The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘But who was playing?’ I asked at the end, feeling that now I had the right to ask a question.

  ‘Filya and Misha,’ answered the one who was taller and more stooped. ‘They’re new, haven’t been here long.’

  I asked if Klim still played.

  ‘Oh, Klim!’ said the other old man with a gesture straight from Odessa, lifting an immense, invisible watermelon in his arms. ‘Klim plays, but when he plays nonsense like that’ – he nodded towards the bench that was now empty – ‘doesn’t happen.’

  Five minutes later I knew that Klim lived in a communal apartment on Shota Rustaveli Street, he sometimes came to the garden square on Fridays, he didn’t drink any more because of the pain in his liver, and he’d stopped breeding aquarium fish, so nobody knew what he lived on nowadays.

  I left, feeling that I was already a member of this club. Now all I had to do was learn to play a half-decent game of chess or draughts. But there wasn’t much chance of that. I would have begrudged the time, and in any case I didn’t like slow games in general.

  On Friday morning I leafed through The Kobza Player again, revelling in the comments in pencil.

  ‘The softness of one’s native earth in no way differs from the softness of foreign earth, since all earth has been the primary foundation of mankind and it could not have been distributed between nations according to the quality of those nations.’

  What amazed me was not so much the clarity of the formulation as the very subject matter of the thought, as if the man who wrote it had only taken Taras Shevchenko’s feelings and rhythms as a starting point, in order to say something about a particular sore point of his own. But then, why was he so concerned about this in those halcyon years of the 1960s? He was not a nationalist, otherwise the notes would have been in Ukrainian. There was no Russian chauvinism here either, since, in addition to the writer’s own thoughts, there was also respect, sympathy and perhaps even love for Shevchenko. At one point I thought that his ideas might be close to the ideas of Lenin – especially concerning the complete absence of any nations and nationalities in the future. But I immediately imagined what Lenin would have said about the idea that a beloved woman is your homeland. No, I didn’t think the Great Lisper would have agreed with that assertion, no matter how beautiful Krupskaya might have been in her young days.

  But time was passing and so I set the book aside – without, however, forgetting about it – and began getting ready to go to the small garden by the university and continue my search for the author of these comments. My intuition told me that Klim would be there today. It was more than just intuition. Outside my window the sun was shining and the birds were singing. It would have been stupid to stay at home in weather like that, especially if your home was a room in a communal apartment on Shota Rustaveli Street, with its noisy trams.

  And I did find him in the garden square. First of all I sought out the two old men who already knew me. They pointed to one of the benches, where the chess championship of the university garden square was being contested. It was not difficult to tell which of the players was Klim, since the other was no more than forty years old.

  I waited for the end of the game, which was being followed closely by at least twenty members of the ‘club’, and then approached Klim. The hard-won victory had obviously brought him a feeling of satisfaction, and although as soon as the game was over all the fans immediately scattered to other benches where there were games taking place, without even bothering to congratulate him, the victor himself was jubilant – the sunken eyes above the high cheekbones of his thin face were positively glowing with youthful ardour.

  ‘You really showed him!’ I told Klim instead of saying hello.

  ‘Yes, I played pretty well,’ he agreed. ‘But Vitek can play a bit too – only I wore him down!’

  Afraid of disgracing myself if I got any more deeply involved in chess talk, I went straight to the point.

  ‘Do you remember Lvovich?’ I asked Klim, who was still smiling happily.

  The smile froze on his face.

  ‘Of course I remember him . . .’ he said, peering at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Why, are you a relative of his?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you look a bit like him . . .’

  ‘I think that, purely by chance, I have come into possession of one of your manuscripts . . .’ I said.

  ‘You don’t say!’ old Klim exclaimed in surprise. ‘Which one’s that?’

  ‘Well, not exactly a manuscript, it’s some annotations to Shevchenko’s Kobza Player . . . very interesting, as a matter of fact.’

  The old man touched his carelessly shaved chin and looked at me intently again.

  ‘Annotations?’ he repeated. ‘That’s not mine . . . I wrote different annotations . . . And did you happen to come by this Kobza Player too?’

  ‘Yes, the comments are in its margins . . .’

  ‘What kind of book is it? Ordinary? What kind of format?’ the old man asked cautiously.

  ‘Not exactly ordinary . . . Like a matryoshka doll. Enclosed in a volume of Tolstoy.’

  The old man nodded and smiled, looking down at the asphalt under his feet.

  ‘Well, fancy that, it’s shown up at last,’ he said in a quiet voice. Then he raised his head and gave me a look that wasn’t intent any longer, but somehow calm and relaxed.

  ‘If you’ve got the money for a bottle of dry white, why don’t you come round to my place?’

  I had the money, and so after a brief detour along the route ‘garden square – delicatessen – Shota Rustaveli Street’, we found ourselves in a spacious room with a high ceiling weighed down by heavy moulding and cut across by zigzag cracks. There were two cupboards in the room – a bookcase and a wardrobe – both old, solid pieces from the fifties. A small table, more appropriate for the tiny kitchen of some microscopic flat, looked like a stunted dwarf in this room.

