Twilight of the Eastern Gods (9 page)

I left the pile of papers where I’d found them, next to the vodka bottle, the tin and the wrapping paper. Then, having cast a last glance over the depressing still-life, I switched off the light and went out.

The only place left for me to go now was my room. I was worn out and lay down on my bed, but although I tried hard, I managed to reach only the outer rim of the Valley of Sleep, the colourless, soundless foothills far removed from the picturesque heartland of my dreams. I could hear the crackling of the current in the overhead wires when trolleybuses pulled into the stop. Those fairytale stags wanted to take me to the centre of town but they were quite lost as they swam about in the sky, their antlers pronging the clouds, while beneath their bellies lay nameless winding grey streets waiting for us to crash into them.

*

Three days later the graduates and teaching staff of the Gorky Institute’s two degree courses started coming back. The great house awoke. The first from our class to arrive was Ladonshchikov, his stagy smile expressing his satisfaction with himself and with the fine running order of the great Soviet Union. His cheeks bore a permanent blush, as if they were lit by some kind of fever, suggesting both the high pomp of a plenary session and emotion spilling over from meetings with his readers and superannuated heroines of Soviet Labour, and an eager Party spirit holding his bureaucratic eminence in check. Similarly, his putty-coloured raincoat, tailored to look almost like a uniform, was cheerful and modest at the same time. If you looked at him closely, especially when he was saying, ‘So that’s how it is, comrades’ –
Vot tak, tovarishchi
– you might well think that his face had provided the model for all the directives from the leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers about matters concerning the positive hero and maybe even for a number of the decisions that had been taken on the issue. Ladonshchikov’s face brought all those tedious questions to mind. He let his Soviet smile fall in only one circumstance: when the topic was Jews. He would turn into another man: his movements would go out of synch, the relative quantities of optimism and pessimism expressed on his face would be inverted, and phrases like
Vot tak, tovarishchi
made way for different and often vulgar ones. But all the same, on those rare occasions, even though what he said was repulsive, he seemed more human, because the stench of manure and pig shit he gave off was at least real. I’d seen him in that state several times last winter in Yalta when he was spying at Paustovsky’s window. But at times like that one of the Shotas used to say, ‘No, don’t be scared of Ladonshchikov!’ In his view it was when he was in that sort of a state that Ladonshchikov became harmless. It was the pink, pompous smiling state that made him dangerous: that was when he could have you sent to Butyrky Prison with a click of his fingers, as he had done a year ago to two of his colleagues. Shota’s words returned to me every time I came out of the metro station at Novoslobodskaya Street and walked past the endless reddish walls of the prison.

The two Shotas came back together that day. Over the holidays they had squabbled many times in cafés in Tbilisi and cursed each other roundly; then, most bizarrely, they had ended up in the same writers’ retreat, had argued and thrown insults at each other, one accusing the other of being glued to his heels, and vice versa, then had decided to give up on holidays and leave for who knew where; although there were hosts of trains every day from Georgia to Moscow, they had ended up travelling not only on the same service but in the same carriage!

The next day Hieronymus Stulpanc and Maskiavicius, our fellow students from the Baltic, turned up, both tipsy; next came the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ (that’s what we called the girls on our course, though only one was from Belarus). The Karakums, as we referred to those from Central Asia, all turned up around midnight, blind drunk, with Taburokov in tow. He’d been flailing about, trying to force his way into the Israeli Embassy because he wanted to have a word – just a word – with the Jewish ambassador to salve his conscience. So the bastard would not be able to claim afterwards that Taburokov hadn’t warned him in time, as his writer’s conscience required him to, and that he’d already changed alphabet three times, yes, he had, and all that that came with, and he didn’t really care anyway, and as a matter of fact he’d be happy to piss in the Jordan, however sacred it was. And that wouldn’t do us any harm either, because we’ve strangled all the Volgas and Olgas in their cradles, along with their alphabets, because we had Cyril and Methodius and the glorious Soviet sandpit and the one and indivisible— Brrr! It’s freezing in here!

