Free Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

be driving not Paustovsky’s blue Volga saloon but a luxury Zim limousine and would be getting three hundred roubles a month more in wages.
    I don’t know why I kept going over Valentin’s monologues. I tried to turn my mind to other things but curiously it kept coming back to Valentin. Was it because I had previously heard those soliloquies in other empty corridors on nights that were just as boring and far away from everybody else? I should have got out of the corridor if I wanted to silence the whispering inside me. Run away, yes – but where to? I no longer felt like shutting myself away in my room. I had Lida’s voice on one of my tapes. She lay there as if she were in a long, magical coffin, without body or hair, just her voice. No! Keep me away from that tape recorder. And suddenly, as my whole being sought a place to escape and forget, I remembered the left wing of the huge building. It was almost always empty and served as a reservoir of rooms that might be allocated to teachers from the Gorky Institute, or to house guests of the Writers’ Union, or as temporary digs for writers who had walked out on their wives and didn’t know where else to go. Some evenings when I’d had a bit to drink I used to enjoy visiting that deserted wing. I had a key to one of the empty apartments. In a way it was my second home, a second silent, secret abode. ‘Want to come to my dacha ?’ I once asked Lida Snegina, during a lively party, and dragged her by the hand into the dark corridors of the left wing. She was fascinated by that uninhabited suite on whose walls and ceilings the distant headlights of cars left translucent streaks, like those of garden snails.
    Let loneliness cure loneliness, I thought, as I went through my pockets looking for the key. Once I had found it I trekked over to the left wing. The floorboards creaked softly beneath my feet. I found the door, opened it and went inside. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The walls hadn’t changed, the floral paper with its green background reminding me of funerals. I went into one of the rooms and stood there for a minute, my hands in my pockets, as if I had frozen. I went to the door to the other room in the suite, but as soon as I had turned on the light, I really did freeze: someone had sullied my sanctuary. I was dumbfounded. My eyes lighted on a corner of the room where there lay an empty bottle, a tin of food, and an object I could not make out. I stepped two paces forward and noticed that next to the bottle there was a torn piece of wrapping paper that must have been used for something greasy. Further on lay a few sheets of paper. I bent down. It was typescript, with closely spaced lines. Nothing else. It looked as if the intruder had come here to drink vodka and read the pages, which perhaps he hadn’t liked because he had left them behind with the remnants of his meal. For a second I thought he was going to come back, jerk open the door and take me by surprise. But the leftovers in the tin had dried out. I knelt down to gather up the typed sheets. There must have been two or three hundred. At first glance the characteristic lay-out of Russian dialogue told me I was holding a literary work. The beginning – possibly the first half (with the title page, obviously) – was missing. The page numbering went from 304 to 514. I was about to put the script back on the floor, but my eyes automatically began to run across the top sheet, which was the opening of a Chapter 31:
‘Zhivago, Zhivago,’ Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his coach, to which they had just passed. ‘From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow . . .’
    I jumped forty or forty-five pages and landed on this sentence:
He analyses and interprets Dostoevsky’s Possessed and The Communist Manifesto with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me . . .
    I would have read on, but a handful of pages slipped from my grasp, and as I bent down to gather them, I