The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  The colonel watched Gulya go with a curious glance, then picked the folder up again and sniffed it. Then he squatted down beside me and sniffed me.

  ‘How come you reek of cinnamon like that? Are you fond of pies with cinnamon?’

  ‘No, it’s just that I crossed the Ukrainian-Russian border in a railway truck full of cinnamon, and the smell ate right into my skin.’

  ‘Aha,’ the colonel drawled, taking my words seriously.

  As the sun rose higher, time started moving as slowly as amber resin. Petro suddenly started coughing drily and asked the colonel for water. The colonel found the canister and gave his bound prisoner a drink. I was amused to observe Taranenko’s wheat-coloured moustache and Petro’s black moustache move so close together. The colonel seemed to take a special pleasure in raising the canister above the head of the drinking man, as if he were forcing him to take large gulps that almost choked him.

  ‘Hey!’ I called out, realising just in time what was happening. ‘There won’t be enough for coffee! That’s all the water!’

  The serious expression returned to the colonel’s face. He immediately took the canister away from Petro’s face and screwed the plastic cap back on.

  Soon Gulya came back and started a fire. About twenty minutes later the first steam appeared above the cooking pot.

  The colonel took a half-litre mug and an aluminium spoon out of his rucksack. He tipped ground coffee into the mug and sat by the fire, waiting for the water to boil.

  Gulya moved away and started packing her things back into the double bundle.

  ‘And what kind of tea do you have?’ the colonel suddenly asked her. ‘Ceylon?’

  ‘It’s all Chinese here,’ my wife replied, looking round for a moment. ‘There’s green, yellow . . .’

  The colonel nodded and turned towards the cooking pot. Eventually he poured boiling water into his mug, threw in two lumps of sugar and began stirring it all noisily with his spoon.

  ‘Comrade Colonel,’ I said, ‘perhaps you’d like some milk?’

  ‘Milk? Where can you get milk here?’

  ‘I’ve got dried milk, infant formula.’

  The colonel glanced carefully at my things, laid out beside the empty rucksack.

  ‘That there?’ he asked, pointing one hand at the cans of ‘baby food’. I nodded.

  ‘All right then, since you’re offering.’ He stood up, opened one can and sprinkled two or three spoonfuls of white powder into the mug.

  He closed the can tightly and went back to his little chair beside the fire. He blew on the mug and looked at the sky. The coffee was still too hot and he put the mug down on the sand, then rummaged in his own rucksack and took out a beige sun hat with the inscription ‘Yalta 86’ on it and put it on his head.

  ‘If you’d all stayed at home, I’d have gone on holiday by now,’ he declared plaintively. ‘Do you think I invented this system? It’s all the top brass’s idea. All they want is more successful operations for the smallest possible budget! And now my travel voucher to Odessa is down the tubes. It was for the Chkalov sanatorium, too! Now I get to bake in the sun here with you, and there isn’t even any sea anywhere near.’

  ‘What about the Caspian?’ I asked. The colonel pulled a face and reached one hand down for the mug.

  I waited impatiently for the moment when the first gulp would be taken. But the Adidas man Taranenko didn’t like his drinks hot. He waited for the coffee to cool down.

  He waited for another five minutes and only then did the mug finally approach his lips. I breathed out my tension in a sigh of relief. All I had to do was wait for him to drink enough.

  39

  AS HE ROSE up heavily off the pale-yellow sand of the desert, for some reason Vitold Yukhimovich Taranenko recalled the wattle-and-daub hut of his grandmother, Fedora Kirillovna Karmeliuk, who he thought must have been known to the other villagers all her life, in fact almost since the day she was born, as Granny Fedora. As if she had never had any childhood. The colonel’s body ascended unhurriedly, and then he opened his eyes, which he had closed ten minutes earlier, owing to a sudden ‘slowing of the circulation’.

  He opened his eyes and actually saw the hut far below him, standing on the edge of the village in the Khmelnitskaya region, in such a remote spot that collective farms hadn’t even appeared there until after the war. Yes, the colonel realised that he couldn’t be flying over his grandma’s hut right now, firstly because he hadn’t risen very high yet, and secondly because of the dubious nature of his flight and the mysterious nature of its causes.