Artashez Pogosian, nicknamed ‘The Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ because he identified with them all at the drop of a hat, apparently delighted to have dumped his wife, swept in with the other students from the Caucasus. They were all drunk, except Shogentsukov, who had come on his own on a later train, and turned up looking slightly drained, his face exhibiting what Pogosian jokingly called his post-prime-ministerial melancholy.

That same day saw the Moldovans come in, as well as the Russians from Siberia and Central Russia, including Yuri Goncharov (nicknamed ‘Yuri Donoschik’ by one of the Shotas, who thought he was a government sneak); then came the Jews, the Tatars and the Ukrainians, the only ones who came by plane. The next day Kyuzengesh arrived in the afternoon, looking quite grey, the last of the group. As was his habit, he shut himself away in his room and did not emerge for forty-eight hours. Stulpanc, who occupied the room next door, said that he always did that when he came back from the tundra because he found it hard to readjust to twenty-four-hour days. It was a serious problem for writers from those parts, Stulpanc went on. Can you imagine living your whole life in six-month-long days and nights, and then being required to divide your time into artificial chunks when you sit down to write? For instance, Kyuzengesh couldn’t write ‘Next morning he left’ because ‘next morning’ for him meant in six months’ time. Or again, when a writer from the tundra set down ‘Night fell’, he was recording something that happened so rarely it would have the same effect as ‘The third Five-year Plan has been launched’ or ‘War has broken out’. ‘Our comrades from the tundra have a problem,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘One night Kyuzengesh said something to me but he spoke so softly I couldn’t understand anything. But he was definitely complaining about all that. I reckon someone ought to look in detail at the
time
factor in the writing of our friends from the tundra. It’s got real potential, even if it comes close to the kind of modernism people say that French fellow Proust fell into when he made time go round in circles. Socialist realism needs to be studied in its impact on the Arctic plains, don’t you agree?’

‘Stulpanc, you really don’t know what you’re saying,’ Nutfulla Shakenov broke in. ‘You’re trying to tell me about that decadent Procrustes, or whatever his name is, but do you realise that in all the tundra and the taiga put together, in an area of three million square kilometres and then some, there is one, and only one, writer and that’s Kyuzengesh? Do we really need a literary theory just for him?’

We all thought that was ominous and grandiose at the same time. To be lord and master in a space more than six times the size of Europe! To be the tundra’s own grey consciousness!

There were crowds of people in the corridors of Herzen’s old two-storey house and outside it, in the garden with the iron railings and two gates, the main one on Tverskoy Boulevard and the other at the rear giving on to Malaya Bronnaya. Nowhere else in the world could so many dreams of eternal glory be crowded into such a small space. Often, when you looked at all those ordinary faces in profile – some fresh and alert, most of them drawn and unkempt – you might guess that several were already turning into marble or bronze. That became obvious when, around dusk and especially when they were drunk, a one-armed fourth-year student and Nutfulla Shakenov, with his partly destroyed nose, resembled statues dug clumsily out of the ground by an archaeologist.

The corridors were crammed mostly with first-year students. They appeared drunk, and had a euphoric glow, as if they had been pumped full of gamma rays, while their pallor was graced with a layer of perspiration that was as becoming as it was permanent. A boy with sparkling, close-set eyes wove among them – a slim, handsome lad who had come from the Altai mountains. He moved from one group to another, getting into conversation with some, saying whatever flashed into his mind, then taking off to talk to another knot of people. ‘What a splendid pair of trousers!’ he exclaimed to me. ‘Where did you get them?’ His wide eyes became even more entrancing. ‘Where did you find them?’ I told him, curtly, because I was rather cross that he should use familiar forms of language with me when I was his senior. He noticed my irritation, bowed two or three times, his hand on his chest in apology, and said he would henceforth adopt a more formal tone, would speak to me in the third or fourth person, if it existed, but that I should not take offence: he came from the highlands of the Altai where men were more frank and open than they were anywhere else. ‘You, you,’ he kept saying with a smile, because it was the only word of English he knew, and I told him he’d pronounced it as if it was an Albanian word. That was when he twigged I was from Albania, and declared passionately that he would wear only Albanian trousers in future because they were the most stylish in the world. Then he asked if I could give him the pattern, and blurted out that he wanted everything he had to be perfect, that he would write perfect works, that within the next month he would meet the prettiest girl in Moscow and have an affair with her. ‘I am a virgin,’ he went on, in breathless excitement, ‘and, like the Altai mountains with their sublime peaks, I insist on losing my virginity to the most inaccessible girl in the capital!’ He carried on talking with unaltered fervour, but instead of blushing he grew even paler. ‘That is how it is! I have to manage this at any cost, because if I don’t, I don’t know what I will do. How lucky I am to make your acquaintance. Oh! Sorry, to make your acquaintance,
sir
. I’ll begin with the trousers. A man who hasn’t got the right kind of trousers doesn’t deserve any favours from life. I only like things that are perfect because I’m from the Altai and up there everything is noble, pure and eternal. I can’t have a fling with an ordinary girl. She’ll be either the most beautiful or there’ll be nobody . . .’

