Twilight of the Eastern Gods (8 page)

I gave the number to an operator and sat on a bench waiting for the call to be put through. Drawling voices announced names of faraway places that I thought had disappeared long ago. Magadan, Astrakhan, and even more legendary cities (apparently, you could call up the whole Golden Horde!), and I felt as if something was being extinguished inside me. I thought it must be from here that Kyuzengesh phoned his desolate tundra late in the afternoon, smoothing it with the low rustle of his voice, promising it who knew what in the twilight hours when sparse flocks of birds flew low overhead in the gloomy not-night and not-day that lasted six full months of the year.

I imagined that Brigita was perhaps still indoors, that she hadn’t gone for a walk in the -
baum
streets. In the last week of my holiday in Riga the weather had been bad and rain had often forced us to take refuge in cinemas where they were showing films we had already seen, in cafés we’d just left or even in some Protestant church where a service was being held. We’d been several times to Dzintari and to all the other stations with names that reminded me of beauty products, and now the smell of her hair had got mixed up with the smell of her toothpaste and her lips, which she made up only a little, to save them from getting chapped by the sea wind, into a single scent that belonged to all those railway stops.

The operator called my name. I went into a booth and said, ‘Hello! Hello!’ several times. At the other end someone said something in Latvian that, of course, I didn’t understand, while in the next booth a coarse voice was speaking with Samarkand or maybe the Karakum – I recognised the simple sounds of an Eastern tongue. Another voice broke in on my line, in an unknown language, then a burst of interference, and I thought I heard Latvian again, then yet more distant and plaintive voices. Almost losing hope in this transcontinental cackle, I blurted out her name, which was immediately swallowed, shredded, crumbled and ingested by the sand and peat of the marshes, by the taiga and the Northern Lights, leaving on the surface nothing more than a bleak hunger for more names, maybe for my own, with an accompaniment of pitiful sighs. I hung up and stumbled out of the post office. As I cut through the passing crowds I was suddenly afflicted with an unbearable headache that beat against my skull, boom! boom! as if the streets of Riga were thrashing me with the rubber mallets of their -
baum, -baum
endings.

On Okhotny Ryad the dun-coloured rain-drenched crowd milled between the huge Gosplan building and the Moskva Hotel. You could just about see the outline of the Bolshoi in the distance and, further behind it, in a welter of mauve and blue lights, the older building of the Metropole, the hotel where only foreigners stayed, and where you would also occasionally see a police van carting away prostitutes. I slowed, dithering between a right turn along Kuznetsky Most, a left turn into the narrow and noisy Peredelkinorovka Street, or even going on up to Red Square. Any solitary walker would have taken the first option, but curiously, without knowing why, I went on towards the square that everyone who has never lived in Moscow believes to be the heart of the city. In fact anyone walking in the evening towards Red Square can feel the floods of people in Gorky Street run dry as they approach its shore – the crowds thin out and only a few people push on as far as the ancient esplanade, like the thinning blood of an anaemic trying to make its way to the brain. If the GUM department store facing the Kremlin weren’t there to draw people in, Red Square would surely be one of the most desolate quarters of Moscow.

GUM must still have been open because people were milling about on the pavement in front of it. On the other side of the square, outside the Historical Museum, there wasn’t a soul. I carried on at a leisurely pace and came onto Red Square. Although I passed along Gorky Street pretty much every day and almost as often crossed Sverdlov Square, the Arbat and Tverskoy Boulevard, as well as Dzerzhinsky Square, where the number three trolleybus left for Butyrki, I hardly ever found my way to Red Square, and only on Sundays. Perhaps my disinclination derived from the disappointment I had felt on first seeing the Kremlin’s rust-coloured bastions. There was something unfinished, apathetic and undramatic about those squat brick walls, with their haughty towers poking up here and there. Perhaps I felt like that because I had grown up in a town overlooked by a citadel that was tens of metres high, with towers that were sometimes above the clouds and ramparts from which, even now, a thousand years after they were built, large blocks of stone sometimes came loose and fell to earth, like bolts of lightning, crushing houses and killing people in their path. By contrast, the somnolent, placid walls of the Kremlin gave off a ruddy cheerfulness that sterilised the imagination. No dashing horseman with moonlight glinting on his steel visor would bring any message to the gates of this castle; through its doors had come only ponderous, leather-robed monks from the Novodevichy Monastery, chanting Church Slavonic and surrounded by the false Dmitrys who had woven the fabric of Russian history.

