Twilight of the Eastern Gods (20 page)

Without waiting for a response from her sister, she took my hand and pulled me towards her bedroom . . .

The countryside, still half covered with snow, was silent. We’d been walking for more than an hour. Olya was with us part of the way and in front for the rest, because she liked to be the first to find the path we would take. A slim girl with delicate limbs and a supple neck, she had the same crystalline voice as her sister, Alla. From afar she pointed out a half-frozen pond, a derelict
izba
, and a half-rotted beam that someone had dragged out there, God knew why. We pretended to be interested in everything she told us, and she ran off happily to make new discoveries.

We came across a few uninhabited
dacha
s with their shutters closed and, less frequently, an
izba
. Alla reckoned we were probably on the outskirts of a village.

‘Hey!’ Olya shouted from the distance. ‘There’s a cemetery!’

It was a village graveyard surrounded by a fence, or at least the remains of one. Most of the wooden crosses were broken or crooked, just as I had always imagined them from the masterpieces of Russian literature. By each grave there was a rudimentary bench made from two planks nailed to short stakes hammered into the ground. That was where the relatives of the deceased would sit when they came to the cemetery on Sundays or on the departed’s name-day. Like the crosses, the wooden benches were black with age and rotting away. Nothing could have been sadder to see.

‘There must be a church somewhere nearby,’ Alla said. That was all that was missing from this deserted landscape: a village church with an Old Russian prayer book in the Old Slavonic that had seemed to be pursing me for a while. I suddenly felt sure I had gone past this cemetery last year. But maybe I was mistaken: the suburbs of Moscow are so similar to each other that you can easily mistake one for another. Or else I’d come here at the start of autumn when everything was golden and copper-coloured, streaked with the dust that reminded me of antiques shops.

I’d forgotten which station we’d got off at: all my memory retained was the magical gilding of the leaves contrasting with the black of the
izba
s, the carpet of dead leaves – the essence of autumn – and the birch trees with their spotted trunks, bare patches revealed by the peeling bark that were so bright and shiny that they reminded me of how village swells had once used mirrors to make spots of sunlight play on girls’ windows.

I’d been with Stulpanc, Kurganov and a poet who worked in a publisher’s office. We’d felt intoxicated as we’d tramped through what the glorious Russian autumn had turned to gold and laid on the ground but we couldn’t understand why the two or three peasants standing on the thresholds of their
izba
s were glaring at us in such a sombre manner. We’d also seen three very aged women, one of them knitting; in their eyes shone the murky gleam of fear mixed with an unknowable measure of resignation. Puzzled by their attitude, we asked a few questions and learned that a nineteen-year-old girl had been stabbed to death in the area a month earlier. She was called Tonia Michelson and was certainly the prettiest young woman in the Moscow suburbs. She’d been killed by hooligans, not far from the suburban station, on the tra-a-a-cks . . . An aged country-woman wearing a headscarf (like all old Russian women) told us the story, her emotions and toothless gums turning her voice into a thin trickle of sound.

‘They killed her for nothing, for nothing!’ she said, and each ‘for nothing’ was like another stab to the heart.

Everything about her story was so raw and terrible that it made you want to double up to fill the pit it left in your stomach. The death of Tonia Michelson, a pretty girl of nineteen, seemed even more sinister told in a slow drawl from a toothless mouth.

Hooligans had come out from Moscow to see one of their mates. They’d been drinking, then played cards and decided that the loser’s forfeit would be to bump off the last girl on the last train back to town. It was a vicious game that had been spreading in recent times. They gambled on the lives of complete strangers – the last customer at the supermarket, the first person to get off the trolleybus, or whoever was sitting in seat seventeen on row nineteen in a cinema.

‘So it’s like I told you, for nothing,’ the old woman said, for the third time.

If she’d said ‘for nothing’ a fourth time, I think I would have screamed, ‘Stop!’

The pain that the unknown Tonia Michelson had prompted was visible everywhere. It had managed to superimpose itself on the landscape, soiling it with bloodstains that would not vanish for at least a century. No geological upheaval could have left a greater mark on those parts than the grief of Tonia Michelson’s death.

I wanted to tell Alla about it, but something stopped me, maybe just that we were not in that part of the Moscow suburbs. And, anyway, everything was covered with snow now – and snow seemed to require one to forget, at least until spring.

We went further into the thinning woods. Through the trees we could make out distant
izba
s on the forest edge. The birches were frozen, and their dormant shoots made bumps in the blistered bark that resembled infected pimples. The lighter streaks on their trunks now gave off only a dull gleam, as if the village swells’ mirrors had suddenly been covered with dust.

We passed yet more empty
dacha
s: doors and shutters closed, verandas with blackened columns, leafless lilac bushes. A few birds of a species I could not name sang plaintively all around.

‘I think Stalin had a
dacha
a few miles from here, over Kuntsevo way,’ Alla said.

‘Stalin? A
dacha
?’

She nodded, happy to have aroused my curiosity. ‘Yes, but it must have been abandoned long ago,’ she added.

Olya, who was walking ahead of us, shouted something about a fox den. My mind was elsewhere and I paid her little attention.

‘Over which way, exactly?’

Alla shrugged. ‘I’m not too sure. Over there, I think.’

I stared for a minute towards where she was pointing. Bare branches broke up the huge grey lid of the winter sky. ‘Is it a long way?’ I thought I heard her eyelashes fluttering.

‘Yes, quite a way . . . but I’m sure it’s been closed up.’

I could see she was afraid that I would ask to go there. Maybe she was aware of the trees bending over us to enquire menacingly: ‘So what do you want to get up to in that
dacha
?’

‘I would have liked to see it,’ I blurted out in the end.

