The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘Come on, they’ll catch you!’

  I jumped, and two fishermen really did catch me, cushioning my landing.

  ‘Marat, start the engine,’ one of them said to the other, and the two men disappeared incredibly quickly on that small schooner, leaving me alone surrounded by the sacks, the boxes and the nets with their big white floats, which had been stashed to starboard.

  The schooner shuddered and began moving away from the towering side of the floating fish-processing plant.

  Down below, close to the water, it was cool. I sat down on a sack and immediately jumped back up because I’d impaled myself on something sharp. When I felt the sacks with my hands, I was stupefied – there could be no doubt that they contained guns, either rifles or sub-machine guns . . .

  ‘Would you believe it!’ I thought, shifting over on to a box of canned fish. ‘A fine fishing schooner, and a fine catch . . .’

  ‘Hey, brother, come over here!’ shouted a figure that peered out from the side of the wheelhouse.

  I took my rucksack and went over to the wheelhouse. The entrance to the cabin below deck was there too.

  ‘Stepan,’ said the man who had called me, holding out his hand. ‘And that’s Marat over there at the wheel.’

  ‘Kolya,’ I said, introducing myself.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Stepan.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Well, if you do, let me know. We don’t drink ourselves, but there’s always something for guests . . . You wouldn’t happen to be a poppy runner, would you, Kolya?’

  It was the second time I’d heard that question.

  ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t know what the phrase meant, but I could guess.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Stepan drawled, ‘or we could have put a bit of work your way . . . OK then, go and have a lie-down . . . We’ll put you off in the morning . . . It’s all the same to you where, isn’t it? As long as it’s well away from where anyone lives? Is that right?’

  I nodded.

  I suddenly started feeling sleepy. Those small waves were lulling me. I went down into the cabin and lay on the nearest bed. A patch of colour flashed before my eyes, and then there was absolute darkness – I was already sleeping, my ears filled with the growling of the industrious little diesel engine hidden somewhere below the floor of the cabin.

  In the middle of the night, through my shallow sleep, I heard voices talking and metal clanking. Then there was a blow and I automatically huddled down into the bed, pushing my right hand out. But then everything went calm and the diesel engine started growling soothingly again.

  In the morning they woke me up. I went out on deck, and the first thing that struck me was the absence of the sacks containing the guns.

  The cardboard boxes of canned fish were still standing there, though, neatly lined up along the port side.

  ‘That’s your coastline!’ Stepan said to me. I looked at the desolate and jagged shore. There was nothing inviting about it. I was paralysed by a sudden feeling of desperation or embarrassment. I said nothing, gazing straight ahead. The deck swayed under my feet and the yellow, indifferent shoreline swayed a hundred metres away from us.

  ‘Marat will steer us in now, it’s deep enough here for us to get in close. Have you got any water?’

  ‘Water?’ I asked, surfacing from my stupor.

  ‘Drinking water.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ Stepan said, shaking his head in amazement. ‘OK, we’ll give you a bottle.’

  What he called a bottle was a five-litre plastic canister. He brought it up out of the cabin and put it beside my rucksack.

  ‘This is a desert,’ he said, slightly annoyed. ‘You won’t find any taps or beer cellars here!’

  I nodded to let him know that I realised my own stupidity. I must say, just at that moment I felt very keenly aware of this stupidity, thanks to which I now found myself God knows where, with the intention of being even further away from all roads and people in twenty minutes. My lips felt nervously dry. I mechanically picked up the five-litre canister, screwed off the top and took a swig of water.

  I felt ill at ease. But the shoreline was approaching implacably. It was only forty or thirty metres away now. A rocky plateau, under cut at its base by the waves that had also licked it smooth, rose up about two metres above the water. At irregular intervals the upper line of the plateau was broken, and at those points the waves licked at the rocks that had tumbled down and which it was possible to scramble up, like a stairway.

  The moment arrived when the schooner jolted and Stepan turned his neck in the direction of the cabin and shouted: ‘Marat, throttle back!’

