The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Andrey Kurkov

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When Kolya moves into a new flat in Kiev, he finds a book hidden within a volume of War and Peace. Intrigued by the annotations that appear on every page, Kolya sets out to discover more about the scribbler. His investigations take him to a graveyard, and more specifically to the coffin of a Ukrainian nationalist who died in mysterious circumstances and was buried with a sealed letter and a manuscript. An exhumation under cover of darkness reveals that an item of great national importance is buried near a fort in Kazakhstan.

  As nightwatchman at a baby-milk factory, Kolya exposes himself to the attentions of a criminal gang, and so he decides to leave Kiev for a while. Armed with only three cases of baby milk, which have unexpected hallucinogenic properties, he sets off on what turns out to be a very bizarre journey: crossing the Caspian Sea and traversing the deserts of Kazakhstan. He meets a host of unlikely characters on the way, including Bedouins, ex-KGB officers and a spirit-like companion in the form of a chameleon . . .

  The Good Angel of Death is a classic, first-rate Kurkov yarn which is sure to delight old and new fans alike.

  About the Author

  Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg and now lives in Kiev. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Language Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder at Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels including Death and the Penguin.

  ALSO BY ANDREY KURKOV

  Death and the Penguin

  The Case of the General’s Thumb

  Penguin Lost

  A Matter of Death and Life

  The President’s Last Love

  The Good Angel of Death

  Andrey Kurkov

  Translated from the Russian by

  Andrew Bromfield

  1

  EARLY IN THE spring of 1997 I sold my two-room flat on the edge of town and bought myself a single-room flat right in the centre of Kiev, beside St Sophia’s Cathedral. The old couple selling it were leaving for Israel, and as well as the flat they also tried to sell me loads of useless junk in it, such as the home-made wire coat stand in the hallway. Grigory Markovich, the man of the house, kept repeating over and over again: ‘I know what everything’s worth! I won’t overcharge you!’ I rejected most of the bric-a-brac out of hand but I did fancy a shelf full of books: that was how it was being sold, to avoid having to take the shelf down off the wall and carry the books to the second-hand bookshop – after all, why go to all that bother? I don’t know what proportion of the five dollars I paid was for the books, and how much was for the shelf, but in any case, I gave the books no more than a cursory glance, and the only one that really caught my interest was an academic edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace – a large-format volume that must have been published back in the fifties. I’ve always liked books like that, not necessarily for their contents, but for that sturdy, respectable look they have.

  On 12 March the moment arrived for the handing over of the keys. I arrived there in the early evening to find a minibus from the ‘Wither’ travel agency standing outside the front entrance to the block, and the old couple loading their things into it with the considerate assistance of two of the agency’s representatives.

  ‘Right then, Kolya Sotnikov,’ I said to myself, when I was finally left alone in my newly purchased flat, ‘this shambles is all yours now!’

  I looked around one more time at all the cracks, contemplating the repairs that were needed. Then I went over to the bookshelf, took down the large-format volume that had stuck in my memory and opened it. Between the covers there was a surprise waiting for me – a secret compartment had been cut out in the middle of the pages, exactly the same way I’d seen it done in all those spy movies, only here there wasn’t any gold or a gun. Instead, the neatly carved recess was occupied by another book, published at a later date – The Kobza Player by Taras Shevchenko.

  Surprised, I lifted the book out and opened it, expecting to find something else unusual between its covers. But this time the book proved to be genuine, it hadn’t been transformed into a casket. I leafed through a few pages and was just about to reassemble this literary matryoshka doll and put it back on the shelf, so that I could astonish my guests with it at some time in the future, when my eye was caught by the notes written with a sharp pencil in the margins of The Kobza Player. Holding the book open in my hands, I went across to the lamp and read a few of the tidy lines of writing.

  ‘T.G. defined patriotism as love for woman and hatred of military service, especially of mindless drilling.’

  ‘Could these comments perhaps have been made by some teacher of literature with dissident tendencies?’ I wondered, recalling my own experience as a teacher.

  After teacher training college, I had spent the three mandatory years as a history teacher in a rural school, but in all that time I had never succeeded in instilling into those wholesome, ruddy-cheeked offspring of milkmaids and tractor drivers either the slightest interest in history or any desire whatever to unravel the numerous historical riddles and mysteries I had gleaned out of heaps of books analysed with a pencil in my hand.

  It was impossible even to imagine Grigory Markovich as the author of these notes. He was a retired army man, and very proud of the fact. One day I had found him packing his medals: they were all laid out on the table and he was wrapping each one in a separate
handkerchief – he had a lot of handkerchiefs; in fact, there seemed to be far more of them than medals.