‘Well,’ I replied, entertained, ‘it’ll be very hard to get everything, so to speak, up to the same height as the Altai.’

He broke in energetically, ‘No, sir, you’ll never persuade me of that. You’ve got the best trousers in Moscow, so please tell me where I can find the most attractive girl in town!’

I smiled and was about to tell him that he would never find what he was after, even with the help of the KGB, but his eyes latched on to mine, like a cat’s, and he seemed to expect that I was about to tell him the name and address of Sleeping Beauty and maybe her telephone number too.

CHAPTER THREE

To my left, beyond the window’s double panes, snow was falling noiselessly; to my right, in complete contrast, the dark smudge of Nutfulla Shakenov’s rough, tanned chin, was bent low over his notes. Wet snow slithered intermittently over Tverskoy Boulevard, settling on the trees and empty benches. The letters that Nutfulla Shakenov was writing in his notebook were widely spaced, as if he were bewildered. The professor of aesthetics was lecturing on the eternal unity of life and art. Sometimes the snow seemed to settle on his sentences, giving them a melancholic and meandering cast. He was explaining that art goes hand in hand with life from the moment of birth, when the infant is greeted with song, until death, when funeral music accompanies a man’s last journey to the grave. Drowsy with the heat rising from the radiators, I gazed at the passers-by as they hurried, wrapped up in themselves, along Tverskoy Boulevard and speculated that sometimes art is bound up with the icy snow sweeping people on to Gorky Street, the Garden Ring or the Arbat. It made them put their heads down, hunch their shoulders, and pick tiny grains of ice from their eyelids. ‘Art does not abandon us even after death,’ the lecturer droned on. Even after death, I parroted in my mind. Snow falls on us all even after death, that’s for sure . . . Nutfulla, beside me, carried on writing his misshapen black letters. In the row in front of mine Antaeus, from Greece, was muttering something to Hieronymus Stulpanc. The two Shotas, sitting beside him, looked horrified. ‘And so, for example,’ the lecturer was saying, ‘some people’s tombs are decorated with sculpture, or simply with an epitaph, a few lines of verse. Art accompanies them even in everlasting sleep . . .’ He paused, presumably to measure the effect his words had had, which he must have judged insufficient, since he went on: ‘A month ago I went to the Novodevichy monastery. I visit the cemetery there quite often. It was very autumnal. I stopped at the tomb of A. P. Kern, on which Pushkin’s famous lines are carved:

‘Я помню чудное мrновенье
Пеpедо мной явилacь ть
І
. . .
I remember that magical moment
When you appeared before me . . .’

‘Who was A. P. Corn?’ Taburokov asked.

Taken aback, the lecturer turned to face him. His grey hair looked electric with anger. He opened his mouth several times before he could find his words. As if something was missing.

‘You ought to know the answer, Taburokov,’ he said at last. ‘Every schoolboy knows that poem by heart. It’s one of the most beautiful poems in all the world, and everyone knows that it is dedicated to a young lady with whom Pushkin had had an affair.’