirl was looking at me suspiciously. I was irritated and went out. Although my fingers were freezing, I started to unfold the papers, sticking initially to making sense of the headlines on the front pages. Two or three people turned to stare at me with curiosity. I went back to the top of the pile. To begin with I just glanced at the front page of each, then at the back page, and then I went through the headlines on the inside pages, but nowhere did I see mention of Albania. How could such a thing have come to pass? I almost shouted. The thousands and millions of Roman and Cyrillic characters, weighing down both sides of my overcoat, like the lead type they were printed from, were deaf and blind. The newspapers I’d bought might as well have been in hieroglyphics. They taught me nothing.

Wandering around like a lost soul, I ended up in Red Square. Yet more posters were stuck on the front windows of the GUM department store. Dozens of them. Lenin’s Mausoleum was closed. Perhaps it was the day when they aired it. Maybe it was closed because of the smallpox epidemic. Or perhaps they were taking measures to stop Lenin catching the disease.

A whirl of crazy ideas churned through my mind. All of a sudden I remembered that Alla Grachova had invited me to lunch the next day at her parents’ dacha. Amid the treacherous drabness Alla instantly appeared to me as an utterly delightful being.

Hundreds of people were pouring out of GUM, burdened not only by their everyday worries but also by the new anxiety from India. The microbe was present among them. It had smuggled itself unseen on who knew which handkerchief, lips or hair, and now it was turning the country upside down, as no visiting prime minister, president or emperor had ever done before. Two or three days previously, when it was still on its way, the city was at peace — as it had been a few weeks earlier when Vukmanović-Tempo had still been en route. It was the calm of yesterday and the day before when those innumerable bundles of deaf and blind newspapers had come into town.

I had wandered to the site where public executions were held in the old days. I tried to work out which side the prisoner had come from and where the executioner’s ladder had been. There would have been a special roll of the drums. The sentence would have been solemnly recited with a declamatory tremolo, then the broad, half-Asiatic, half-European blade would have fallen.

I put up the collar of my overcoat against the wind blowing in from the Moskva River and began to walk back to Okhotny Ryad.

Sunday lunch at Alla Grachova’s parents’ dacha began in good humour but ended almost in tears. Alla told me that was usual in her family when vodka was on the table. Apart from her mother, her grandmother and her younger sister, Olya, there was also the uncle she had told me about, as well as two couples who were old friends. At the start we talked about smallpox; they presumed that quarantine would be imposed in due course. Alla’s uncle, a ruddy, fat-faced man, bald and overweight, argued that there would be no quarantine, above all because it would make a bad impression on the political front. As he spoke he looked at me askance, as if I was among the supporters of quarantine.

‘If it had been up to me,’ he said, ‘I’d have kept quiet about this disease. It’s the sort of thing that’s like manna from Heaven for our enemies. You’ll see — they’ll trumpet it all over the world, as if they’ve never had outbreaks of smallpox or any other calamity. Only they’re clever, they are. They don’t wash their dirty linen in public, but they keep their eyes on ours.’

He kept a sideways eye on me all the time he was holding forth. It was clear that at this table I stood for all that was foreign and hostile, from Western Europe to Standard Oil and the decadent bourgeoisie. Alla, who was surely well aware of his dislike of foreigners, kept contradicting him, and blushed with satisfaction every time when, in defending his position with excessive passion, he made some egregious blunder. When the others burst out laughing, Alla, who was sitting next to me, took the opportunity to whisper in my ear, ‘I told you he was a right old Slavophile!’

‘There’s a real lack of gratitude towards the Soviet Union,’ the uncle went on sourly. ‘We spilled our blood for the peoples of Europe, we gave them the great gift of freedom, and they don’t even bother to thank us!’

He looked as though he was staring at the piece of bread in front of me and I automatically drew my hand back from it.

Some of those round the table were paying attention to him, while others chatted to each other sotto voce.

‘There is only one Communist Party in the world,’ he resumed, without looking at me. ‘One, not ten. There’s a mother party and daughter parties, and people who say differently…’

I struggled to swallow the piece of meat that was in my mouth. Does he know something? I wondered.

Alla interrupted, ‘Are there uncle parties as well?’

He glanced at her, disapproving. ‘Stop it, Alla,’ he grunted.

But his reproach had no effect on her. As she knew her uncle was really out to get at me, she seemed happy to have an opportunity to support me in an environment where I was entirely on my own, showing the warmth and sweetness of her nature.

In the course of the meal, despite Alla’s interventions, her uncle got on my nerves. I hadn’t yet opened my mouth, although I’d long been itching to retaliate. An opportunity arose, or so I thought, when someone alluded to Khrushchev.

‘I’ve noticed that in recent weeks he’s been referred to in the papers by pet names, like Nikitushka, Nikitinka, or Nikituchnok,’ I said, in an excruciating accent, with the stress on all the wrong syllables. ‘I know it’s a Russian folk tradition, but don’t you think it makes him sound a bit silly?’

While I was speaking the uncle stared hard at me, struggling to guess whether I was making fun of him or not. When I’d finished, he replied, ‘Contrary to the impression some people may have, the pet names show the people’s affection for our Nikita Sergeyevich. Got that?’ The beer glass he was holding was jumping around. ‘Have you got that, molodoy chelovek, young man?’ he repeated. ‘Nobody would have thought of calling Stalin “Joseph”, let alone “Yossifuchka”!’

