The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘Who is this?’ I instinctively blurted out.

  ‘You mean you haven’t got it yet?’ the voice asked indignantly. ‘If I tell you who this is, you’ll owe us twenty grand instead of ten, you lousy jerk!’

  The line went dead, but I was still holding the receiver up to my ear.

  Sleep had fled, and a depressing, sordid sense of reality was gradually seeping into the place it had occupied.

  And just why did I close the door? Maybe I wouldn’t have had to run for it if that lock hadn’t clicked . . .

  A wave of despondency flooded over me. The night was ruined, and I really wanted to believe that it was only the night. Although the ten grand that someone wanted from me for the closed door didn’t sound much like a joke.

  I got up, doddered around the room that was lit by nothing but the dull glow of the night sky coming in through the window and making the darkness amenable to the eye.

  Once again the night was a sheer waste of time – I would never get back to sleep now.

  I took down the matryoshka book and went into the kitchen, put some coffee on and sat down at the table. I took The Kobza Player out of Tolstoy and with my eyes still screwed up as I got used to the unshaded light bulb dangling on its wire from the kitchen ceiling like a hanged man, I opened the book that had unexpectedly brought something bright and mysterious into my life, something that took me away from dingy everyday reality.

  It would probably have been more interesting to read Gershovich’s manuscript, but I was afraid of the intense concentration of his thought. Here, in the margins of The Kobza Player, every annotation written in that fine handwriting was like a separate picture, beautifully composed and framed, so that it was possible to contemplate this picture and think about it, without suffering any thought fatigue.

  ‘All his life a man struggles with his supposedly natural role of “being strong”, he sometimes wastes his entire life on deliberately developing this characteristic, while subconsciously always seeking the protection that only a woman can give him. He devotes every demonstration of his natural male quality to the search for this protection. In politics this natural process is exploited precisely to inculcate patriotism: every monument erected to the homeland portrays a woman, and often in a militant pose. A woman as the defender of the weak, that is, of men.’

  The bitter taste of the coffee settled on my tongue, and I wanted to keep that taste until the morning – it cheered me and distracted me from the smell of cinnamon that seemed to be hovering in the air everywhere, no matter where I went in the flat.

  I leafed through a few more pages.

  ‘A man easily transfers his love for himself and his own life to love for a woman in the attempt to make her an integral part of his life.’

  This thought struck me as a little banal. But since I realised that all these annotations had not been meant to be published, I didn’t accuse the deceased thinker of admiring his own ideas so excessively that he lost sight of their quality. After all, this was a discovery he had made for himself, and if there was nothing new in it to me, that was only because I had already realised it intuitively anyway.

  I sat there, leafing through The Kobza Player and reading Gershovich’s notes. But at this stage I was reading inattentively, without remembering or appreciating his thoughts. I was waiting for the night to be over. For the approach of dawn to start scattering the darkness that curtained the window.

  12

  NEXT MORNING, WHEN I remembered the night-time phone call, I started feeling really anxious.

  The cold light of day seemed to introduce a sense of reality into the threats made over the phone. Ten thousand dollars was such a large amount of money that even earning it, let alone giving it away, was an absolutely fantastic idea to me. But the threat to take away my flat instead of the money threw me into a cold sweat. After I’d sold a two-room flat in the suburbs to buy a one-room flat in the centre, now someone wanted to make me homeless! I realised that I had ruined all plans of these unknown visitors who were so keen to get into the ‘baby food’ storeroom. But then, that was why I’d been hired as a watchman . . . Only they couldn’t give a damn about that, of course. I didn’t even know if they had managed to get in or not.

  ‘No,’ I decided quite firmly, ‘not a single step backwards. I don’t have that kind of money, and I won’t let them have the flat!’ I had five hundred dollars in the emergency fund – what I ought to do was install a metal-plated door. They were hardly likely to try cutting through it with an arc welder. And if they did try, I would have time to call the police . . . The idea of relying on the police made me smile. But I had to hope that someone would protect me. The police could certainly offer more real protection than the new constitution, but they couldn’t provide me with round-the-clock protection.

  By eleven I had already phoned a firm that manufactured and installed armoured doors. A representative came round to see me, took measurements and offered me a choice of locks. We signed a computer printout of a contract on the spot, and then I only had to survive another two days without protection. And the door proved cheaper than I was expecting – only three hundred bucks.

  Once I had signed the contract, I felt more confident. I noticed the fresh sunlight outside the window and I heard the sparrows chirping. Life was going on, and I had to go on with it, taking as much as possible from it and giving as little as possible back, so that what was left would last longer.

  13

  THE TWO DAYS went by, and my flat was transformed into a fortress. When the heavy armoured door had been installed and I had said goodbye to the two craftsmen, the feeling of freedom struck me like a thunderbolt. For the time being, the security of my flat was left in my own hands. And I set off, securely protected, to take a stroll along the street.

