Twilight of the Eastern Gods

by Ismail Kadare

  The waiter brought us the brass thimbles and poured our coffee into them.

  ‘To tell the truth, I’ve grown unaccustomed to my own name. I’ve spent most of my life under one alias or another.’

  ‘Have you had many?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, a few . . . I had to change them frequently, especially when I was underground.’

  ‘And Antaeus is the latest?’

  He shook his head melancholically. ‘I think it’s the last.’ Staring through the window at the station entrance, Antaeus recited his various noms de guerre in a low voice. Almost all were names from classical tragedies, and for a second I saw him covered with tough, sword-proof scales that had come from ancient times to protect his soft, mortal flesh. Perhaps he felt that such anachronistic armour made him safe; perhaps, too, he could hear circling tambourines playing seductive rhythms, aiming to draw him on so he would stick out his head and be struck down . . . I’d seen how hedgehogs can be deceived by music when they roll up into a ball.

  ‘The last,’ he repeated, ‘and the unluckiest.’

  I knew what he meant: ‘Antaeus’ was the alias he’d been using at the time of the defeat, in 1949.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like when a comrade in arms spits on you and you have no right to avenge that spit of shame,’ he said. ‘Antaeus is the name I was using when that happened to me. Did I tell you about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘“Antaeus, raise your head, raise your head, for God’s sake . . .” I can still hear the words.’ He brought the thimble to his lips and turned it upside down as if he wanted to empty it, except that there wasn’t a drop of coffee left in it. A trace of the dregs stuck to the edge of his mouth. ‘It happened to me the day after we had crossed the border . . . The Albanian border,’ he added, after a pause.

  ‘I recall the first lorries that brought Greek partisans into Gjirokastër.’ I’d interrupted him, in an intentionally casual tone, hoping to lessen the level of drama that always loomed when conversation turned to the defeat of the Greek insurrection.

  ‘It’s imprinted on my mind,’ he continued, without hearing what I’d said. ‘We were in a mountain gorge, there was constant drizzle, and your soldiers’ helmets were gleaming. We were harassed, muddy and bloodied – most of us were wounded; some were delirious, and as if that weren’t enough, there he was, a terrifying figure, propped up on his crutches, hurling insults at us. Boy, did he give us hell! “Antaeus, raise your head, you faker!”’

  ‘Who was that?’ I enquired calmly. ‘Who was insulting you?’

  ‘Hang on, didn’t I ever tell you his name?’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘He was a comrade in arms, an old militant who’d been wounded more than once and been put right abroad, on your side, in fact, at Gjirokastër. On his last stay in hospital he’d had both legs amputated, and though he was an invalid and only half alive he’d come to wait for us at the border, beneath a cliff, a few metres from the place where, after crossing into Albanian territory, we surrendered our weapons. He swore at us because we’d been beaten. Boy, did he insult us! He called us cowards, deserters, namby-pambies, fools. His hair, face and clothes were soaking but his tears were mixed with the rain. Only his voice gave away that he was sobbing. We were marching with our heads down and his harsh words struck sidelong blows on our wounds. Strangely, nobody answered him back. Our fighters marched on without turning their heads to either side. He recognised me: “Antaeus, raise your head!” he yelled, anger, tears and hurt breaking his voice. Like everyone else, I cast down my weapons and carried on. I could see nothing but I heard him shouting again, “Antaeus, raise your head, you fraud!” From the side he was waving a rake or some other implement that seemed to be directed at my eyes. In the end I did raise my head, and that was when he spat on me. I walked on, moving further away from him as he carried on bawling and jigging about on his crutches, like he was being crucified, in the rain, a rain I’ll never forget . . .’ For the third time Antaeus sipped at his empty cup. ‘So that’s how it was!’ he said, with a tap of his finger on the table top.

  ‘Yes, those were grandiose and terrible events.’

  ‘And now I give lectures, go to conferences, write theory . . .’

