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

Moscow’s Rizhsky Voksal almost timidly beneath early autumn rain. I put my face to the windowpane hoping to catch a first glimpse of the station’s lights. I sensed a muted illumination rising within me. At long last the concrete platform appeared and, from the first few feet, it looked empty. It slithered along the side of the carriage like a wet, grey snake. I guessed that Lida, to whom I’d sent a telegram a couple of days earlier, had not come to meet me. She has another boyfriend: that was my first thought. No, was the second. She’d been there a while and was waiting for the train to come to a halt before showing herself. She’s got another boy— Stop it! I remembered that the engine’s whistle had announced our arrival: the locomotive had been first into the station and had seen what was happening on the platform before anyone else.
    ‘Beware the summer!’ a fellow student had said to me just before we parted at the start of the holidays. ‘It has a powerful hold over Russian girls . . .’
    To illustrate his own summer failures, he told me several stories in which stations featured alongside tickets bearing unlucky numbers.
    Another boyfriend. Or an abortion . . . I vaguely remembered that last time she’d asked me to be careful (‘Just this time, only this time!’) but I hadn’t listened.
    I stepped down onto the platform with my suitcase. Here and there, bodies entwined, with conjoined heads that resembled oversized seashells. They, too, have spent the summer apart, I thought, but they haven’t forgotten each other.
    I plunged into a taxi on the square outside the station and blurted out the address I wanted – Butyrsky Khutor, the Gorky Institute’s student housing block – to the back of the aged driver’s neck. He was wearing a fur hat.

    Unlike the Institute’s old two-storey house on Tverskoy Boulevard, the residential hall for undergraduate and graduate students at Butyrsky Khutor was a seven-floor hulk in off-white brick that had already lost its colour, like most recent constructions. Not knowing why, but with some apprehension, I leaned forward so I would spot it in the distance among the other buildings. My face was pressed to the window when its outline emerged and I suddenly became aware of my own anxiety. The block was almost entirely dark. I had expected to see lights on in the windows, but only one was lit, on the sixth or seventh floor, and its faint gleam underscored the air of abandonment the building gave off. I told myself that nobody was back yet from their vacation.
    I settled up with the cab driver, got out and walked towards the door, looking up, as if to make doubly sure that the building really was empty. All the floors were dark, but the fourth, the women’s floor, seemed particularly so.
    I stopped at the porter’s lodge on the ground floor. It struck me that Auntie Katya wasn’t as welcoming as usual. She seemed to be searching for something in her desk drawer and it crossed my mind that a telegram, bearing bad news, might have come for me from Albania. But in her eyes, through the thick spectacle lenses, I saw not a glimmer of sympathy.
    ‘You, my boy, and your friend, the other one from Albania,’ she said, ‘you’re to report to the police.’
    I frowned. I was about to ask her why when I saw in her face the same question: it had cancelled out her usual bonhomie. ‘Why?’ I asked all the same.

    Lida’s abortion flashed through my mind.
    ‘I don’t know. I heard them say something about your ID documents.’ She pronounced dokumenty with the stress on the second syllable, like all uneducated Russians.
    Through her circular glasses her eyes seemed to be asking: So what did you and he get up to over the summer?
    ‘My papers are all in order,’ I said. ‘And my friend has already gone back to Albania.’
    She shrugged her shoulders and returned to scrabbling in her desk drawer. I was expecting her to hand over a packet of letters or newspapers from