  It was about two o’clock. The sun hanging above St Sophia’s Cathedral looked as if it was about to fall. The spot at which the innocent patriarch Vladimir lay beneath the asphalt was empty, and I walked hurriedly past his unwanted grave, past the secret headquarters of the state border guard, where every now and then a bald little man who looked like a boletus mushroom would appear out of the door with a mobile phone in his hand and conduct telephone negotiations that were no doubt top secret out in the street in front of the building. But he wasn’t there right now.

  I met only the odd person walking by, no crowds organised into any kind of rally or demonstration.

  As I walked along, I pondered the unjustified sense of freedom that my new metal door had given me. Suddenly a ‘number 9’ Lada pulled up beside me. The tinted glass of the side window slid down and I saw a man of about forty-five wearing a blue T-shirt.

  ‘Tell me, how do I get to Bessarabka?’ he asked.

  I explained and then watched the car drive away.

  The registration number on the number 9 was from Odessa.

  When the car disappeared from sight, my feeling of freedom and security disappeared with it. And a good thing too, I must say. I started peering around cautiously and immediately spotted the familiar dark-haired couple. The man with the moustache was watching me, and his girlfriend was examining a magazine through the glass of a newspaper kiosk.

  ‘Another chance coincidence?’ I thought. ‘Or do they live somewhere close by?’

  I walked round the Golden Gates and went back home.

  That evening the phone rang again.

  ‘How are the greenbacks coming along?’ the familiar voice asked me.

  ‘They’re not,’ I replied.

  ‘Look here, arsehole, we’re not going to leave the meter running for you – times have changed. I warned you: if you don’t come up with the ten grand, we’ll relocate you to the “Missing Persons” noticeboard.’

  After saying ‘I get it’ I didn’t expect any reply and I hung up.

  My mood was suddenly dismal.

  What good was that door, if I could feel secure only when I locked myself inside?

  ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I need to cle
ar off to somewhere else for a while. Close the flat and get away. Sooner or later they’ll forget about me anyway.’

  And although those were not times that really encouraged tourism, I started thinking seriously about leaving the city that I loved. I had to go, and I had to go quickly. And the direction I would go in seemed to choose itself – the Cossack coast of the Caspian Sea, to the Mangyshlak Peninsula, where the Novopetrovsk Fortress once used to stand.

  Getting my things together took my mind off the unpleasant feelings that had come flooding in after the phone call.

  I stuffed Gershovich’s manuscript into my Chinese rucksack, together with the three cans of infant milk formula and two cans of something else that I found in the kitchen cupboard. I put my clothes in on top.

  Then I sat down in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Outside the window it was already dark, and the darkness reassured me. Maybe my nameless enemies were sleeping? Now was just the right moment to slip out of the building and dissolve into the darkness.

  And so I did. And I greeted the dawn on board the Kiev– Astrakhan train, in a half-empty carriage with a conductor with a crumpled, red face, who was vainly trying to get the coal to burn in his hot-water boiler.

  14

  AT ABOUT NOON the train stopped on the border. First the dreary Ukrainian customs officers walked through the carriage. One of them cast a glance at me and asked with a note of hope in his voice: ‘Taking anything out, are we?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘All right, show me your luggage,’ he demanded. I lifted up my bunk and showed him my lean rucksack. I could tell from the customs officer’s face that he felt like spitting at the sight, but he restrained himself.

  Then the Russian customs men arrived. Two of them walked into the carriage.

  ‘What are we bringing in?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Just myself,’ I joked.

  The second customs man narrowed his eyes and sniffed.

  ‘Are you carrying cinnamon for sale?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  They didn’t believe me, and I had to show them my rucksack too. But at that point they took the dignified approach and didn’t ask to look inside it.

  The train started panting and hammering on the rails again. The same landscapes flitted by outside the window, only now they were Russian. The water in the boiler finally came to the boil, and the conductor brought me a glass of tea with that special ‘railway’ sugar that’s almost impossible to dissolve.

  As I drank that tea, lulled by the senseless motion of the landscape outside the window, I thought that I had left behind in Kiev two closed metal doors and one opened grave. No more, no less.

  15

  THE SALTY SMELL of the sea overpowered even the usual smell of a railway station. The sun shining down on Astrakhan was an albino, as if it had been heated to an incandescent white. But I didn’t feel the heat – perhaps because of the breeze that was blowing from the sea.

  Moving rather sluggishly, I walked away from the station without knowing where I was going, simply gazing around, taking a look at the unfamiliar town. There was almost no one about, and those people that my eyes did light on looked like vagrants, or followers of the teachings of Ivanov: a fat man with bare feet wearing tracksuit bottoms came walking towards me, thrusting out his immodest belly as proof of his normal past. And he walked straight by.

  I noticed an immoderate number of Russian flags hanging on the buildings. The pleasant sound of banners flapping in the breeze accompanied me everywhere I went, inspiring an unaccountable, smug pride, although it was quite obvious that I was an outsider here, a foreigner, an incidental visitor with a rather unusual goal in mind.

  ‘Ah yes!’ I remembered. ‘It’s Saturday today. But just because it’s the weekend is that good enough reason for decorating the town so patriotically?’

