The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  On Wednesday night I was back at the cemetery, this time in genial company that also inspired a certain degree of apprehension. I had found two vagrants at the railway station and promised each of them enough for two bottles of vodka when the job was done. And now here they were walking round the little grave with their spades, either squaring up to the job or seeking inspiration.

  ‘So what is it you want to find in there?’ one of them kept asking. His name was Zhora, a stocky man with a bluish face, and every time he looked at me he gave a tense, ugly smile.

  ‘I told you, there are some documents under his head . . .’

  Zhora cleared his throat and stuck his spade in first. At the other side, his friend Senya, a short but skinny man of about forty, immediately grabbed the handle of his own spade.

  They threw the earth out on to the little path running between Gershovich’s grave and the low fence of the next one, which was better cared for. The heap of earth grew. The low, dark blue sky radiated warmth, and every now and then birds called abruptly and tunelessly.

  Despite several breaks for a smoke, the taciturn diggers worked on feebly and without enthusiasm. Finally Zhora’s spade struck wood and they livened up. They cleaned off the lid of the coffin.

  ‘Are we going to lift it up or rummage in it like that?’ Zhora asked me.

  ‘Can you get the lid off without lifting it out?’ I asked them, for some reason assuming that vagrants knew more than me about opening graves.

  Zhora looked down expertly into the pit that they had dug.

  ‘We can pull it off here. Even if it gets a bit broken, what the hell does he care anyway?’

  Zhora and Senya prised off the lid of the shallowly buried coffin with their spades and hoisted it up. Bright as the moonlight was, even with the support of myriad stars it could not light up the inside of the open coffin lying in the excavated grave. I could see a dark, amorphous mass in it. I leaned down, expecting to make out at least the general contours of a body, but in vain. And the smell rising up from below was sweet, as if it was permeated with cinnamon.

  ‘Well?’ Zhora asked. ‘Are you going to climb in?’

  I realised he was talking to me and I turned round. ‘Why me? We had adeal . . .’ I said indignantly.

  Suddenly something heavy came down hard on my head, covering me with a net of some dark, impervious material, as if I were a butterfly. Then immediately, as if the butterfly hunter had abruptly jerked his net backwards, I lost my balance, swayed and crashed down on to the warm night earth, hearing cautious whispering voices fading into the distance.

  6

  WHEN I CAME round it was already getting light. The early birds were calling to each other in ringing voices; it was like a morning roll call. I got up off the ground slowly and hesitantly. I looked around: one spade was stuck into the ground, the other was just lying there– that was obviously the one I’d been hit with. My pockets had been rifled and naturally all the money – not very much, thank God – was gone. There was a dead man lying on his side in the coffin in the opened grave. His head – totally black – was also lying on its side, and beside it there was a package with a cardboard folder protruding from it.

  I thought about my helpers of the night before and couldn’t help smiling.

  I imagined how they had worked themselves up, expecting to find some genuine treasure – gold or something of the sort – and then, following the plot line familiar since childhood, they had tried get rid of the superfluous third man and split everything two ways. They’d tried so hard, and all the treasure they’d got was the money I’d promised them anyway.

  When I was completely awake, I climbed down into the grave. Gershovich seemed to be lying on his side especially so that I would have somewhere to set my foot. I took hold of the package with the folder and put it up on the edge of the grave. Then I clambered out myself. I took the lid of the coffin, set the narrower end at Gershovich’s feet and dropped it. The lid snagged on a piece of root that hadn’t been trimmed back properly and hung there above the head end. I took a spade and with a couple of blows forced the lid down into its proper place. And then I spent another half-hour burying the coffin, smoothing out the grave and sticking the welded iron cross painted with silver paint back in its place.

  When I was finished, I picked up the package with the folder and once again noticed that strange, sweetish smell of cinnamon – now it seemed as if all my clothes were permeated with it, and the package exuded the same smell too.

  The sun was beginning to warm things up. I gave the cross a glance farewell. I had to be going – someone might turn up here soon. I wondered what time it was.

