Twilight of the Eastern Gods Read Free Page B

right when others got it wrong. Let me not make some ridiculous gesture, I thought, since the match seemed to have turned against me irrevocably. The silent ash-blonde smudge among the noisy spectators held me in its sway.
    I dropped and abandoned my bat in disgust. Though I was cross I went towards the stranger and wiped my brow with a handkerchief. I was annoyed at losing three games in a row and I had a feeling someone had fiddled the score. As I wiped my face, I looked at her: she had her hands in her trouser pockets and was gazing at the table with a supercilious pout.
    Night had fallen some time ago, and at the water’s edge the strollers, as if they had lost their faces, had now turned into outlines, but we knew they were the people we had caught on our film an hour earlier.
    My annoyance subsided and I looked more attentively at the wonderful hair of the young newcomer. In this part of the world hair like hers was not uncommon. Sometimes it reminded you of autumn sadness: it was, so to speak, not of this world; it was as if its owner had come from the moon. But this girl’s hair reminded me especially of Lida. One of my Yalta colleagues had tried to persuade me that there was a kind of dog that reacted to such hair with stifled yelping, as if it was greeting the full moon out on the steppe. Subsequently, when I thought back on those words, I became convinced that, however absurd such tall tales might seem, they contained a grain of truth. Obviously it wasn’t referring to real dogs howling, but to humans. My Yalta colleague must surely have gone through something like that himself. But it couldn’t be a matter of screaming out loud, it must have been more like a silent, internal yell, arising from an infinite quivering that was on the point of turning into – why not? – a symphony.
    ‘Are you having a dance here tonight?’ the young woman suddenly asked, with a lively turn of her head.
    She had beautiful, serious grey eyes.
    ‘There are never any dances here,’ I replied.
    She smiled tentatively. ‘Why not?’
    I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All we have here is fame.’
    She laughed, her eyes on the table, and I was pleased with my witticism, which, though entirely unoriginal, seemed to have had some effect. I’d heard it the day I arrived, from the mouth of a taxi driver, whose licence-plate number had remained fixed in my memory, like so many other superfluous things.
    ‘Are you from abroad?’ the girl asked again.
    ‘Yes.’

    She stared at me curiously. ‘Your accent gives you away,’ she said. ‘I don’t speak perfect Russian myself, but I can tell a foreign accent.’ She told me that she’d been among her own folk forty-eight hours before; that she was staying in a villa right beside our retreat; and that she was bored. However, she seemed surprised when I confided that I came from a distant country and was therefore much more bored than she was. She had never set eyes on an Albanian before. What was more, she had always imagined they were darker than Georgians, that they all had hooked noses and were keen on the kind of Oriental chanting she hated.
    ‘Wherever did you get those ideas?’ I asked rather crossly.
    ‘I don’t know. I think it’s an impression I got from the exhibition you held last year at Riga.’
    ‘Hm,’ I muttered. I wanted to drop the subject.
    I’d noticed more than once that ordinary Soviet citizens were much given to comparing foreigners from other socialist countries to the natives of their own sixteen republics. If you were very blond, they would say you were like a Lithuanian or an Estonian; if you had a curved nose they would think you had a Georgian look; if you had sad eyes, you must be Armenian, and so on. Some even thought that Turkey was a province of Azerbaijan that had been left on the wrong side of the border by a quirk of history. And on one sad afternoon a tipsy Belarusian tried to convince me that Armenians were really Muslims: they pretended to