Twilight of the Eastern Gods (16 page)

On the radio the anti-Pasternak diatribe had resumed. The announcer read out a letter from the people of a region of Qipstap, on the steppe, then a statement by the Tashkent clergy. A sixth of the globe was awash once more under a tidal wave of invective. In recent times so many important events had taken place – there had been so many tragic reversals: whole central committees had been thrown out, factions had fought implacably to gain or retain power, there’d been plots and backstage deals. But none of that, or almost none, showed up on the pages of novels or in the speeches of characters on stage. All you got was the rustling of birch trees – ah! my beloved silver birch! – and in all that literature it was always Sunday, as it had been on the day we were skiing at Peredelkino.

I got up, dressed and went into the corridor. I was at a loose end and just sauntered up and down. The dim bulbs gave off a wan light and now and again you could hear the lift humming. I knocked at Stulpanc’s door a couple of times but there was no answer. Where have they all gone? I wondered. I went back to my room and stood in front of the radio with my arms at my sides, almost standing to attention, as if I’d just heard a sentence handed down by a court. The campaign was still going on. Some statement was being made in elaborately convoluted prose, maybe by the North Sea whaling fleet. Not much later I was in the corridor again, and as I wandered up and down, I found myself in front of Stulpanc’s door more than once. Where has he gone? an inner voice asked. It was buried deep inside me, but I could feel it rising to the surface. As my hand reached out mechanically to knock on Stulpanc’s door for the fourth time I realised that I had been waiting in the corridor for his return. In my muddled mind I tried to imagine where he had gone to hide, but it took me a while to convince myself that it was a useless game, and that it mattered not a jot to me whether Stulpanc was at the bar of the
Kavkaz
, the editorial offices of
Tabak
, having lunch with Khrushchev or supping with the Devil himself. The only thing that mattered was that he was not with one particular person – Lida. I couldn’t believe he’d have phoned her so soon and it was even less believable that he’d got a date already. That’s impossible, I said to myself. Stulpanc is a plodder in that department. And then, if she’d written me such a sorrowful letter, it wasn’t so she could fall into someone else’s arms!

But one minute later I was convinced the opposite was the case. It wasn’t possible that Stulpanc had refrained from trying to get in touch with such a pretty woman. He’d seemed entranced by her. No, no, there was no reason for him to have put off calling her. As for Lida, her letter, the feelings she’d put into it, the Old Russian and all that, wouldn’t have prevented her running off with Stulpanc – quite the opposite, if all she’d written to me was true and if therefore her affection for me, the etymology, the Old Russian and all that such things entailed, had reached the state she had claimed, then of course, once she’d heard about the disaster (because that idiot Stulpanc must surely have told her I was dead), she must have dropped everything to hurry round to see him to find out more. Yes! Yes! I almost cried aloud in despair. He called her and she’s gone out with him on a date! Especially because, on this ice-cold day, all she had to listen to was this unending campaign, which must have made her think about writers and similarly sinister matters. I shouldn’t have let Stulpanc out of my sight on a day like this.

I was at my wit’s end. I’d spent half an hour shuttling back and forth between my room and the corridor, so I decided to go out to cool off.

A chilly breeze was whirling snowflakes into spirals under the lamp posts. I got onto a trolleybus that took me to Pushkin Square. Gorky Street looked quite beautiful in the snow. I walked to the Artists’ Café where I’d decided to have dinner. To hell with the pair of them! I thought, in a sudden burst of indifference. The snow, the wind and the street in its winter attire had clarified my feelings. It all seemed simpler now. They were in their own country, they could get married and have children, whereas I was only in transit.
In transit
seemed a good way to refer to myself in the soggy, soporific season of winter that I had lived through up to this point.
In transit
, I repeated to myself, and the Russian word
vremmeny
– ‘provisional’ – merged in my mind with the name of Vukmanović-Tempo. Yes, to hell with them! I ordered a glass of wine, and a little later I came out of the restaurant and went back to the bus stop in a thoroughly good mood.

*

The first thing that struck me when I reached the residence was the light streaming from under Stulpanc’s door. I felt a pang in my heart. I no longer had the support of snow-covered open spaces and I almost fainted. I hurried on and pushed into his room without knocking. He was smoking a cigarette. I tried not to speak too quickly.

‘So where did you get to, then?’

Guilt and surprise were combined in the smile that spread across his broad Nordic face. I’d never burst into his room before with a plaintive ‘So where did you get to?’

‘Well?’ I added.

‘What?’

‘Where were you?’

He stared at me with pale eyes that seemed not to have enough room in his face. At last he replied, ‘Well, I was out, with her.’

‘With Lida?’

He nodded, without ceasing to stare at me.

Gently, in heavy silence, something broke inside me. So there you are, I said to myself. I felt a great emptiness. Ideas and words had simply flown. All that was left were a few scraps of language, sounds like
um
and
I see
and
really
. I remembered that whenever I had had an upset of this kind, words had left me just as plant life deserts areas where the climate is too harsh; all I had left were clipped syllables of that sort, as if only they could tolerate the sudden worsening of the climate inside me.

‘But you yourself said . . .’ Stulpanc began. He surely meant to say, ‘You palmed her off on me,’ but apparently he found it too direct, or too vulgar, to say outright.

My mind was a blank and I studied a picture on the wall. It depicted a sight I knew: Sigurd’s castle in Latvia. I’d visited it the previous summer.

‘But didn’t you set me up?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘I can see you’ve had a change of heart. But if you like . . .’

‘What?’ My voice had gone faint despite all my efforts to make it sound normal.

‘If you like . . . though now, of course, the case is closed. Yes! To hell with it!’

I’d lost the thread. Who or what was supposed to go to hell? Could nothing be salvaged? ‘Did you tell her I was dead?’

