Twilight of the Eastern Gods (7 page)

Students on our course filled most of the rooms on the sixth floor. No names were posted on the doors, even though most of the residents were famous writers in their home regions or towns. Some were the chairs of the Writers’ Union in an Autonomous Republic or Region and had been obliged by the burdensome duties of their position or by insidious plots to give up their studies. At long last, after overcoming their adversaries, having accused them of Stalinism, liberalism, bourgeois nationalism, Russophobia, petty nationalism, Zionism, modernism, folklorism, etc., having crushed their literary careers and banned the publication of their works, having hounded them into alcoholism or suicide, or, more simply, having had them deported, that is to say, after having done what had had to be done, they had been inspired to come to the Gorky Institute to complete their literary education. Some were members of the Supreme Soviet of their respective republics and others were prominent figures. One day, in an economics seminar when we were discussing inflation, Shogentsukov had coolly remarked, ‘When I was prime minister I had to deal with a similar problem.’

I was now walking along the dark part of the corridor. I could see hardly anything, except the little bronze plaques that I’m sure they all dreamed of having one day on their shoddily gloss-painted doors: ‘From 1958 to 1960 this room was the home of the celebrated Abdullakhanov’; ‘From 1955 to 1960 this room was the home of . . .’ Wait! I almost shouted. A pale beam of light could be seen at the base of a nearby door. It was Anatoly Kuznetsov’s. It must have been his window I’d seen lit when I was in the taxi. So Kuznetsov had got back from vacation before me. If anyone had told me a minute before that somebody I knew was inside this seven-storey Sahara I would have rushed to greet him in a frenzy . . . One word, my brother, one word to people this desert! But suddenly in my mind I could see the eyes of the author of
Continuation of a Legend
– two slits behind thick lenses – and I lowered the hand I’d raised to knock at his door. I didn’t like the man any more than I liked Yuri Goncharov, whom one of the two Shotas said was the most prominent writer of all the lands watered by the Volga, while the other insisted that he was nothing more than a police informer.

I began to walk slowly down the stairs. At one point I thought I heard muffled voices and stopped to listen. Perhaps Kuznetsov was reading aloud what he’d just been writing. On the landing of the fifth floor I heard the sounds again. It was like a discreet invitation to stop. A resident had apparently gone into one of the rooms that looked onto the inner courtyard. I made my way through the murky half-light of the corridor in the hope that he was someone I knew. Thanks to a glow coming from under a door, I soon discovered which room it was. It was indeed one of those that faced the courtyard but I didn’t know who lived there. This floor was occupied by first-year students – we treated them with a degree of condescension. Despite that, I was about to knock on the door when I heard a voice coming from the room and suddenly remembered it belonged to a Chinese student, Ping, whom, for some unfathomable reason, we called Hundred Flower Bloom. He must have been reading aloud. I recalled his accent and his features and thought a screech-owl speaking Russian would have been easier to understand.

I moved away and carried on down the stairs. The other floors seemed to be dead. In the lobby Auntie Katya’s beady eyes followed me without a trace of goodwill. As I went out I realised I had never needed human warmth more than I did that evening. Even if she were to revert to her former friendliness, to the particular variety of benevolence that most Russian babushkas exhibited towards foreign students, I would never forgive her the coldness she had shown me earlier.

When I got into the street, it had stopped raining. There weren’t many people at the trolleybus stop. I felt a vibration in the overhead wires and then in the distance, as if emerging from a dream, I saw the stately stag coming towards me in the twilight, its antlers held high.

I got off at Pushkin Square. Gorky Street was brightly lit and as busy as ever. The block between the
Izvestia
newspaper building and the Moskva Hotel – the right-side pavement, especially – was the favoured promenade of the Gorky Institute crowd, perhaps because Herzen’s old house, which had been turned into the Institute, was at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Moscow’s main thoroughfare.

On the façade of the
Izvestia
building the neon board mentioned an exhibition of some kind and also the name of Richard Nixon. Ah! I thought. So there’s an American exhibition in Sokolniki Park . . . Other news, from Ukraine and the Urals, and of Khrushchev’s departure on a trip abroad, or his return, was also streaming on the board but the moving letters made me dizzy and I turned away. At Central Cinema they were showing
Nights of Cabiria
, but I’d seen it in Riga. A crowd had assembled around the entrance.