There was evil in his eyes.

‘Nikitushka, Nikitinka… That’s how drunks talk,’ said Alla.

I expected him to pounce on his niece, but all he did was look at her disapprovingly again. Apparently all his anger was being saved up for me.

He kept on coming out with unpleasant, double-edged observations, and I wavered between two reactions: to get up from the table and invent a pretext — a headache, for example — for taking my leave; or just to push off without a word of explanation. I would surely have taken the second option had not Alla’s grandmother, who was, I thought, the only person present, apart from Alla, to have realised that I was the sole target of the old soak’s bilious drivel, spat at him through clenched teeth, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Andrey Timofeyich!’

The others didn’t notice anything and carried on chatting among themselves. A young widow from a neighbouring dacha even seemed about to break into song. She tried out a few notes at low volume a couple of times, but didn’t dare either to proceed or to give up, like a swimmer hovering at the lakeside.

Alla said no more. She was on the verge of tears, staring scornfully at her uncle who continued relieving himself of spiteful remarks, but she had turned away from me. As for myself, I was trying to keep my temper by imagining those parts of Alla’s body that especially attracted me: I was pretty sure that later on, when we were alone together, she would be more than usually comforting to compensate for her uncle’s bile.

That was when something unexpected happened. The young widow from the nearby dacha, who had seemed about to burst into song, burst into tears instead. But it wasn’t unalloyed weeping: it contained all the ingredients of the song she’d been ready to sing, including the words, which you could just about make out between her sobs.

‘Come on, Rosa, pull yourself together,’ two or three people urged, though their voices were also near to breaking.

Alla explained later that it happened quite often at her home. Most of the dachas surrounding her mother’s were allocated to the families of airmen who had been shot down during the defence of Moscow. It took almost nothing to turn a lunch party into a funeral wake. Her father had also been killed at the start of the German air raids on Moscow.

‘Nina, do you remember when they called them out on red alert that night?’ the young widow said, to Alla’s mother. ‘They’d just got home from a mission, but they had to go back on duty all the same. I had a sudden dark premonition…’

All of the women, those who were still widows and those who had remarried, began to reminisce about their long evenings and nights of waiting, their grim forebodings and their brief conversations over the garden fence.

Alla’s father’s plane had been surrounded by a squadron of Junkers and disappeared.

‘Poor boy,’ Alla’s grandmother repeated, from time to time. ‘Those vultures tore him to pieces. In the dark, all alone, up there, in the sky…’

All alone, in the dark… Those words hid something. They were like a bolted door in my way. I combed through my mind seeking desperately to resuscitate a memory. All aloooone, in the daaaark.

Suddenly it came to me. It was an old song someone had sung long ago at a wedding I’d attended:

I set out for Ioannina

In the dark, on my oooown

Just me and black Haxhi

In the dark, on my oooown

Every time I heard the words I heard them differently. Sometimes I thought it was ‘just me and arabaxhi [the coachman]’ and at other times it seemed more like ‘just me and arap Haxhi [black Haxhi]’, which I found even more sinister.

I shuddered. The thick of night, the road and black Haxhi, the servant. I couldn’t remember the rest. I think the traveller was attacked by highwaymen:

They cut me up with their knives

In the dark, on my oooown

I thought there could not be a sadder song about loneliness in the whole wide world.

‘Nina, do you remember September the twelfth?’ said the woman sitting next to her.

Wide-eyed and attentive, Alla’s uncle was listening to the women’s lively talk. The other men had taken on a look that was half guilty and half annoyed, presumably because it was not particularly pleasant for them to hear their wives talking with so much feeling about their first husbands.

As people were no longer paying any attention to us, Alla and I took the opportunity to slip away. Olya, Alla’s younger sister, stuck to our heels.

‘We’ll all go for a walk in the forest together,’ Alla told her. ‘Only you’re going to leave us alone for a minute. We’ve got something else to do first…’

Without waiting for a response from her sister, she took my hand and pulled me towards her bedroom…

The countryside, still half covered with snow, was silent. We’d been walking for more than an hour. Olya was with us part of the way and in front for the rest, because she liked to be the first to find the path we would take. A slim girl with delicate limbs and a supple neck, she had the same crystalline voice as her sister, Alla. From afar she pointed out a half-frozen pond, a derelict izba, and a half-rotted beam that someone had dragged out there, God knew why. We pretended to be interested in everything she told us, and she ran off happily to make new discoveries.

We came across a few uninhabited dachas with their shutters closed and, less frequently, an izba. Alla reckoned we were probably on the outskirts of a village.

‘Hey!’ Olya shouted from the distance. ‘There’s a cemetery!’

It was a village graveyard surrounded by a fence, or at least the remains of one. Most of the wooden crosses were broken or crooked, just as I had always imagined them from the masterpieces of Russian literature. By each grave there was a rudimentary bench made from two planks nailed to short stakes hammered into the ground. That was where the relatives of the deceased would sit when they came to the cemetery on Sundays or on the departed’s name-day. Like the crosses, the wooden benches were black with age and rotting away. Nothing could have been sadder to see.