  The old man handed me a little knife.

  ‘Open the dry!’ he said and went out into the corridor. He came back with two glasses.

  ‘As a decent man, will you invite me back to your place?’ he suddenly asked with a smile.

  ‘Of course,’ I promised.

  ‘Then I’ll show you something!’ The old man walked over to the bookcase and opened the door.

  ‘Here.’ He pulled a massive volume off the bottom shelf.

  4

  I TOOK HOLD of the book – it was an academic edition of The Kobza Player. My hands delighted in the pleasant roughness of the calico binding – there are some objects and substances which it is a positive physical pleasure to touch.

  ‘Go on, open it. Open it!’ said the old man. I opened it and found myself looking at another matryoshka book. Lying in a hollow cut into The Kobza Player was a plainer volume, although it was published during the same period: The Idiot by Dostoevsky. I looked up enquiringly at Klim. He was smiling, but not at me, more likely at his own past, which had suddenly been stirred up – by my appearance.

  A vague hunch suddenly made me remove the book by Dostoevsky from its cosy secret lair and leaf through its pages. I was correct – I caught glimpses of comments in pencil in the margins of The Idiot, only the handwriting here was a bit larger.

  ‘Did you write this?’ I asked Klim.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he said, sitting down at the small rectangular table.

  ‘And The Kobza Player?’ I reached out one hand to the bottle and started pouring the Riesling into the glasses, at the same time arranging my thoughts into some kind of logical order.

  ‘The Kobza Player? No, it was someone else who wrote about The Kobza Player . . .’ the old man said slowly, picking up his glass.

  ‘Lvovich?’ I asked, trying to encourage him to remember.

  ‘Why Lvovich? Lvovich chose Dead Souls.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, feeling my head drowning in a thick fog of confusion, ‘did you have some kind of literary club, then?’

  ‘Not literary, philosophical,’ the old man corr
ected me. ‘And it still exists . . . At least, while I’m alive it does. I’m a one-man club all on my own!’

  ‘But then, who did write the comments on The Kobza Player?’ I asked.

  ‘Slava Gershovich . . . may he rest in peace.’

  ‘What, is he dead?’

  ‘He was killed . . . They killed him with electricity.’ The old man lowered his head dolefully. ‘He was a great guy. A brilliant mind. Long before all these Kashpirovskys and psychics he knew all about that stuff . . . That’s why they killed him . . .’

  The fog started swirling around my head again.

  ‘What has The Kobza Player got to do with psychics?’ I said, totally bewildered at this stage.

  ‘What kind of question’s that?’ The old man looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘And just what do you think high literature is? Nothing but letters and metaphors? It’s an instrument for transmitting spiritual electricity, a sort of conductor! Feel like charging yourself up with deep, dismal energy? Then open one of Dostoevsky’s books. Feel like purging yourself and spending a while in a lucid, enlightened state? Then pick up Turgenev’s prose . . . These idiots like Kashpirovsky have turned it all into curing haemorrhoids on the television. But mark my words, St Iorgen’s day will soon be over, and literature will be left once again as the only conductor for any kind of bioenergy.’

  ‘Well then, what kind of energy does The Kobza Player transmit?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s something you ought to have asked Gershovich . . . But, I tell you, there’s more serious business involved there, with that Kobza Player, and Shevchenko too . . . That’s really serious business . . . Well, they killed him because of that . . .’

  ‘Because of what?’

  The old man finished his wine. He stroked his flabby, stubbly chin again.

  ‘Because Gershovich had figured out where something very important for the Ukrainian people was hidden . . . But you’ll never understand it from that. And don’t you go thinking that I’ve turned senile – if Gershovich were still alive, he’d explain it all to you in five minutes!’

  ‘And are there any of this Gershovich’s manuscripts left?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Manuscripts? There was one manuscript, and there was a letter in it . . .’ said the old man, nodding in time to his own words. ‘Lvovich and I put the manuscript under his head in the coffin . . .’

  ‘And you didn’t read it?’

  ‘No. He asked us not to. He told us lots of things, he told us everything he thought about. And we saw that letter. The letter mentioned it, that buried . . . A letter written by Shevchenko himself, from Mangyshlak . . . Maybe it was because of the letter that they killed him! After all, that night, it was in’ 67, when they killed him, someone broke into this flat. They stole a crystal vase, turned everything upside down . . . But they didn’t find the folder! He hid it at Grisha’s place – that’s my sister’s husband. It was afterwards that we took it from Grisha’s place and put it under his head in the coffin.’

  ‘From Grigory Markovich’s place?’

  ‘That’s right!’ Old Klim’s eyes suddenly flared up brightly. ‘So you’re Grigory Markovich’s relative?’

  ‘I’m not anybody’s relative! I’m just curious.’

  ‘Well, young man, being just curious can prove very costly.’

  I turned a deaf ear to the old man’s final comment. The fog enveloping my thoughts had cleared a little. This first link discovered between the deceased Gershovich and Grigory Markovich, who had gone to Israel, had titillated my curiosity even further.

