Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online Page A

dew-drenched ping-pong table, with its two bats casually abandoned on it after the last game, I reflected that a man can encounter more marvels in a single night than his anthropoid forebears got to see in tens of thousands of years of evolution. I went past the fountain with the dolphin sculptures, where I should have slain Yermilov long ago. Now I was walking past the chalets. All were dark and silent, and I had an urge to shout, ‘Wake up, Shakespeares of the Revolution!’ I was just going past the ‘Swedish House’, where the most eminent writers were staying, when the sound of coughing broke the lonely silence. I stood still. Those were old lungs coughing: a cough with a procession of croaks and sighs in its wake.
    As I followed the path that led to my chalet I turned one last time and gazed on the unending vista of dunes that a thin northern light was beginning to whiten. Something would not let me take my eyes off the scene. Somewhere out there lay strewn the bones of the horses on whose backs we had ridden just a few hours before in the company of the dead. What a long night that was! I thought, and, half asleep, I wended my way to bed.

CHAPTER TWO
    Our train came into Moscow in the twilight. It was a very long one. Throughout the day’s journey, sunshine had alternated with heavy showers, and I imagined that some of the carriages were gleaming in the sun’s last rays while others were still wet with rain. The front must now be in the bad-weather zone because I could see raindrops banging against the windows. But this time the train did not emerge into sunshine. Once we had got through the stormy patch, it seemed that night had fallen, dispelling the light of day. On the empty flat lands beyond the blackened panes, twilight and darkness fought it out in silence. The struggle was brief – the bad weather surely helped – and it was soon obvious that all along the track and well beyond it everything had now succumbed to night.
    Two or three times I thought we were already in Moscow but it was the twinkling lights of outlying suburbs that tangled in my head until I shook myself free of daydreams.
    Over the summer I had sometimes dreamed of Moscow: I was alighting in the capital but had lost my bearings and could not find the city centre. I would stop on a pavement; the traffic lights were out of order, and electric trolleybuses were gliding past, as great stags do in fairy tales. At Yalta, too, as in Riga, I had felt homesick for the city, and I’d gone to the rest-house library to hunt out a contemporary novel with detailed descriptions of the city where I had once lived and where I expected to spend a further period of my life. But the libraries of Yalta and Dubulti had left me wanting. Not a single Soviet novel contained anything like an exact description of Moscow. Even characters who lived there or were visiting always remained in some imaginary street, as I did in my dreams, and almost never turned into Gorky Street, Tverskoy Boulevard, Okhotny Ryad, or the environs of the Metropole Hotel, as if they were frightened of the city centre. And if they did wander into it they seemed stunned: they heard nothing and saw nothing – or, rather, they had eyes and ears only for the Kremlin and its bells. They would flee the centre, as if in panic, and I could feel their terror in the rhythm of the prose, which calmed only when the author took us away from Moscow, perhaps to his remote collective farm where he could squat cross-legged on the floor and describe in minute detail each of the alleyways and squares of his village.
    I had tried without success to work out the relationship between the dull anxiety I felt in my dreams about Moscow and the way Soviet writers steered clear of the capital, as if they were sending themselves into exile.
    The lights outside the windows were dancing less frantically and I guessed the train had slowed. With a whistle that seemed to run parallel to the tracks, it was pulling into