‘There must be a church somewhere nearby,’ Alla said. That was all that was missing from this deserted landscape: a village church with an Old Russian prayer book in the Old Slavonic that had seemed to be pursing me for a while. I suddenly felt sure I had gone past this cemetery last year. But maybe I was mistaken: the suburbs of Moscow are so similar to each other that you can easily mistake one for another. Or else I’d come here at the start of autumn when everything was golden and copper-coloured, streaked with the dust that reminded me of antiques shops.

I’d forgotten which station we’d got off at: all my memory retained was the magical gilding of the leaves contrasting with the black of the izbas, the carpet of dead leaves — the essence of autumn — and the birch trees with their spotted trunks, bare patches revealed by the peeling bark that were so bright and shiny that they reminded me of how village swells had once used mirrors to make spots of sunlight play on girls’ windows.

I’d been with Stulpanc, Kurganov and a poet who worked in a publisher’s office. We’d felt intoxicated as we’d tramped through what the glorious Russian autumn had turned to gold and laid on the ground but we couldn’t understand why the two or three peasants standing on the thresholds of their izbas were glaring at us in such a sombre manner. We’d also seen three very aged women, one of them knitting; in their eyes shone the murky gleam of fear mixed with an unknowable measure of resignation. Puzzled by their attitude, we asked a few questions and learned that a nineteen-year-old girl had been stabbed to death in the area a month earlier. She was called Tonia Michelson and was certainly the prettiest young woman in the Moscow suburbs. She’d been killed by hooligans, not far from the suburban station, on the tra-a-a-cks… An aged country-woman wearing a headscarf (like all old Russian women) told us the story, her emotions and toothless gums turning her voice into a thin trickle of sound.

‘They killed her for nothing, for nothing!’ she said, and each ‘for nothing’ was like another stab to the heart.

Everything about her story was so raw and terrible that it made you want to double up to fill the pit it left in your stomach. The death of Tonia Michelson, a pretty girl of nineteen, seemed even more sinister told in a slow drawl from a toothless mouth.

Hooligans had come out from Moscow to see one of their mates. They’d been drinking, then played cards and decided that the loser’s forfeit would be to bump off the last girl on the last train back to town. It was a vicious game that had been spreading in recent times. They gambled on the lives of complete strangers — the last customer at the supermarket, the first person to get off the trolleybus, or whoever was sitting in seat seventeen on row nineteen in a cinema.

‘So it’s like I told you, for nothing,’ the old woman said, for the third time.

If she’d said ‘for nothing’ a fourth time, I think I would have screamed, ‘Stop!’

The pain that the unknown Tonia Michelson had prompted was visible everywhere. It had managed to superimpose itself on the landscape, soiling it with bloodstains that would not vanish for at least a century. No geological upheaval could have left a greater mark on those parts than the grief of Tonia Michelson’s death.

I wanted to tell Alla about it, but something stopped me, maybe just that we were not in that part of the Moscow suburbs. And, anyway, everything was covered with snow now — and snow seemed to require one to forget, at least until spring.

We went further into the thinning woods. Through the trees we could make out distant izbas on the forest edge. The birches were frozen, and their dormant shoots made bumps in the blistered bark that resembled infected pimples. The lighter streaks on their trunks now gave off only a dull gleam, as if the village swells’ mirrors had suddenly been covered with dust.

We passed yet more empty dachas: doors and shutters closed, verandas with blackened columns, leafless lilac bushes. A few birds of a species I could not name sang plaintively all around.

‘I think Stalin had a dacha a few miles from here, over Kuntsevo way,’ Alla said.

‘Stalin? A dacha?’

She nodded, happy to have aroused my curiosity. ‘Yes, but it must have been abandoned long ago,’ she added.

Olya, who was walking ahead of us, shouted something about a fox den. My mind was elsewhere and I paid her little attention.

‘Over which way, exactly?’

Alla shrugged. ‘I’m not too sure. Over there, I think.’

I stared for a minute towards where she was pointing. Bare branches broke up the huge grey lid of the winter sky. ‘Is it a long way?’ I thought I heard her eyelashes fluttering.

‘Yes, quite a way… but I’m sure it’s been closed up.’

I could see she was afraid that I would ask to go there. Maybe she was aware of the trees bending over us to enquire menacingly: ‘So what do you want to get up to in that dacha?’

‘I would have liked to see it,’ I blurted out in the end.

‘Oh, no!’ It was almost a cry of fright. ‘It’s a long way from here, as I told you, and there’s surely nobody there.’

‘But that’s exactly the way I want to see it, the way it is nowadays!’ I said.

Alla blushed slightly. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure…’ she went on. ‘Maybe I’m misinformed and the dacha is somewhere else.’

I noticed her face had got redder. I remembered when I’d gone looking for Zog’s villa at Dubulti. On that occasion it had been the girl I was with who was eager to find it.

Today it was the opposite.

It seemed that each of us was curious about the other’s tyrant, but preferred to avoid his or her own.

‘All right, have it your way,’ I said.

The snow crunched under our boots. Olya was out ahead and once again trying to communicate something about a fox den.

‘Apparently, he was frightening,’ Alla said, after a while. ‘He lived alone, like a hermit.’

