‘We don’t have any tickets,’ I said.
‘That’s hardly a worry! At this time of night there’s no ticket inspector.’
I began to whistle. She smiled at me. We were staring at each other, and had she not also glanced at the station names we would have missed ours. Suddenly she clapped her hands and shouted a name. The train stopped and we jumped out. A few seconds later it moved off again, rattling away into the black night. Silence fell once more on the deserted platform where we stood alone.
‘So, we did get on the right train, after all,’ she said, pointing to the sign with the station’s name.
‘Makes no difference to me!’ I said. That’s true, I thought. Evenings at the residence are so mortally dull that the further away I can get, the happier I shall be.
‘It does to me,’ she retorted. ‘I want to see your king’s villa.’
‘How are we going to find it?’ I asked
‘I don’t know. But I think we’ll manage.’
We crossed the tracks and walked towards the beach. Again she put her arm in mine and I felt the weight of her body. The beach was entirely empty. Through the darkness you could just make out the gloomy outlines of the buildings on the seafront. There were no lights on anywhere. All you could hear was the swell of the sea, which made it feel even lonelier.
We passed the locked gates and shuttered windows of silent villas, and from time to time she wondered which might have been the royal residence.
‘Perhaps it’s this one,’ she said. ‘It’s more ornate and luxurious than the others.’
‘Could be,’ I replied. It was a large two-storey house set in a formal garden behind iron railings. ‘Yes, perhaps it is,’ I added. ‘He was very rich and spared no expense.’
‘Shall we have a rest?’ she suggested.
We sat down on the stone steps, and as she’d said she was cold, I allowed my arm to wrap itself around her shoulders. I was cold too. There was a breeze coming in from the sea and strands of her hair, which were weighed down by the damp of the night, like copper filaments, occasionally brushed my face.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, impulsively using the more intimate Ú˚ form of the verb. Neither of us was a native Russian speaker, and the complex rules on how to say ‘you’ caught us out occasionally.
I shrugged. To be honest, there was nothing in my brain that could have been called a thought. At first I was tempted to say, ‘I’m thinking of you,’ but it seemed too banal.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘You’re thinking that maybe your king sat on these steps, that maybe he looked out at the sea just as we’re doing now, and that you are perhaps the only Albanian to have come here since he did.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said.
‘Yes, you are!’ she insisted.
‘I really am not!’
‘You don’t want to admit it, out of pride.’
‘Frankly, no,’ I said once more, wearily. ‘It makes no difference to me whether or not he sat on these steps. Far from stirring my imagination, as you think it does, the very idea—’
‘Then you must be completely devoid of imagination!’
‘Perhaps I am.’
‘Please forgive me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
We said nothing for several minutes. Now and again I could feel her icy hair on my cheek. The arm I had round her shoulder had gone numb. It was like one of those heavy, damp branches blown down by the wind during the night that you find lying outside the house in the morning.
So we’ll have to talk about the ex-king, I thought. From the moment the old interloper had been mentioned that evening I’d avoided saying anything about him, but I knew that I could put it off no longer.
I took a deep breath, feeling tired even before I began. I intended to tell her about Albania and especially its former poverty, which we’d learned about at school, where the monarch was discussed even less positively than the sultans, Nero or the tsars. I told her more or less that the Albanians who had given birth to those magnificent legends (I must have told her about the man walled into the bridge by then) were so poor that although most of them lived near the sea they had never seen it when that man (I waved at the iron railings) had been buying himself lavish properties abroad and running around with tarts on foreign beaches. I went on to tell her that Albanians were then so destitute that in some parts of the country the highlanders owned no more than a single piece of cloth they bound around their heads, like a turban; it was a shroud that they carried with them at all times so that if they happened to be killed on the road a passer-by could give them a proper burial.
I felt her fingers running up the back of my neck, as if she was searching for a shroud, and shivered.
‘Had you ever heard that before?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I knew that Albania was a land of exquisite beauty but what you’ve just told me is so sad.’
She carried on running her fingers through my hair, above the nape of my neck, and after a pause she added: ‘You know what? Maybe you’re right where kings are concerned, but you still have to let your imagination roam sometimes . . . Indulge in a bit of fantasy. Most books nowadays are so boring, with their permanently smiling and always rugged heroes. Don’t you think?’
I didn’t know what to say. She was quite possibly right, but all the same I tried to remonstrate with her, saying that the Revolution had had its own beauty, such as the three Latvian Guards we’d met a couple of hours earlier, or Lenin, who had made all the kings, tsars, khans, emirs, emperors, sultans, caliphs and popes look like pygmies, like . . .
I’d let myself get carried away by the tidal wave of Lenin-worship. Encomia of that sort were common. A fellow student had told me that it was the safest way yet found to take Stalin down a notch. The two were portrayed as radically different, almost as if they had been enemies; there were even hints that Lenin had been persecuted by his successor, but that everything would be brought into the open at the right time . . .
‘Yes, sure, OK,’ she acknowledged, sounding tired, ’but most contemporary books about the Revolution and about Lenin are so dry and . . . I can’t find the right word.’
I realised it would not be easy to contradict her.
‘Perhaps it’s because Shakespeare wrote about kings,’ I blurted out, without thinking. Indeed, I pondered, Shakespeare wrote about kings, but the people who write about the Revolution . . . In my mind I saw in the long procession of all those mediocre writers, eyes lit with envy (some were still jealous of Mayakovsky), who had made fools of themselves in the view of the younger generation by writing so badly about the Revolution. I could see the crimson face of Vladimir Yermilov, whom I found odious because I knew he was one of those responsible for Mayakovsky’s suicide. Every time I saw him, with his ugly snout, having lunch in the dining room at the writers’ retreat I was astounded that the assembled company didn’t charge at him, beat him up, lynch him, drag him out to the road, then to the dunes and all the way to the dolphin fountain. Once in a while I said to myself that the absence of an event of that sort must mean that something was out of kilter in the house, completely out of true.
‘So