  The shore was just three metres away.

  ‘Let’s throw your things over, so they don’t get wet,’ said Stepan, walking over to the rucksack.

  Swinging the rucksack between us, we tossed it ashore, and then the canister of water thudded down beside it.

  ‘Jump!’ Stepan said to me, nodding towards the shore. ‘The sun will soon heat things up a bit – you’ll dry out in five minutes!’

  I said goodbye to him and Marat, thanked them, then pushed off with my feet from the side of the boat and plumped down into the turbid water of the Caspian in my jeans and T-shirt.

  ‘Hey,’ Stepan called to me when I had clambered out, with my clothes heavy and waterlogged, on to a narrow little bank that ran into a shallow grotto washed by the waves. ‘If you need anything shipped across, we can always do it! Find us! The schooner Old Comrade.’

  The diesel engine started growling quietly again and the schooner slowly drifted to the left, gradually increasing the distance between itself and the bank. I watched it go and read the name on its side. I waved, although they weren’t watching me any more.

  The further the Old Comrade moved away, the more keenly I felt my isolation. And then, when the final trace of my ‘comrade’ had dissolved into the fidgeting waves of the Caspian, I experienced an unexpected tranquillity, a feeling akin to acceptance of the inevitable. I carried my things up on to that unusual rocky elevation, which turned out to be covered with warm sand, and looked around.

  I sat down on the sand beside the rucksack and the canister. The sun was shining above me and a light breeze that carried the smell of the Caspian was drying my hair. I didn’t feel like going anywhere.

  I didn’t have a compass and I knew absolutely nothing about the desert. I did have water and cans of fish, but one thing was no substitute for the other. I had to focus my mind on making a decision, but I realised there was no logic that would tell me which direction to walk in. I ought to have asked Marat or Stepan, but I simply hadn’t thought of it.

  ‘OK, for the time being I’ll walk along the shore,’ I decided. ‘Maybe I’ll come out somewhere. But first I need to dry off . . .’

  I lay down on the warm sand and turned on to my side. But it still felt uncomfortable in wet clothes. I got up and stripped naked, leaving only my watch on my wrist. I spread my clothes out on the sand and lay down beside them, feeling like the proud owner of some massive nudist beach.

  21

  I WAS WOKEN by the heat. Thoughts that seemed to have been melted were wandering about sluggishly in my head, overheated by the sun. It was like sunstroke. I reached out for the T-shirt and covered my head with it. My clothes had completely dried out. I shook my jeans and the sand ran off them lightly. But it was hard to imagine that I was going to put my jeans on in that kind of heat. I looked at the sun – it was hanging almost at the centre of the sky.

  Glancing at my watch I saw water under the glass, and under the water the hands had stuck at nine in the morning – the time of my landing on this coast.

  ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m getting close to Robinson Crusoe conditions.’

  Covered by the T-shirt, my head gradually cooled down and my thoughts once again assumed a readable form and regular rhythm. I put all my clothes in the rucksack and left on a pair of pants in case I met anyon
e unexpectedly. Although it was hard to imagine who I could possibly embarrass here. I looked around resolutely, hoisted the heavy rucksack on to my back, picked up the canister of water with my right hand and set off almost along the edge of the rocky plateau that held back the sand from creeping into the Caspian. I set out after the schooner Old Comrade that had sailed beyond the horizon long ago.

  The shoreline that followed the plateau was jagged and irregular. I quickly realised that it sometimes made sense to cut the corners that the plateau thrust out into the waters of the Caspian. Economising my strength on these corners, I walked for at least a kilometre before I felt pain in my shoulders and fatigue in my feet, which were not used to walking across hot loose sand.

  To make a halt under the scorching sun was not a very rational idea and when I came across a projection of the plateau into the sea, I climbed down on to the wet shore and sat in a cave hollowed out by the waves. The sudden cold there raised goosebumps on my skin – the drop in temperature was incredible. There was a smell of dampness and the sea. The sun could not reach this little spot of the shoreline.

