Twilight of the Eastern Gods (6 page)

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, after a protracted silence.

I told her, and she leaned forward to trace my initials with her finger on the smooth wet sand.

I don’t know why but my mind turned to the initials of the fat woman, and then to the length of the evening that had now become a whole night, just as a girl turns into a woman. In a minute we would stand up and leave to walk in the darkness alongside the rail tracks so we wouldn’t get lost. Then I imagined I would walk her back to her villa, that I would kiss her and that she would slip away without even saying goodnight, and that I wouldn’t take offence since I knew that was what local girls usually did after the first kiss. Tomorrow she’d come back to where we would be playing ping-pong and still be arguing over the score, and then we would go for a walk at sunset, along the waterline, exactly when the shutter-fiends would be focusing their cameras to catch it. We would slowly turn into black-and-white silhouettes and the shallow water would bounce our image back, like a catapult, to annoy people looking in frozen solitude at the far horizon. Then, like most of the silhouettes that sauntered along the shore in the evening, we would enter a dark space inside unknown cameras, and, later, when the films came to be developed, we would re-emerge from the Nordic dusk in the snapshots of strangers, not one of whom would know who we were or what we’d been doing there.

‘It’s very late,’ she said. ‘We ought to get back.’

Yes, we really should. We stood up without a word and moved off in the direction we had come from, passing in front of silent front doors with metal knockers shaped like human hands. For some reason I always imagined that crimes must be committed behind doors with that kind of knocker or behind the railings that enclosed silent gardens. At this time of night there were no trains. She said we would have to go as far as the main road to find a taxi or a passing car. We got to the highway, but there was not much traffic and, as usually happens in such circumstances, none of the vehicles that stopped was going in our direction. At long last an aged couple on their way home from a silver-wedding celebration gave us a lift to one of the stations – I had read its name on bottles of nail-varnish and shampoo. From there, we walked.

We got back to Dubulti before daybreak. Our conversation had become intermittent perhaps because our minds were also losing clarity, as if our thoughts had been transported into the ionosphere. I escorted my companion to her door, and what I had expected came to pass. As I moved off I turned back once more and saw a hazy glow coming from one of the villa’s windows, giving it a platinum sheen. I recalled the desire to scream that my comrade had spoken of last winter in Yalta, and it occurred to me that the similarity of the sounds in
platinum
and
planet
was not entirely coincidental. I’d had direct confirmation of that when my companion had started running, just as Lida had run away in Neglinnaya Street, with the same strange and almost astral aura over her head.

I’ll tell you my ballad, too, as soon as I’m back in Moscow, I thought, as I crossed the formal gardens on my way back to the guesthouse. I felt as if the shape and weight of my limbs had altered, as if I was walking on the moon. As I went past the dew-drenched ping-pong table, with its two bats casually abandoned on it after the last game, I reflected that a man can encounter more marvels in a single night than his anthropoid forebears got to see in tens of thousands of years of evolution. I went past the fountain with the dolphin sculptures, where I should have slain Yermilov long ago. Now I was walking past the chalets. All were dark and silent, and I had an urge to shout, ‘Wake up, Shakespeares of the Revolution!’ I was just going past the ‘Swedish House’, where the most eminent writers were staying, when the sound of coughing broke the lonely silence. I stood still. Those were old lungs coughing: a cough with a procession of croaks and sighs in its wake.

As I followed the path that led to my chalet I turned one last time and gazed on the unending vista of dunes that a thin northern light was beginning to whiten. Something would not let me take my eyes off the scene. Somewhere out there lay strewn the bones of the horses on whose backs we had ridden just a few hours before in the company of the dead. What a long night that was! I thought, and, half asleep, I wended my way to bed.

CHAPTER TWO

Our train came into Moscow in the twilight. It was a very long one. Throughout the day’s journey, sunshine had alternated with heavy showers, and I imagined that some of the carriages were gleaming in the sun’s last rays while others were still wet with rain. The front must now be in the bad-weather zone because I could see raindrops banging against the windows. But this time the train did not emerge into sunshine. Once we had got through the stormy patch, it seemed that night had fallen, dispelling the light of day. On the empty flat lands beyond the blackened panes, twilight and darkness fought it out in silence. The struggle was brief – the bad weather surely helped – and it was soon obvious that all along the track and well beyond it everything had now succumbed to night.

