Free Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

lost my place in the typescript. I hurriedly leafed through the rest of the work and only stopped on the very last sheet to read the line where the text broke off:
Outside it was snowing. Wind shovelled the snow everywhere. It was falling more and more thickly, more densely, as if in pursuit of something, and Yuri Andreyevich looked out of the window at it as if it wasn’t snow but . . .
    What is this? I wondered. I had thought at first it might have been left behind by whoever had been drinking in the room, but as I recalled the phrase about Dostoyevsky and The Communist Manifesto it struck me it might be a forbidden work circulating from hand to hand. Such things had become quite common in recent times. Three months before, late one night, or maybe just before dawn, Maskiavicius had knocked on my door – or, rather, collapsed in front of it in a state of complete inebriation – and when I opened it he had shoved a handful of typescript sheets towards me and slurred, ‘Take this and read what he said, this guy, that’s right, it’s Dante Tvardovsky, oops, I mean Marguerite, sorry, I meant to say Aleksandr Alighieri . . .’ It had taken me all of fifteen minutes to work out that the pages contained a banned poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky called ‘Vasily Tyorkin in the Other World’.
    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