The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  There was nothing we could do except wait for morning. Meanwhile, Gulya started a fire with twigs gathered along our way. And right there beside the fortifications we unexpectedly discovered a dried-out tree trunk. The trunk was as thick as a man’s waist, so it wasn’t possible to break it across your knee, and Petro and I took turns at smashing it into splinters with the blade of the spade.

  Eventually the fire blazed up, with the splinters of the shattered tree trunk lending it unusual brilliance and strength. The water in the canister was running out, and we were being more careful with it than before. We left just enough for the morning tea. We didn’t think there was anything to worry about here, since now we were close, not only to the ruins, but also to the people who had settled by these ruins. The town of Fort Shevchenko was somewhere nearby.

  I felt more in the mood for strolling through a real town than digging in the sand. The nostalgia of the city dweller was surfacing.

  But the evening was rapidly turning into night, and I already knew that we had enough strength only to eat a traveller’s supper and spread out the sleeping mats.

  42

  VITOLD YUKHIMOVICH SUDDENLY felt a lack of oxygen. He had lost track of how long he had been flying. Outer space already seemed monotonous to him, especially as nothing interesting had happened since the encounter with the Easter egg and the old cosmonaut. Meteorites of various colours had gone flying past, some of rather large dimensions. And when a meteorite the size of his grandmother’s wattle-and-daub hut had come floating by very close, some mysterious force had moved the colonel out of the way, and he had continued to feel the inertia of that movement for about an hour.

  But now he was beginning to feel bad. There wasn’t enough air, and there was an unpleasant sensation of heat in his head, as if his temperature had risen. At first he thought it must be sunstroke, but when he looked around he realised there wasn’t any sun anywhere.

  He could see a small yellow planet in the distance, but it was very dim. ‘It’s not even a moon,’ Colonel Taranenko decided, and started thinking about his head again. He slowly reached up to touch his forehead, but it proved to be surprisingly cold. ‘Perhaps my hand is very hot and I can’t feel the real temperature of my forehead?’ Vitold Yukhimovich thought.

  Then he noticed internal sensations that put him on his guard – his body was gaining weight, becoming heavier, as if someone invisible was putting bricks in his pockets. He began to be drawn downwards and he made a sharp movement with his arms and looked around fearfully. If he had been in the gondola of a hot-air balloon, he would have gone dashing to throw sacks of sand – the ballast – out of the basket. But he wasn’t in the gondola of a balloon. Rather, he himself was the balloon . . .

  And now he could quite clearly feel the speed and direction of his movement. He wasn’t floating, he was falling downwards. As long as he could see below him the bottomless depths of the cosmos, falling wasn’t so very frightening, although he had been in a state of nervous tension from the moment the fall began. But then a point suddenly appeared in those bottomless depths and started to grow even as he watched it, gradually expanding into a sphere. It had already grown to the size of a tennis ball, but the colonel realised that this was not a painted egg, it was something far more bulky. After a while the point grew to the size of a planet, and he already knew what planet it was. He still remembered the pictures of this planet in his school textbook. The planet was called Earth. He himself lived on this planet. But the colonel was not cheered by the return to his home planet. The air was burning the skin on his hands and face. ‘It’s the speed that does that,’ Vitold Yukhimovich realised. ‘It’s the speed of travel through space that makes satellites burn up as they enter the dense layers of the atmosphere . . .’ and he imagined with horror the air around him bursting into flame from the friction with his skin and realised that once he entered the dense layers of the atmosphere he would never get back out of them.

  And then he saw those dense layers, although to look at they weren’t really all that dense. They were more like a semi-trans parent, cloudy sphere enveloping his Earth. His speed was increasing. The dense layers were coming closer and in his fear of burning up in these layers Colonel Taranenko closed his eyes. He carried on flying with his eyes closed until suddenly he felt his body break through some kind of shell with a sound like the crack of paper tearing or a plastic bag bursting. The colonel opened his eyes and looked back – now he was flying feet first and the dense layers of the atmosphere had been left behind, with a substantial hole made in them by his body.

  Below him lay the Earth.

  43

  I WAS THE last to wake up in the morning. Petro was standing a little distance away, holding the plan in his hand. Every now and then he swung his head around, evidently searching for some reference point marked on the plan. A fire was crackling beside him, with the last of the water boiling over it.

  My spirits rose at the thought that this day could be the decisive one. After all, we had already arrived – without even getting up I could see the ruins of an artillery battery on a low hillock not far away. And although for the time being the undulating surface of the area concealed from my eyes other details of the fortifications that were familiar in theory from the plan, I knew that it was all somewhere close by. As close as a wife can be on the first night of marriage.

  Soon we were sitting by the fire with bowls of tea in our hands. I could see businesslike concentration even in Galya’s usually melancholy and pensive eyes.

  After breakfast Petro laid out the plan of the Novopetrovsk Fortress on the sand and called me over.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to figure out the scale.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy, we’ll take one distance, measure it on the map in centimetres, pace it out here in metres and divide the centimetres by the metres, and we’ll have the scale.’