Two or three times I thought we were already in Moscow but it was the twinkling lights of outlying suburbs that tangled in my head until I shook myself free of daydreams.

Over the summer I had sometimes dreamed of Moscow: I was alighting in the capital but had lost my bearings and could not find the city centre. I would stop on a pavement; the traffic lights were out of order, and electric trolleybuses were gliding past, as great stags do in fairy tales. At Yalta, too, as in Riga, I had felt homesick for the city, and I’d gone to the rest-house library to hunt out a contemporary novel with detailed descriptions of the city where I had once lived and where I expected to spend a further period of my life. But the libraries of Yalta and Dubulti had left me wanting. Not a single Soviet novel contained anything like an exact description of Moscow. Even characters who lived there or were visiting always remained in some imaginary street, as I did in my dreams, and almost never turned into Gorky Street, Tverskoy Boulevard, Okhotny Ryad, or the environs of the Metropole Hotel, as if they were frightened of the city centre. And if they did wander into it they seemed stunned: they heard nothing and saw nothing – or, rather, they had eyes and ears only for the Kremlin and its bells. They would flee the centre, as if in panic, and I could feel their terror in the rhythm of the prose, which calmed only when the author took us away from Moscow, perhaps to his remote collective farm where he could squat cross-legged on the floor and describe in minute detail each of the alleyways and squares of his village.

I had tried without success to work out the relationship between the dull anxiety I felt in my dreams about Moscow and the way Soviet writers steered clear of the capital, as if they were sending themselves into exile.

The lights outside the windows were dancing less frantically and I guessed the train had slowed. With a whistle that seemed to run parallel to the tracks, it was pulling into Moscow’s Rizhsky Voksal almost timidly beneath early autumn rain. I put my face to the windowpane hoping to catch a first glimpse of the station’s lights. I sensed a muted illumination rising within me. At long last the concrete platform appeared and, from the first few feet, it looked empty. It slithered along the side of the carriage like a wet, grey snake. I guessed that Lida, to whom I’d sent a telegram a couple of days earlier, had not come to meet me. She has another boyfriend: that was my first thought. No, was the second. She’d been there a while and was waiting for the train to come to a halt before showing herself. She’s got another boy— Stop it! I remembered that the engine’s whistle had announced our arrival: the locomotive had been first into the station and had seen what was happening on the platform before anyone else.

‘Beware the summer!’ a fellow student had said to me just before we parted at the start of the holidays. ‘It has a powerful hold over Russian girls . . .’

To illustrate his own summer failures, he told me several stories in which stations featured alongside tickets bearing unlucky numbers.

Another boyfriend. Or an abortion . . . I vaguely remembered that last time she’d asked me to be careful (‘Just this time, only this time!’) but I hadn’t listened.

I stepped down onto the platform with my suitcase. Here and there, bodies entwined, with conjoined heads that resembled oversized seashells. They, too, have spent the summer apart, I thought, but they haven’t forgotten each other.

I plunged into a taxi on the square outside the station and blurted out the address I wanted – Butyrsky Khutor, the Gorky Institute’s student housing block – to the back of the aged driver’s neck. He was wearing a fur hat.

Unlike the Institute’s old two-storey house on Tverskoy Boulevard, the residential hall for undergraduate and graduate students at Butyrsky Khutor was a seven-floor hulk in off-white brick that had already lost its colour, like most recent constructions. Not knowing why, but with some apprehension, I leaned forward so I would spot it in the distance among the other buildings. My face was pressed to the window when its outline emerged and I suddenly became aware of my own anxiety. The block was almost entirely dark. I had expected to see lights on in the windows, but only one was lit, on the sixth or seventh floor, and its faint gleam underscored the air of abandonment the building gave off. I told myself that nobody was back yet from their vacation.

I settled up with the cab driver, got out and walked towards the door, looking up, as if to make doubly sure that the building really was empty. All the floors were dark, but the fourth, the women’s floor, seemed particularly so.

