As with all things beyond understanding, this metamorphosis possessed a mysterious beauty. A world sensation! Newspaper headlines. General stupefaction. The horror and grandeur of breaking off. I was spread out among them, as if I’d been scattered by a gale. A continuous burning tightness afflicted my throat. Then, as in a dream of flying, I thought I could see the black earth laid out beneath me, with a few chrome-ore freight wagons of the kind I used to notice in the goods station at Durrës on Sundays when I went to the beach with friends, alongside the barrels of bitumen that would sometimes be there when there’d been a hold-up in loading the ships, stacked in terrifying funereal mounds.
None of that did much to calm me, though I maintained an outward icy demeanour. The events of 1956 in Hungary. The Party Conference in Tirana that had taken place then, too, at which, for the first time, the Soviets had been spoken of unkindly . . .
‘Now pull yourself together!’ Maskiavicius said.
We would have to put up with economic sanctions, maybe a blockade or something worse. The legendary Slavic head would puff out his cheeks to raise a truly hellish wind that would blow all the way to Albania.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Maskiavicius mumbled, standing beside me.
The dreadful round face that seemed to have been born from the steppe merged in my mind with Khrushchev’s.
‘Name, first name, and date of birth,’ a nurse said.
I was standing in front of a table laden with vials and lancets. All around, a constant hubbub of people coming and going. Maskiavicius had vanished.
‘Take off your coat and jacket, please,’ said the nurse. ‘Roll up your shirt sleeve as far as you can.’
Out of the corner of my eye I watched her white fingers rub my upper arm with a cotton swab dipped in medicinal alcohol. Then they gripped a blood lancet and proceeded to make pricks in my skin with as much care as if they were tracing out an ancient pattern.
It occurred to me that the princess’s coffin must have been decorated with really strange designs to have cast such a spell on the painter.
At the site of the butchery I saw blood about to spurt. Then the young woman’s slender fingers placed a patch of damp gauze over the pattern.
‘Don’t roll down your sleeve until the bandage is dry,’ she said.
*
On my way back to the Institute I couldn’t stop turning over in my mind the brief conversation I’d had with Maskiavicius. Posters advising the people of Moscow to get vaccinated were plastered everywhere. Passers-by gathered in groups to read them line by line, nodding or chatting with each other. I stopped a few times at such gatherings in the absurd hope that someone would mention the particularly sunny relations with India and consequently the cooling of friendship with . . . with a certain country.
Antaeus wasn’t at the residence. Apart from him, I didn’t know anyone I could quiz openly on the subject so I put my overcoat back on and went out again. It was cold. With my mind a blank, I went up Gorky Street on the right-hand side. There, too, the smallpox announcements were posted everywhere. I glanced at them now and again as if I hoped to find something else written on them. Something other than the fact that a painter had brought a dreadful sickness with him on the plane from India.
What means had Vukmanović-Tempo used to get to Moscow, then?
The imposing edifice of the Hotel Moskva stood before me on the opposite side of the street. I scurried over the road and plunged into the foyer. It was completely quiet. In one corner, on the right, there was a stall selling foreign newspapers, particularly from the people’s democracies and Western Communist parties.
‘Have you got Zëri i Popullit?’ I asked the salesgirl. ‘From Albania,’ I added, after a pause, to make myself clear.
When she held it out to me, I almost snatched it from her hand. I unfolded it in haste, scanning the headlines, the top lines first, then the middle ones, then the less prominent columns. Not a sign.
‘Have you any back issues?’
She gave me a pile and I rifled through them at the same feverish speed. Still nothing.
I bought a dozen newspapers in a variety of languages and was about to sit down in an easy chair to go through them when I noticed that the salesgirl was looking at me suspiciously. I was irritated and went out. Although my fingers were freezing, I started to unfold the papers, sticking initially to making sense of the headlines on the front pages. Two or three people turned to stare at me with curiosity. I went back to the top of the pile. To begin with I just glanced at the front page of each, then at the back page, and then I went through the headlines on the inside pages, but nowhere did I see mention of Albania. How could such a thing have come to pass? I almost shouted. The thousands and millions of Roman and Cyrillic characters, weighing down both sides of my overcoat, like the lead type they were printed from, were deaf and blind. The newspapers I’d bought might as well have been in hieroglyphics. They taught me nothing.
