Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Ismail Kadare, David Bellos

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857868909
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

1958. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author, Boris Pasternak, faces exile, the press hound him and demand that he refuse the award. A few days earlier the young writer found a copy of this book - could those simple pages really be so dangerous?Based on Ismail Kadare's own experience, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a fictionalised recreation of his time as a student at the prestigious Gorky Institute for World Literature - a strange 'factory of the intellect' set up to produce a new generation of Socialist writers. With its drunken nights, uninspiring professors, specially selected students and enforced Socialist Realism his time at the Gorky Institute brought Kadare to the brink of abandoning writing altogether. In English for the first time, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city and a time, it is a story of youth, of disenchantment and of the incredible importance of the written word.

CHAPTER ONE

We played table-tennis outdoors, not far from the beach, until after midnight because even though the white nights had passed it still didn’t get very dark. Those with the best eyes played last; the rest of us lounged against the wooden railing, watching the game and correcting the score. After midnight, when everyone had gone to bed, leaving their bats on the table to get drenched by a shower before dawn, I didn’t know what to do with myself – I didn’t feel like sleeping. I would wander for a while around the gardens of the Writers’ Retreat (it used to be the estate of a Latvian baron), go as far as the fountain, which spurted from a group of stone dolphins, then track back to the ‘Swedish House’ and on down to the Baltic shore. The nights were very cold and quickly chilled you to the bone.

I did much the same thing almost every evening. On fine days, the mornings and afternoons went by quickly, with swimming and sunbathing, but evenings were dreary, and most of the residents were quite old. Almost all of them were VIPs, with titles galore, but that didn’t stop evenings being dull, especially as I happened to be the only foreigner staying there.

As dusk drew in we would take our cameras down to the beach and set them so they were ready to snap at the moment the sun sank into the sea. The Baltic turned a slightly different colour each night, and we used to try to fix each successive sunset on film. Sometimes a couple of distant strollers along the waterline wandered into the shot. When we developed the film, they appeared as meaningless smudges in the endless vista. After dinner we got together again around the ping-pong table, and as I watched the small white ball going back and forth, I could feel my whole being adjusting to its pace. I would try, but usually fail, to pull myself back from the ball’s metronome effect. Only every so often, in short, rebellious bursts, would I manage to break free from my enslavement to the little white sphere, whose jagged leaps, small diameter, and sharp, metallic noise when it hit the table almost succeeded in sending me into a trance. But at those instants when I recovered my lucidity I would jerk my head towards the shore, and every time I turned, like a sleepwalker, towards the water’s edge I hoped to spy in the far distance, at long last, something different from what I had seen the day before. But the seashore at dusk was merciless. It had nothing to offer but a view it had probably been rehearsing since the dawn of time: silhouettes of couples walking slowly by. They probably came from the other residences in the vicinity, and after passing our house, they scattered in directions that seemed to me quite mysterious, towards resorts whose beaches bore the names of the little stations on the electric railway line, strange-sounding names like Dzintari, Majori and Dubulti. They were names I had previously read on perfume bottles and tubes of face cream in shop windows in other places, without imagining they might be the names of stations or holiday resorts.

Old men, who knew there was no point in trying to get to sleep, stayed on the benches until well after dark. As I walked around I could occasionally hear their whispers and coughs or, when they finally got up, the tapping of their sticks as they walked towards the ‘Swedish House’, where the oldest and most distinguished of the residents stayed.

I would carry on sauntering aimlessly, wondering how almost all of these old men could be famous writers and frequently the dedicatees of each other’s works. Most of the children who ran around noisily in the daytime had had poems and stories dedicated to them by their parents, and you could tell that some of the youngsters had read the works in question. As for the older women, who chatted among themselves for hours every evening after dinner, I knew that quite a few were still stepping out on the pages of some books as good-looking girls in high heels, under the mask of initials such as D.V. or N. or even their first names. The men sometimes appeared beneath the disguise of initials in books written by women, but less often. As a rule, those men had stomach ailments, and in the dining room you could see they were on some special diet or other.