  ‘Things have calmed down more or less everywhere,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Have you noticed our embarrassment when we hear people talk about the epic spirit of the old revolutionary struggle? We’re like schoolboys when their parents come up from the provinces to visit them, wearing old-fashioned greatcoats.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘It’s like the alias business,’ I went on. ‘If you ever took on another clandestine job, I don’t think you’d look to the tragedies for a new pseudonym—’

  Smiling, he interrupted: ‘Do you mean I’d take one from a comedy? Go on being ironic! I’ve got a thick skin, I can take it. When all’s said and done, I’m a defeated man.’

  In the few words he’d just spoken, I saw a suggestion of vulnerability, and shouted, ‘It’s impossible to have a conversation with you any more! You’re always so prickly!’

  In fact this was the first time he had seemed to take offence, and we had never quarrelled before.

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘I’m on edge, over-sensitive. Anyway, take no notice. Please, go on. What were you saying about pseudonyms?’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  He laughed. ‘I can guess what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You see an ex-militant who’s now a peaceable Muscovite. With a fur collar on his coat and a pair of bedroom slippers, Antaeus has become the very model of the petit-bourgeois. What a character! Am I right?’

  ‘Typical characters arise in typical situations. Isn’t that what Engels said?’ I joked.

  ‘True, in typical circumstances . . . In typical circumstances,’ he said again, nodding. ‘Yes, of course, with baby fox fur and slippers as soft as the southern breeze on his bedside rug . . .’ He looked around for his coffee cup, but the waiter had already cleared it away.

  ‘So my aliases are just stage names!’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Be honest: isn’t that what you think of me?’

  I’d actually said that as a general observation, not directly about him. I’d never thought about the matter at any length. It was just that in the atmosphere of the lives we led, ancient and legendary names, like Prometheus, Antaeus and so on, didn’t sit well with the activists I’d encountered at the Soviet Writers’ Retreat. At most they might use aliases from opera or, if it had to be a classical reference, then perhaps Dionysus . . .

  I laid that out quite bluntly while insisting that my observations did not apply to him, he didn’t have to believe me but I wouldn’t waste my breath on telling lies, especially as I’d have to do it in Russian, which would be tiring. He was at liberty to believe me or not, that was up to him, but that was what I thought and it would be a good idea to put an end to the discussion.

  He was intelligent. He understood I meant what I said. He put his somewhat sallow hand on mine, and said, ‘I believe you.’

  ‘It’s like the titles of Soviet politicians,’ I said, following my train of thought. ‘They used to be called People’s Commissars, and in those days it sounded right, didn’t it? Then, for whatever reason, they were turned into ministers, like everywhere else. Nowadays if you tried calling them People’s Commissars it would sound so peculiar.’

  ‘If they wanted to be called People’s Commissars, they’d have to start by being the commissars of the people!’

  I pretended not to have heard and looked out through the window. An intermission was taking place at the cinema next to the metro station.

  My conversation with Antaeus lurched on clumsily, like a caged bird beating its wings in the café until one of us managed to open the door and let it fly off to the southeastern corner of Europe, which was home to us both. We started talking about things that had happened to us when Antaeus was a teenager and I was a child. He told me ab
out the severed heads of Greek partisans that our enemies had kept in refrigerators to show to people, and I told him what I’d heard about the severed heads of rebellious pashas that were displayed in a stone niche in Istanbul, to dampen separatist aspirations.

  ‘That’s the way large aggressor nations always behave,’ he said. ‘Scare the people! Horrify them! Terrorise them mercilessly! But, tell me, what was that niche called?’

  ‘Ibret-taşι: Let it be a lesson!’

  ‘Hm.’ He nodded, as a sardonic smile spread across his face. ‘You share a naval base with the Soviets, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes – Pasha Liman.’

  ‘Another Turkish name!’

  Conversation drifted back to the Albanian-Greek border, to rain, winter, hail and shame.

