After resting for about half an hour, I walked out of the park and back on to one of the town’s streets. Looking this way and that, I spotted a cafe that was open. Hanging above its door was a broad wooden signboard that had been repainted many times. When I got closer, I realised the sign had been repainted because of frequent changes of name. The cafe was now called ‘The Sailor’. The dim light bulbs glowing inside had been painted red and yellow. They stuck straight out of sockets screwed to the low ceiling, without any shades. Standing on the counter was an entire battery of vodka bottles – Frontline, Pugachev, Teardrop, Caspian Wave . . . There was definitely a choice of brands on offer here, but I didn’t feel like having vodka.
‘What do you want?’ the woman behind the counter asked me in a voice hoarse from smoking.
‘Do you have wine?’
‘Port for a thousand a glass.’
I took a glass of the pink port and parted with a crumpled Russian thousand-rouble note. I sat down at an unsteady plastic table and leaned my rucksack against the wall.
I took a sip from the glass. I didn’t taste anything, but I did feel the wave of warmth that ran through my tired body.
An old granny came running into the cafe.
‘Nyurka, lend me three thousand,’ she shouted. The woman at the counter gave the granny the money, and she ran back out again just as quickly.
I sipped away at the port, and when I got halfway down the glass, I could feel that I was getting drunk. I needed a bite of something to go with it, but alcoholic sloth had already spread through my body. I mechanically raised the hand that had been covered in caviar to my mouth and licked the palm. The taste of caviar seemed to have eaten into my skin, and I carried on, enjoying licking the invisible grains off my palm and washing them down with port. Until I fell asleep there, sitting with my head lowered on to the rickety table, which made it steadier.
I was woken by a fear that filtered through into my sober, but still sleepy consciousness. I lifted my head up off the table – it was dark in the cafe, although the light of morning was coming in through the solitary barred window. My head felt heavy after the wine, but that didn’t really hinder my thinking. I looked around and walked over to the door – it was locked from the outside. Naturally, I was alone in the cafe. The vodka bottles were still standing there on the shadowy counter. I found the switch beside the door and turned on the light. Behind the counter I saw an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee. I looked into the back room, found a washbasin and washed my face. I made myself a coffee, poured a couple of drops of milk into it and sat back down at my table. My head had cleared now and the freshness was gradually returning to my body. I was hungry, it’s true, but when you drink coffee, thoughts of food recede into the background. My watch said half past eight.
At nine the lock on the door grated and sunlight came streaming into the cafe.
‘Ah, you’re awake!’ the owner’s smoke-roughened voice exclaimed. ‘How come one glass put you out like that, eh?’
I shrugged.
‘I noticed,’ she continued, already behind the counter now and putting on a white blouse over her blue T-shirt, ‘he only has one glass, and he arrived looking sober, and he’s out like a light. And he has a rucksack too. Well, I thought, if I drag him outside and lean him against the wall, when he wakes up he won’t have any rucksack, or any clothes either . . . So I decided to leave you here, my little Kiev darling . . .’
‘How do you know I’m from Kiev?’ I asked in surprise.
She unlocked a drawer under the counter and put my passport down on top of it.
‘You don’t think I’d leave someone in my property without checking, do you? Here!’
I got up, took my passport and automatically felt the pocket where my passport and wallet had both been.
‘What’re you doing that for, darling?’ she laughed. ‘I didn’t go looking for anything else of yours, and if I did, I’d have been looking a bit lower down, only you won’t find that on a drunk . . . I see you know your way round the kitchen . . . Kolya . . . Do you want another coffee? Or something for a hangover?’
‘I wouldn’t mind some breakfast . . .’ I said, emboldened by her familiarity.
‘Coming up. Will you eat an omelette?’
Fifteen minutes later I was greedily eating the omelette and she was sitting beside me at the table, pressing it down with her pointed elbows and watching me closely, like a mother or a police investigator. Her kindness persuaded me to be open with her, and I said I wanted to get across to Mangyshlak. Of course, I didn’t say why. I just said I’d like to touch the sand that Shevchenko had walked on.