  I automatically pulled back my shirt cuff and looked at my watch. It was a little after five. ‘Why didn’t they take the watch?’ I thought with a sad smile at my helpers. ‘Or has life really only taught them to clean out pockets?’

  I walked to the stop at the end of the tramline. Somewhere in the distance the first tram was probably already running along the forest section of the track between Kuryonovka and Pushche-Voditsa, clanging like a huge alarm clock. Coming to take me home. To distract me from the caked blood on the back of my head and the sweet smell that seemed to have eaten right into my clothes.

  A smell that had a calming effect and also evoked a light, even frivolous smile, regardless of the nature of my thoughts.

  When I got home the clock on the wall in the kitchen said five to seven.

  Halting in front of the mirror in the hallway, I noticed that my clothes were in need of a good wash, and I myself looked very much like a vagrant who had spent the night on a heap of clay. I quickly changed into my dressing gown and put my clothes to soak in a large basin. Then I decided to soak myself in the bath. I filled it up with hot water and dived in, spilling water over the edge on to the floor. The heat of the water worked its way through to my bones and I started feeling a pleasant ache in my collarbones, like in a sauna. My body gradually began feeling more lively and so did my head, ridding itself of the quiet buzzing that had been reminding me of the blow from the spade and lining my thoughts up in a row one by one, so that each of them could be contemplated calmly, without any haste.

  The nocturnal incident had already receded into the past. And up ahead, waiting on the kitchen table for the newly washed, fresh me in just half an hour from now, was the folder, for the sake of which the whole risky adventure had been undertaken. But any adventure seemed appropriate to me in those dangerous and dynamic changing times.

  After rubbing myself down with a big, fluffy towel, I noticed to my surprise that the sweetish odour I had first noticed at the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery was still there. I leaned down over the basin with my dirty clothes but the basin gave off a smell of washing powder, while the scent of cinnamon was ‘floating’ somewhere higher, at the level of my shoulders and face.

  ‘OK,’ I thought. ‘It’s not the worst smell in the world, and there’s no smell that doesn’t fade in time.’

  I sat down at the kitchen table and opened the folder. It contained a stack of paper covered in small handwriting that was already familiar to me. But in the state I was in, I didn’t feel like straining to make out this superfine script – I wanted to find the letter that Klim had mentioned. I picked up the stack of paper and fanned it out to leaf through the sheets. And an envelope twice the usual letter size really did fall out. It flew out and fell straight on to the floor. In the envelope I found a small, worn piece of paper that looked rather like a page from an exercise book with barely visible lines of writing in ink that had turned lilac with age.

  I read it through quickly, and even before I had fully grasped what I had read, I had the feeling that I was in contact with something genuinely interesting and mysterious. The sheet of paper was titled ‘Report’, but in fact it was an ordinary piece of informing against a colleague. A certain Captain Paleev informed a Major Antipov that ‘when Private Shevchenko leaves the Novopetrovsk Fortress, he often sits behind a dune on the sand and, c
ontrary to the prohibition, writes things, and yesterday he buried something in this sand about three sazhens from the old well in the direction of the sea’.

  Outside the window bright sunlight was already streaming down on to the earth. The morning was catching fire, effacing the boundary between spring and summer. I set aside the informer’s letter that was written in January 1851 and drank my tea, wondering what Taras Shevchenko could have buried there, in faraway Mangyshlak. He didn’t have any money, and if he did, why would he bury it in the sand? No, he wasn’t the kind of man to go hiding his kopeks from others. I recalled my distant schooldays and the story of the ‘free’ book in which the soldier Shevchenko wrote down his poems, always carrying it with him in his boot. Maybe that was what he had buried, to keep it away from the curious eyes of informers like this Captain Paleev?

  ‘Perhaps I could find it there, in the sand,’ I thought, and immediately imagined what a joyful clamour there would be in Ukraine over that. ‘And perhaps they’d pay me a couple of hundred thousand dollars or give me a state pension for life? After all, it’s an important historical relic!’