  Speculating in this way, I ambled along the street. I passed a sign that told me I was on Togliatti Street. Somewhere above my head a window opened noisily. I automatically looked up and saw an elderly woman sweep her sleepy glance along the street like a broom, after which she hid herself away again, leaving the window open. The town was waking up. Ahead of me a banner appeared, hanging above the deserted street.

  The Kulibin Joint Stock Company – General Sponsor of Day of the City.

  ‘Well, now,’ I realised, ‘I’ve arrived on a holiday. Maybe there’ll be something for me in this celebration of theirs?’

  The town, however, was still at rest, although on my watch the hands had met to show ten to ten.

  Fifteen minutes later I saw a queue of people running into the door of a bakery. When I approached them an expression of concern flickered across the faces of those in the queue, and I understood the reason for it almost immediately – from deep inside the shop, a stentorian woman’s voice announced that there were no baguettes left. Before my eyes the crooked line of intent people fell apart and its contents went dashing off in two opposite directions. A couple of minutes later, the bakery and the street behind me were deserted and dead.

  ‘Well, OK,’ I told my hungry self, ‘on holidays they usually have stalls of different food, so I’m sure to get something to eat before I find a ferry or a ship.’

  Half an hour later, without knowing how, I arrived back at the railway station, although I didn’t think I’d made any turns anywhere – the town was obviously round, like a small version of the globe. But now the station was a hive of activity – perhaps some other trains had arrived, or perhaps people had already started waking up. This time I walked away from the station along a different, equally wide street. And after I had taken only ten steps, I saw a citizen of Astrakhan walking towards me clutching a prodigious sandwich. It was a baguette cut in half lengthwise and plastered thickly with black caviar. He was holding this super-sandwich in both hands and taking obvious pleasure in nibbling on it as he walked along.

  I already knew there was a lot of fish in Astrakhan, and so I took this scene as a case of patriotic affectation. But ten minutes later, when I met several other citizens with identical sandwiches – including an old woman dressed in rags and wearing a ‘Victory over Germany’ medal on her chest – I started thinking more deeply on the matter. Now it all looked less like affectation and more like some kind of charitable event. That conclusion didn’t do anything to satisfy my hunger, though; in fact, it even provoked a certain feeling of envy for the deprived – they, at least, had been remembered and fed caviar on the Day of the City!

  As I continued my semi-aimless wandering, I observed that practically everyone I encountered along the way was holding similar huge sandwiches. And not all of them looked as if they were deprived, there were some perfectly respectable-looking individuals.

  I then came out into a square where there were Russian flags fluttering even above the trading kiosks. In front of the kiosks stood citizens queuing holding flat empty sandwiches – long baguettes cut in half lengthwise. After stopping and observing for a while, I understood the way in which the Day of the City was being celebrated. The citizens thrust their baguettes in through the little kiosk windows and received them back covered with caviar. And nobody demanded to see the citizens’ documents, so if I could find myself a baguette, then I would also receive this same Astrakhan aristocrat’s lunch.

  If I could find one. But after striding athletically round the nearby streets, I realised that I was too late – all the bakeries were closed, and outside the door of one of them an old woman who was walking by informed me compassionately that the town had run out of bread the day before.

  Feeling desperate, I walked up to a kiosk where I had just seen the queue dissolve.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a baguette, would you?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ the young salesman said.

  ‘A bit of black bread, then? I’m really hungry,’ I confessed, trying to play on his pity. ‘I’m just off the train . . .’

  The young guy sighed.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ h
e said.

  Not really understanding what was going on, I held my hand in through his little window, expecting him to put a free Snickers bar or something of the sort into it. But the young guy leaned down for a couple of seconds and then I felt something sticky oozing across my palm.

  ‘You can eat it like that!’ he told me.

  I pulled my hand back out of the window. My palm was covered with a centimetre-thick layer of black caviar.

  I thanked my generous provider and walked away from the kiosk, still not really knowing how I was going to eat it.

  ‘Come again!’ the young guy shouted behind me. I walked along the street, carefully balancing my open hand spread with caviar. Every now and then I raised it to my mouth and licked off the tasty, salty little grains. Now the holiday atmosphere in the town felt real to me too. I no longer envied those who had stocked up on baguettes in good time – I was doing all right too. I asked a passer-by how to get to the port. He gestured like a man sowing grain. I realised that the port here was immense and set off in the general direction of his gesture, licking at my palm sandwich.

  Early in the evening, having licked all the caviar off my hand and walked round several huge port jetties without finding a single passenger ship, on the point of exhaustion I sat down beside a monument to Kirov in a park. It was still light. I realised that if I communicated on a deeper level with the local population, I would find what I wanted. But I really didn’t feel like communicating with anyone – I already had experience of chance encounters and their consequences. If it had been an ordinary day, I would have bought a map of the town in a newspaper kiosk and found everything for myself. But all the kiosks were closed, apart from those that provided caviar. And I sat there alone, resting on that massive, green park bench with its cast-iron side pieces.