Twilight of the Eastern Gods. Ismail Kadare

the squalor of his court, with all its princes and princesses, the highnesses’ aunts and uncles, and the cohorts of courtiers, whose grotesque portraits I had so often seen in old magazines when I was doing research for my dissertation in the National Library. But it was too late to start a conversation of that kind, so I said nothing.

      Maybe it was my not saying anything, or the way my arm round her shoulders stiffened, that made me think she’d read my thoughts, because she suddenly whispered: ‘Perhaps it’s not his villa anyway.’

      ‘Could be.’ I gave a deep sigh. I was worn out by this Pyrrhic victory, because I was angry with the ex-king – very angry, in fact – for having loomed up out of the past to spoil my night out. Then it occurred to me that no evening is ever entirely safe, and you can never know in advance from which forgotten depths the attack will come. But then I thought that it was perhaps no coincidence that the ex-king’s ghost had cropped up when I’d been depressed, and in this place, on deserted dunes where the dead and the living team up in pairs to ride on the horses of legend.

      ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, after a protracted silence.

      I told her, and she leaned forward to trace my initials with her finger on the smooth wet sand.

      I don’t know why but my mind turned to the initials of the fat woman, and then to the length of the evening that had now become a whole night, just as a girl turns into a woman. In a minute we would stand up and leave to walk in the darkness alongside the rail tracks so we wouldn’t get lost. Then I imagined I would walk her back to her villa, that I would kiss her and that she would slip away without even saying goodnight, and that I wouldn’t take offence since I knew that was what local girls usually did after the first kiss. Tomorrow she’d come back to where we would be playing ping-pong and still be arguing over the score, and then we would go for a walk at sunset, along the waterline, exactly when the shutter-fiends would be focusing their cameras to catch it. We would slowly turn into black-and-white silhouettes and the shallow water would bounce our image back, like a catapult, to annoy people looking in frozen solitude at the far horizon. Then, like most of the silhouettes that sauntered along the shore in the evening, we would enter a dark space inside unknown cameras, and, later, when the films came to be developed, we would re-emerge from the Nordic dusk in the snapshots of strangers, not one of whom would know who we were or what we’d been doing there.

      ‘It’s very late,’ she said. ‘We ought to get back.’

      Yes, we really should. We stood up without a word and moved off in the direction we had come from, passing in front of silent front doors with metal knockers shaped like human hands. For some reason I always imagined that crimes must be committed behind doors with that kind of knocker or behind the railings that enclosed silent gardens. At this time of night there were no trains. She said we would have to go as far as the main road to find a taxi or a passing car. We got to the highway, but there was not much traffic and, as usually happens in such circumstances, none of the vehicles that stopped was going in our direction. At long last an aged couple on their way home from a silver-wedding celebration gave us a lift to one of the stations – I had read its name on bottles of nail-varnish and shampoo. From there, we walked.

      We got back to Dubulti before daybreak. Our conversation had become intermittent perhaps because our minds were also losing clarity, as if our thoughts had been transported into the ionosphere. I escorted my companion to her door, and what I had expected came to pass. As I moved off I turned back once more and saw a hazy glow coming from one of the villa’s windows, giving it a platinum sheen. I recalled the desire to scream that my comrade had spoken of last winter in Yalta, and it occurred to me that the similarity of the sounds in platinum and planet was not entirely coincidental. I’d had direct confirmation of that when my companion had started running, just as Lida had run away in Neglinnaya Street, with the same strange and almost astral aura over her head.

      I’ll tell you my ballad, too, as soon as I’m back in Moscow, I thought, as I crossed the formal gardens on my way back to the guesthouse. I felt as if the shape and weight of my limbs had altered, as if I was walking on the moon. As I went past the 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.