The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘You might at least introduce yourselves!’ I said to them, trying to sound as relaxed as possible.

  ‘Why bother with introductions?’ the guy said with a shrug. ‘I’m Petro, that’s Galya. That’s all the introduction you need . . .’

  ‘Have you been following me all the way from Kiev?’ I asked, trying to understand what was happening and what their plans were.

  ‘No way . . .’ said Petro. ‘We knew where you were going. So we came out to meet you. That’s the way it is . . .’

  ‘But what did you tie me up for?’

  ‘If you weren’t tied, we couldn’t talk calmly . . . But like this we can talk in a civilised fashion. If only your Kazakh girl hadn’t run off, the four of us could have talked.’

  ‘So what is it you want to talk about?’

  ‘What about? About you, you Russian trickster. You found out about something like this and didn’t tell anyone about it . . . You decided to grab it all for yourself . . . You wanted to take something sacred to our people! You should be killed just for that!’ said Petro, unexpectedly raising his voice.

  ‘Quiet, quiet,’ said Galya, trying to calm him down. ‘There’ll be a landslide!’ and she glanced up at the mountains.

  ‘I haven’t hidden anything from anyone,’ I said. ‘On the contrary, I wanted to bring everything home, to Kiev . . .’

  ‘Stop playing the fool,’ said Petro, calm now. ‘You’d have taken it wherever they paid you the most.’

  35

  THE HEAT OF the day was beginning to make me tired. I was sitting on the bed with my hands and feet tied. Nearby, Galya was tinkering with our tripod and cooking pot beside the fire, and Petro had gone off somewhere. I thought it would be stupid not to take advantage of the man’s absence and looked closely at this dark-complexioned woman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘My arms are numb . . . Couldn’t you untie my hands for just five minutes?’

  ‘First your arms, and then your legs will swell up . . . What am I supposed to do, go chasing after you? No . . .’ And she turned back to the cooking pot, in which there was something already boiling. ‘You’ll feel better once I feed you,’ she added, no longer looking at me.

  Apparently it wasn’t so simple getting a conversation started with this Galya.

  ‘And where’s Petro?’ I asked a few minutes later.

  ‘Petro? He’ll be here in a minute. He’ll collect our things and come back . . .’

  I fell over on to my side – balancing on the fifth point of the body had already become painful. My eyes were beginning to close – either fatigue or the enforced immobility was making me feel sleepy. And I would probably have fallen asleep if my nose had not suddenly caught a familiar smell.

  I opened my eyes and saw the cooking pot on the bed mat. It was full of boiled buckwheat. Galya was sitting beside it, holding an aluminium canteen spoon in her hand and looking at my face.

  ‘Let me feed you,’ she said. ‘Only sit up, you can’t eat like that.’

  I obediently jerked myself up into a sitting position. A spoonful of buckwheat immediately appeared in front of my face.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ Galya ordered. The buckwheat was too hot.

  ‘Let it cool down,’ I said.

  ‘You fool! Petro will come any moment and tell me not to give you any.’

  That lunch was like torture. I sucked air into my mouth, hoping that it would cool the buckwheat down at least a bit before I swallowed it. But the air was warm and salty. Finally I couldn’t eat any more, and to avoid pointless explanations I simply fell on to my other side with my back towards Galya.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked in surprise. ‘What, you don’t like it? Well, please yourself!’

  My mouth was burning. I rolled the mucous membrane that had been scalded off into little balls with my tongue and spat it out on to the bed mat. The pain eased a little after that and I fell asleep.

  Petro’s voice woke me when he came back. I lay there without moving and pretended to be asleep while I listened to their conversation.

  ‘What did you bring so much food for?’ Petro asked indignantly. ‘Is there famine here? Has he eaten?’

  ‘Of course. I gave him some buckwheat . . . Don’t be angry, he’s as meek as a calf . . .’

  ‘And if I tied you up, would you start kicking out? Eh? . . . I’ve brought the spade . . .The spades here are so small, they’re like toys for children.’