Without thinking, I turned back to the
Izvestia
news board. On his arrival at the airport, Nikita Khrushchev had been met by the p r e s i d e n t of the Presidium. But L i d a S n e g i n a had not come to meet
me
at the Rizhsky Voksal. I felt depressed. On the pavement outside the cinema there was a newsstand and several phone booths. I wasn’t angry with Lida, just sad. I went into one of the booths, inserted a coin, dialled the number and waited. The receiver smelt of tobacco. It occurred to me that perhaps this phone had been used to break off a relationship only a few moments earlier – I couldn’t account for the oppressive, acrid stench in any other way. I was tempted to hang up but I didn’t move, just waited. I forced myself to imagine Lida walking towards the telephone in high heels on a thick carpet (I’ve no idea why), her hair glinting gold and her stiff, straight neck keeping vulgarity at bay. Her hair and her neck, which always seemed to exude an electric fragrance, had struck me when I first saw her at a party with a Georgian man. Before I’d even glimpsed her face, I had learned her hair and neck. People are as recognisable by their necks as they are by their faces, yet in the days and weeks after our first encounter I was astounded by my own inability to memorise anything of her, save her neck. It was delicate and silky, and expressed its owner’s coolness and warmth, in so far as reserve can be called coolness, and passion, warmth.

I don’t know why but as I gazed at it, I felt that that fascinating, swan-like neck was threatened. It was perhaps a result of how my interest in that young woman first arose and perhaps because of all I had seen and heard in the corridors at my hall of residence, but that evening I imagined Lida Snegina’s neck was threatened either by the teeth of loud-mouthed Abdullakhanov or those of the mumbling Kyuzengesh.

All around her reigned the usual hubbub of dancing parties at the Gorky Institute, whose special flavour arose from the contrast between the eternal glory of literature and its living embodiments either stumbling around the dance floor or talking nonsense. Those soirées were only really lively early in the evening when the girls were still entranced by the thought that they would soon meet an actual writer. Their suitors – Goethes, Villons and so forth – were all around them: celebrity was close, just look around. May I introduce my friend Piotr Reutsky? He’s a poet. Have you read ‘Dawn of the Birches’? He wrote it. Really? Yes, indeed, that’s who he is . . . Over the chatter there hovered, as in a mist, the implication and the illusion that by meeting a writer you might become someone yourself and perhaps earn the right to have your initials at the head of a poem or a story, not to mention, later on, in posthumously published diaries, correspondence, memoirs, archives . . .

It was still the first half of the party (in the second, the truth would slowly emerge and the girls would begin to cast disdainful glances at their partners, to extricate themselves from their arms and occasionally, as happened to Nutfulla Shakenov, one would slap the face of a man with whom, only two hours earlier, she had dreamed of being entwined on a marble tombstone, her initials beside a line from the poem he would have dedicated to her, ‘I remember our April, April in the icy Karakum . . .’). So, as I was saying, it was still the pink and jolly part of the evening, yet Lida Snegina was already regarding it with unaffected scorn. She seemed sorry to have come, while one of her girlfriends was beside herself with excitement. ‘It’s odd,’ Lida explained to me later, once we had become better acquainted. ‘She’s an interesting person, but she has an irrational passion for writers. That one over there, he’s a prose writer, isn’t he?’ She nodded towards a man called Kurganov. ‘My friend waited four months for him to publish a story that was supposed to be about her. When the story appeared, it turned out to feature a milkmaid from the Lenin’s Way collective farm! But my friend is quite happy because Kurganov managed to convince her that the milkmaid was a disguise for the true subject, which was her! I’m not sure what I would call that if it happened to me. How about you? Are you a writer as well?’