  I took off the rucksack and sighed as I looked at the red stripes left on my shoulders by its straps.

  Feeling hungry, I took out a can of Caspian Herring, opened it with a knife and then poked about in the lumps of fish with the knife and, not having discovered anything extraneous, transferred the lumps of fish to my mouth with my fingers and followed it with its own juice, the ‘added oil’, as it said on the can. I washed the food down with warm water from the canister – there was an aftertaste of plastic left on my tongue. To cool the canister down a bit, I lowered it into the water at the very edge of the shore, between two rocks that had fallen off the rim of the plateau at some point in time.

  My body gradually grew accustomed to the coolness, the goosebumps disappeared and little by little my spirits began to revive.

  I was sitting on a cool rock. Looking at the sea, at the slanting lines of the waves calmly and monotonously polishing the shore.

  ‘Life is beautiful . . .’ I thought, although I thought it with a certain sad irony. I didn’t know whether I was mocking myself or the thought was some kind of inner mirage caused by the heat of the sun. But if a mirage could arise internally, in the form of a thought, on the very first day in the desert – that really was sad.

  What I felt wasn’t really sadness, though. I felt calm, and I didn’t want to move or to leave this cool secluded little spot. I didn’t want anything. Except simply to sit there and watch the bright sea glittering in the sun from which I had managed to hide so well.

  I don’t know how long I spent sitting by the sea, resting and delighting in the absence of heat. My watch refused to work, no matter how much I shook it. The inside of the glass was covered with condensation, through which it was hard to make out the two stuck hands.

  Something told me that it wasn’t so hot now even in the sun. The line of the horizon seemed to have moved closer and to be quivering more. Evening must be coming on.

  I took the canister out of the water, put on the rucksack and clambered back up on to the sand. It was true – the sun was already sinking. The sandy horizon was tinged slightly red. And the air itself was no longer so dry and prickly hot.

  I continued on my way and now I found it much easier to walk than in the recent heat. This discovery roused a memory of some book in which travellers also walked through a desert, and they walked only in the evening and at night.

  ‘Right then,’ I thought. ‘Forward with a song.’

  22

  I FELL ASLEEP late at night, in the dark, above which the stars were shining to each other. The sand had cooled a little, but retained the warmth of the sun. The air also warmed me, like a blanket that I couldn’t take off. I covered my head with the T-shirt.

  I was woken by a sensation of alien movement close to my face. Jerking the T-shirt away, I saw a small scorpion and pulled back sharply, screwing up my eyes against the morning sun. The scorpion lazily turned round on the spot and unhurriedly buried itself in the sand.

  This morning encounter with the local animal world had woken me up better than any cold water, but it was still a good idea to have a wash. I walked towards the sea, found a little gap, went down on to the shore and splashed my face with several handfuls of the cool, dirty-green Caspian.

  Remembering my discovery of the previous day, I decided to use the time before it got too hot for travelling and to ensconce myself in some little shoreline grotto when the sun’s heat became more fierce.

  Without taking breakfast, I hoisted the rucksack on to my shoulders – it seemed even heavier than the day before. I picked up the canister and was just about to set off when I noticed some tracks in the sand. It was hard to tell what kind of tracks they were, since the sand hadn’t retained any precise lines or forms. But these tracks ran around the spot where I had spent the night. Looking at the tracks that I myself had just left in the sand, I found the same thing. As I followed my own tracks to the sea I saw that a similar line of tracks ran parallel, about two or three metres away, down to the sea at the next cleft.

  Mystified, I listened to the silence surrounding me, but it was crystalline, absolutely quiet.

  I shrugged and set off, still thinking about those tracks.

  The sun was climbing higher and already beginning to scorch me, even reaching my head through the T-shirt. I managed to go a couple of kilometres, no further.

  Realising that it wasn’t worth the risk of playing games with the desert sun, I went down to the sea and sat on a rock beside the water. Again the abrupt descent into shade sent a cold shudder across my skin, but the coolness felt like a pleasant, refreshing wave on my body.