‘Don’t times change!’ she sighed. ‘They used to visit the places Lenin had been, or Brezhnev, but now every republic has its own idol.’
‘Why do you call him an idol?’ I protested. ‘He was a perfectly normal man. In Petersburg he used to steal geese and roast them with his friends.’
‘You don’t say!’ she exclaimed. ‘Like Panikovsky!’
After she’d fed me, she served a rapid-transit customer, who came running in to down his morning shot of a hundred grams of vodka and immediately went dashing on his way again.
‘You can’t get straight to Mangyshlak from here,’ she said when she came back to my table. ‘If you like, I’ll find out the best way to go.’
‘Please do!’ I said.
‘OK. You work here behind the counter for a while,’ she said briskly. ‘All the vodka’s a thousand for a hundred grams, the wine’s a thousand a glass. And I’ll be back in an hour . . . Oh yes, give me your passport!’
I held out my passport to her.
‘And another thing,’ she added. ‘Have you got anything to pay with?’
‘I have a bit . . .’
Left alone in the cafe, I stood behind the counter and looked out through the open door, which revealed a vertical rectangle of street lit by bright sunshine and traversed by occasional passers-by.
A man about fifty years old came in, unshaven and wearing a vest.
‘Is Nyurka here?’ he asked.
‘She’ll be here in an hour.’
He nodded and went out without drinking anything.
Then two serious-looking women, also in their fifties, but tastefully dressed, came in.
They took a hundred grams of vodka each, drank it immediately without sitting down and left.
Eventually Nyurka came back. By that time I was so well used to the cafe, I felt as if I could quite easily move in and settle down. But did I want to? No, I wanted to go to Mangyshlak, even though I didn’t know what was waiting for me there. Perhaps that was why I wanted to get there so badly. And anyway, was there anything at all waiting for me? If not for that stupid business at the baby-food storeroom, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere just now. It was simply point A, from which I had to run to point B. A fine ambition. There’s nothing like a threat to your life to make travel seem appealing.
‘Well then, darling, in a couple of days there’s a fish-processing ship going through the canal to the Caspian. If you like, I can try to make arrangements with them.’
‘But where’s it sailing to?’
‘It’s a floating factory, not a tourist ship. It’ll anchor in the Caspian, then go to Guriev or somewhere else to unload the canned fish.’
‘But how will I get to Mangyshlak?’
‘A lot of ships dock there . . . I have a friend who works on board, Dasha. She’ll help you . . .’
I was pleased with the outcome of this chance encounter. Even Nyurka’s smoke-roughened voice sounded agreeable and considerate to my ears. Until the fish processor left I stayed in her cafe, helping her and sometimes taking her place. And I slept there too, giving her my passport and remaining locked in overnight. But three days later, in the morning, Nyurka led me to the port and handed me over to her friend Dasha, a round-faced woman of about thirty-five who looked from a distance like a brightly coloured can of condensed milk.
16
THE UNWIELDY, MULTI-DECK rectangular block of the fish-processing plant cast off from its mooring at noon. I was standing on the third-level deck, and it seemed to me as if it wasn’t the floating factory that had left, but the town itself that had pushed off from us and gone floating away into the distance. On that day the sun was particularly vicious – it seemed to be hanging low and broiling as hard as it could. The metalwork of the massive, clumsy vessel was so sizzling hot you could have fried an egg on it. Only a Volga breeze could have dispersed the sweltering atmosphere sur rounding the processing plant, but the air was motionless. The plant didn’t sail like a ship, it crept imperceptibly across the smooth water, moving so slowly that even the surface of the Volga was unaffected, remaining alarmingly still.
‘Hey, kitten! What are you standing here for? Let’s go to the cabin!’ Dasha called to me.