She must have thought that talking about the dacha being shuttered and Stalin’s asceticism would diminish my interest.

‘Yes, that’s what people say,’ she repeated. ‘He lived there on his own, like a hermit.’

‘The Revolutionary Monk… that’s the nickname his opponents used. Did you know that?’

She shrugged her shoulders as if she was lost for words.

One day, I can’t remember where, I heard a drunk saying, ‘Ah! What a wily fox our Nikitoushka is! Khrushchev is a revolutionary fox!’

Light was fading. Olya suggested we go back before nightfall, or we might lose our way.

‘Yes, of course,’ Alla said. ‘Let’s go home!’

On the walk back to the dacha the three of us made a game of finding the footprints we’d left in the snow on the way out.

I could feel the opening of a poem I’d heard recited long before making its way into my mind: ‘What are these clouds forever flying past…?’ After a moment I thought, Yes, what are these girls who get mixed up with dead dictators…?

Fleetingly, the twilight splashed broad blue and black stripes over isolated izbas, hollowed-out tree trunks and the roofs of shuttered dachas. Here and there trees shook their crowns and released handfuls of snow that sparkled one last time before disappearing in the half-light, which was gradually acquiring the shade of tarnished silver. We were leaving ever further behind us the murky forest where the Monk and the Fox would continue to watch each other in silence as on the eve of mortal combat.

When we reached Alla’s parents’ dacha I said it would be better if I carried on to the station without going indoors to take my leave of the others. She agreed.

The two sisters walked down to the station with me.

Looking out through the carriage window I saw that Alla’s cheeks had gone crimson again. Olya must have been teasing her about me as I got on to the train. The innocent bites of a harmless insect.

They waved from the platform as the train set off. I felt worn out. I closed my eyes and sat there for a while, my mind blank. It was a few miles before I even began to hear what the other people in the carriage were saying. They were talking about smallpox.

‘They rang twice!’ Auntie Katya called from behind her counter, as she rummaged in her drawer for the piece of paper where she’d jotted down the caller’s name. ‘Ah, here it is. Yes, it was the Albanian Embassy. You have to call them back right away.’

What could the matter be? I wondered. A vision of a coffin lying thousands of miles away, in my home town, Gjirokastër, arose instantly in my mind. My mother’s? My father’s?

I pulled my address book out of my pocket and, with clumsy fingers, opened it at A: Antaeus, Alla, Albanian…

As I dialled the number a pit opened in my stomach.

‘Hello, is that the embassy?’ I asked in Albanian.

‘Yes,’ said a calm voice.

‘You called,’ I said, and gave my name.

‘Correct. About a meeting this evening. You must be here at the embassy at six.’

Ice-cold sweat covered my brow. For a second, my eye caught Auntie Katya’s suspicious glance.

The main reception room at the embassy was packed. Students, most of them men, were talking quietly to each other in groups of two or three. The three candelabra, which had been brought down a little lower than the last time I was there, or so I thought, cast a yellow glare. A large bronze-framed portrait of Enver Hoxha filled almost a whole wall. Nobody knew why we had been summoned with such haste.

At six, the counsellor came into the room. He was wearing a black suit, and perhaps it was the contrast of his white shirt that made his face seem paler than it had been the last time I had seen him.

With him was a man I had never seen before and who had probably just come in from Tirana.

The first few sentences of his speech, before he even got to the subject, told me that the rumours about a cooling between Albania and the Soviet Union were true. He stressed that relations between the two countries had been and remained good, but there were nonetheless internal and external forces intent on damaging them. So we students had to be vigilant not to provide pretexts for provocation from whatever quarter. To that end we were urged to limit, as far as we could, all relations with Muscovites for the time being. ‘I mean especially young female Muscovites…’ he added. My heart sank, not so much from what the counsellor had just said but from his having said it without a shadow of a smile. It was obvious that we all expected him to smile, as he had done on all earlier occasions when urging us to behave impeccably with Russian girls. Such sentences were always followed by a silence full of suggestive thoughts, such as: we’re perfectly aware of what you get up to but don’t make them pregnant… This time his face was stony. ‘You will therefore have to stop dating them,’ he went on, in what sounded to me like a weary voice. He spoke for two more minutes, stressing that relations between the two countries were good, telling us not to be unnecessarily alarmed, and especially not to mention any of this to anyone.

‘Well, there you are, young men, that’s why I called you all in,’ he concluded smoothly. ‘I don’t think you need any further explanation. Have a good evening.’

It was one of the most peculiar meetings I ever had occasion to attend.

A rumour flew round that all the close relatives of the painter who had caught smallpox had fallen ill. The airport workers who had been on the site when the Air India flight had landed were all under close medical observation. People said that if there was a fatality beyond the painter’s immediate circle, the whole of Moscow would be quarantined.

It was Saturday, when the most tiresome lectures were given. To amuse myself I watched people coming and going along Tverskoy. If the building had been set facing just slightly more towards the north I would have been able to see the statue of Pushkin and the doors of Central Cinema, where there was always a long queue. But I couldn’t actually see either, and Tverskoy was as sad as any boulevard in winter.

