However poor my deferred rendition of an Albanian original to which I have no direct access, I think Kadare’s main qualities survive: his humour and his anger, his self-critical wit, and his conviction, all the stronger for having been put to the test by his Moscow years, that real literature is, in the end, more important than anything else.
David Bellos
Princeton, February 2014
| * | The Soviet Union’s involvement in the Second World War, that began only with the German invasion of 1941, has always been known in Russia as ‘The Great Patriotic War’. |
A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
Albanian is written in Latin characters but some letters and combinations are pronounced in a special way. The only one occurring in this novel is:
Xh makes the sound dj as in bridge
THE CYRILLIC ALPHABET
A few words and phrases are given in their original Russian forms. The thirty-two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet are pronounced roughly as follows:
| A | a |
| Б | b |
| B | v |
| Γ | g |
| Д | d |
| E | ye |
| Ë | yo |
| Ж | zh as in pleasure |
| З | z |
| И | i as in beet |
| Й | y |
| κ | k |
| Л | l |
| M | m |
| H | n |
| O | o |
| П | p |
| P | r |
| C | s |
| T | t |
| Y | u as in loose |
| Φ | f |
| X | kh as in (Scottish) loch |
| Ц | ts |
| Ч | ch as in church |
| Ш | sh |
| Щ | sh-ch as in fish chowder |
| Э | e |
| Ы | uh |
| Ь | [soft sign] |
| Я | ya |
| Ю | yu |
CHAPTER ONE
We played table-tennis outdoors, not far from the beach, until after midnight because even though the white nights had passed it still didn’t get very dark. Those with the best eyes played last; the rest of us lounged against the wooden railing, watching the game and correcting the score. After midnight, when everyone had gone to bed, leaving their bats on the table to get drenched by a shower before dawn, I didn’t know what to do with myself – I didn’t feel like sleeping. I would wander for a while around the gardens of the Writers’ Retreat (it used to be the estate of a Latvian baron), go as far as the fountain, which spurted from a group of stone dolphins, then track back to the ‘Swedish House’ and on down to the Baltic shore. The nights were very cold and quickly chilled you to the bone.
I did much the same thing almost every evening. On fine days, the mornings and afternoons went by quickly, with swimming and sunbathing, but evenings were dreary, and most of the residents were quite old. Almost all of them were VIPs, with titles galore, but that didn’t stop evenings being dull, especially as I happened to be the only foreigner staying there.
As dusk drew in we would take our cameras down to the beach and set them so they were ready to snap at the moment the sun sank into the sea. The Baltic turned a slightly different colour each night, and we used to try to fix each successive sunset on film. Sometimes a couple of distant strollers along the waterline wandered into the shot. When we developed the film, they appeared as meaningless smudges in the endless vista. After dinner we got together again around the ping-pong table, and as I watched the small white ball going back and forth, I could feel my whole being adjusting to its pace. I would try, but usually fail, to pull myself back from the ball’s metronome effect. Only every so often, in short, rebellious bursts, would I manage to break free from my enslavement to the little white sphere, whose jagged leaps, small diameter, and sharp, metallic noise when it hit the table almost succeeded in sending me into a trance. But at those instants when I recovered my lucidity I would jerk my head towards the shore, and every time I turned, like a sleepwalker, towards the water’s edge I hoped to spy in the far distance, at long last, something different from what I had seen the day before. But the seashore at dusk was merciless. It had nothing to offer but a view it had probably been rehearsing since the dawn of time: silhouettes of couples walking slowly by. They probably came from the other residences in the vicinity, and after passing our house, they scattered in directions that seemed to me quite mysterious, towards resorts whose beaches bore the names of the little stations on the electric railway line, strange-sounding names like Dzintari, Majori and Dubulti. They were names I had previously read on perfume bottles and tubes of face cream in shop windows in other places, without imagining they might be the names of stations or holiday resorts.
Old men, who knew there was no point in trying to get to sleep, stayed on the benches until well after dark. As I walked around I could occasionally hear their whispers and coughs or, when they finally got up, the tapping of their sticks as they walked towards the ‘Swedish House’, where the oldest and most distinguished of the residents stayed.
I would carry on sauntering aimlessly, wondering how almost all of these old men could be famous writers and frequently the dedicatees of each other’s works. Most of the children who ran around noisily in the daytime had had poems and stories dedicated to them by their parents, and you could tell that some of the youngsters had read the works in question. As for the older women, who chatted among themselves for hours every evening after dinner, I knew that quite a few were still stepping out on the pages of some books as good-looking girls in high heels, under the mask of initials such as D.V. or N. or even their first names. The men sometimes appeared beneath the disguise of initials in books written by women, but less often. As a rule, those men had stomach ailments, and in the dining room you could see they were on some special diet or other.
Some evenings I went to the post office in the hope that the line to Moscow would be open so I could call Lida Snegina. But the telephones were usually busy. You could only be sure of placing a call if you booked it a day in advance.
Lida was the young woman I had been seeing in Moscow. She’d come with me to the station on the gloomy day I’d left for Riga. Before the train departed, we paced slowly up and down on the rain-wet platform along with many other parting couples, and she’d said, with her eyes averted, that she found it difficult to go around with foreigners, especially foreigners from far-off lands. When I asked her why, she told me about a friend of hers who had got involved with a Belgian who had disappeared overnight, just like that, without even telling her he was going. Of course, she added, ‘It may well be that not all foreigners are the same, but they often bolt without leaving so much as a word.’ At least, that was what she’d heard people say.
I really ought to have riposted, but only a few moments remained before the train would depart, and the time available was much too short to quarrel and make up. So I had to choose between argument and appeasement. I chose the latter: I swallowed my pride, and declared that in any circumstance, and come what may, I would never slip away, like a thief in the night. I wanted to add that I came from an ancient Balkan land with grandiose legends about the given word, but the time left was disappearing fast and would barely permit a synopsis, let alone the full story of Kostandin and Doruntine’s ghostly ride.
I liked to walk to the post office and back on my own. It wasn’t a particularly scenic route – in fact, it was rather desolate, with only scraggy reeds, small piles of sand and plump thistles on either side. All the same, that particular path, like some women who, though not beautiful, possess a hidden charm, was conducive to my having new thoughts.
It was my second holiday at a writers’ retreat and I knew most of the ropes, as well as the oddities of the inmates. The previous