  I ate breakfast and drank some water from the canister. I bathed in the sea – for some reason this idea hadn’t occurred to me the day before, but today I revelled in splashing about in the cool water. And I dried out in a few minutes when I went up to the plateau. Once I was dry, I went back down to the rock and sat on it, keeping an eye on the horizon and waiting for the evening.

  The distant, quivering horizon inclined me to reflection, and in the state I was in just then, I found it easy to accept everything that was happening to me and no longer felt angry either with myself, for having ended up in such a lifeless area in pursuit of a crazy adventure, or with the dead man Gershovich whom I had disturbed and who had prompted me to travel in this direction. But then, he wasn’t the reason why I had come here. It was the threat from bandits I didn’t even know, whose plans I had disrupted, that had really launched me into my journey. And it had launched me abruptly, leaving me no time to make any preparations.

  For a moment I suddenly felt sad when I thought that bandits have good memories. When I went back to Kiev – if I went back – they would show up again. And I hadn’t paid for the flat, or my telephone calls . . .

  I gazed with spellbound eyes at the quivering line of the horizon. I saw a little ship in the distance and it sailed straight along that line for several minutes, then disappeared as it moved away beyond it.

  When the midday heat had abated and there already seemed to be more warmth rising up from the sand than coming down from the sun, I climbed back up on to the plateau and walked on.

  I walked for a long time. For hours. And I would have walked for longer, if I hadn’t suddenly spotted a piece of tarpaulin, faded by the sun, sticking up out of the sand. Simple curiosity made me tug on it. The sand wouldn’t let it go, and that whetted my appetite even further. I took off the rucksack, cleaned the sand off the piece of tarpaulin with my hands and tugged again. The tarpaulin yielded slightly, but literally only ten or fifteen centimetres. I raked more sand away with my hands, trying to free the coarse material. When another twenty centimetres or so of tarpaulin slid out from under the sand, I could see that I was looking at a tent. It took me at least an hour to free it completely from its sandy captivity. I got incredibly tired and started feeling hot again – more from the physical effor
t than from the sun hanging in the sky. The sweat ran off me rapidly, dropping on to the sand and immediately disappearing, discolouring the sand with its vital moisture for only a brief instant. I sat down by the tent and got my breath back. Despite feeling tired, I was very pleased with my find – it was as if I had found a house! Now I could hide from the rain, and the sun . . . Although, if it had started to rain just then, I wouldn’t have wanted to hide from it.

  Leaving my trophy on the sand, I went down to the sea to bathe. When I got back, I shook the sand out of the inside of the tent and thought about the possibility of using it that night, especially as my body was demanding rest.

  I got a bit tangled up in the ropes, but finally managed to sort them out and flatten the tent on the sand. Then I found the entrance, took hold of the opposite end and shook the tent. Something rustled inside it. I shook it again and saw that there was almost no sand tipping out, so I put my hand inside, feeling slightly afraid of coming across another little scorpion. But I was lucky. There were no representatives of the local fauna in the tent, but I did drag out a yellowed newspaper. Imagine my surprise when I picked it up and read the name: the Evening Kiev. My jaw dropped and stayed stuck in that position for several minutes, I was so astounded to see an edition of the Evening Kiev for 15 April 1974.

  When I had recovered my wits somewhat and put my hand back into the tarpaulin tent, I pulled out a box of matches and a Smena camera. There was nothing else inside.

  The owner of the tent had most likely been a solitary traveller. To judge from the newspaper, he must have set out from Kiev on 15 April in the distant year of 1974. That was all I knew about him. And he himself must have dissolved into the sand. I automatically glanced around nervously at the sand, afraid of spotting traces of a mummy desiccated by the sun.

  Turning my attention back to the Smena camera, I took it out of its case and inspected it. There seemed to be an almost completely used film inside – the little window showing how many shots had been taken said ‘34’. Two frames left.