The lectures were nearly over but I wasn’t excited. The other students were steering clear of me. But that wasn’t what irritated me most. What I found unbearable was that they spent their time staring at me but looked away as soon as our eyes met. It drove me mad, irrespective of whether they were venomous (as were Yuri Goncharov’s and Ladonshchikov’s) or sympathetic (such as Pogosian’s, otherwise known as the ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’). The ‘Belarusian Virgins’ looked at me with suspicion. Shogentsukov and the two Shotas did so with curiosity, and others, such as Stulpanc, Maskiavicius and a couple of generally unruffled Russians, with secret sympathy. The Karakums stared at me uninterruptedly, their faces expressing consternation; as for Kyuzengesh, he put on a show of indifference tinged with sadness. The only one who treated me normally, as before, was Antaeus. ‘You’d have to be stupid not to see that you’re going to be hit by a dreadful hurricane,’ he’d told me, two days previously. ‘Everyone thinks this cyclone will wipe you off the face of the earth, but I’ve been to your country and know the Balkan lands fairly well, and I know you’ll stick it out…’ That was the first time I did not feel I needed to question him further. Balkan lands, I said to myself, as if I had just rediscovered something forgotten and buried deeply inside me… And let nobody forget that we no longer live in an age when they can put our heads into that famous stone niche! ‘Let it be a lesson’: isn’t that the motto? The red-brown walls of the Kremlin flashed before my mind’s eye. Was it possible that someone was thinking of carving a new Niche of Shame in them? ‘The time has come,’ Antaeus went on. ‘Your hour is nigh!’

‘What do you mean?’

He looked at me pensively for a moment, then said, ‘One day we talked about the besa, do you recall? Well, the time has come for the besa to confront perfidy.’

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was waiting for him to add something to what he had just said. And then it came: ‘We belong to the Homeric camp! Let nobody ever forget it!’

The Homeric camp! I said to myself. It was true. When Lida Snegina and I had started our affair I had amazed her by talking about the river that flows near to my home town. ‘Lida,’ I said, ‘did you know I’ve swum in the Acheron, the river of the Underworld?’

She’d thought I was joking. ‘But you’re still alive,’ she said teasingly. ‘How did you manage to come back?’

Then I explained that I meant it seriously: one of the two notorious mythical rivers passed near to Gjirokastër and the last time I had been there on a trip with friends we’d come across hydrologists on strange boats made of blue plastic, struggling against the river’s swells and eddies. We asked them what they were doing and they said they were surveying the river’s flow for a planned hydroelectric installation. My story enchanted Lida.

Now she must be convinced that I really had crossed the Acheron and that I would never come back from over there.

The lecture came to an end. As we left the hall, Antaeus passed close by and whispered, ‘Have you heard that Enver Hoxha is going to come to Moscow?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. So maybe the rumour is wrong.’

In the courtyard I noticed Ping smiling at me two or three times. What’s got into him? I wondered. It was an insistent, glacial smile. Antaeus, who apparently noticed what the Chinese was doing and also my anxiety, leaned over my shoulder. ‘It seems that once you’ve finished squabbling with all the countries in the socialist camp, you’ll become China’s darling…’

‘Really? Honestly, I don’t know a thing. All I do know…’

‘Yes?’

The Chinese was still staring at me.

As I walked across the yard I suddenly felt a great wind coming over my right shoulder. ‘Solitary demons that split open the sky!’ I turned and saw the student from the Altai region. He’d lost weight and his eyes had mauve bags under them.

‘Where have you been hiding?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages!’

He said, ‘Solitary demons of the socialist camp… ‘

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That I messed up. I failed to copy you in any way. Demons that you are!’

He walked alongside me for a few paces. ‘Is it true that German women have their opening set попepëк, horizontally, instead of vertically? Kurganov told me so. Oh! I would love to lose my virginity with a German woman like that…’

‘You and your virginity can get lost!’

‘Pardon me, demon. I forgot: you have other worries.’

At the railing I saw a familiar face.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I think someone’s waiting for me.’

It was Alla Grachova. She smiled at me. ‘You see, I was waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Mama, Grandma, Olya and I are leaving for the dacha this afternoon. We’re going to spend tonight and tomorrow out there—’ She broke off. ‘But what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?’

‘What?’

‘You look washed out.’

‘Actually, I’ve got a pain… in my ear. It’s almost unbearable.’

‘What a pity! Mama and Grandma told me to ask you to come along, and it made me so happy! Especially as my uncle won’t be around.’

‘Yes, it is a pity,’ I said, in a positively icy tone. ‘Please pass on my thanks. I’m truly sorry I can’t come.’

She looked me up and down sadly. ‘Are you in such a hurry?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Alla, I’m really sorry I can’t accept. It was so nice at your family’s place.’

‘You weren’t too bored last time?’

‘No, not at all. Quite the opposite — you were wonderful…’

She was trying to smile but something stopped her.

We shook hands at the bus stop and parted. On the way back to the residence at Butyrsky Khutor, I remembered what Antaeus had said: ‘Enver Hoxha is coming to Moscow.’ The windows of the bus were frosted. I felt worn out. I wondered what such a midwinter journey might mean.

Quarantine was declared the following afternoon. Apparently someone not related to the painter had died of smallpox.

The city was too spread out for us to know exactly what was going on at the airports, railway stations and all other points of access to the capital. What affected us most was the closing of cinemas, theatres, skating rinks, art museums and department stores, and especially the ban on outsiders entering student boarding houses and hostels.