  ‘And what’s there to dig for here? Eat, eat, you must be hungry . . .’

  ‘Why isn’t it salted?’

  ‘And who gave the bag of salt to those Kazakh kids? Me?’

  ‘All right, all right. Calm down! Has he found out anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s bad that the girl got away.’

  This quiet family discussion of theirs, in which I didn’t hear any particular hatred for myself, or any explicit or covert threat, prompted me to try talking to them. I sighed loudly, as if I was waking up, squirmed about and then turned on to my other side, facing them. They looked at me without saying anything.

  ‘Look, he’s awake,’ said Petro.

  ‘Good evening!’ I said.

  Petro laughed and stroked his moustache. ‘And what makes you so cheerful?’

  ‘Cheerful? I’m not cheerful.’

  ‘Why aren’t you shouting or swearing?’ he went on.

  I shrugged.

  Petro took out a pipe and lit it from the fire.

  ‘There’s something wrong with him,’ he said, turning to Galya and breathing out tobacco smoke. ‘He’s been caught and tied up, and he says “good evening”. That’s not normal.’

  ‘And maybe he is a normal person,’ Galya said, taking my side. ‘He doesn’t want any fussing and fighting, he wants to live in peace . . .’

  ‘Sure, until we untie him. Then what?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, already tired of hearing about myself in the third person. ‘Tell me what you want from me and we’ll sort things out . . .’

  Petro and Galya seemed taken aback by such a concrete suggestion coming from me. They exchanged glances.

  ‘Well, if we’re being specific,’ Petro eventually said. ‘I’ve brought the spade, you’re going to dig while we supervise . . . You know where to dig?’

  ‘“Three sazhens away from an old well,”’ I recited monotonously, recalling the old ‘report’.

  ‘And where’s the well?’

  ‘“Outside the wall of the fort.”’

  ‘There hasn’t been any well there for a long time,’ said Petro, peering hard straight into my eyes. ‘You know, I won’t let you go until you find what Shevchenko buried!’

  ‘You could at least untie my hands for an hour!’ I said slowly, realising that there was no point in pursuing a conversation on ‘concrete’ matters just at the moment.

  ‘I’m not going to untie you, no chance,’ said Petro. ‘If you work out how to find the place, then I’ll untie you and put the spade in your hands, like Lenin on a working Saturday.’

  I lay on my side again. My swollen hands and feet were hurting – it was as if they weren’t part of my body, but some kind of ballast attached to me that prevented me from moving or feeling free.

  Darkness was descending from the sky. The fire was crackling behind my back. Petro and his Galya were whispering about something beside the fire. I was feeling lousy. Gulya wasn’t there. Somehow everything connected with her seemed like a dream now, and all the horror of the present day was simply a return to reality. The reality of Kiev had caught up with me, found me and bound me hand and foot. And this was only a part of the reality that could catch up with me. Not the best part, and not the worst, simply one part. And so I lay there on the bed mat that was warmed from below by the sand. My wrists hurt, restrained by the ropes, my entire body ached. There was nothing I could do but grit my teeth and lie there, waiting for the moment when my tormented body would go to sleep and I would drift off with it. Where was my Gulya now?
Where had she run off to? I just hoped that she was all right.

  That night I woke up beneath the lofty stars. I heard Petro and Galya breathing together, lying on their bed mat about three metres away from me, on the other side of the extinct fire with the tripod standing over it. The peaceful night encouraged my thoughts to flow calmly.

  Lying to the right of them were my rucksack and Gulya’s double bundle. Neither Petro nor Galya had touched them, which now seemed very strange to me. All they’d taken was the canister of water, which was lying by the dead campfire. I looked at my things and Gulya’s. Surely it wasn’t the respect for property inscribed in the new constitution of the Ukraine that had prevented my captors from taking an interest in the contents of the rucksack and the bundle? Gershovich’s manuscript was in there, and Captain Paleev’s denunciation, which essentially defined the goal of my flight-cum-voyage. It was odd that they hadn’t even asked what we had in there . . . On the one hand, I was reassured by their behaving like that – in fact, from the very beginning there had been something amateurish and unprofessional about their aggression, something that allowed me not to take them seriously as a threat to my life. They seemed to be playing at aggression. I remembered everything I had heard about UNA-UNSO in Kiev. I remembered the harsh and aggressive slogans, the manifestos, the election campaign programmes. And, through some obscure association, the Lesi Kurbas theatre surfaced in my memory from out of the distant past. Yes, there was something theatrical about their aggressive attitude.

