Twilight of the Eastern Gods (13 page)

‘What is wrong with you?’ Her voice was softer now. She was gazing at me with sympathy, clouded with a bluish haze. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

You’ll soon see, you little witch!

We were on the sixth floor and I was leaning against the lift-cage ironwork. She saw that I was about to tell her something important; she was waiting for it with her mouth half open and what might have been the marks of suffering on her cheeks.

‘Listen!’ I said, in a feeble voice I could barely get past my teeth. Then, my eyes darting around as if I was about to reveal a great secret, I mumbled something half Albanian and half Russian that I didn’t understand myself.

She looked at me serenely. Then, putting a hand on my shoulder, she drew her head close to mine as if she had spotted something barely visible in the depths of my eyes, at the back of my skull. Hoarsely, as if she’d said, ‘From now on you are a diminished man in my eyes, you are a murderer, a member of the Mafia, of the Zionist International, of the Ku Klux Klan,’ she whispered, ‘I’m beginning to believe that you . . . you too . . . you are a writer!’

It seemed to me that my answer was just a laugh. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a writer but, unfortunately, not a dead one!’

We stood there for a while just looking each other in the eye.

‘I’d started thinking you were,’ she murmured.

Suddenly I felt that my confession had not been destructive enough and I hastened to finish digging myself into a hole. I told her that if I didn’t get out soon I would start throwing up as the others did, not just in the corridor but from the windows on to passers-by, on to taxis, from the sixth floor, from the top of the Kremlin’s towers, from – from—

Her eyes were popping as she put one hand over her mouth and, with the other, pressed the call button for the lift. Eventually it arrived but only when she closed the door on herself did I grasp that she was leaving. I shook the handle but it was already on its way down. I started running down the stairs, winding round and round the cage inside which Lida was falling, inexorably falling. I spiralled around a void that was a monumental column. I clung to it as though I were an ornament, in classical, Doric, Ionian or Corinthian style, wrapped around Trajan’s column, crisscrossing the bas-relief depictions of battles, armour, blood, and horses with hoofs that trampled my head . . .

When I got to the bottom the lift’s door was open and it was empty. Lida had gone. I saw Stulpanc pacing up and down the corridor.

‘I saw your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Why was she in such a hurry to get out?’

I mumbled a few incomprehensible syllables.

‘What a fabulous girl!’ he added. ‘You’re a fool to let her go.’

‘If you want her, take her!’

His eyes widened.

What made me rejoice in the satisfaction of revenge? Oh, yes. In saying ‘Take her!’ to Stulpanc, I had maintained the illusion that I was treating her like a harem slave, selling her on. I knew it wasn’t true, that I had no power over her, but the brash way in which I’d offered her to Stulpanc made me feel as if I had.

In fact, the previous year, at a very private party in his room, when we had been drunk, we had swapped partners. It was an episode neither of us liked to recall.

‘She’s all yours,’ I repeated. ‘I’m serious. Over to you.’

‘Hang on,’ said Stulpanc. ‘Tell me more . . .’

‘There’s no deal involved,’ I told him. ‘She’s a present.’

Absurdly, I felt relieved.

‘But how am I going to—’

‘Look, here’s her phone number,’ I said, fishing a piece of paper out of my pocket. ‘Call her some evening and tell her I’ve left or gone mad or— Wait . . . say I’m dead! Do you hear? Tell her I died in a plane crash.’

The idea that if she believed I was dead she would think of me with affection, perhaps even love, flashed through my mind and something softened in my chest.

Stulpanc stared at me, astonished. ‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘I don’t like the way you’re behaving.’ And he gave me back the scrap of paper with her phone number.

‘Go on!’ I said. ‘I’ve lost her anyway. I’d rather it was you who laid her next instead of an Eskimo or some Uzbek pimp.’