  ‘Maybe I could sell you this book?’ the old man suddenly said with a mysterious kind of intonation. ‘I’ve already sold the fish tanks, there’s almost nothing left here now . . .’ He looked around.

  ‘The book?’ I said, ‘Why, are you going away?’

  ‘Yes, on foot though . . . Not right now, of course . . . In a while. You remember how Tolstoy died?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I love him . . .’ said the old man. ‘I’ve read him over and over again, I wanted to learn how to live from him . . . Well, at least I’ll learn how to die from him. He had a wonderful death . . . Don’t you think so? I’ll set out from here on foot to Konotop. Not in order ever to get there . . . You know what I mean?’

  I drank a second glass of dry white, but the wine was too weak to help me lay out these fragments of the past and glue them all together, like some ancient amphora. Of course, I realised that all these men for whom Klim now acted as a kind of extraordinary spokesman were lunatics, crazy 1960s types, seekers of meaning in literature and philosophy in life. As a member of a different generation, I found it hard to talk with him. We used the same words, but he clearly endowed those words with more meaning than I did. I think the wine was the only thing we both understood in the same way. Wine from the same bottle couldn’t be different in two glasses.

  The old man took a map of Ukraine out of the bookcase and pointed out a thick pencil line running along the railway track that was shown on it. ‘This is where I’m going to walk,’ he said, running his finger all the way along the line, stopping every time he reached a railway station.

  I eventually reached a point at which I felt the old man had overburdened my brain. I made a note of his telephone number and promised to treat him to wine in my new flat sometime in the next few days.

  ‘But don’t you want to buy the book?’ he asked again at the very end when I’d already reached the door on my way out.

  ‘Well, how much do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘A hundred hryvnas!’ he declared proudly, with an expression that suggested he had deliberately named an unacceptable price, not in order to sell that high, but to indicate that the item was priceless.

  ‘I don’t have that much on me,’ I said, and heard something like a sigh of relief in reply.

  5

  TWO DAYS LATER old Klim came to visit me. We drank two bottles of dry wine, and while we were drinking them the conversation never faltered. What I heard from the old man enflamed my somewhat inebriated imagination. The late Slava Gershovich had apparently discovered some secret – either philosophical, or more material in nature – as a result of which he had been killed by a home-made electrical shock device. As far as I could understand, the secret that had led him to such an unusual death was revealed either in full or in part in the letter that Shevchenko wrote from Mangyshlak, which had come into Gershovich’s possession in some manner unknown and had then been buried, together with his own manuscript and body, in the cemetery at Pushche-Voditsa.

  The first thought I had was bound to be rather ungodly – I wanted to extract the manuscript and the letter from the grave in order to confirm the existence of the secret in which old Klim believed so solemnly. The word ‘exhumation’ occurs quite frequently in criminal literature. But it refers only to the removal from a grave of the body that is buried there. My idea of exhuming the manuscript and the letter seemed somehow less sordid and repulsive although, knowing as I did that the manuscript and letter were lying under Gershovich’s head, I found it hard to imagine how I could lift that head without coming into contact with the very essence of death, with that very substance that could not be called anything but dead.

  On Monday – the day everyone hates – I set off for Pushche-Voditsa on the tram.

  As I had expected, the cemetery was deserted. A light wind was swaying the long ship-mast pines that grew between the graves. The creaking of this forest created an odd impression – as if I were wandering through a long-abandoned city overrun by nature, among invisible ruins covered over with earth.

  At first I simply strolled about, looking closely at the neat lettering on the monuments. But then the time came when I had to plunge into the narrow tracks between the low little fences.

  This cemetery was located on a hill and its natural boundary on one side was a steep slope down to a forest lake. I methodically checked through the names on the monuments and the headstones until I found the famili
ar surname at the very edge of the cemetery, right beside the slope. It was carelessly engraved on an iron tablet attached to a welded iron cross that was painted silver. The poverty of the grave surprised me at first, but when I sat down on a bench and listened to a cuckoo counting off the remainder of someone or other’s life, I naturally arrived at the thought that a man who had been concerned with philosophy all his life couldn’t possibly be interested in marble monuments. Perhaps he might not even have wanted a cross. But the cross had probably been put there by his friends. Relatives are usually more particular about their dead – we can’t have our dear departed put to shame, why, some Bosonozhenko or other has an entire monument with bronze letters, what’s wrong with our . . .

  After sitting there for about fifteen minutes with thoughts like that for company, I looked at the grave with different eyes – seeing it as a safe that had to be opened somehow. And I realised that every kind of work has its own specialists. And I also realised what kind of specialists I needed – not gravediggers, of course; they were very expensive and they might turn me in – after all, the business I had in mind could hardly be called legal. What I had to find was a couple of vagrants who hadn’t been completely destroyed by drink, and two spades. The digging would have to be done at night too, and there was a certain mystical allure about that. But I regarded the forthcoming job without any fright or alarm – I was driven by the passionate desire to discover a secret and I was prepared to take risks, while at the same time I felt that basically there wasn’t really any risk. If no one nowadays gave a damn for the living, why would anyone be bothered about some dead man being taken out for a few minutes simply in order to adjust his head and put something softer than a manuscript under it?