Twilight of the Eastern Gods (21 page)

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.