  ‘A mirage,’ Vitold Yukhimovich thought to himself about the hut, and then immediately looked down again at the solid ground moving away from him.

  The air at this height was sweet, and although the sun was hanging above him, he no longer felt the heat. All he could feel was the confusion of his thoughts, which were behaving like new recruits to the army who haven’t managed to line up in ranks yet and don’t even know how to line up. ‘Hey!’ the colonel shouted at them in his mind, and they settled down. They became calm and a feeling of bliss filled his soul, allowing him to look around and concentrate on the sensations of flight. The flight continued.

  After a few brupt movements with his arms and legs, the colonel acknowledged his own reality and in addition realised that his body’s aerodynamic qualities were better with his arms pressed against his sides and his legs held together rather than with his feet apart and arms sticking out. The air was amazingly transparent – he saw a small rock, the size of a tennis ball, flying towards him. It moved closer, and when the ball was only two or three metres away, the colonel saw that it would miss his body by about thirty centimetres. And then Vitold Yukhimovich held out his open hand in the path of the ball and caught it. And this unexpected contact between two objects flying towards other set Colonel Taranenko spinning slowly in the air like a top, clutching in his hand the extraterrestrial object that was like a tennis ball. Vitold Yukhimovich was spun round several more times and carried off to one side, as if he were dancing a waltz with an invisible partner. And finally the movement stopped and the colonel was left hanging in space. And then he raised the object to his face to see what it was that he had caught and shook his head in amazement – there was a painted egg lying in his hand, decorated with familiar Carpathian designs. Only the colours had already faded and could barely be made out. They must have been bleached by the sun. Without knowing why, Vitold Yukhimovich started turning the egg in his hand and examining the designs carefully – he felt a desire to find a date, he wanted to know how many years this egg had been flying through space. But there wasn’t a date anywhere. Nothing but decorative annular designs, in which all the lines – straight, zigzag and dotted – ran together like an infinite thread with no ends.

  ‘Even if it’s from last Easter,’ the colonel thought, ‘that’s still a long time ago now . . .’

  Then suddenly his attention was caught by something large flying towards him. He turned his head and saw a human figure, not dressed in ordinary clothes, but in a real, genuine cosmonaut’s suit, with a helmet on its head. The figure was coming towards him slowly, far more slowly than the egg he had caught. There was something meticulous about the cosmonaut’s flight. And when the cosmonaut came close to the colonel, Vitold Yukhimovich could see him clearly – an old man with thin, grey hair, badly shaved, with an embroidered peasant shirt peeping out from under his spacesuit at the neck. While the colonel was examining this old cosmonaut floating independently through space, the cosmonaut suddenly grabbed the painted Easter egg out of the colonel’s hand and kicked the colonel. It was a weak blow, of course, there was no pain. But the colonel felt offended.

  His fingers clenched into fists. In his mind he was already reaching out for the helmet with his right hand, but then a scientific sort of explanation suddenly came to mind: what if, thought the colonel, he didn’t kick me, but merely pushed off in order to carry on moving? After all, there is no gravity here! And as if in c
onfirmation of this idea he saw a smile of gratitude appear on the face of the old cosmonaut slowly drifting away from him. And the old man raised the Easter egg above his helmeted head and waved to him. ‘It must be his egg!’ the colonel thought. But even so the struggle continued in his mind between resentment at this cosmonaut and the desire to forgive what he had done.

  40

  WHILE GULYA WAS untying me, I explained to Petro where the waking spirit of our Adidas man had flown off to and how.

  Gulya untied Petro last, and he immediately grabbed his rope and dashed over to Colonel Taranenko, lying beside the small folding chair with a smile on his face.

  ‘I’ll teach you to fight against your own people!’ he cried.

  But just then everything was deep purple to the colonel. His body lay on the warm sand like a dead weight. It was no more than the pledge of his future return to Earth.