He swallowed, then admitted it. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘I’d hoped you would be kinder!’ Now I knew the truth, words had returned to me. ‘Yes, kinder!’ I repeated, doing my best to laugh as I said it. ‘It’s just like you to pass a death sentence on me!’

‘But you asked me to say that! And you went so far as to tell me I should say you had died in a plane crash. Don’t you remember?’

‘That really takes the biscuit! I was drunk, for heaven’s sake! Didn’t you notice?’

‘Do you think I was sober?’

I thought, It’s all over now. Now she believes I am dead, it’s all done for. ‘If only you hadn’t killed me off entirely,’ I said, with a flicker of optimism. Just before, when I’d asked him if he’d told Lida of my death, he’d replied, ‘In a manner of speaking . . .’ ‘You could have told her I was only injured . . .’

Now Stulpanc lost his temper. ‘You need your head examining!’ he shouted. ‘You got me into this. I’ve never played that sort of trick. You’ve turned me into a kind of Chichikov from
Dead Souls
. I’d never have called the girl if she hadn’t attracted me so . . . so . . . What’s the Russian adverb to express an absolute superlative?’

‘Insanely.’

‘That’s right! Attracted me so insanely!’

We stood there without speaking for a few seconds. I examined the Latvian castle on the wall, trying to summon up some memory of the previous summer I’d spent in Stulpanc’s country, but it was now light years away.

‘All right, all right,’ I said wearily. ‘How did she take it?’

He saw that I had calmed down and smiled faintly, without looking at me. ‘She was very upset . . .’ He was staring at the floor, but I kept my eyes on him. ‘Yes, she was very, very upset,’ he repeated. ‘Insanely so.’ I thought, To be pitied by someone, to arouse sympathy in Old Russian . . . ‘She even wept. Yes, she cried a couple of times. I saw tears in her eyes . . .’

I sighed deeply, trying not to make a sound to prevent Stulpanc noticing I had sighed. I felt strangely relieved. Maybe things were better like this. If they’d been different, perhaps she would never have had a chance to cry over me. Suddenly a vague, lukewarm feeling spread through my chest. My ribs began to soften and bend as if they were in a surrealist painting. One day you will cry over me . . . Two days earlier such a thought would have made me laugh out loud. Ah! She’s crying! Little Lida is upset! Tut-tut! I was making superhuman efforts to hold down a great guffaw accompanied by those clucking noises I found so repellent in other people, but I failed. But far from succeeding in clucking, like the ne’er-do-wells of Gorky Street, I couldn’t even manage to laugh naturally, like an ordinary person. The whole thing seemed more and more primitive to me. I must have been waiting years for someone to shed tears on my behalf. I’d longed for tears with a more terrible thirst than a parched Bedouin in the deserts of Arabia. Over the last two years I’d had relationships with young women who were very free: I’d taken them to the theatre, to cafés, on night trains; we’d danced and kissed and slept together without ever saying, ‘I love you’, because it seemed old-fashioned, and recently we’d gone so far as to replace the word
lyublyu
(‘I love’) with the word
seksyu
, and were very proud of our invention. So we’d said a lot of stupid things and done just as many, following our whims from bars to dance halls, and from there, blindly and joyfully, onto a snowy downhill slope. This long pilgrimage through the desert, in gradual stages, without my noticing, but to an unbearable degree, had given me that thirst for a few tears. At last they had been shed. It had taken the intercession of death to bring those tiny blue drops into being.

‘What a peculiar fellow you are,’ Stulpanc said.

So that was it! She liked dead men more than the living. And his words of consolation had not been wasted.

‘You really are funny,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘At first, when you came in, you looked like a thundercloud, but now you’re almost smiling. Did you know that sudden changes of mood are supposed to be one of the first symptoms of madness?’

I went on staring him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s quite possible I’m going off my rocker, seeing what I did.’

The following morning was as gloomy as the ones that preceded it. I’d barely washed when I switched on the radio, automatically. The campaign hadn’t stopped. The diatribes were the same as before but they were now being spoken in a graver tone. You could sense straight away that a new phase of the campaign was being launched that day. There was no doubt that it had been worked out in advance in great detail. The gigantic state propaganda machine never slumbered.

There was an unusual bustle at the Gorky Institute. The consequences of Sunday’s drinking – puffy cheeks, blotches, bags under the eyes – had been finally wiped from faces that henceforth expressed only sinister harshness.

After the second period, posters appeared on the walls of all corridors announcing an ultra-important meeting that afternoon. It was rumoured that the most eminent writers of the Soviet Union would attend, and there was even talk that the presidents of the Writers’ Unions of the People’s Republics had been called to Moscow and would probably be there.

Meanwhile the Institute’s inmates carried on sending statements to the papers and to radio and television stations. Taburokov alone had sent pieces to fourteen different reviews and newspapers; in one he’d even described Pasternak as an enemy of the Arab nation. On the second day of the campaign one hundred and eleven dailies and seventy-four periodicals had published editorials, articles, statements and reports condemning Pasternak. More such pieces were expected in other daily, weekly and fortnightly publications and then in monthly and bi-monthly journals, science magazines, quarterlies, bilingual reviews and so on.

‘He ought to make a statement this evening turning down the Nobel,’ Maskiavicius said. ‘If it’s not wrapped up by eight tonight, the campaign will get even nastier.’

‘How could it be nastier than it is?’ someone asked.

‘Apparently,’ Maskiavicius answered, ‘the patriarch of Soviet letters, Korney Chukovsky, is going to call on him at two this afternoon to try to persuade him.’

‘And if he fails?’

‘Then we’ll have a big meeting.’

‘To what purpose?’

‘I suspect we’ll move to menace, third degree.’

‘Where did you learn all that?’

‘I know what I know,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That’s all.’