Some of these thoughts whirled in my mind as I walked along the side of the ancient fortress. In the blue-tinted light of the evening the cupolas of St Basil’s looked like the turbans of our own Bektashi preachers or like coloured soap bubbles blown by some gigantic mouth. Slavic myths tell of a terrifying head all alone in the middle of the steppe that puffs out its cheeks to blow the great wind that raises the dust-storm. That wind is so strong that no rider who dares to come before it – even if he keeps as far away as the horizon – can stay on his horse. Every time I read anything about that head I tingled with fright, despite the absence of bloodshed and mystery. But perhaps that was exactly what made me shiver: a fall caused by wind and earth in a vast empty flatness with only that head rising from it. ‘It would be better not to have myths like that!’ Maskiavicius sometimes remarked. ‘It really does belong to steppe and dust. Stunted Slavic divinities . . . But you Balkan folk have legends of a different class – they’re almost as good as Lithuanian folklore! But what’s the use? Socialist realism forbids us to write about them.’ That was what Maskiavicius used to say, but you couldn’t rely on him. He changed his opinions as often as his shirts.

I crossed the square and walked along the pavement outside GUM, as far as the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, raised on a plinth originally used as an executioner’s block. From that corner the Kremlin walls looked even more peaceful. A muddled voice in my head told me that castles weren’t more or less Macbethical or Buddhistical solely by virtue of the grey or red colouring of their walls or their more or less mysterious shapes, but from the fret-work-like appearance of their turrets. The same voice also told me that, behind its casual ruddy face, this half-European and half-Asiatic castle soon would, or maybe already did, contain a great mystery. The block where heads had been severed was still there, not far from the walls, like a moon hovering over the horizon.

I suddenly remembered the police summons that Auntie Katya had handed me, then almost told myself aloud that I was exhausted and ought to get back to the hall of residence.

It was still just as empty and dark as it had been when I had gone out, and I wondered where I could go to kill time that night, even for an hour: to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s or Chinese Ping’s? I didn’t really want to be with either of them and felt I would prefer to be alone in my room. I began climbing towards the sixth floor. I recalled the monastic silence of the corridors in the Writers’ Residence in Yalta, with Ladonshchikov’s furtive footfalls on the carpeted floor, and Valentin, Paustovsky’s driver, who told us one day, between two hiccups, his eyes glazed from drink, that he was being tormented by the writer’s wife, a harridan who was wrecking his life, and that if he was still driving that car it was out of loyalty to Konstantin Paustovsky: if it hadn’t been for him he wouldn’t have stayed a minute longer in the job – he’d rather drive a pig lorry, a manure truck or a hearse than set eyes on that woman’s snout again. But there was nothing Konstantin could do about it, he went on, when he had calmed down. She had been a present to Paustovsky from that carrot-haired pig called Arbuzov – that guy who wrote plays with which he, Valentin, wouldn’t deign to wipe his arse, seeing as Arbuzov could never rise above Konstantin Georgevich, and had failed to bring down Paustovsky with insults and had not managed to poison him or have him deported or infect him with a contagious disease. The worst Arbuzov could do to Paustovsky was to palm off his own ghastly wife on him. When he got to that point in his tale Valentin usually looked round to see if there was still any benighted soul who did not know that Paustovsky’s current wife had previously been married to Arbuzov. He had landed him with the woman, Valentin would go on, once he had made certain everyone was in the know, and ruined his life, because otherwise Konstantin Georgevich, not that fuckwit Fedin, would be president of the Writers’ Union, and Valentin would be driving not Paustovsky’s blue Volga saloon but a luxury Zim limousine and would be getting three hundred roubles a month more in wages.