  ‘Don’t be in such a hurry!’ I called, trying to stop Petro, but he had already turned Taranenko’s body on to its stomach and was feverishly tying the colonel’s limp wrists behind his back.

  Petro cooled down after that and calmly tied the ankles together, then sat down on the sand, like a hunter beside a prostrate bear, and lit his pipe.

  Galya watched him with anxious agitation, and I read love for this lean, gruff young man in her eyes. Although I didn’t even know what their relationship was, who they were: man and wife or simply comrades-in-arms, like Lenin and Krupskaya.

  But either way, they suited each other, they were more than merely ‘the same blood’. Then I looked at Gulya, busy with something by the fire. She was wearing her dark green shirt-dress and part of her face was concealed behind a semi-transparent screen of dark chestnut hair. Until then I had not really believed that she and I made up the ‘we’ that is called a family. Yes, she called herself my wife, but we still didn’t have the kind of relationship that is like superglue, that makes people inseparable from each other. Our emotions – or at least mine – weren’t settled yet, I still wasn’t even fully aware of them. I still didn’t know what she felt for me. She was still a mystery to me. A mix of concealed steel and outward docility. If I had not met Gulya, I could never have imagined a mixture like that in a single person.

  ‘We need to pack,’ Petro said calmly, after saying nothing for five minutes.

  He cast one more glance at the colonel’s body and got to his feet.

  ‘I’m going to take a look at what he’s got there,’ he declared as he walked towards Taranenko’s things.

  The fire was crackling. The pot was hanging over it on the tripod, with Gulya sitting beside it.

  I sat on the bed mat, thinking about the colonel who had ‘flown away’. I didn’t know which way to go now. My goal had suddenly become dangerous. But it seemed impossible to abandon it. The only thing I could do was to achieve that goal and afterwards try to dissolve into the darkness, withdraw from the game. A long life is better than posthumous glory.

  ‘Hey, you, look what I’ve found in his things!’ Petro came over to me and held out a detailed plan of the Novopetrovsk fortifications. It was an old plan, drawn in Indian ink, but not ancient. In the lower right-hand corner I saw the signature of the person who had made it and the date – ‘1956’.

  ‘Look at this here!’ said Petro, jabbing a finger at a little black circle, with the words ‘location of old well’ written beside it in small black letters.

  ‘So he knew everything, then?’ I exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘He didn’t know anything,’ Petro snapped. ‘He had a map, but he didn’t know where to search, or else what did he want with us?’

  Inside my brain, badly overheated by the Kazakh sun, everything gradually fell into place.

  I realised that now we had everything necessary to find the ‘treasure’ buried in the sand. We even had a spade. And so the joint Ukrainian-Russian-Kazakh journey was moving into its final, concluding stage, after which I would be able to congratulate Petro and Galya, and perhaps Colonel Taranenko, on the discovery of a historical relic and be left alone with Gulya. Yes, the objective of my wanderings had changed. Now there was only one thing I wanted – to be left alone with Gulya and then to decide what we should do, where we should go. My future now appeared to me in a new, unexpected light. It had changed from adventure to romance. ‘A romantic journey for two.’ I think there’s a prize like that in the TV quiz Love at First Sight. I had won the prize without even taking part in the show. Now I had to get rid of our companions, whose presence merely hindered the transformation of this journey of adventure into the journey of romance. And all I had to do to achieve that was to find what the great poet had buried in the sand and wave goodbye to those who would carry the item that was found back to my distant black-earth motherland.

  Gulya poured tea for everyone and handed out little cheese balls. Galya gave her ball to Petro, and received a Snickers bar and a mocking smile from him.

  Petro turned once again to gaze at Taranenko, who was still ‘in flight’. Only after a long, weary look at the captive colonel did he take a sip of his green tea and toss a small yellowish ball of cheese into his mouth. He did it so easily and naturally that for an instant he seemed to me like an absolutely genuine Kazakh. ‘A little bit longer and all of us here will become Kazakhs,’ I thought. ‘And any suspicions between nationalities will disappear of their own accord, dissolve in the green tea together with the cheese balls, be rolled out across our tongues and reduced to the consistency of saliva.’