I turned my back and made for the stairs. There was dancing on one of the lower floors. My last words to Stulpanc had been entirely sincere. Through a glass door I could see the outlines of couples dancing. Now and again I thought of Lida walking alone across Moscow. It’s cold outside, I thought, as I got to the Russian-nationalist floor. It’s pitch black out there and the streets are full of Tatars . . . And now you’re writing ballads!

On the fourth floor I fell in with the disenchanted, who were whispering to each other as they paced up and down, two by two. Maybe it was the narrowness of the corridor that made them seem taller than they were in the Institute’s lecture theatres. But maybe the disenchanted always seem taller than they are . . . Fragments of scenes and synopses, spoken in more or less muffled tones, reached my ears, sometimes the left, at others the right. Themes ranged from limping party secretaries who stole piglets from the collective farm, fake ministers, decrepit and dim-witted generals, and Politburo members who spied on each other and buried a proportion of their pay under
izba
floors against a rainy day. Some stories portrayed top officials’ luxurious
dacha
s, their drinking parties and bribes, and their offspring dancing in the nude. Others dealt with uprisings, if not with real insurrections in various parts of the country; they spoke of hushed-up massacres, the growth of religious sects, deportation, prisons and crimes, the monstrous difference in pay between workers, the supposed ‘masters of the land’, and the leading cadres of the Party and state, ‘the people’s servants’. ‘
A Hundred to One
is the title of my play,’ said a voice. ‘Maybe you think I’m telling a story about a Soviet soldier fighting off a hundred Germans, a revolutionary overcoming a hundred Tsarists, or a Korean versus a hundred Americans. No, my sweet, there’s nothing of the sort in my play. A hundred to one means that the salary of one character is a hundred times higher than that of another, and what’s most amazing about it is that they’re both positive characters!’

‘Ha-ha-ha!’ said his interlocutor.

‘Yes, yes, my play ends just like that, with a laugh,’ the playwright replied. ‘My low-paid character starts giggling, ha-ha-ha! The whole company bursts out laughing, ha-haha!, and the laughter spreads to the audience and from the audience it ignites the whole wintry city. And then all that’s left for Piotr Ivanovich is a wee stretch of time in our cosy little prison at Butyrky!’

‘Ha-ha!’ said the other.

‘Yuri Goncharov!’ someone said. In the blink of an eye, the novels, plays and poems metamorphosed. The tall, sturdy Party Secretary gives his jacket to a comrade feeling the cold; the Party committee delegate, seen in Act I of version A distilling vodka illegally, now forgets to draw his pay, forgets even to have dinner because he is so absorbed by world revolution; insurrections are transformed into art fairs on collective farms, massacres recast as prize-giving ceremonies; youngsters who danced naked in
dacha
s now volunteer to upturn the virgin soil. Whereupon the disenchanted all began to throw up . . .

I turned and plunged blindly into the other part of the corridor where the women lived. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. Outside one door I thought I recognised the ‘Belarusian Virgins’, and a little further on, the haughty expression and eternal cigarette of their antithesis, Bella Akhmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s wife. She was in her fourth year. With a complexion that was milk-white, despite her Tatar ancestry and good health, she exuded impending maternity, which she never mentioned in her poetry. Each time I met her on the stairs, I could not help thinking of the efforts she must have made to be dressed always at the height of fashion.

‘Bon akşam
, Bella,’ I muttered, through my teeth.

‘. . .
akşam
,’ she breathed, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.

Nobody knew who had invented this half-French, half-Turkish ‘good evening’, but almost everyone had adopted it.
Akşam
, I repeated inwardly without ceasing to gaze at Bella’s pale face, sadness rippling across it, like waves on a pond. Melancholy clung to the mascara on her eyelashes and spread over the Saharan expanse of the shimmering, moon-like powder on her neck.
Akşam
, I thought. What a majestic word! This evening is truly an
akşam
. It’s not an
Abend
or a
soir
or a
B
eчep, but an
akşam
. Let
akşam
reign on the frozen steppes of Russia, on the phone lines of the night shift, in the cities and collective farms, over the memories of the civil war, over snow, guns and the soviets of the sixteen republics.
Akşam
be upon the vastest state in the world!