I don’t know why I kept going over Valentin’s monologues. I tried to turn my mind to other things but curiously it kept coming back to Valentin. Was it because I had previously heard those soliloquies in other empty corridors on nights that were just as boring and far away from everybody else? I should have got out of the corridor if I wanted to silence the whispering inside me. Run away, yes – but where to? I no longer felt like shutting myself away in my room. I had Lida’s voice on one of my tapes. She lay there as if she were in a long, magical coffin, without body or hair, just her voice. No! Keep me away from that tape recorder. And suddenly, as my whole being sought a place to escape and forget, I remembered the left wing of the huge building. It was almost always empty and served as a reservoir of rooms that might be allocated to teachers from the Gorky Institute, or to house guests of the Writers’ Union, or as temporary digs for writers who had walked out on their wives and didn’t know where else to go. Some evenings when I’d had a bit to drink I used to enjoy visiting that deserted wing. I had a key to one of the empty apartments. In a way it was my second home, a second silent, secret abode. ‘Want to come to my
dacha
?’ I once asked Lida Snegina, during a lively party, and dragged her by the hand into the dark corridors of the left wing. She was fascinated by that uninhabited suite on whose walls and ceilings the distant headlights of cars left translucent streaks, like those of garden snails.

Let loneliness cure loneliness, I thought, as I went through my pockets looking for the key. Once I had found it I trekked over to the left wing. The floorboards creaked softly beneath my feet. I found the door, opened it and went inside. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The walls hadn’t changed, the floral paper with its green background reminding me of funerals. I went into one of the rooms and stood there for a minute, my hands in my pockets, as if I had frozen. I went to the door to the other room in the suite, but as soon as I had turned on the light, I really did freeze: someone had sullied my sanctuary. I was dumbfounded. My eyes lighted on a corner of the room where there lay an empty bottle, a tin of food, and an object I could not make out. I stepped two paces forward and noticed that next to the bottle there was a torn piece of wrapping paper that must have been used for something greasy. Further on lay a few sheets of paper. I bent down. It was typescript, with closely spaced lines. Nothing else. It looked as if the intruder had come here to drink vodka and read the pages, which perhaps he hadn’t liked because he had left them behind with the remnants of his meal. For a second I thought he was going to come back, jerk open the door and take me by surprise. But the leftovers in the tin had dried out. I knelt down to gather up the typed sheets. There must have been two or three hundred. At first glance the characteristic lay-out of Russian dialogue told me I was holding a literary work. The beginning – possibly the first half (with the title page, obviously) – was missing. The page numbering went from 304 to 514. I was about to put the script back on the floor, but my eyes automatically began to run across the top sheet, which was the opening of a Chapter 31:

‘Zhivago, Zhivago,’ Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his coach, to which they had just passed. ‘From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow . . .’

I jumped forty or forty-five pages and landed on this sentence:

He analyses and interprets Dostoevsky’s
Possessed
and
The Communist Manifesto
with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me . . .

I would have read on, but a handful of pages slipped from my grasp, and as I bent down to gather them, I lost my place in the typescript. I hurriedly leafed through the rest of the work and only stopped on the very last sheet to read the line where the text broke off:

Outside it was snowing. Wind shovelled the snow everywhere. It was falling more and more thickly, more densely, as if in pursuit of something, and Yuri Andreyevich looked out of the window at it as if it wasn’t snow but . . .

What is this? I wondered. I had thought at first it might have been left behind by whoever had been drinking in the room, but as I recalled the phrase about Dostoyevsky and
The Communist Manifesto
it struck me it might be a forbidden work circulating from hand to hand. Such things had become quite common in recent times. Three months before, late one night, or maybe just before dawn, Maskiavicius had knocked on my door – or, rather, collapsed in front of it in a state of complete inebriation – and when I opened it he had shoved a handful of typescript sheets towards me and slurred, ‘Take this and read what he said, this guy, that’s right, it’s Dante Tvardovsky, oops, I mean Marguerite, sorry, I meant to say Aleksandr Alighieri . . .’ It had taken me all of fifteen minutes to work out that the pages contained a banned poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky called ‘Vasily Tyorkin in the Other World’.