Dozens of young men and women had met up outside the entrance to the Gorky Institute in the faint hope that they would be allowed in to visit.

‘Now you’re really deprived,’ said Dalya Eipsteks, a Jewish student from Vilnius, to Maskiavicius and me. ‘Like it or not, you’ll have to make do with us!’

Short and not pretty, but with a Parisian je ne sais quoi in her sly and lively eyes, Dalya peered at us through her spectacles.

‘Humph,’ Maskiavicius said crossly. After three months’ strenuous courtship he’d at last persuaded one of his girlfriends to come to his room, and the quarantine had thwarted his plans. ‘Humph! Sleeping with you would be like sleeping with Klara Zetkin!’

She came out with something in Lithuanian that Maskiavicius said meant ‘boor’, but I was sure it was much more vulgar than that.

‘I really have no luck at all,’ Maskiavicius moaned. ‘I’m jinxed!’

At the porter’s lodge a few couples were trying to bribe Auntie Katya. But they couldn’t get in. What were Lida and Stulpanc up to? In what frozen parks were they trysting? In which cafés?

Maskiavicius continued to rant, half in Russian and half in Lithuanian, about the quarantine, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that clown in a paper hat who looked more like a chef than a prime minister.

On the second day of quarantine, on the seven floors of the residence, there began what was only to be expected: a drinking bout. It was of a different kind from those that had come before: an understated, ‘lugubrious and Eurasian’ piss-up, as Dalya Eipsteks liked to say. That was probably because of the short supply of women. Their absence was noticeable everywhere, from the table and in the sound of voices, to quarrels and punch-ups. Now that girls could not be brought in because of the quarantine, we realised that their presence had previously served as a kind of permanent regulator. They’d cleaned the air, stopped it souring, prevented it rotting. Without them, words, gestures, songs and the rest quickly went downhill. Even the blood oozing from bruised noses seemed different, more viscous and blacker, without the vermilion hue that only the disturbing presence of womenfolk seemed able to confer on it in such circumstances.

For hours on end they drank, mumbled and had fights almost silently, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, in bits of corridor lit by forty-watt bulbs made even dimmer by a coat of dust.

One night in one of these gloomy recesses I found myself face to face with Yuri Goncharov. He seemed to be barricaded behind the checkerboard pattern of his suit, as if he were standing behind the railings of hatred.

‘What’s your Enver Hoxha trying to do?’ he hissed, through his teeth. ‘He wouldn’t be trying to play the smart Alec, would he? Ha-ha-ha!’

I was struck dumb. I was quite unable to focus my mind and formulate a riposte. My mouth felt as if it was opening into the void. A sharp stab of anger pierced my ribcage. Finally my mouth uttered mechanically a word that my brain did not control. Even before I heard myself say it I could see its effect reflected in Goncharov’s face.

‘Доносчик! Snitch!’

Goncharov flinched. A venomous grin of the kind that betrays extreme resentment spread across his face. He brought his hand up to his jaw as if he needed to hold it in place — it must have hurt him as much as, if not more than, it did me to get the word out. Then he said, ‘Have you ever seen János Kádár’s hands on television? Tell me, have you?

I didn’t answer.

‘Ha-ha-ha! You really should take a look. Haven’t you seen his fingers without nails?’

I still said nothing. Goncharov’s face was close up to mine.

‘He tried to scratch Russia’s face with his nails. So we tore them out! Got that? Ha-ha-ha!’

Dorian Gray, I thought. I wanted to slash that picture with a knife! As it had the first time, my mouth opened automatically and repeated, ‘Snitch!’

He burped out an ‘Ooh’, as if he was bringing up something from his stomach, and a second later neither he nor I was there.

The drinking continued. Afternoons were defiled with sausage, vodka and cheap tobacco. There was nothing but moaning and demands to be heard along the corridors. Now and again you could hear something like a drum beating slowly — that was Abdullakhanov banging his head against the wall again.

The sky was overcast. Even the snow had stopped falling. It seemed we would have to be content for ever more with the old snow that was heaped in piles on the pavements and at the roadside.

It was an afternoon at half mast that could have been from a page torn out of the last diary in the world. From the window of my room I looked out on the roofs of the housing blocks laid out one after another. I thought of the municipal apartments where, in the shared kitchens, neighbourly hatred had settled like a film on the blackened base of the cooking pots and on gas hobs covered with grease and grime.

And on top of all that, quarantine. In Russian the disease was called ‘black pox’, чëpнaя оспa. All over Moscow.

I was overcome with nostalgia to the point of paralysis; it swept away everything else. I burned with fever and the next minute I was shivering with cold. On my right shoulder, where they’d done a tattoo imitating the Asian sarcophagus of an Indian princess, I could feel a constant itch. That was where a weakened bacillus of the pox, isolated from its horde, had been tamed, overcome, trapped by civilisation, and was in the process of giving up the ghost.

Black pox, I repeated in my mind, unable to tear myself away from the window. The pox… How would I get through this evening, then the next evening, then the one after that? The dull, staccato thud of Abdullakhanov’s cranium a short distance away no longer seemed quite so abnormal.

