Twilight of the Eastern Gods (10 page)

‘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
s
s 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?’