Free Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismaíl Kadaré

coloured soap bubbles blown by some gigantic mouth. Slavic myths tell of a terrifying head all alone in the middle of the steppe that puffs out its cheeks to blow the great wind that raises the dust-storm. That wind is so strong that no rider who dares to come before it – even if he keeps as far away as the horizon – can stay on his horse. Every time I read anything about that head I tingled with fright, despite the absence of bloodshed and mystery. But perhaps that was exactly what made me shiver: a fall caused by wind and earth in a vast empty flatness with only that head rising from it. ‘It would be better not to have myths like that!’ Maskiavicius sometimes remarked. ‘It really does belong to steppe and dust. Stunted Slavic divinities . . . But you Balkan folk have legends of a different class – they’re almost as good as Lithuanian folklore! But what’s the use? Socialist realism forbids us to write about them.’ That was what Maskiavicius used to say, but you couldn’t rely on him. He changed his opinions as often as his shirts.
    I crossed the square and walked along the pavement outside GUM, as far as the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, raised on a plinth originally used as an executioner’s block. From that corner the Kremlin walls looked even more peaceful. A muddled voice in my head told me that castles weren’t more or less Macbethical or Buddhistical solely by virtue of the grey or red colouring of their walls or their more or less mysterious shapes, but from the fret-work-like appearance of their turrets. The same voice also told me that, behind its casual ruddy face, this half-European and half-Asiatic castle soon would, or maybe already did, contain a great mystery. The block where heads had been severed was still there, not far from the walls, like a moon hovering over the horizon.
    I suddenly remembered the police summons that Auntie Katya had handed me, then almost told myself aloud that I was exhausted and ought to get back to the hall of residence.
    It was still just as empty and dark as it had been when I had gone out, and I wondered where I could go to kill time that night, even for an hour: to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s or Chinese Ping’s? I didn’t really want to be with either of them and felt I would prefer to be alone in my room. I began climbing towards the sixth floor. I recalled the monastic silence of the corridors in the Writers’ Residence in Yalta, with Ladonshchikov’s furtive footfalls on the carpeted floor, and Valentin, Paustovsky’s driver, who told us one day, between two hiccups, his eyes glazed from drink, that he was being tormented by the writer’s wife, a harridan who was wrecking his life, and that if he was still driving that car it was out of loyalty to Konstantin Paustovsky: if it hadn’t been for him he wouldn’t have stayed a minute longer in the job – he’d rather drive a pig lorry, a manure truck or a hearse than set eyes on that woman’s snout again. But there was nothing Konstantin could do about it, he went on, when he had calmed down. She had been a present to Paustovsky from that carrot-haired pig called Arbuzov – that guy who wrote plays with which he, Valentin, wouldn’t deign to wipe his arse, seeing as Arbuzov could never rise above Konstantin Georgevich, and had failed to bring down Paustovsky with insults and had not managed to poison him or have him deported or infect him with a contagious disease. The worst Arbuzov could do to Paustovsky was to palm off his own ghastly wife on him. When he got to that point in his tale Valentin usually looked round to see if there was still any benighted soul who did not know that Paustovsky’s current wife had previously been married to Arbuzov. He had landed him with the woman, Valentin would go on, once he had made certain everyone was in the know, and ruined his life, because otherwise Konstantin Georgevich, not that fuckwit Fedin, would be president of the Writers’ Union, and Valentin would