Lida! I am not as you imagine me! I suddenly thought. I’d leaned my head against the freezing windowpane, and in the condensation my breath made on it, I wrote her telephone number. Well, I thought, it’s ruined between us, obliterated, as if by a wall of fog. Even if the quarantine were lifted as suddenly as it had been decreed, we two would be as before, two frozen, haunted shadows lost in a grey mist. Then as soon the airports reopened I would leave Russia with the other students from Albania on the first plane to Tirana. But I had promised her that, whatever happened, I would say farewell to her in person. I had given her my word… and I came from the country where nobody, wherever he may be on this earth or under it, goes back on their word.

The idea of calling her came to me quite calmly, as icily as everything else, without a flaw, brooking no objection. I paused before the phone booth in the corridor beneath the pale light of a forty-watt moon, just like in the ancient ballad. Then I almost said it aloud: The hour has come, Kostandin! Raise the lid of your tomb!

The dial rotated with difficulty as if it had been made of stone.

‘Hello?’

Her voice came to me as through a filter of quarantine and mourning.

‘Is that you, Lida?’

‘…’

‘Lida!’

‘…’

‘Hello! Lida, can you hear me? It’s me…’

‘Yes, sure,’ she said faintly, almost inaudibly, ‘but you…’

‘Yes, it is really me — it was a misunderstanding, I know, I know… Hello?’

I could hear her gasping for breath.

‘You… alive?’

‘Of course I am, since I’m phoning you.’

She had used the formal вы to say ‘you’ but, strangely, it sounded natural to me.

‘Lida… I…’

‘Oh! Wait a minute…’

Time to regain her composure. She didn’t say so, but I guessed. To be honest, I probably needed to readjust as much as she did. I heard her breathing awkwardly again. Then she said, ‘I’m listening…’

I tried to speak very casually, inventing something about a misunderstanding, an air disaster that turned out to be not a catastrophe at all, just a scare, and so forth.

I picked up a note of doubt in the way she was breathing. At last I managed to say to her, ‘Would you like us to get together at seven, at the usual place? Everything’s so boring, these days.’

I was about to ask her whether the quarantine affected her quarter of the town as well, but then I remembered that the measure was universal.

‘The usual place?’ she asked. ‘Where do you mean?’

‘Well, at the Novoslobodskaya metro station, of course, by the old entrance, like we always used to.’

‘Oh! Of course…’

Apparently she was still unsure, while I remained incapable of finding a way of proving to her from a distance that I was not a ghost.

‘At seven?’ she repeated.

‘Yes.’

I’ll have time to saddle my horse, I thought. That cold stone slab metamorphosed into a steed…

I waited for her as I used to at the old entrance to Novoslobodskaya metro station. From far away I saw her coming towards me in the crowd of pedestrians, with her blonde halo and her special way of walking, which seemed to have changed very slightly. You could see she was worried from the slight trembling in her knees, shoulders and neck.

I popped out from behind a pillar. ‘Lida!’

I had realised she might be frightened by seeing me. As she told me on our walk, she had made up her mind not to let it show but, despite that, she jumped.

I smiled and gave her my hand. The station lighting made her seem paler, and she had slight bags under her eyes, which added to her charm yet made her seem more distant.

But it was she who said to me, still in the polite form of address, ‘You’re really pale. Are you ill?’

‘Yes.’

We looked at each other. Her eyes were blank. Her sadness and fear seemed to have flowed to their edges, like the waters of a lake blown ashore.

Without saying anything, we forged a path through the throng of travellers coming and going at the metro exit. I got the impression a couple of times that she was glancing at my hair to see if there wasn’t a trace of the earth of a grave on it. Good thing I’d told the legend of Kostandin and Doruntine only to that Latvian girl from Riga, last summer, at Dubulti, more than a century ago.

We went along Chekhov Street. At last, when we were abreast of the Izvestia building, she took my arm. World news was streaming in lights on the front, high up, at the level of the top floor. No mention of Albania. Her shoulder seemed to transmit a muffled sob to my own.

We’d crossed Pushkin Square and were on Gorky Street. The cafés were closed. We were galloping hazily across windows lit by the falling light of the late afternoon, just like the Quick and the Dead of the legend, sitting astride the same horse. I had a temperature. A side-effect of vaccination, most likely.

‘Did you miss me?’ she blurted out, without warning.

I jumped as though I’d been startled from sleep. She’d gone back to using the affectionate ты form of address, and on top of that the word ‘missed’ seemed pregnant with danger.

Ah, yes! I started to muse. You were missing me to the point of suffocation. Years of separation with no hope, no word, not even a carrier bird to bring me a note… It had been a desert, the desert of Yemen…

In a shop window I noticed packets of coffee labelled ‘Yemen’. ‘Far away in Arabia,’ I said, ‘there’s a bridge, the Bridge of Mecca…’

She was listening to me, apparently enthralled.

If she asks which woman he took for his wife

Tell her, Lady Snegina from the land of ice

‘Your hands are burning,’ she said. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, it must the vaccination.’

I wanted to ask her about Stulpanc, but he seemed as far away and as foreign as a bird.

The corners of the quarantine notices were beginning to peel off, as posters always do in winter.

‘When I heard your voice on the phone I thought my heart was about to stop.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Nobody has yet rung up from the Other Side.’