I stopped at the porter’s lodge on the ground floor. It struck me that Auntie Katya wasn’t as welcoming as usual. She seemed to be searching for something in her desk drawer and it crossed my mind that a telegram, bearing bad news, might have come for me from Albania. But in her eyes, through the thick spectacle lenses, I saw not a glimmer of sympathy.

‘You, my boy, and your friend, the other one from Albania,’ she said, ‘you’re to report to the police.’

I frowned. I was about to ask her why when I saw in her face the same question: it had cancelled out her usual bonhomie. ‘Why?’ I asked all the same.

Lida’s abortion flashed through my mind.

‘I don’t know. I heard them say something about your ID documents.’ She pronounced
dokumenty
with the stress on the second syllable, like all uneducated Russians.

Through her circular glasses her eyes seemed to be asking: So what did you and he get up to over the summer?

‘My papers are all in order,’ I said. ‘And my friend has already gone back to Albania.’

She shrugged her shoulders and returned to scrabbling in her desk drawer. I was expecting her to hand over a packet of letters or newspapers from Albania, but the drawer shut with a sharp click.

‘Don’t I have any mail?’

She shook her head.

I picked up my suitcase and turned away. The lift was out of order. And my room was on the sixth floor. I started walking up the staircase, shifting my case, which was heavy, from hand to hand, wondering why I had to report to the police.

At last I got to the door of my room, opened it and went in, leaving my case in the corridor. I was exhausted. I sat on the bed and hugged my knees. For a moment I felt that all I wanted was to lie on the bed and sleep until that joyless day had been wiped from my memory. However, a few seconds later I did exactly the opposite. I stood up and started to pace up and down. My reel-to-reel tape recorder was on the table, its lid still open from the last time I had played it with Lida. I had recorded music on the tapes, but just then it seemed easier to move the Cyclops’s stone from the door of an ancient tomb and carry out its mummy than to switch on that machine. I don’t know why, but the idea of listening to music in that desert seemed monstrous.

Without stopping to think what I was doing, I opened the door and went out into the corridor. It seemed longer than usual, with its single nightlight gleaming somewhere towards the other end. I stood still for a minute, my mind a blank. The corridor was truly endless: maybe sixty doors opened on to it. No corridor before had played such an important role in my life. I recalled how it looked late at night on noisy Saturdays when young drunks, slumped on the floor, mumbled lunatic verse, or tried to break down self-locking doors that had shut in their faces.

I walked slowly. The flooring, which had been damaged in places, creaked under my feet. The Corridoriad . . . I felt a quiver of the kind usually set off by a combination of good and bad memories. Five other corridors ran beneath this one, and a seventh above it, and much the same things had happened in each one: people had walked along them, gone into their rooms, come out again, had friends in, swapped literary gossip, consisting of plots and suppositions often much better constructed than their own works; they’d escorted to the lift speechless, smiling and weeping women or girls who, once behind the openwork metal door, resembled caged birds eager to fly away or wild animals stuck in a trap. Sometimes, when a girl was the first to step in, she would slam the door in the face of her companion and, while the lift made its slow descent, he would run down the stairs to catch her arrival. The stairway and the pursuer twisted round the lift shaft like a vine around a monumental column.

I walked on, the floorboards still creaking beneath my feet. The emptiness in the corridor was unbearable. That door was Ladonshchikov’s. Further on I reached Taburokov’s – he was from Central Asia. Then, in sequence, I passed the doors of Hieronymus Stulpanc, from Latvia, Artashez Pogosian, from Armenia, then those of the two Georgians, who were both called Shota (one was a Stalinist, the other anti), Yuri Goncharov – he was Russian – then Kyuzengesh, from the far north; he was a Yakut or maybe even an Eskimo – his face, especially his teeth, were the sad grey colour of the tundra – and spoke disjointed Russian in such a soft voice that it sounded like the rustling of reeds. Every time I encountered him I felt like a lonely wanderer about to sink into marshland. Then came the doors of A. Shogentsukov, from the Caucasus, and Maskiavicius, from Lithuania.