  ‘On the march towards Albania,’ he said, ‘we didn’t know whether you would defend us or not. There were rumours that Tito would hand over men from our side. But you stuck to your ancient besa . . . Besa,’ he whispered. ‘I know that Albanian word. I heard it in Athens, when I was a student. One day it will come into every language in the world.’ He stopped talking and swept his hand over the table, as if he were wiping it clean. ‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s drop the subject. Tomorrow I shall drink like a character from an opera!’

  I laughed heartily.

  ‘Tomorrow everyone is going to get drunk. We’re all at the end of our tethers . . .’

  ‘Hanging over us all is a black cloud of discouragement,’ he said, lowering his voice on the last words as if he already regretted having uttered them.

  A cloud of discouragement . . . I looked through the window at the people streaming into the cinema. Most were young, holding hands or arm in arm, and all of a sudden I was overcome with joy at the memory of Lida Snegina. We’d met again since her return from Crimea and we’d been back to Neskuchny Sad, as well as to the bar on the thirteenth floor of the Peking Hotel, which had a view over all of Moscow and our other old haunts. The following day, a Sunday, we were due to meet at Novoslobodskaya metro station, and suddenly, at the table where we’d just been talking about khandra, thinking of Lida, I was overcome by a wave of sentimental gratitude for the metro trains that ran day and night, for overground trains, ticket-sellers, taxis that were always there to help if you were running late, and for all the other means of transport that allowed us to see each other. The warmth I experienced was such that I felt a bit of an imposter at a table where we had talked of painful things. I was about to tell Antaeus that at six thirty the next day I had an appointment with a wonderful woman at a station, but just then, without looking at me and still staring at the street, he mumbled, ‘Raise your head, you faker!’

  I pretended I hadn’t heard and looked towards the metro station exit. I thought of Lida approaching our rendezvous the next day with the light step of any girl on her way to meet a boy, her eyes at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ground, all alone amid the passers-by, five minutes late, her steps rustling with anxiety and desire.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re perfectly right.’

  I looked at him, puzzled. I hadn’t grasped what he was talking about.

  ‘A character out of comic opera,’ he resumed, after a short pause. ‘And yet . . .’

  I still had no idea what he was talking about. ‘And yet what?’

  He stared at me intently. Ancient Athenian, I thought, why won’t you tell me what you know?

  ‘There’s going to be a meeting in Bucharest,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine who’s a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Party passed the information to me. You’re not in the loop?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No!’

  And it was true: I knew nothing about any meetings coming up in Bucharest or Warsaw. But if I’d heard about them I don’t think I’d have been whispering and making such a drama of it as he was. There were gatherings of that kind almost every month in one or other of the socialist capitals.

  ‘Apparently, here in Moscow as well,’ he went on, in the same near-whisper, ‘there’s going to be a conference alongside the festivities for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And it’s already a while since they appointed the central committee and the preparatory subcommittees – the political subcommittee, the economic and cultural subcommittee . . .’

  What subcommittees? Why did hearing about them make me shiver?

  ‘Ah! You don’t know anything. You didn’t know that Vukmanović-Tempo has just been in Moscow as well, did you?’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

  ‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’

  I was on the point of telling him what Maskiavicius had told me two days earlier about the alternately smiling and scowling faces of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung that had been shown on posters after their meeting a few weeks earlier in the airport at Beijing, but thought better of it. What’s the point? I thought. It’s probably just gossip.

  He seemed about to tell me something else, or maybe not. He paused, then said, ‘Tomorrow we shall drink.’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I repeated.

  While we were in the café we said the word ‘tomorrow’ many times in a particular way, almost with a kind of relief. Occasionally it seemed to me – and maybe to Antaeus as well – that we were piling into it, as into a dustbin, all our unexpressed thoughts, all our hopes, our flaws and our mutual suspicions.