Some evenings I went to the post office in the hope that the line to Moscow would be open so I could call Lida Snegina. But the telephones were usually busy. You could only be sure of placing a call if you booked it a day in advance.

Lida was the young woman I had been seeing in Moscow. She’d come with me to the station on the gloomy day I’d left for Riga. Before the train departed, we paced slowly up and down on the rain-wet platform along with many other parting couples, and she’d said, with her eyes averted, that she found it difficult to go around with foreigners, especially foreigners from far-off lands. When I asked her why, she told me about a friend of hers who had got involved with a Belgian who had disappeared overnight, just like that, without even telling her he was going. Of course, she added, ‘It may well be that not all foreigners are the same, but they often bolt without leaving so much as a word.’ At least, that was what she’d heard people say.

I really ought to have riposted, but only a few moments remained before the train would depart, and the time available was much too short to quarrel and make up. So I had to choose between argument and appeasement. I chose the latter: I swallowed my pride, and declared that in any circumstance, and come what may, I would never slip away, like a thief in the night. I wanted to add that I came from an ancient Balkan land with grandiose legends about the given word, but the time left was disappearing fast and would barely permit a synopsis, let alone the full story of Kostandin and Doruntine’s ghostly ride.

I liked to walk to the post office and back on my own. It wasn’t a particularly scenic route – in fact, it was rather desolate, with only scraggy reeds, small piles of sand and plump thistles on either side. All the same, that particular path, like some women who, though not beautiful, possess a hidden charm, was conducive to my having new thoughts.

It was my second holiday at a writers’ retreat and I knew most of the ropes, as well as the oddities of the inmates. The previous winter I had spent some time in Yalta. My room had been next to Paustovsky’s. The lights stayed on in his room until late; we all knew he was writing his memoirs. Whenever I went out into the corridor I encountered the starosta, our course leader at the Institute, Ladonshchikov by name, who was forever watching the light in Paustovsky’s room. Whenever he came across somebody in the hall, he would confide in them with a sigh and the beating of his breast, as if he were reporting the worst news in the world, that the aforementioned Paustovsky was bringing all the Jews back to life in his memoirs. What I remembered of Yalta was uninterrupted rain, games of billiards that I always lost, a few Tatar inscriptions, and the permanent look of jealousy on the utterly insignificant face of Ladonshchikov, despite the solemn air he wore of a man concerned for the fate of the Fatherland. I had hoped that life in the Riga retreat would be less sinister, but what I encountered were some of the people I had seen at Yalta, table-tennis instead of billiards, and intermittent rain, confirming Pushkin’s bon mot about northern summers being caricatures of southern ones. The similarity of faces, conversations and names (the only ones missing were Paustovsky and Ladonshchikov, oddly enough) gave me a sense of constant déjà vu. The life we led there had something sterile about it, like an extract in an anthology. At Yalta, in this rather odd world, I was aware of leading a hybrid existence, where life and death were mixed up and overlapping, as in the ancient Balkan legend I hadn’t managed to recite to Lida Snegina. The idea was imposed on me by the equation I could not help making automatically between the people around me and their doubles – the characters of novels and plays I knew well. An irrepressible and somewhat diabolical desire to compare their words, gestures and even their faces to those of their originals had arisen the previous winter in Yalta, where for the first time I realised that most contemporary Soviet writers virtually never talked about money in their works. It was like a sign. Now, in Riga, I was learning that alongside money there were many other things they did not mention, and reciprocally, many of the topics that filled whole chapters or acts of their works barely impinged on their real lives. The contrast made me constantly uneasy. Besides, there was something abnormal about being cut off from the world like that, and it brought to mind the monstrous beings I had seen preserved in glass jars in the Natural History Museum.

I’d tried a few times to break away from this frozen landscape, which seemed to me more and more like some kind of obsolete monument, but all my efforts came to nothing and brought me back to billiards in Yalta, then to ping-pong at the Riga retreat. In both settings, at the weighty winter billiards and the flimsy summer ping-pong, I only ever lost.