  Reassured by these reflections, I fell asleep again.

  I slept soundly, but I was disturbed by mysterious sounds, either sobs or cries. Then I had a dream of Gulya with the beautiful clear skin of her face and her brown eyes looking into my eyes. In the dream we seemed to be talking with our eyes, and then I stroked her hair, so soft and silky. And I caught her breath, salty-sweet, in my mouth and made it my breath. I wanted us to breathe the same air, for us to share everything and for it to be ours alone.

  I was woken by the touch of her hot lips on my forehead.

  My hands were free, but my wrists, chafed and tormented by the rope, itched as if they had been bitten all over by mosquitoes.

  ‘Shhh, it’s me,’ Gulya said in a warm, breathy whisper, leaning down over my face. ‘Wait, I’ll cut the rope on your feet.’

  Her head floated away from my face. And I lay on my back without moving, waiting for her to lean over me again.

  ‘All done,’ she whispered, sitting down beside me on the mat.

  ‘What about them?’ I asked, also in a whisper.

  ‘I’ve tied them up.’

  ‘Then why are we whispering?’

  ‘Because it’s night. They might want to sleep a bit more . . .’

  I nodded and tried to lift myself up on my elbows. But Gulya stopped me.

  ‘It’s too soon,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s lie down until dawn. I want to sleep too.’

  36

  IN THE MORNING we fed the bound Galya and Petro tea ‘by hand’. They didn’t look too good – naturally enough – interrupted sleep is not good for anyone.

  ‘You won’t get away with this!’ Petro said, heaving a sigh. Then he stopped talking and didn’t say anything for about half an hour.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you were following us for a while, I saw your tracks several times after I came ashore. Why didn’t you make a move before now?’

  ‘What tracks?’ Petro asked with genuine surprise. ‘As if we had nothing better to do than follow you around. We found you here, alone, without that Kazakh girl.’

  ‘She has a name, by the way – it’s Gulya,’ I said severely. ‘She’s my wife.’

  I read astonishment in Galya’s tired face. She started looking at Gulya in a different way, as if she had just discovered something she had failed to notice before.

  Petro also squinted at Gulya, but his dark face with the moustache remained morose.

  ‘Give me my pipe,’ he said.

  I found his pipe and then, under his instruction, I packed it with tobacco, stuck it under his moustache and gave him a light.

  ‘So what are we going to do then?’ he asked, releasing a puff of tobacco smoke.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I wasn’t counting on meeting you. Untying you would be dangerous – you’ll tie us up, and we’ve already been through that . . . Let’s wait and see if something comes to mind. Maybe we’ll leave you here and just carry on –’

  ‘What, have you lost your marbles?’ said Petro, his eyes flashing. ‘How can you leave us here? Untie us, or you’ll pay for it.’

  ‘Well now,’ I said, spreading my hands, delighted to find that my wrists had recovered from the rope. In this place, in the very possibility of its existence, I felt that my freedom had returned to me. ‘You see, you’re already threatening me, and what will happen later, if I untie you?’ I asked rather acidly.

  ‘Calm down, Petro,’ Galya suddenly said. ‘We have to be reasonable. Perhaps you could untie our feet and then we can go together?’ she said to me.

  I shrugged. ‘I need to think about it. First, let’s clarify what everybody’s up to. I can start with myself. Basically, I wanted to find what Taras Shevchenko buried and take it to Kiev in order to, so to speak . . . win fame – and money – in my native Ukraine . . . or perhaps just fame . . . And you, respected people, what are your objectives?’

