Twilight of the Eastern Gods Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 rivoluzion e, 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