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 winter I had spent some time in Yalta. My room had been next to Paustovsky’s. The lights stayed on in his room until late; we all knew he was writing his memoirs. Whenever I went out into the corridor I encountered the starosta, our course leader at the Institute, Ladonshchikov by name, who was forever watching the light in Paustovsky’s room. Whenever he came across somebody in the hall, he would confide in them with a sigh and the beating of his breast, as if he were reporting the worst news in the world, that the aforementioned Paustovsky was bringing all the Jews back to life in his memoirs. What I remembered of Yalta was uninterrupted rain, games of billiards that I always lost, a few Tatar inscriptions, and the permanent look of jealousy on the utterly insignificant face of Ladonshchikov, despite the solemn air he wore of a man concerned for the fate of the Fatherland. I had hoped that life in the Riga retreat would be less sinister, but what I encountered were some of the people I had seen at Yalta, table-tennis instead of billiards, and intermittent rain, confirming Pushkin’s bon mot about northern summers being caricatures of southern ones. The similarity of faces, conversations and names (the only ones missing were Paustovsky and Ladonshchikov, oddly enough) gave me a sense of constant déjà vu. The life we led there had something sterile about it, like an extract in an anthology. At Yalta, in this rather odd world, I was aware of leading a hybrid existence, where life and death were mixed up and overlapping, as in the ancient Balkan legend I hadn’t managed to recite to Lida Snegina. The idea was imposed on me by the equation I could not help making automatically between the people around me and their doubles — the characters of novels and plays I knew well. An irrepressible and somewhat diabolical desire to compare their words, gestures and even their faces to those of their originals had arisen the previous winter in Yalta, where for the first time I realised that most contemporary Soviet writers virtually never talked about money in their works. It was like a sign. Now, in Riga, I was learning that alongside money there were many other things they did not mention, and reciprocally, many of the topics that filled whole chapters or acts of their works barely impinged on their real lives. The contrast made me constantly uneasy. Besides, there was something abnormal about being cut off from the world like that, and it brought to mind the monstrous beings I had seen preserved in glass jars in the Natural History Museum.
I’d tried a few times to break away from this frozen landscape, which seemed to me more and more like some kind of obsolete monument, but all my efforts came to nothing and brought me back to billiards in Yalta, then to ping-pong at the Riga retreat. In both settings, at the weighty winter billiards and the flimsy summer ping-pong, I only ever lost.
It was Saturday. As always we were playing in the dim but sufficient light of the evening, and although I was cheered at the prospect of winning the third set after losing the first two, I felt beside me a presence that was both new and familiar.
It was a kind of ash-blonde smudge that reminded me of Lida’s hair. The impression was so strong that I put off turning as if I wanted to give the stranger enough time to become Lida. In that brief moment I realised that, without knowing it, I had long been yearning for her to come through the sky and across the steppe, as silently as the setting of the moon, to be beside me at the table-tennis table.
The little ping-pong ball, with its irritating rebound, scraped my right ear, and as I bent down to pick it up I stole a glance at the visitor, who’d not been seen before in the gardens of our writers’ retreat.