Twilight of the Eastern Gods

At the front door of the residence stood a tall man, boyishly skinny with colourless hair and a cigarette stuck between his lips, like the ones you don’t actually smoke. It was Zhenya Yevtushenko. ‘Have you seen Bella?’ he asked. I shook my head, but it seemed obvious he didn’t give a damn where Bella was. ‘You seen that?’ he questioned, directing his eyes to his right-hand jacket pocket from which a copy of Literaturnaya gazeta was poking out, showing half of Pasternak’s name. ‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ I said. ‘Hee-hee,’ he said, with a triumphant grin. ‘The Nobel… at last!’

I’d noticed more than once that ordinary Soviet citizens were much given to comparing foreigners from other socialist countries to the natives of their own sixteen republics. If you were very blond, they would say you were like a Lithuanian or an Estonian; if you had a curved nose they would think you had a Georgian look; if you had sad eyes, you must be Armenian, and so on. Some even thought that Turkey was a province of Azerbaijan that had been left on the wrong side of the border by a quirk of history. And on one sad afternoon a tipsy Belarusian tried to convince me that Armenians were really Muslims: they pretended to be Christians only to enrage the Azeris, and it was high time to sort things out down there…