Wandering around like a lost soul, I ended up in Red Square. Yet more posters were stuck on the front windows of the GUM department store. Dozens of them. Lenin’s Mausoleum was closed. Perhaps it was the day when they aired it. Maybe it was closed because of the smallpox epidemic. Or perhaps they were taking measures to stop Lenin catching the disease.
A whirl of crazy ideas churned through my mind. All of a sudden I remembered that Alla Grachova had invited me to lunch the next day at her parents’ dacha. Amid the treacherous drabness Alla instantly appeared to me as an utterly delightful being.
Hundreds of people were pouring out of GUM, burdened not only by their everyday worries but also by the new anxiety from India. The microbe was present among them. It had smuggled itself unseen on who knew which handkerchief, lips or hair, and now it was turning the country upside down, as no visiting prime minister, president or emperor had ever done before. Two or three days previously, when it was still on its way, the city was at peace – as it had been a few weeks earlier when Vukmanović-Tempo had still been en route. It was the calm of yesterday and the day before when those innumerable bundles of deaf and blind newspapers had come into town.
I had wandered to the site where public executions were held in the old days. I tried to work out which side the prisoner had come from and where the executioner’s ladder had been. There would have been a special roll of the drums. The sentence would have been solemnly recited with a declamatory tremolo, then the broad, half-Asiatic, half-European blade would have fallen.
I put up the collar of my overcoat against the wind blowing in from the Moskva River and began to walk back to Okhotny Ryad.
Sunday lunch at Alla Grachova’s parents’ dacha began in good humour but ended almost in tears. Alla told me that was usual in her family when vodka was on the table. Apart from her mother, her grandmother and her younger sister, Olya, there was also the uncle she had told me about, as well as two couples who were old friends. At the start we talked about smallpox; they presumed that quarantine would be imposed in due course. Alla’s uncle, a ruddy, fat-faced man, bald and overweight, argued that there would be no quarantine, above all because it would make a bad impression on the political front. As he spoke he looked at me askance, as if I was among the supporters of quarantine.
‘If it had been up to me,’ he said, ‘I’d have kept quiet about this disease. It’s the sort of thing that’s like manna from Heaven for our enemies. You’ll see – they’ll trumpet it all over the world, as if they’ve never had outbreaks of smallpox or any other calamity. Only they’re clever, they are. They don’t wash their dirty linen in public, but they keep their eyes on ours.’
He kept a sideways eye on me all the time he was holding forth. It was clear that at this table I stood for all that was foreign and hostile, from Western Europe to Standard Oil and the decadent bourgeoisie. Alla, who was surely well aware of his dislike of foreigners, kept contradicting him, and blushed with satisfaction every time when, in defending his position with excessive passion, he made some egregious b
lunder. When the others burst out laughing, Alla, who was sitting next to me, took the opportunity to whisper in my ear, ‘I told you he was a right old Slavophile!’
‘There’s a real lack of gratitude towards the Soviet Union,’ the uncle went on sourly. ‘We spilled our blood for the peoples of Europe, we gave them the great gift of freedom, and they don’t even bother to thank us!’
He looked as though he was staring at the piece of bread in front of me and I automatically drew my hand back from it.
Some of those round the table were paying attention to him, while others chatted to each other sotto voce.
‘There is only one Communist Party in the world,’ he resumed, without looking at me. ‘One, not ten. There’s a mother party and daughter parties, and people who say differently . . .’
I struggled to swallow the piece of meat that was in my mouth. Does he know something? I wondered.
Alla interrupted, ‘Are there uncle parties as well?’
He glanced at her, disapproving. ‘Stop it, Alla,’ he grunted.
But his reproach had no effect on her. As she knew her uncle was really out to get at me, she seemed happy to have an opportunity to support me in an environment where I was entirely on my own, showing the warmth and sweetness of her nature.
In the course of the meal, despite Alla’s interventions, her uncle got on my nerves. I hadn’t yet opened my mouth, although I’d long been itching to retaliate. An opportunity arose, or so I thought, when someone alluded to Khrushchev.
‘I’ve noticed that in recent weeks he’s been referred to in the papers by pet names, like Nikitushka, Nikitinka, or Nikituchnok,’ I said, in an excruciating accent, with the stress on all the wrong syllables. ‘I know it’s a Russian folk tradition, but don’t you think it makes him sound a bit silly?’
