connected to the wearisome sameness of vacation days spent among initialled individuals dotted around like statues on plinths, and with the spiritual disarray I had been suffering for some time. At last a living being had turned up in the museum! What was more, the visitor’s hair and smooth neck were amazingly reminiscent of Lida Snegina’s.
The ping-pong ball bounced around like a little devil and its weightless vacuity obliterated all possibility of thought. Silence between us persisted beyond endurance and I repeated in my mind: There it is! She’s going to leave and I’ll be all alone in this archive dump.
But she didn’t go. She carried on watching the table-tennis, with distance and disdain. The light reflected by her ash-blonde hair continued to fall on me, like an accidental sunset, and my mind wandered back to the howls or, rather, to the canine symphony I’d been told about in Yalta last winter. At one point I was tempted to drop her there and then, but I thought better of it: women in those parts were like that and, anyway, compared to easy-going Moscow women, girls from anywhere else in the world seem sour.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I asked bluntly.
‘Where to?’ she answered, without turning her head.
‘That way. Maybe there’s somewhere further on that we can dance.’
She didn’t reply but started walking towards the shore. I followed her. Sand scrunched beneath our feet. She still had her hands in her pockets, and now her mauve blouse looked black.
The sea stretched out on our left-hand side; on the right, the black outlines of pines and, further away, rest houses and the little stations on the electric train line were scattered about. Here and there through the trees you could see tiny churches with spires higher than any I had seen before. I’d been struggling for a while to find a topic of conversation, and as I tried, I couldn’t help fondly recalling the image of the Ukrainian girl in Yalta who had not only lapped up the most outlandish stories but responded to any nonsense you fed her by throwing her arms gaily around your neck.
But the silence between us grew heavier, and I had almost lost hope of establishing a dialogue when suddenly she asked me about Fadeyev. I couldn’t have wished for a more suitable question, and when I told her that in Moscow I passed his apartment every day she uttered an ‘Ah!’
‘There are a lot of rumours about his suicide,’ she said, and then, after a pause, went on. ‘You’re from the capital and perhaps you heard more about it than we did.’
‘Of course.’
In Moscow literary circles I had indeed heard a lot of talk about the suicide. I shared with her the most interesting pieces of gossip that were going around. She listened without responding. Suddenly it occurred to me to tell her about Fadeyev’s treatment in the Kremlin hospital. It was a sad story I’d heard one evening after dinner in a Moscow suburb. It was the writer’s very last attempt at getting cured. The method was to have him imbibe vodka in increasing doses day by day until his whole organism rejected it in disgust. Every morning, in the silent corridors of the hospital, there could be seen a man of considerable height dressed in an inmate’s gown moving along like a sleepwalker, with unfocused eyes and unfocused mind, blind drunk, mistaking doors for people and people for objects. In little groups, hiding at the ends of the corridor or behind the doors, nurses whispered, ‘Today we gave him three hundred cl, tomorrow we’ll increase the dose,’ and they watched him with curiosity. Some felt sorry for the man; others felt the satisfaction of ordinary people when they see a great man brought low; they were really curious to see the pride of Soviet literature turned into an unrecognisable wreck, his skull now filled with nothing but alcoholic haze.
I tried to make my story as true to life as possible and thought I had succeeded because when I finished my legs were as wobbly as if I were drunk too. She put her arm in mine and leaned on me ever so slightly.
‘But why? Why?’ she asked softly.
I was expecting the question and answered, with a shrug, that I had no idea. Yes, indeed, why in spite of everything had he killed himself the day after his discharge?
We walked on for a long time without saying anything. I felt my mind going numb. It had wandered back once more to the folk ballad with its legendary horse ridden simultaneously by the Quick and the Dead.
‘It’s such a sad story,’ she said. ‘Let’s change the subject.’
I nodded agreement and we put an end to the conversation. We remembered we were looking for a place where there was music, then realised we had wandered a long way from my residence. The empty beach stretched for ever beside the water where, from time to time, something seemed to be stirring in the darkness. It was the flickering phosphorescence of the waves. On our other side, through the pines, we could see shapes that were white and oblong, like stone belfries. A train whistled somewhere in the distance. My mind went back to Lida seeing me off on the train at Rizhsky Voksal, the Moscow terminus, and to the legend I’d not managed to recite to her.
‘A penny for your thoughts?’ she asked.
‘Have you read Bürger’s “Lenore”?’ I enquired abruptly.
She shook her head.
‘And Zhukovsky’s “Ludmila”?’
‘Oh, yes. We studied it at school!’
‘It’s the same story,’ I told her. ‘Zhukovsky just translated Bürger’s version.’
‘I remember vaguely our teacher telling us about that,’ she said. ‘Although Russians don’t like to mention that sort of thing.’
She had no great sympathy for Russians and barely hid it.
‘But Bürger didn’t make anything up either,’ I went on. ‘He borrowed the story from others as well and, like Zhukovsky, distorted it.’
‘Bürger was German, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did he borrow it from?’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘From us,’ but held back so I did not resemble those spokesmen for small nations who are forever intent on saying ‘we’ or ‘our people’ with the kind of pride or bluster that makes my heart sink, because even they barely believe what they are saying.
I was cautious about what I had to say next. I explained that the Balkan Peninsula, even though more or less everyone – even the Eskimos! – detests it, was, whether it ruffled you or not, the home of outstanding poetry, the birthplace of many legends and ballads of incomparable beauty. It was one of those, the legend of Death who rises from his grave to keep his word, that had inspired Bürger to write ‘Lenore’, though he had made a pretty dismal job of it. I added that all the Balkan peoples had invented variations on the legend. She should not take me for a chauvinist, but our own version was the most moving and therefore the most beautiful. Even a Greek poet who was on my course in Moscow had agreed with me on that.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘Why might I think the Greek version better?’
‘Because of Homer,’ I said. ‘Because he belongs to them.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But please tell me what the legend says!’
I was expecting her to ask for it. Straight away! I thought. You’ll get to hear it right now! It seemed I just had to tell the story that summer, come what may. If I’d not managed to do it at the station when I was saying farewell to Lida Snegina, it was probably because my brain hadn’t yet processed it well enough to enable me to restore it to perfection. But I felt that the moment had now come. I took a deep breath, summoned my skill with words, concentrated my energy, and launched into an explanation of what it meant for an Albanian mother of nine to marry her only daughter to a man from a faraway place ‘over the seven mountains’. I sensed that my companion was listening to me, but also that the Baltic, that body of foreign water, was helping me along as it lapped that northern shore. The mother didn’t want her daughter to marry so far away, since she knew the girl would never be able to