  Galya suddenly held out half of her Snickers to Gulya, who took it, put it straight into her mouth and drowned it in tea.

  I recalled my recent ruminations on the various ways of achieving harmony between nations. Now I could add Snickers bars to the list of actions and items that eliminate mutual distrust.

  ‘Well then,’ said Petro, looking at me, ‘time to be going . . . We’ll leave this swine here . . .’ – he nodded towards the colonel. I shook my head in disagreement.

  ‘We can’t – he’ll die. He could lie there for another three days, and in three days the sun alone will finish him off! And then in Kiev your friend, SBU Captain Semyonov will ask you: “Where’s the leader of your expedition, Colonel Taranenko?”’

  Petro scowled and heaved a sigh. ‘But what can we do with him?’ he asked at last. ‘I’m not going to carry him.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s no need,’ I said. ‘Let’s roll him into the shade of a rock, cover him with something and untie his hands . . .’

  Petro didn’t agree and it took me another five minutes to demonstrate to him that my suggestion was not only humane, but also good for us. During the three days he was ‘flying’, we would have time to sort out the business of the ‘treasure’ and get away from Fort Shevchenko. I didn’t even try to think where we could go. It wasn’t all that important just at the moment.

  Eventually he gave in. The two of us rolled Taranenko into the pointed inner corner between two spurs and carried his things in there. We covered his head with a T-shirt that we found in his rucksack. We untied his hands. Then Gulya came over and set the aluminium mug, full of water, beside his head and stuck one end of the T-shirt covering his head into the water.

  Meanwhile Galya packed our things into the double bundle and the rucksack and her own things into the shopping bag with long handles. Half an hour later we set off.

  That evening, after we settled in for a halt, we saw the flickering lights of a town in the distance. The goal was near, and our mood automatically improved. Galya decided to boil some buckwheat and we all waited patiently for our supper, sitting round the little campfire. Suddenly Galya cried out and jumped up. Petro jumped up too, and then we got to our feet. I leaned forward and saw a little chameleon beside Galya’s feet. ‘Petrovich?’ I thought. ‘He hasn’t been around for ages! I assumed he’d been left behind . . .’

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ my wife told Galya. ‘He’s good. He brings good luck.’

  ‘But isn’t it a scorpion?’ Galya ask
ed mistrustfully, her voice still shaking.

  ‘No, he’s a chameleon. He was travelling with us. He must have fallen asleep and only just woken up,’ said Gulya.

  ‘He slept through the most interesting part,’ I said, putting in my penny’s worth.

  We sat down round the fire again, and the cause of all the commotion climbed on to Galya’s jeans and froze there with his dragon-head thrust skywards. Galya leaned down and examined him apprehensively.

  ‘Animals like me,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Dogs and cats and cows . . .’

  ‘Me too,’ Gulya said with a sigh. Petro and I exchanged glances without saying anything.

  I thought this was the first time I’d heard the women talking, and I hoped it would continue. It sounded so peaceful that I even tried to breathe more quietly.

  And up above, stars suddenly came showering down from the lofty sky. But I was the only one who saw them. No, that’s not true, the chameleon did too. The two of us sat there, immersed in the sky. The women made quiet, homely conversation. And Petro smoked his pipe and gazed pensively at the cooking pot in which the buckwheat was boiling.

  41

  THE NEXT DAY, as evening was approaching, we halted on the edge of what many years earlier had been known by the proud name of the Novopetrovsk Fortress. All that could be seen at this spot now were the remains of walls and isolated blocks of limestone foundations protruding from the sand or the rock face. The transparency of the air was thickening under the pressure of the advancing evening. It was already difficult to make out the boundaries of this fortress and understand whether it was large or small. Even when we took out the 1956 plan that we had borrowed from Colonel Taranenko it was impossible to match up the remains of structures drawn in ink and sharp pencil with the real ruins.