  *

  Sometimes Sunday seemed so palpable to me that I almost believed it was embossed and in colour. I could even feel it moving and sliding away under our skis, beneath our feet. I felt as if in this endlessly white and undulating area it had always been Sunday, since the time of the tsars and even further back, that it had been Sunday since the year 1407 or 1007. How many times had Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and even savage Tuesdays come close? They’d prowled around silently in the hope of getting on to the plateau – to no avail. They eventually understood there was no easy way in for them and had discreetly withdrawn from an area where Sunday had reigned supreme for centuries.

  Grey izbas dotted the landscape beneath a uniform sky about which I had written a hendecasyllabic line some time before: The formless sky is like an idiot’s brain. In Russian translation it sounded even more grisly:

  Бeзфopмeннoe нeъo кaк мoзг тулици

  Yнылый дoждь зaливaeт улицы

  I’d been harshly criticised for it in the poetry seminar.

  The day was rushing away beneath my feet. Among the hummocks of snow, people with odd fixtures on their skis came and went, then dropped in at the Writers’ Club and reappeared with greater ease in their movements, having downed a dram without even taking off their skis.

  In fact, with a few exceptions, nobody knew how to ski properly, but none of us ever took our skis off. Taburokov even tried to go to the toilet with his on.

  They all looked drunk. But it wasn’t just the vodka. They were under the influence of the uninterrupted sky, the sadness of the horizontal beams of the izbas, and the snow, which made it so easy to laugh (Kurganov said that only in snow can people laugh one hundred per cent, especially if their feet are strapped into skis).

  We spent the whole day going round in unending circles, with the hissing sound of skiers lost on the piste, disappearing then reappearing from behind mounds of snow, like ungainly ghosts.

  At twilight the intoxication increased. But that was only the beginning. The tacit understanding was that everything would happen ‘at our place’, the hall of residence at Butyrsky Khutor.

  Night fell, and our noisy party set off for the railway station, full of expectation and foreboding. The floor of the carriage was soon dotted with clumps of snow. As we got on, passengers stared at us, their curiosity tinged with disapproval. There were women from the outlying regions with knapsacks in their laps, a girl and a boy with colourless hair, clenched fists and hooligans’ scars on their rough cheeks. The latest fashion among teenage
ruffians was to put blades between their knuckles so even the slightest blow would draw blood.

  The train juddered into motion. The familiar landscape slid backwards at an increasing rate. My idea of an everlasting Sunday vanished. No, at Peredelkino it was never Sunday or Thursday, it was only ever today. Eternally now. Sunday was what we had brought to it, like roast lamb to a picnic, like the savages had brought Friday to Robinson Crusoe’s island. We’d brought our Moscow Sunday so we could cope with it in peace, between the izbas and the sky, far from other human eyes.

  Now everything was over and dusk had fallen. Small suburban stations rushed past. Alcoholic fumes befuddled our sense of proportion. Outside in the snowy landscape we glimpsed people wrapped from head to toe in angora houpelandes, as if they had just walked out of a Russian folktale. A group of young people got on. With them were two girls, pink with cold, who gazed at everything as if they were under the influence. The Shotas stared at them.

  ‘Simpatiaga,’ one of the girls said, referring to a Shota.

  I’d never heard the suffix -iaga added to the Russian word for ‘nice’: it usually expressed disdain or referred to ugliness.

  Behind me I heard ‘Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ saying to Abdullakhanov: ‘You understand, Khrushchev spent three days in the country as Sholokhov’s house-guest . . .’

  Abdullakhanov clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Tut-tut. If anyone else had told me I wouldn’t have believed it, but since it comes from you, I’ll take you at your word.’

  ‘But it’s serious!’ Pogosian retorted. ‘I heard it on the radio.’

  ‘Ha! On the radio! On the radio!’ Abdullakhanov repeated, nodding so vigorously that it seemed he was banging his head against the window.

  Further down the carriage, Taburokov was standing still but was shaken, at regular intervals, by hiccups, which made him roll his eyes, as if he was watching an insect fluttering at the end of his nose.