Twilight of the Eastern Gods. Ismail Kadare
full of yourself, aren’t you?’ she riposted.
Oh dear! I thought. Now she thinks I’m jealous of the old king. To be honest, I had felt slightly jarred when her eyes, which had been grey and serious up to that point, had lit up at the mention of the former sovereign. I tried to hide my feelings from her by addressing myself mainly to the three veterans: ‘He must have come here after he fled. He had a lot of enemies and was very cautious. Maybe he thought this was far enough away from Albania.’
‘Oh, yes, it is a long way,’ one man said.
If only this conversation were over, I thought. We raised our glasses and toasted each of us in turn, starting with my girlfriend. They were tipsy. They said they would like to see us dance, and as we moved around the floor they watched us with kindly eyes and smiled at us from time to time.
My girlfriend realised how late it was and said we should leave. We had a last drink with the three Latvians. Then, as we were preparing to go the veterans put their heads together and, apparently in my honour, began to sing very softly ‘Avanti popolo’. There was a lot of noise, and they were singing softly in their slightly hoarse baritone voices. Maybe they thought it was an Albanian song, or perhaps they knew it was Italian but sang it anyway, because I came from a faraway country next door to where the song was from, or perhaps it was the only foreign song they knew and they were singing it simply because I was a foreigner. I refrained from filling them in, and didn’t ask them to explain, because none of it mattered, but I stayed to listen to the familiar tune and lyrics, which they mangled, except for the word rivoluzione, which they transformed into revolutiones, with the typically Latvian -es ending.
We bade them farewell and left. It was rather cool outside. In the dark the shoreline was barely visible. My companion put her arm in mine and we set off in a random direction, as before, except our pace was slower now and the crunching of the sand seemed louder in the deeper silence all around. We walked on without speaking, and it occurred to me that we had now turned into one of the silhouettes that at the writers’ retreat we captured in our snapshots of the sunset.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Wherever you want.’
‘I prefer not to know where I’m going. I like walking aimlessly, like this.’
I told her I also liked wandering with no destination in mind. Then we fell silent and could again hear the dull crunch of our footfalls on the sand. We didn’t know which way we were going. It wouldn’t have been hard to find our bearings and make our way towards our respective lodgings, but it amused us not to do so and, as it turned out, we were going in the opposite direction.
‘Apart from your king, have any other Albanians come to this country on holiday?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’
‘I hope not,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to be the only Albanian who’s been here, apart from your king.’
She said the words ‘apart from your king’ in an intimate tone, as if the king and I were two knights-in-waiting on this deserted beach, one of whom she had deigned to favour.
‘Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if you were the only two Albanians ever to have spent a holiday here?’ she added, soon after.
‘I can’t say,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t see that as particularly unlikely.’
‘I see!’ she said. ‘You think it’s more interesting to know that “When sunsets were blue” was dedicated to an old lady with a weight problem?’
I didn’t know what to say and began to laugh. She was getting her own back. I’ve lost it, I thought. A fat lady and an ex-king must surely be enough to ruin a date. Damn you, King, why did you trip me up again?
Then, as if she had been reading my thoughts, she said: ‘Do you really think I’ve got any sympathy for monarchs? To tell the truth, I think they’re all pathetic old men destined to have their heads cut off.’
I burst out laughing again.
‘Like in period films . . .’ I said, but stopped for fear of upsetting her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Our king was young, rough and sly, nothing like a pathetic old man.’
My words had no apparent effect on her.
‘Was he good-looking?’ she asked, after a while.
So that was what she wanted to know! ‘No,’ I said. ‘He had a hooked nose and liked Oriental singing.’
‘You sound like you’re jealous!’
We laughed, and I admitted that the monarch had actually been a very handsome man.
‘Really?’ she cried, and we were laughing again. Then we stopped talking for quite a while, with her leaning on my arm, and I felt like whistling a tune. But the shadow of the ex-king fell on us, just as Fadeyev’s had walked beside us earlier.
At one point we heard a muffled clatter in the distance, then a light – maybe the headlamp of a locomotive – threw a pale beam from far away. Probably it reminded her of the legend I’d told her because she mumbled something about it. I asked her which part of my tale she’d liked most. She replied that it was the point when Kostandin stopped at the cemetery gate and said to his sister, ‘You go on. I have something to do here.’
‘I don’t know how to explain this . . . It’s something everybody might have felt in some form or another . . . Even though it doesn’t seem to have any connection with reality . . . How can I say . . .’
‘You mean that it expresses universal pain, like all great art?’
‘“You go on. I have something to do here.” Oh! It’s both terrible and magnificent!’
It occurred to me again that it was perhaps the right time to tell her the other legend, the one about the man walled into the bridge.
‘“You go on. I have something to do here,”’ she repeated softly, as if to herself. ‘Yes, it does express something like universal pain, doesn’t it? As if all people on earth . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . well, that everybody has their share of that pain . . . With some left over, so to speak, for the moon and the stars . . .’
We held forth for a while on the universality of great art. On reflection, I reckoned it was better not to tell her the second legend: it might weaken the impact of the first.
As we chatted about art that was great or even just ordinary, we found we had got to a small station.
‘It’s the last train,’ she said, as we paced up and down the empty platform, our footsteps echoing on the concrete. The imposing, almost empty green train soon pulled into the station and screeched to a halt in front of us. Perhaps it was the one whose headlamp we had seen shining in the distance. The doors opened but nobody got off. A second later, as the carriages juddered into movement again, my companion suddenly grabbed my arm and yelled, ‘Come on! Let’s get on!’ and rushed towards a door. I followed. She was brighter now than she’d been all evening. Her eyes were aflame as we went into an empty compartment, with dim lighting that made the long bench seats seem even more deserted.
We went into the corridor and stared at the thick night through the window.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘No idea!’ she answered. ‘I really don’t know. All I know is that we’re going somewhere!’
I didn’t care where we were going either, and I was happy to be alone with her that night on an almost empty train.
‘If the villa is in this direction, I’d like to get off to see the place where your king spent his holidays, at his old estate.’
I smiled, but she insisted, so I gave in to avoid a quarrel. She was almost too entrancing when she was stubborn. Anyway, there’s