  But then the value of this unknown item buried in the sands of Mangyshlak was rather uncertain; it was probably of interest only to a museum. A few scholars would write doctoral dissertations, and that would probably be all that came of it.

  I pulled over the stack of paper that Gershovich had covered in writing and leafed through it again, and suddenly my eye caught a glimpse of a sheet with a drawing that was clearly topographical. I picked it out and inspected the hand-drawn map, and then immediately lost interest in it, since written underneath it in Gershovich’s own handwriting was this:

  ‘Copied from the materials of the “Shevchenko Expedition” at an exhibition in the Literary Museum Archive.’

  I sighed and looked out of the window. The rising tide of bright yellow sunlight was almost lapping at my kitchen table. I yawned and rubbed my eyelids that seemed to be stuck together – the invigorating effect of the bath hadn’t lasted long. My body was demanding sleep.

  Early in the evening, when I had recovered, I sat down at the kitchen table again. First I satisfied my hunger with a piece of healthy sausage, then I took Gershovich’s manuscript and ran through its lines of writing with a fresh eye.

  And once again my nose was struck by the sweetish smell of cinnamon. I raised a sheet of paper to my face and sniffed it. Then I automatically sniffed the hand that was holding the sheet and realised that my hand was giving out a much stronger smell than the paper.

  Unwilling to make the mental effort to discover the reason for the appearance of this smell, I turned my attention back to the lines of Gershovich’s manuscript.

  The first few pages seemed to me to be a repetition or rehash of the same ideas that he had expressed in pencil in the margins of The Kobza Player, but then, on the seventh page, his thoughts moved off into a different sphere.

  ‘The national wealth is born inside a chosen individual, condemning him to wander in a tormented search for the way to apply this wealth, since as a chosen one, he may be loved by his nation and respected by it, but clearly not understood, or at least not understood correctly, which only increases his inner tribulation, and the suffering that results from the impossibility of applying the riches granted to him from on high can result in insanity or perplexing and tragic twists of fate, capable of leading him to regions far away from his homeland (woman).’

  This was followed by a description of the route of Grigory Skovoroda’s travels round Ukraine. But on the next page Gershovich returned to Shevchenko’s tragic fate. And here I immediately noticed a similarity to the thoughts concerning the denunciation by Captain Paleev that I had already read.

  ‘The spot (by a well) chosen by T.G. Shevchenko to bury the unknown object indicates a clear desire either to come back himself and recover what he had hidden or to make it easy for someone else to find the place from its description.

  ‘This spot must still exist, it is at least two kilometres away from the sea. As for the object itself, it is most probably a manuscript or a notebook – both of these survive well in sand in hot dry conditions. Perhaps in this notebook he expressed those thoughts and feelings that his contemporaries were not yet capable of understanding. And so it is unlikely that they were expressed in poetry (the form most accessible to people of that time).’

  After reading this page, I recalled a recent announcement about the manuscript of Einstein’s theory of relativity being put up for auction in New York – the asking price had been four million dollars, but the buyer had paid only three million.

  ‘Interesting,’ I thought. ‘I wonder how much they would pay for an unknown manuscript by Shevchenko at an auction somewhere in Canada? That’s where the richest and most sentimental Ukrainians live, and one of them could easily shed tears of tender emotion as he laid out a couple of million dollars, even if they are Canadian.’