  Petro thought and nodded. ‘Only you know what,’ he added, ‘there are two wells here on the map . . .’

  ‘It’s lucky there aren’t more.’

  ‘Well, all right, here, you figure out the scale, and I’ll take a look around.’

  I was left alone with the map. I decided to calculate the distance from the artillery battery to the remains of the foundations of the barracks. While I was sitting on the warm sand leaning over the map, I heard soft, rustling footsteps behind me and turned round. Gulya walked up and sat beside me.

  ‘What do you think, how many centimetres is this?’ I asked her, pointing out the distance I had selected on the map.

  ‘Probably thirty-five or forty.’

  ‘And if I walk from the battery to the wall?’

  ‘About three hundred metres . . .’

  I nodded. We looked into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Do you know what I want more than anything now?’ I said.

  ‘To leave all this behind?’

  ‘All of it, except you.’

  Gulya smiled. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Why don’t you wear the cap my father gave you?’ Gulya asked, glancing up at the sun hanging above our heads.

  ‘I’ll put it on, it’s in the rucksack . . .’

  After pacing out the chosen distance twice, I noted down the result of three hundred and fifty-five metres on the reverse of the map. Then I drew a fine ‘centimetre line’ between the two reference points on the map. And then I spent a long time dividing the metres into the centimetres, getting things confused and counting all over again. Something always came out wrong. Eventually I worked out that one centimetre on the plan was equal to almost nine metres. Now I had to check this scale against some other distance, and I started studying the map. I decided to take the artillery battery as my starting point again. I drew a mental line from it to the foundation of the soldiers’ mess – the distance there was shorter. Then I drew a pencil line divided into approximate centimetres and I went to pace out the real distance.

  The result was disheartening – the map see
med to have been drawn by surveyors who were drunk – after several re-counts I was certain that for this distance one centimetre on the map was equal to twenty-two metres.

  Still puzzled, I asked Gulya to re-count one more time. Her result was the same.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Gulya asked, astonished.

  ‘It means that we’ll have to do a lot of digging,’ I declared dejectedly.

  And just then Petro turned up most opportunely with the spade across his shoulder. He came towards us down a little hill of sand, humming something to himself.

  I spoiled his mood straight away and the smile under his black moustache straightened out into the usual line of his mouth.

  ‘Well, all right,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘If we know where to look . . .’

  ‘Aha,’ I said with a nod. ‘From those stones there, probably almost all the way to the sea. And another two or three hundred metres in the opposite direction . . .’

  ‘Here’s the spade – get started!’ Petro commanded, holding out the instrument of physical labour.

  I glanced at the map again, at the two indications of wells that had not existed for a very long time. It would not have been hard to calculate their locations if it had been a normal map. But the only thing here that was almost normal was the spade. Everything and everyone, including me, seemed rather distant from the norm. Except for Gulya and the chameleon, who was nowhere to be seen again – he must have climbed back into the double bundle or he was hiding from the sun under my rucksack.

  I took the spade from Petro and started wandering through the not very picturesque ruins.

  44

  THAT WAS THE day we started treasure-hunting in earnest, and I must say it proved to be a rather infectious business. The spade ‘belonged’ only to my hands, and while Gulya was away, having taken the canister to get some water, Petro and Galya walked around after me. I scraped away the sand at several spots calculated approximately from the plan. The sand in this area was remarkably loose and crumbly and I could only dig a hole about sixty centimetres deep before it collapsed.

  Working on the check-row system, I left sandy craters behind me every two metres. The first two hours of the search were fruitless, and then I unearthed a large mummified lizard. When they saw me down on my knees, Petro and Galya came running up and also squatted down beside me.

  ‘There really is a lot of work,’ Petro said, shaking his head, then glanced round the locality and rested his gaze on the sea that could be seen below us. ‘If only we had a regiment of Rooskies with spades!’

  I laughed. ‘What makes you think the Rooskies would dig for you here?’

  ‘Come on, keep looking!’ he snapped, getting to his feet.

  I continued with the search, although by this time my arms were tired and my own accommodating attitude was beginning to annoy me. Why should I do what he said? And when would it be his turn to dig?

  Soon I noticed that a long thin stick had appeared in Galya’s hands and she was using it as a probe as she walked along, occasionally thrusting it deep into the sand.

  Gulya was still not back, and that was beginning to worry me a bit. And even without that worry I wasn’t excavating all that carefully. I was finding the task of locating some unknown item ‘three sazhens from an old well’ that didn’t exist any more, when I didn’t even know where it had been in the first place, not to mention the fact that there used to be two wells around here somewhere, less and less attractive, in fact it seemed quite simply impossible. The sun had given me a headache and I stuck the spade in the ground and went back to my things. I tipped them out of the rucksack on to the sand, found the pointed felt cap and stuck it on my head. I started packing everything else back into the rucksack – the cans of ‘baby food’, the socks. And suddenly I saw something I’d forgotten about – the Smena camera I had found with the canvas tent at the very beginning of my desert journey.