  He showed me one of his awards and declared proudly: ‘I took Prague!’

  ‘But did Prague notice?’ I wondered at that moment, scarcely able to repress a smile as I looked at this skinny, little old man who was still so spry at the age of ninety.

  The dirty kitchen was also in need of repair. Its old owners had to be scrubbed out of it – somehow people’s possessions, even the very walls, take on the age of their owners, and if you don’t want to feel suddenly older yourself, you have to change the finishes and the colours, freshen everything up a bit. Who knows, perhaps timely repairs prolong the life of the occupants, as well as the flat?

  I put the kettle on the sooty old gas stove and began leafing through the book again, thinking about those strange inscriptions. On one page I came across a remarkable idea very much in keeping with my own way of thinking: ‘The patriotism of a hungry man is an attempt to take a crust of bread away from a member of some minor nationality; the patriotism of a satisfied man is a magnanimous attitude that evokes respect.’

  I felt a real desire to understand what kind of person had written these annotations in The Kobza Player, I really wanted to find concrete evidence of the period when it had all been written. My job at the time, as a nightwatchman working on a humane schedule – every third night – didn’t require me to make any use of my brain, and my brain was feeling bored. Then suddenly here was this mysterious ‘present’, far better than any brain-teaser or crossword!

  I turned page after page, the way people skim through a book to decide whether they should not just read it, but study it with a notebook and pencil. And another idea caught my eye: ‘The absolute patriot recognises neither the national majority nor the national minority. His love for woman is stronger than his love for the motherland, because a woman who reciprocates his feelings is herself a symbol of the motherland, and the ideal of the absolute patriot. Protecting a woman who reciprocates one’s feelings of love is the highest manifestation of patriotism.’

  In another place, under one of the poems, there was a straightforward diary entry: ‘16 April 1964. Met Lvovich in the beer parlour opposite the pawnshop. Told him about the manuscript I’d written. He wanted to read it, but he can take a hike. After that provocative incident in the cinema, even his hand looks too clammy to shake. And then there’s that habit he has of looking over his shoulder all the time.’

  I sat up until midnight, then reassembled the matryoshka book and put it back on the shelf.

  2

  THE NEXT DAY I went to see a sculptor I knew who could name almost everyone who’d lived in Kiev over the last thirty years.

  ‘A beer parlour opposite a pawnshop?’ he said. ‘Of course, that’s where the “Russian Tea” cafe is now. No, sorry, it’s not “Russian” any longer. It’s either just “Tea”, or . . . Everything there’s different now, and all the people are different . . .’

  ‘But did you know anyone called Lvovich back then?’

  The sculptor paused in thought.

  His two-storey studio was full of blocks of undressed stone, maquettes and small sculptures, and there were huge numbers of photographs stuck on the walls instead of wallpaper. He got up from his low dining-cum-coffee table and went across to the photos.

  ‘There are lots of faces here from that beer parlour, but I don’t remember . . . Lvovich . . . Lvovich . . . I don’t think he was one of the regulars in our set. A lot of “extras” used to come in, but even if they showed up fairly often, they still didn’t get to be one of the in-crowd. Maybe he was one of those? I’ll try to remember again, but not today. It has to be very wet weather, or a thunderstorm – then I remember everything very well . . .’

  ‘I’ll give you a call to remind you next time there’s a thunderstorm,’ I promised on my way out.

  The repairs in my new flat proceeded slowly and, I must say, in pretty half-arsed fashion. The friends who’d promised to help me paint the place suddenly disappeared, leaving me on my own to face the walls and all those tins of matt white paint. I was afraid to start painting alone, so I got on with all sorts of little jobs, like scraping patches of old paint off the pipes in the bathroom and other such nonsense.

  Then suddenly the sculptor phoned.

  ‘You know, he died yesterday, that Lvovich of yours – if it was him, of course. An old friend of mine called and asked me to help out with the funeral – there’s no one to carry the coffin. You could come with me, if you like?’

  This suggestion was both unexpected and puzzling.

  ‘But I didn’t know him,’ I blurted out.

  ‘But you were trying to find him, weren’t you? I don’t think I knew him, either,’ said the sculptor. ‘In fact, I couldn’t even remember Alik, the guy who called me. But he assures me we used to get together in that beer parlour . . .’

  Going to meet a dead man for whom I had questions that had never been asked seemed, to put it mildly, rather stupid. But I agreed.

