Twilight of the Eastern Gods Read Online Free PDF Page A

mothers do very rarely indeed: she cursed her dead son. ‘O you who have failed to keep your word, may the earth disgorge you!’ And when night fell . . .
    Scarcely had I uttered those words than my companion grasped my hand and exclaimed, ‘How terrible!’ Then, after a pause, as if she wanted to bring the conversation down to earth, she pointed out that none of what I had just told her was to be found in ballads in this part of the world.
    ‘Don’t mention those thieves to me ever again!’ I blurted out almost angrily. ‘So, when the night was deep and the graveyard lit by the moon, the lid of Kostandin’s tomb rose, and from the grave, his face quite white and his hair a muddy tangle, the Dead Man cursed by his mother came.’
    Her hand was shaking but, regardless, I went on, ‘Kostandin rose from his grave, because, as it is said in our land, the given word makes Death step back . . . Do you understand?’

    The quivering had moved up from her hands to her shoulders, so I told her then about Kostandin’s moonlit ride to the far country where his sister had married. The young man found Doruntine in the middle of a feast and hoisted her onto his horse to take her back to her mother. On the way she kept asking, ‘Brother, why are you so pale? Why do you have mud in your hair?’ And he replied every time: ‘It’s from weariness and the dirt of the road.’ They rode on together on the horse, the Dead Man and the Living Girl, until they got to the village where their mother lived. Kostandin brought the horse to a standstill outside the church. Behind the surrounding wall, with its iron gate, the church was almost entirely dark. Only the nave was faintly lit. Kostandin said to his sister, ‘You go on. I have something to do here.’ He pushed open the iron gate and went into the graveyard, never to emerge from it again.
    I stopped.
    ‘How gripping!’ she said.
    ‘Did you really like that version of the legend?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, a lot. It’s so different from the one we learned at school!’
    ‘So don’t mention those wretches to me again!’
    We had walked quite a distance as I told the tale and now we could hear a band.
    I felt astonishingly unburdened by having at last told the story of Kostandin and Doruntine. As I was glad she had liked it, I was tempted to tell her the other great Albanian legend, the one about the man who was buried alive in the pillar of a bridge, but I held back for fear of overdoing the folklore.

    We were walking towards the source of the music and soon we found ourselves in front of a restaurant’s illuminated sign.
    ‘The Lido,’ I read aloud. ‘Shall we go in?’
    ‘Wait’, she said. ‘It must be expensive. And I don’t like the look of it.’
    I stuck my hands into my pockets and pulled out all the change I had. ‘I’ve got a hundred and ten roubles. Maybe that’ll be enough.’
    ‘No, no. I really don’t like the look of this place. Let’s go somewhere else.’
    I knew my resources wouldn’t be adequate for the Lido, so I didn’t insist.
    Further on we heard more music. We wandered towards another place where a dance night had been organised by the veterans’ and workers’ holiday resorts. Nobody stopped us at the door. We went in. People were dancing. Others sat drinking at tables set around the dance floor. In the lamplight my companion looked even prettier and we found nothing better to do than to dance. There was a lot of noise. Now and again customers who were drunk were shown the door. In an environment where we were both outsiders, we felt closer to each other. She was serious yet casual, which I liked. We went up to the bar and ordered two brandies. She had style, and drank with confident movements. At a nearby table three middle-aged men were talking in Latvian. They looked at us inquisitively, and one of them, the oldest, asked my companion a question. I didn’t understand a word of the language, but I grasped that he wanted to know what