  I was sitting on the sand and all the movements I made were extremely slow. I was simply resting, and as I rested I turned the camera in my hands, after removing it from its leather case. Did it really contain an exposed film? How old was it? If the newspaper that the missing owner of the tent had with him – the one that was now lying at the very bottom of my rucksack – was more or less fresh, then this film had been waiting twenty years to be developed!

  ‘Hey, what are you doing sitting around? Get digging!’ I heard Petro shout.

  I got up lazily, put the camera in the rucksack and headed for my spade.

  And that was how the day passed. As I was on my way back to our campsite, I counted the fruits of my labours – more than forty holes. Forty holes and only one discovery – a mummified lizard! But who knows, perhaps some local history museum might be glad to buy it or at least offer me a mummified jerboa in exchange – there were plenty of those around here too: at least five times that day I had spotted their curious little eyes observing my movements from the low, undulating sand dunes.

  As we were drinking our evening tea, the chameleon crept out of the luggage to join us and once again clambered up on to Galya’s jeans. This time she stroked him less nervously and smiled.

  To everyone’s surprise, Gulya told us that she had gone into the town for water and drawn it from a public pump beside a shop selling clothes. Galya’s eyes glinted at the mention of a dress shop.

  ‘Is it far?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re not going there!’ Petro shouted at her, sur prisingly agitated. ‘What did you come here for, to go shopping?’ He chewed on his lips and cast a glance of annoyance at Gulya.

  ‘Why don’t we see any people round here, if they live close by?’

  ‘They think this place is cursed,’ said Gulya. ‘A lot of people have been lost here . . .’

  ‘How do you mean, lost?’

  ‘They say that if a weak Kazakh comes here, then straight away he forgets his own language and in a few days he dies from a mysterious melancholy . . . perhaps the lizards here are poisonous?’

  Petro looked around him anxiously, although twilight was already thickening the air.

  I could understand how Petro felt. The first day of searching had clearly put an end to his illusions about ‘easy treasure-hunting’, and now there were these local myths . . .

  We all fell silent and our silence was rapidly enveloped by the darkness that descended from the sky as the real evening set in. The fire crackled, casting glimmers of light across our faces. A nocturnal freshness appeared in the air, it seemed to wipe down our foreheads, a healing balm after nature’s heat. I recalled a student construction brigade from long ago and far away and thought that if I had a guitar in my hands right now, we would sit there until morning, listening to stupid romantic songs.

  My mood had improved and I wanted all of us to feel a bit more cheerful. Never mind whatever it was that that was buried here, I wanted to forget the differences that people had invented to divide everyone into ‘us’ and ‘them’. The evening was the same for all of us, and so was nature, and the sand in which we were searching for something or other was all the same colour. And my thoughts and the surprising wishes that I had suddenly felt acquired a clear form and were transformed into a simple request to my Gulya, expressed in a single short word: ‘Sing!’

  And Gulya started to sing. In the Kazakh language. Her quiet, velvety voice filled the space around the campfire, and it seemed as if even the fire was crackling in time to her song. The song went on and on, and although I couldn’t understand the words, in some inexpressible way I felt that I could trust the story that it told. I didn’t know what the song was about, who was in it and what happened to them, but the warmth of the song and the warmth of the voice affected me, and I’m sure they affected Petro and Galya too. Once again we were united by a foreign song that neither I nor they could have retold. But I knew that when Gulya finished singing, Galya would ask her what the song was about. And the story that was told would be familiar and comprehensible and exotic all at once. But its ex
oticism would not be the ethnographical-museum kind. Oh no. Its exoticism would be like a mirror, it would allow us to see that every one of us is distinct from everyone else, exotic for the other person, only not in the way that animals we have never seen before are exotic, but on the inside. Our thoughts and beliefs would be shown to be exotic. And the most important thing would simply be to understand them, and not refuse to understand them out of some acquired habit of disagreement.

  The evening lingered on, prolonged by sad Ukrainian songs. At one point I even thought that Petro had begun to sing along with Galya, but when I listened closely, I realised I was mistaken. And once again the songs that rang out created an atmosphere of trust and as I lay down to sleep under the low-hanging sky, we wished each other goodnight for the first time.

  But dawn turned the page of a new day, restoring everything to normal, and after a quick drink of tea I picked up the spade and with the sound of Petro’s steps at my back, I set off to continue the work begun the day before.

  Gulya and Galya stayed with the things and the fire. Petro and I located the boundary of the ‘worked’ sector of the desert and halted there.

  ‘You’re not digging right,’ said Petro, surveying the previous day’s holes, which had already subsided.

  ‘Well, in the first place, no one ever taught me how to do it and, in the second place – you take the spade and dig, maybe you’ll do better!’

  Petro stroked his black moustache and gave me a hostile look.

  ‘What did you come here for?’ he asked. ‘You came to dig, right? So you ought to thank me for giving you a spade!’

  I heaved a sigh, adjusted the felt cap on my head, took one step towards the sea from the last hole and thrust the spade into the stand.

  The work went tediously again. The closer I got to the sea, the looser the sand was under the surface. At one point the spade struck a rock and I realised that I was simply wasting my time. The well couldn’t have been right on the shoreline – it wasn’t Caspian water that they used to draw from it!