I went back to the cabin, which I hadn’t had time to examine so far – I’d just dropped in my rucksack and left. It was a twin-berth cabin, with a little square window that was curtained off with a piece of lettuce-green material. In the corner beside the oval door there was a washbasin, with a rubbish bin standing underneath it. Under the window there was a low table with an alarm clock and a heavy ashtray of moulded glass. There were two narrow beds set along the walls of the cabin, like in a compartment on a train. They were both neatly made up, with their pillows standing Napoleon-style, one corner pointing skywards.
‘That one’s yours,’ Dasha told me, pointing to the bed on the right. ‘You can sit in here during the day, and in the evening – when everyone’s drunk – wander around the decks. Only don’t get lost!
‘Will it take long?’ I asked.
‘That depends on where you’re going,’ Dasha said reasonably enough. ‘You need to get to that place . . . Young Communist, don’t you?’
‘What young communist?’
‘You know, Young Communist Bay?’
‘Why do I want to go there?’
‘Nyurka said you want to get to Mangyshlak, right? Well, that’s the closest point, after Guriev we’ll go there, and then back in the opposite direction, to Mumra . . .’
I started thinking. Young Communist Bay? The name didn’t have a very Cossack ring to it, and apart from that, I didn’t know how I was going to get out of the place afterwards. What was there? A port? A town? A fishing village?
‘Dasha, what’s there, is the factory going to dock there?’
‘What for? No, we’ll take the fish off the trawlers, hang about for a day or two and move on.’
‘But how will I get off?’
‘We’ll arrange that with some ship,’ Dasha promised confidently. ‘OK, you stay here. If you want, there’s vodka in the locker under the table and water in the tap. There’s some canned food in the locker too, in case you get hungry. I’ve got to go to an urgent meeting.’
The heavy oval door smoothly opened and closed. I was left alone.
I sat down on my bed, stretched one hand out to the window, moved aside the improvised lettuce-green curtain and glanced out at freedom. Two metres away from the window I could see the grey-painted wall of the hull, beyond which the invisible shoreline was slipping past.
A strip of light blue sky baked by the sun – that was the only view from this window of the famous scenery of the Volga.
I lay down on the bed and listened to the silence. The silence proved to be rather loud – deep humming noises and various other sounds appeared to infiltrate the cabin from every side. But there were no abrupt tones, and so all this noise seemed peaceful and natural, like the sound of nature. It made a good background for thinking.
I remembered the town of Astrakhan. I remembered it with gratitude. I raised my right hand to my nose, sniffed the palm and smiled at the persistent smell of caviar. It didn’t annoy me, quite the opposite in fact – I seemed to have been given yet another proof of the variety of life and its smells. And I remembered Kiev, and the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery, and the folder with the manuscript in it that I had extracted from the grave. I didn’t want to remember anything else about Kiev after that, and I sniffed at my right palm again. I was amused that a smell could switch over my memories and thoughts. I smiled at the recent past with a lazy, rather drowsy smile. And I dozed off.
17
THAT EVENING WHEN she got back from work, Dasha let me out ‘for a walk’. In order not to get lost – I had a genuine fear of that – I strolled around on my own level. I walked out on to the deck and in twenty minutes or so of walking without hurrying or stopping and looking about, I had gone all the way round the huge bulk of the floating fish-processing plant. On each side in the distance the banks of the river with their sparse sprinkling of green slipped back towards Astrakhan. The sun, now red, was suspended on my right, and I could see it retreating in the face of the powerful tide of evening coolness in the air. The air smelled of the river and the breeze ruffled my hair. The fresh dampness of the evening was exhilarating. And I was clearly not the only one to be exhilarated. Inside the fish-processing plant life was seething. From deep in its entrails voices, laughter and shouts leaked out to the deck through the long iron corridors and the curtained windows of the cabins. And as the sun sank under the weight of evening, gradually turning crimson and growing weaker, the voices and the noises sounded louder and louder, until I was absolutely certain that any moment now they would erupt out on to the deck and spill overboard, and somewhere far off, on one of the banks, a fisherman sitting by his campfire would turn his head to watch the distant behemoth floating past with its dozens of square windows glowing and its multitudinous voices spreading out across the evening Volga.