Aha, my little pigeon, I thought, you won’t catch me out so easily! It took no great insight to guess that Lida did not like writers and that she had attached herself to me because I did not look like one. I shook my head and mumbled a few words to the effect that I did something in the cinema, regretting instantly that I hadn’t invented a calling even more distant from literature, such as table-tennis or Egyptology. She asked if I was training as a scriptwriter, but to shield myself from danger I muttered that I was vaguely involved in translating subtitles but, to be honest, I didn’t even do that . . . At the rate I was going I’d soon have downgraded myself to lighting assistant. At that point the band stopped playing and we parted.

Having asked her for the next dance, I told her I found it amazing that she had so little liking for writers when she was in their lair. She explained that she loved literature but mostly the works of dead authors. As for living writers, well, it was perhaps because she’d known two or three and maybe also because of her friend’s experience, no, she didn’t like them . . . I thought, It’s the ballad of Doruntine and Kostandin all over again, with the quick and the dead on the same horse! I felt I wanted to tell her the old legend about the promise. But something, I don’t know what, held me back.

Meanwhile her friend beamed as she danced beside us with Kurganov, and I whispered in Lida’s ear that he was surely promising to put her in a novel and make her the deputy chair of the collective farm or a matronly militant heading a delegation from the Autonomous Republic of Belarus at an international peace conference.

Lida laughed, and I reckoned it was now or never that I should ask for her telephone number. The string of six glowing pearls emerged from her whole being, from the curve of her back, her legs, her groin and her breasts, her neck and her lips – half a dozen magical digits with which I could summon her voice from anywhere in the universe. I felt more exhausted than a pearl fisherman and finally, when she and her friend left, escorted by Kurganov, I said to myself, She really was one of the most interesting women I have ever met. I had one reservation: I feared she might be a little cool. However, when I called her a few days later and she answered in a warm, still sleepy voice that she had been waiting for me to ring, I decided my fears were unfounded. She was a medical student and we saw each other frequently throughout April, May and part of June, up to the start of the long vacation. Each time I rang it struck me as odd that some women have hidden inside them a peculiar device that turns their voices from the normal tone to the tone of love, rather like a transformer that turns electricity from 110 to 220 volts, or vice versa.

All of that was going through my mind as I stood in the telephone kiosk listening to the gaps between the ring tones and surrounded by the smell of stale tobacco.
Razluka
: ‘Break-up’. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that as a brand-name for cigarettes? It would surely be a winner. A packet of
Razluka
. Twenty
Rusalka
. A carton of
Rizhsky Voksal
.

I imagined her on her way to pick up the phone, holding herself so straight, and, in my mind, I mercilessly dismembered the Procrustean corridor of her lodgings, making it longer and longer to justify the time she was taking to get to the phone and pick up. At long last the fifteen kopecks dropped somewhere inside the call box – or, rather, into the pit of my stomach, like lead weights, as if they were coins from Herod’s ancient kingdom. ‘Hello?’ said a quavery voice. It was her grandmother’s. After a short period of muddle (What? Who? I see. Lida?), I was given to understand that she was away in the Crimea.

I left the phone booth, crossed Pushkin Square, and walked down Gorky Street, on the right-hand side, where young layabouts regularly hung around for hours on end, watching the girls go by. On the front of the
Izvestia
building, the news board went on streaming. Khrushchev was going on another trip. For some time now papers had been calling him Nikitushka or Nikitinka, affectionate diminutives used for folk heroes like Ilya Muromets and so forth. Every time I’d tried to call Lida ‘Lidushka’ or ‘Lidochka’ she had burst out laughing because I put the stress on the wrong syllable, the last, as if I was speaking Albanian. So, Lida was now at the midpoint of her summer, as I had been at the middle of mine a few days previously, in Dubulti. As I walked on I was overcome with the desire to talk about the weather, about the summer, about anything at all to anyone I could find, even a statue. In front of me stood the huge central post office building. Brigita, the Latvian girl I’d met! Why hadn’t I thought of calling her sooner? I almost ran up the steps to the post office. Brigita had left Dubulti two days before I had. She must be home now in Riga, in one of those comfortable old apartments with a big ceramic stove taking up almost a whole wall and heavy oak furniture. I liked that town – where it would soon be getting cold – with its grey buildings, the turrets that resembled knights’ helmets, its ancient cobbled streets, their names mostly ending with -
baum
.