  After a smile at the liveliness of my own imagination, which had conjured up this touching scene from the life of the Canadian diaspora, I started thinking how since Soviet times the idea of buried treasure had changed in the minds of the new generation. In the eighties, in their teenage years everyone read Stevenson’s novels, but at the same time they read works by the classic writers of Soviet literature in which boy treasure hunters didn’t find gold and diamonds buried in a pot buried in the ground, but instead discovered somebody’s Communist Party card and a Second World War medal. And they immediately stood to attention like good Young Pioneers and saluted those who had fallen fighting for the righteous cause. That was probably where the late Gershovich’s ideas had come from too. This was the source of that desire to seek non-material values, symbolic treasures and spiritual treasure troves. But what if what was still lying there under the sand was simply an old gold coin or two? What if he had hidden them there so that they wouldn’t be taken from him by some drunken officer reduced to the beastly depths of complete moral degradation by life on the margins of the empire? Eh? And then all these thoughts that Gershovich had written down would amount to nothing more than a way of playing hide-and-seek with the reality in which he lived. Another game, just like the one with matryoshka-doll books that he or Lvovich or Klim had invented.

  ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘this is all very interesting, but as the old alcoholic who was my neighbour at my previous flat says, “Have a good time, but don’t forget to take all the bottles back!” So I’ll calmly finish reading this manuscript and just maybe I’ll be spiritually enriched, but I still have to earn the money for my healthy sausage . . .’

  I hid the manuscript away in the folder, once again putting my nose to the hand that smelled of cinnamon, and went to get dressed. Every third night was like a period of active combat – I guarded a storeroom of Finnish baby food that belonged to the Corsair Charitable Foundation.

  7

  AFTER TAKING OVER from Vanya, a student from the college of physical education, I sat down at the old office desk with its full set of night-watchman’s gear: an electric kettle, a small portable television, a rubber truncheon, a telephone and gas cylinder. As you can see, the means for providing protection and defending yourself were minimal, and they didn’t exactly encourage any desire to give my last drop of blood in protecting the material property entrusted to me. But the wages here were paid on time and in full, and the place seemed fairly safe: the baby food – which was in any case out of date according to the markings on the cardboard boxes – was hardly likely to attract the interest of any of today’s would-be expropriators.

  A large rat ambled lazily past the boxes and the table. I watched it go with a quizzical glance. Then I switched on the television and took the kettle to the sink that was just three steps away – the ritual of ‘getting into’ the job was beginning.Usually, after tea and a couple of films, I would arrange four chairs in a row along the wall and would sleep peacefully until the morning, when a knock at the door would wake me and I’d open the door to admit Grishche
nko, the chairman of the Corsair Charitable Foundation, with his battered old attaché case. Grishchenko was about fifty years old and he looked like a classical accountant – a bit on the fat side, round-faced, balding. He didn’t seem to know how to smile, but the expression on his face – eternally perplexed – was enough to raise a smile on anyone else’s.

  After casting a quick glance round the spacious semi-basement premises stacked with cardboard boxes bearing blue square paper stickers with a picture of a happy baby, he usually nodded to me. That meant I was free to go. And I would go away for three days and two nights until my next shift.

  But that night I was not destined to get a good night’s sleep at my workplace. First the phone rang in the middle of some action movie or other. I picked up the receiver, but all I heard was someone breathing hoarsely. It didn’t sound like a joke, so I enquired patiently: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Close the door!’ Grishchenko’s abnormally hoarse voice said. ‘Block it with something . . .’

  ‘It is closed!’ I said, glancing round at the heavy metal door locked with two bolts.

  Grishchenko put the phone down without even saying goodbye. I did the same and carried on watching the small black-and-white screen on which some hoodlums had just riddled a good guy with bullets from a machine gun and spots of black blood had appeared on his white shirt.

  After watching the film to the end, I remembered the recent phone call and inspected the storeroom thoroughly. There were no windows here, and so the door was the only point through which uninvited guests could break in.

  But it was a warehouse door from Soviet times, when the country had at least a tonne of thick iron plate for every member of the population. To break in from the outside you would have to use a tank. The tinplate pipe of a ventilation system stretched across the ceiling and disappeared into the wall. It was a thick pipe, and sometimes rats ran through it, using it as a way into other rooms. One rat set off enough dull rumbling to make the air shake. The cardboard boxes piled on top of each other in several rows propped this pipe up from below, so it was not hard for the rats to clamber up the cardboard and in through the gaps in the ventilation system.