It got dark more quickly than I had expected. Somehow I suddenly found myself surrounded by darkness and the darkness was immediately emphasised by the light falling from the window of someone’s cabin. And then someone stopped nearby – two figures, two glowing cigarettes, fading alternately like glow worms.
I listened, expecting to learn who they were from their voices. But they didn’t say anything.
They were silent for five minutes. Suddenly one twinkling cigarette went flying overboard like a falling star, and a woman’s voice murmured: ‘Serve the arsehole right!’ A second voice, also a woman’s but clearer, said: ‘Aha!’ and both figures began moving away from me, leaving behind a small light fading away on the handrail of the side. I walked over to it and flicked the glowing butt overboard with my finger. I looked in the direction they had gone. The oval iron door connecting the general corridor with the deck creaked.
I decided to stand there for a bit. I remembered the number of the cabin, and while I was on my own level, I wasn’t afraid of getting lost any more.
Twenty minutes later I went back to the cabin. Dasha was sitting on her bed in a cotton-print dressing gown. Standing on the table were an open bottle of vodka, two water glasses and a large cup of cold water.
‘Had a good walk?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Will you have a drink?’
‘Just a small one . . .’
She poured about fifty grams into each of the glasses.
‘A lousy day today,’ she complained as she handed me a glass.
I took the glass and sat down at the head of my own bed, close to the table.
I looked at Dasha – no matter what clothes she put on, the remarkable roundedness of her body seemed to bulge its way out of them. She was somehow round from top to bottom, and only the uplift of her large breasts disrupted the impression that she was smooth and round from all sides.
‘What are you staring at?’ Dasha said with a smile. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a beautiful woman before? Drink up!’
We clinked glasses and drank. Dasha picked up the cup of water and took a swallow to wash the vodka down. Then she handed me the cup and I took a swallow too.
‘Hungry?’ Dasha asked. I nodded.
She leaned down, clicked open the door of the locker under the table and took out a can of fish.
/> ‘These are ours,’ she said with a hint of pride. ‘In oil. She deftly cut open the tin with a small craftwork knife, the kind cobblers usually work with. Then she took two forks out of the locker and handed one to me.
We ate loudly and with pleasure, emptying the can in a couple of minutes. Then she asked: ‘More?’
I nodded, and history was repeated. After the second can a feeling of peaceful contentment filled my soul. We drank another fifty grams each.
‘Today was a lousy day . . .’ she said slowly, after putting the cup of water down on the table. ‘First the conveyor system wouldn’t start, then there was a short circuit in the autoclave shop, then that arsehole Mazai – the industrial safety engineer – was drunk from early in the morning and kept pawing everyone . . . Couldn’t do it like any normal human being, out on deck in the evening, oh no – right there in the workshop. And what’s he got for you to paw, when it’s just hanging there like a dead man? Eh? What’s he got to paw? Yuck.’
I listened to Dasha, and although the vodka had relaxed me a bit, what she said put me slightly on my guard, as if I had suddenly found myself facing a lioness ready to pounce. But three minutes later, I realised my apprehensions had been groundless. Dasha had moved on from Mazai to the way Caspian sardines are packed in a barrel, and now she was talking excitedly about the flavour of lightly salted fish.
‘I’ll take you there at night, when everyone’s drunk. We’ll take it out of the temporary store and eat it right there by the barrel – I tell you, it’s sheer heaven! You’ll never forget it! Will you have another drink?’
I nodded. Dasha poured the rest of the vodka into the glasses.
‘We won’t have any more today,’ she said, putting the empty bottle away under the table. ‘The economicly challenged should be economical. I can’t stand going round the cabins in the morning the way they do here, trying to cadge a hundred grams . . . What’s your own should be your own!’
The Good Angel of Death Page 6