  ‘Then our objectives are the same, only we’re doing it for our homeland, we don’t want money or fame,’ said Petro. ‘The important thing is for everything that belongs to the Ukraine to go back there . . . especially things as sacred as this.’

  ‘Well then, if our objectives are the same, all we have to do is conduct negotiations on how to achieve them . . .’ I looked expectantly into Petro’s eyes. ‘And if we can agree, we can go on together. Only how did you find out that I was planning to come here?’

  ‘A comrade of ours, a captain in the SBU, told us all about you.’

  ‘You have friends in the SBU?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘There are decent people everywhere,’ Petro replied and turned away.

  I looked round at Gulya – she was absorbed in thoughts of her own. Then she turned to look at Galya, who had also lowered her eyes and was contemplating something: I thought she had a poetic, melancholy air, whereas my Kazakh wife’s face had an expression of serious concentration.

  ‘Untie my hands,’ Galya suddenly piped up. ‘I’ll cook you some buckwheat. Petro has to eat, he has an ulcer.’

  I turned towards Gulya and we exchanged glances.

  ‘I’ll cook the buckwheat,’ Gulya said in a stern voice. ‘Where is it?’

  Galya nodded towards a bag beside the fire.

  The sun was already roasting hot. I was hungry too, and the thought of boiled buckwheat distracted me from exalted international matters.

  We fed Galya and Petro with a spoon, and after that we sat down, got comfortable and ate ourselves. We brewed tea and again we both worked ‘for two mouths’, alternately sipping our selves and holding up the tea bowls to the prisoners’ lips. Gulya took out some cheese balls and fed them to Petro and Galya.

  The food and the sun made us feel quite tired, we’d lost that vigorous morning feeling and were probably ready to fall asleep, but Gulya resolutely got to her feet.

  She straightened out her bright lettuce-green shirt-dress.

  ‘We have to go,’ she said.

  The prisoners’ faces looked tired.

  ‘Well, shall I untie their feet?’ I asked Gulya.

  She thought about it.

  In the silence I thought I could hear the quiet whispering movement of the sand – the voice of the desert. I surveyed the edge of the sand, where it licked at the rocky shore of the mountains like a dry sea.

  There was no movement to be seen, but I already knew that the slow progress of the sand was as invisible and impalpable as the movement of the air.

  ‘Listen,’ I heard Petro say, ‘maybe we can reach
an agreement . . . for the time being. Only without any of those Russian tricks!’

  I turned round and heaved a sigh. It seemed bizarre to me that I wasn’t setting the conditions on which he would be untied, but he was setting them for me.

  ‘Well, how about it?’ he asked after a minute’s pause.

  ‘You know what,’ I said, heaving another sigh. ‘Let’s arrange things like this: I untie you, but on condition that not only will there be no Russian tricks, there won’t be any Ukrainian ones either!’

  Petro worked his lips, as if he were taking a very important decision.

  ‘OK,’ he said eventually with a sigh. ‘Untie us!’

  I glanced at Gulya again. She nodded.

  37

  WE WALKED NO more than ten kilometres before the evening. In silence. Each of us carried our own luggage – Gulya and I had much more than the others, but neither Petro nor Galya offered to help. Petro was carrying a spade over his shoulder, and in his left hand he had a shopping bag with long straps, which he could also throw over his shoulder if he wished.

  When the heat abated, we stopped and put everything down together.

  ‘I’ll go to get kindling,’ said Gulya.

  When Gulya had gone about fifty metres, Galya cast a questioning glance at Petro and went after her.

  Petro and I were left alone. Neither of us spoke. I felt no desire to start a conversation with him, and he apparently shared my lack of interest.

  Petro lit his pipe.

  ‘Is it still a long way?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Where did you come from?’

  ‘From Fort Shevchenko.’

  ‘And how far is that?’

  ‘About two days.’

  ‘Well, the spot is right beside Fort Shevchenko,’ I said. ‘“Three sazhens from an old well in the direction of the sea.”’