She tried to laugh. ‘Not even the pharaohs!’

I felt her hand tighten on my arm, which I could take for a sign of increasing intimacy or as the need to check there was a real arm and not just bones inside my jacket sleeve.

‘Your letter…’ I started to say.

‘Oh! Did you get it, then?’

I’d have liked to say something more about Stulpanc, but he seemed to have drifted even further away. Her shoulder nudged mine once again as if to transmit a secret message.

‘Let’s go to your place,’ she muttered, leaning even closer to me.

Her shoulders must have been red hot under her sweater. But her eyes remained as blank as ever.

If she asks which horse he took as his mount

Tell her it was the tram to Butyrsky Khutor

‘But it’s quarantined, like everywhere else. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Oh, yes, smallpox…’

Her sidelong glance scalded my forehead.

Better go to your place, I thought. It would feel more forgiving in her bedroom. She would undress slowly, and before we made love I would study each part of her body carefully, as if I wanted to find out what had changed during my absence.

I suddenly remembered the embassy’s instructions about relationships with Russian girls. I thought the three yellow chandeliers of the reception room were about to come loose and fall right on top of me. I tried to cry out, ‘What have I done?’ and the chandeliers, as if they had heard my protest, began to hoist themselves back up, getting smaller and smaller until they were no bigger in my mind’s eye than ladybirds. The same scenario repeated itself several times.

Well, what had I done? I felt a hot flush run through my temples and my forehead. I’d been thoughtless enough to call her and try to resurrect an affair that was truly dead and buried. I’d done something really stupid and, what was more, to no purpose. Now I had to beat the retreat.

I consoled myself with the thought that I hadn’t committed any great crime. I’d come out to see her just to keep my word.

‘You look like death warmed up!’ she said.

I didn’t reply. We were now sauntering like a pair of lost souls amid the rushing crowd of Muscovites, with their heads snug in fur collars and hoods. I guessed all of them bore, like an emblem or a seal on the invitation to a macabre entertainment, the mark of the vaccination.

My temperature made my head throb. My mind was a muddle and I would not have been surprised if she’d asked me, ‘Why is there soil in your hair?’ I’d made her a promise, I said again to myself. I gave her my word last summer, and maybe well before that, a thousand years ago. In any case our night ride will soon be over, I thought, as we came towards Tverskoy Boulevard. I had to leave her, but I was unable to find the flimsiest reason to do so. Even if I could not tell her the actual truth, I still did not want to lie to her. The bottom line was that I had phoned her.

‘You’re not well,’ she said. ‘It’s plain to see. Why did you come out?’

‘I’d given you my word.’

Now I only had to shake the soil from my hair.

‘I gave you my word,’ I repeated, moving my head closer to her hair. ‘I gave it to you long ago, in the age of the great ballads.’

She stared at me. It was clear that she thought I was delirious. I was tempted to say, ‘You can’t understand, your people have other ballads, other gods…’

She did not take her eyes off me. Suddenly before my mind’s eye the current Soviet leadership appeared, looking as if they had been flattened by their fur hats, standing side by side on the podium in Red Square. They were visible only from the waist up, which made them seem even more squat and obese than they were. The stunted gods of the socialist camp! The Scythian steppe gods about to puff out their fearsome cheeks to blow my country off the face of the earth!

‘You’re boiling hot!’ Lida said to me. ‘You should have stayed indoors.’

She was right: I shouldn’t have gone out. But I had given my word. All because of the old legend. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind for the last few months. Was it just by chance? Surely not.

The gods of the steppe were as stuck in my mind as if they had been glued to the top table at a meeting of the Presidium. With their fur bonnets, half-Asiatic cheeks and sly eyes. No, the resurgence of the Ballad of the Given Word was no mere coincidence. Called forth by treacherous times it had come back from the brink of extinction. By the climate of treachery I’d been aware of for months. It’s cold in Russia, my friend. A treacherous climate… Who’d prompted those words in my mind?

Despite all of that, I was still trying to find a pretext for leaving her.

Lida, I thought, you’ll not get a word of adieu out of me. It has to happen as it does in the ballad!

However much I thought about what I would say, I still could not take my eyes off her.

‘Lida, I once told you, in a station, that, whatever comes to pass…’

‘Yes?’ she said, lips pursed.

We were outside the Gorky Institute. In the twilight its railings and windows looked even gloomier. The only light was a dim glow from a ground-floor porthole in the porter’s lodge. I stood still, and as she waited for me to finish my sentence, I turned my head towards the Institute and said, ‘Lida, you go on now, I have something to do here.’

I didn’t say another word, I didn’t tell her to wait for me and I didn’t say adieu. Instead I opened the gate and went into the pitch-dark courtyard. I walked with my hands held out in front of me to avoid stumbling over the marble benches, pale blotches that, in the black of night, looked like tombstones. The gate at the other end of the garden that gave on to Malaya Bronnaya was locked but I had no trouble clambering over it.

I was on the other side, in the cold, dimly lit street, where a few pedestrians hurried past with their heads deep inside their fur collars.

As I walked on, I thought of her standing on Tverskoy Boulevard, facing the sombre railings around the Institute’s garden and waiting in vain for me to come back from that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.

Tirana, 1962–1976