‘Oh, no!’ It was almost a cry of fright. ‘It’s a long way from here, as I told you, and there’s surely nobody there.’

‘But that’s exactly the way I want to see it, the way it is nowadays!’ I said.

Alla blushed slightly. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure . . .’ she went on. ‘Maybe I’m misinformed and the
dacha
is somewhere else.’

I noticed her face had got redder. I remembered when I’d gone looking for Zog’s villa at Dubulti. On that occasion it had been the girl I was with who was eager to find it.

Today it was the opposite.

It seemed that each of us was curious about the other’s tyrant, but preferred to avoid his or her own.

‘All right, have it your way,’ I said.

The snow crunched under our boots. Olya was out ahead and once again trying to communicate something about a fox den.

‘Apparently, he was frightening,’ Alla said, after a while. ‘He lived alone, like a hermit.’

She must have thought that talking about the
dacha
being shuttered and Stalin’s asceticism would diminish my interest.

‘Yes, that’s what people say,’ she repeated. ‘He lived there on his own, like a hermit.’

‘The Revolutionary Monk . . . that’s the nickname his opponents used. Did you know that?’

She shrugged her shoulders as if she was lost for words.

One day, I can’t remember where, I heard a drunk saying, ‘Ah! What a wily fox our Nikitoushka is! Khrushchev is a revolutionary fox!’

Light was fading. Olya suggested we go back before nightfall, or we might lose our way.

‘Yes, of course,’ Alla said. ‘Let’s go home!’

On the walk back to the
dacha
the three of us made a game of finding the footprints we’d left in the snow on the way out.

I could feel the opening of a poem I’d heard recited long before making its way into my mind: ‘What are these clouds forever flying past . . .?’ After a moment I thought, Yes, what are these girls who get mixed up with dead dictators . . .?

Fleetingly, the twilight splashed broad blue and black stripes over isolated
izba
s, hollowed-out tree trunks and the roofs of shuttered
dacha
s. Here and there trees shook their crowns and released handfuls of snow that sparkled one last time before disappearing in the half-light, which was gradually acquiring the shade of tarnished silver. We were leaving ever further behind us the murky forest where the Monk and the Fox would continue to watch each other in silence as on the eve of mortal combat.

When we reached Alla’s parents’
dacha
I said it would be better if I carried on to the station without going indoors to take my leave of the others. She agreed.

The two sisters walked down to the station with me.

Looking out through the carriage window I saw that Alla’s cheeks had gone crimson again. Olya must have been teasing her about me as I got on to the train. The innocent bites of a harmless insect.

They waved from the platform as the train set off. I felt worn out. I closed my eyes and sat there for a while, my mind blank. It was a few miles before I even began to hear what the other people in the carriage were saying. They were talking about smallpox.

‘They rang twice!’ Auntie Katya called from behind her counter, as she rummaged in her drawer for the piece of paper where she’d jotted down the caller’s name. ‘Ah, here it is. Yes, it was the Albanian Embassy. You have to call them back right away.’

What could the matter be? I wondered. A vision of a coffin lying thousands of miles away, in my home town, Gjirokastër, arose instantly in my mind. My mother’s? My father’s?

I pulled my address book out of my pocket and, with clumsy fingers, opened it at A: Antaeus, Alla, Albanian . . .

As I dialled the number a pit opened in my stomach.

‘Hello, is that the embassy?’ I asked in Albanian.

‘Yes,’ said a calm voice.

‘You called,’ I said, and gave my name.

‘Correct. About a meeting this evening. You must be here at the embassy at six.’

Ice-cold sweat covered my brow. For a second, my eye caught Auntie Katya’s suspicious glance.

The main reception room at the embassy was packed. Students, most of them men, were talking quietly to each other in groups of two or three. The three candelabra, which had been brought down a little lower than the last time I was there, or so I thought, cast a yellow glare. A large bronze-framed portrait of Enver Hoxha filled almost a whole wall. Nobody knew why we had been summoned with such haste.

At six, the counsellor came into the room. He was wearing a black suit, and perhaps it was the contrast of his white shirt that made his face seem paler than it had been the last time I had seen him.

With him was a man I had never seen before and who had probably just come in from Tirana.

The first few sentences of his speech, before he even got to the subject, told me that the rumours about a cooling between Albania and the Soviet Union were true. He stressed that relations between the two countries had been and remained good, but there were nonetheless internal and external forces intent on damaging them. So we students had to be vigilant not to provide pretexts for provocation from whatever quarter. To that end we were urged to limit, as far as we could, all relations with Muscovites for the time being. ‘I mean especially young female Muscovites . . .’ he added. My heart sank, not so much from what the counsellor had just said but from his having said it without a shadow of a smile. It was obvious that we all expected him to smile, as he had done on all earlier occasions when urging us to behave impeccably with Russian girls. Such sentences were always followed by a silence full of suggestive thoughts, such as: we’re perfectly aware of what you get up to but don’t make them pregnant . . . This time his face was stony. ‘You will therefore have to stop dating them,’ he went on, in what sounded to me like a weary voice. He spoke for two more minutes, stressing that relations between the two countries were good, telling us not to be unnecessarily alarmed, and especially not to mention any of this to anyone.

‘Well, there you are, young men, that’s why I called you all in,’ he concluded smoothly. ‘I don’t think you need any further explanation. Have a good evening.’

It was one of the most peculiar meetings I ever had occasion to attend.

A rumour flew round that all the close relatives of the painter who had caught smallpox had fallen ill. The airport workers who had been on the site when the Air India flight had landed were all under close medical observation. People said that if there was a fatality beyond the painter’s immediate circle, the whole of Moscow would be quarantined.