It was Saturday. As always we were playing in the dim but sufficient light of the evening, and although I was cheered at the prospect of winning the third set after losing the first two, I felt beside me a presence that was both new and familiar.

It was a kind of ash-blonde smudge that reminded me of Lida’s hair. The impression was so strong that I put off turning as if I wanted to give the stranger enough time to become Lida. In that brief moment I realised that, without knowing it, I had long been yearning for her to come through the sky and across the steppe, as silently as the setting of the moon, to be beside me at the table-tennis table.

The little ping-pong ball, with its irritating rebound, scraped my right ear, and as I bent down to pick it up I stole a glance at the visitor, who’d not been seen before in the gardens of our writers’ retreat.

She had come up quietly and stopped amid the keen observers of the table-tennis matches, the people who put the score right when others got it wrong. Let me not make some ridiculous gesture, I thought, since the match seemed to have turned against me irrevocably. The silent ash-blonde smudge among the noisy spectators held me in its sway.

I dropped and abandoned my bat in disgust. Though I was cross I went towards the stranger and wiped my brow with a handkerchief. I was annoyed at losing three games in a row and I had a feeling someone had fiddled the score. As I wiped my face, I looked at her: she had her hands in her trouser pockets and was gazing at the table with a supercilious pout.

Night had fallen some time ago, and at the water’s edge the strollers, as if they had lost their faces, had now turned into outlines, but we knew they were the people we had caught on our film an hour earlier.

My annoyance subsided and I looked more attentively at the wonderful hair of the young newcomer. In this part of the world hair like hers was not uncommon. Sometimes it reminded you of autumn sadness: it was, so to speak, not of this world; it was as if its owner had come from the moon. But this girl’s hair reminded me especially of Lida. One of my Yalta colleagues had tried to persuade me that there was a kind of dog that reacted to such hair with stifled yelping, as if it was greeting the full moon out on the steppe. Subsequently, when I thought back on those words, I became convinced that, however absurd such tall tales might seem, they contained a grain of truth. Obviously it wasn’t referring to real dogs howling, but to humans. My Yalta colleague must surely have gone through something like that himself. But it couldn’t be a matter of screaming out loud, it must have been more like a silent, internal yell, arising from an infinite quivering that was on the point of turning into – why not? – a symphony.

‘Are you having a dance here tonight?’ the young woman suddenly asked, with a lively turn of her head.

She had beautiful, serious grey eyes.

‘There are never any dances here,’ I replied.

She smiled tentatively. ‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All we have here is fame.’

She laughed, her eyes on the table, and I was pleased with my witticism, which, though entirely unoriginal, seemed to have had some effect. I’d heard it the day I arrived, from the mouth of a taxi driver, whose licence-plate number had remained fixed in my memory, like so many other superfluous things.

‘Are you from abroad?’ the girl asked again.

‘Yes.’

She stared at me curiously. ‘Your accent gives you away,’ she said. ‘I don’t speak perfect Russian myself, but I can tell a foreign accent.’ She told me that she’d been among her own folk forty-eight hours before; that she was staying in a villa right beside our retreat; and that she was bored. However, she seemed surprised when I confided that I came from a distant country and was therefore much more bored than she was. She had never set eyes on an Albanian before. What was more, she had always imagined they were darker than Georgians, that they all had hooked noses and were keen on the kind of Oriental chanting she hated.

‘Wherever did you get those ideas?’ I asked rather crossly.

‘I don’t know. I think it’s an impression I got from the exhibition you held last year at Riga.’

‘Hm,’ I muttered. I wanted to drop the subject.

I’d noticed more than once that ordinary Soviet citizens were much given to comparing foreigners from other socialist countries to the natives of their own sixteen republics. If you were very blond, they would say you were like a Lithuanian or an Estonian; if you had a curved nose they would think you had a Georgian look; if you had sad eyes, you must be Armenian, and so on. Some even thought that Turkey was a province of Azerbaijan that had been left on the wrong side of the border by a quirk of history. And on one sad afternoon a tipsy Belarusian tried to convince me that Armenians were re...