  We buried him at Berkovtsy. Or rather, we didn’t just bury him, we laid him to rest with his relatives, who had already settled in there for the rest of eternity. His yellow, shrunken face meant nothing to me. And the sculptor leaned down to my ear beside the grave and whispered: ‘I just don’t remember him.’ But Alik, who had organised the funeral, reminded the sculptor of several episodes from the distant past, and the sculptor nodded. Then they reeled off a couple of names in my presence.

  I plucked up courage and asked Alik about the man with a keen interest in Taras Shevchenko’s literary heritage and questions of patriotism. I explained that he had been a friend of the deceased Lvovich.

  Alik scratched himself behind one ear. He said nothing for a while and then shrugged. ‘Later,’ he said at last. ‘Are you going to the wake?’

  I nodded.

  3

  IT SOON EMERGED that the sculptor had organised for the wake to take place in his studio. There were about seven men sitting round the dining-cum-coffee table. The sculptor was really enjoying himself frying beef liver on an electric cooker standing in the corner. The others were already drinking vodka, without waiting for the hors d’oeuvres. They drank in silence, without any toasts, not even a sigh.

  When the first serving of liver appeared on the table they brightened up a bit. The sculptor tossed some forks on to the table and put down some bread. The meal acquired a more lively character after that and for the first time someone started talking about the deceased, but then immediately switched his attention to the living and concluded his almost incoherent speech with the thought that things used to be better in the old days.

  ‘Yes,’ someone else agreed.

  The wake went off just as a wake should, and everybody went home drunk. Not a single bad word was said about the deceased. In fact, after that first time, no one even mentioned him again. When we got up from the table to stretch our legs, one of the guests recognised his young self in one of the old photos.

  ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, sticking out his lips with an air of puzzlement, as if he were annoyed with the person he’d been thirty years earlier.

  I went over to him and asked him about the man who’d been so keen on Shevchenko and questions of patriotism.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Lots of people took an interest in that kind of thing back then.’

  ‘And did anyone write manuscripts about it?’

  ‘Yes, they wrote, of course they did. Samizdat! But what good was all that? You know, he who never struggled, never lost.’ Then he carried on and on about something or other until he suddenly said: ‘But there were a few hoaxers, I remember one of them – Klim – used to pretend he was writing something philosophical. Everyone asked him to let them read it, but all he ever did was take out the manuscript, flick it under your nose and then put it back in his briefcase. He was just sitting in his kitchen at home and writing out Pushkin’s poems in prose, you known, not in columns, but continuous lin
es . . .’

  ‘And where is he now?’ I asked, thinking he could very well be the author of the commentaries on The Kobza Player.

  ‘Klim? God only knows. I saw him once in the garden square beside the university. You know, where they get together to play chess for money. Two years ago. But I haven’t come across him since then.’

  Every society or club is exclusive in its own way. Beekeepers get together and talk about things that only they understand. And they probably think a long time about whether or not to let anybody join their club. Chess players are no exception to the rule. The ones who play beside the university know each other, but they’re very standoffish with everyone else. And they only play with outsiders for money.

  I made several rounds of the small groups of people playing chess and draughts that had huddled on the benches in the small public garden. Nobody took any notice of me. Every little group was frozen, immobile, watching the action on the board at its centre. They weren’t watching the players, whose presence seemed to be no more than an annoying necessity. You couldn’t tell who was supporting whom, or if anybody was supporting anybody at all. The situation on the board was contemplated in mysterious silence, and the board itself was the hero of the action.

  Klim ought to have been sixty-something by now, a description that fitted most members of this informal chess and draughts club. And since they played in silence, it wasn’t even possible to overhear anybody’s name by chance. I simply attached myself to one small group and began waiting patiently for events to develop, trying to insinuate myself into the trust of these fanatics of the chequered board by my sheer physical presence.

  Suddenly I found myself plunged into a strange, inexplicable trance and for a while I evidently must have actually become part of that living, breathing chess-and-draughts organism.

  I spent about an hour in this condition, until the game came to an end, and then, together with all the other figures enslaved by the trance of the chessboard, I breathed out my torpor with a sharp breath, straightened my back and realised that an hour of collective standing had brought me closer in spirit to these people. I was a poor chess player, and could hardly have given even the most elementary commentary on the game that had just finished, but the others could, and I proved to be a grateful listener. At first, it’s true, two old men almost came to blows as they argued over a supposedly wrong move by a bishop. My abstention from their argument had a positive effect, and they enlisted me as their audience, rehearsing the main moves of the game from memory.