While I was speaking the uncle stared hard at me, struggling to guess whether I was making fun of him or not. When I’d finished, he replied, ‘Contrary to the impression some people may have, the pet names show the people’s affection for our Nikita Sergeyevich. Got that?’ The beer glass he was holding was jumping around. ‘Have you got that, molodoy chelovek, young man?’ he repeated. ‘Nobody would have thought of calling Stalin “Joseph”, let alone “Yossifuchka”!’
There was evil in his eyes.
‘Nikitushka, Nikitinka . . . That’s how drunks talk,’ said Alla.
I expected him to pounce on his niece, but all he did was look at her disapprovingly again. Apparently all his anger was being saved up for me.
He kept on coming out with unpleasant, double-edged observations, and I wavered between two reactions: to get up from the table and invent a pretext – a headache, for example – for taking my leave; or just to push off without a word of explanation. I would surely have taken the second option had not Alla’s grandmother, who was, I thought, the only person present, apart from Alla, to have realised that I was the sole target of the old soak’s bilious drivel, spat at him through clenched teeth, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Andrey Timofeyich!’
The others didn’t notice anything and carried on chatting among themselves. A young widow from a neighbouring dacha even seemed about to break into song. She tried out a few notes at low volume a couple of times, but didn’t dare either to proceed or to give up, like a swimmer hovering at the lakeside.
Alla said no more. She was on the verge of tears, staring scornfully at her uncle who continued relieving himself of spiteful remarks, but she had turned away from me. As for myself, I was trying to keep my temper by imagining those parts of Alla’s body that especially attracted me: I was pretty sure that later on, when we were alone together, she would be more than usually comforting to compensate for her uncle’s bile.
That was when something unexpected happened. The young widow from the nearby dacha, who had seemed about to burst into song, burst into tears instead. But it wasn’t unalloyed weeping: it contained all the ingredients of the song she’d been ready to sing, including the words, which you could just about make out between her sobs.
‘Come on, Rosa, pull yourself together,’ two or three people urged, though their voices were also near to breaking.
Alla explained later that it happened quite often at her home. Most of the dachas surrounding her mother’s were allocated to the families of airmen who had been shot down during the defence of Moscow. It took almost nothing to turn a lunch party into a funeral wake. Her father had also been killed at the start of the German air raids on Moscow.
‘Nina, do you remember when they called them out on red alert that night?’ the young widow said, to Alla’s mother. ‘They’d just got home from a mission, but they had to go back on duty all the same. I had a sudden dark premonition . . .’
All of the women, those who were still widows and those who had remarried, began to reminisce about their long evenings and nights of waiting, their grim forebodings and their brief conversations over the garden fence.
Alla’s father’s plane had been surrounded by a squadron of Junkers and disappeared.
‘Poor boy,’ Alla’s grandmother repeated, from time to time. ‘Those vultures tore him to pieces. In the dark, all alone, up there, in the sky . . .’
All alone, in the dark . . . Those words hid something. They were like a bolted door in my way. I combed through my mind seeking desperately to resuscitate a memory. All aloooone, in the daaaark.
Suddenly it came to me. It was an old song someone had sung long ago at a wedding I’d attended:
I set out for Ioannina
In the dark, on my oooown
Just me and black Haxhi
In the dark, on my oooown
Every time I heard the words I heard them differently. Sometimes I thought it was ‘just me and arabaxhi [the coachman]’ and at other times it seemed more like ‘just me and arap Haxhi [black Haxhi]’, which I found even more sinister.
I shuddered. The thick of night, the road and black Haxhi, the servant. I couldn’t remember the rest. I think the traveller was attacked by highwaymen:
They cut me up with their knives
In the dark, on my oooown
I thought there could not be a sadder song about loneliness in the whole wide world.
‘Nina, do you remember September the twelfth?’ said the woman sitting next to her.
Wide-eyed and attentive, Alla’s uncle was listening to the women’s lively talk. The other men had taken on a look that was half guilty and half annoyed, presumably because it was not particularly pleasant for them to hear their wives talking with so much feeling about their first husbands.
As people were no longer paying any attention to us, Alla and I took the opportunity to slip away. Olya, Alla’s younger sister, stuck to our heels.
‘We’ll all go for a walk in the forest together,’ Alla told her. ‘Only you’re going to leave us alone for a minute. We’ve got something else to do first . . .’
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 dachas 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 gr
ave 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 izbas, 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 izbas 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.
Twilight of the Eastern Gods Page 14