That was when I saw our professor of art history. She was standing at the very end of the corridor, almost glued to the wall, and her eyes were trained on me.

‘I’m still waiting,’ said the icon, barely audible.

I stopped in my tracks and glared at my boots.

‘You promised me a plot,’ the wall-bound voice went on. ‘A plot with death in it.’

I moved a step nearer. Her face was close to mine now. She had pale skin and unhealthy pink blotches on both cheeks. ‘With death in it,’ I repeated, as if I had heard my own sentence read out. I leaned even nearer and, very gently, not even putting my hand on her unflinching shoulders, I kissed her on the lips. Then I drew my head back in the same measured way, as if expecting the human mural to crumble and bury me in its rubble. I took a few steps backwards. Then, without a pause, I turned on my heels and ran down the corridor.

‘Oh, those bloody Chinese!’ I heard someone say, as he peered through the keyhole of Ping’s door. ‘Come on, Hundred Flower Bloom, or Hundred Nettles, whatever your name is! You there, you inside, open up! I’ve got something to tell you . . .’ Not a sound came from within.

‘Ladonshchikov is a turd!’ another voice wailed, but I didn’t turn to see whose it was. I ran up the stairs four by four and was gasping for breath by the time I got to the sixth floor. The first person I fell upon was Taburokov. With his wispy black hair rising from his sweaty scalp, like fumes from the flame of a gas hob, he came towards me like an apparition in blue. ‘
Nkell gox avahl uhr
,’ he said threateningly, but I evaded him and went past.

‘A Mongolian has jumped out of a window on the fifth floor,’ someone said. ‘Call Emergency!’

Despite the dim lighting there was muffled excitement along the corridor. Denaturalised writers were coming and going in disarray amid suppressed quarrelling. Now and again dull thuds could be heard. Boom! Boom! That must have been Abdullakhanov banging his head against the wall, as he usually did after more than two hours’ drinking. Nearby I heard mumbling: ‘
Hran, xingeth frull ckellfirau hie
.’ It came from the Karakums, advancing in a squad from the depths of the corridor. They were speaking their own half-dead language and their words whistled past me, like a sandstorm desiccated by the desert sun. ‘
Auhr, auhr, nkr ub
. . .’ I wanted to get out, to get away from the dust that was already grating on my teeth and coating me with its namelessness. I fell, my friends, I fell,
krauhl ah rk meit
! On the other side of the bridge at Mecca . . . Fortunately I found myself at the opening of the unlit corridor that led on my right towards the empty suite, and I plunged into it. As I went along it in a state of bewilderment I heard a noise that sounded like the rustling of reeds against a gurgle of water. I thought my feet were sinking into mud, my legs were unsteady, I was about to be swallowed by soggy tundra. Kyuzengesh had sprung up beside me. ‘
Bon akşam
,’ I whispered.

‘Jounalla hanelle avuksi
,’ he replied.

I’d never heard the sound of his voice before. As he carried on speaking I tried to hang on to the wall so that I didn’t sink into the mud. Although he had always seemed placid and slightly bemused, he was now talking harshly, if still at low volume. His anger was easier to see than to hear. You could read the fury in his crooked teeth – they looked like whitish blobs emitting words of death, or small tombstones half buried in a muddy pit. I turned my back on him and found myself once again in the sixth-floor corridor where the denaturalised group was now thoroughly mixed up and speaking all its dead and dying languages simultaneously. It was a dreadful nightmare. Their greasy faces distorted by drink and sweat, and streaked with dried tears, they were hoarsely espousing the languages they had rejected, beating their breasts, sobbing and swearing they would never forget them, they would speak them in their dreams; they were castigating themselves for having abandoned their languages, their mother tongues, for having left them at home to the mercy of mountains or deserts so they could take up with that hag of a stepmother, Russian.