The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  I walked back to the point I had started from the day before. I glanced round and saw Petro about three hundred metres away. He was standing there, holding a stick in his hand and either gazing at the sand in front of him or lost in thought.

  When the sun was suspended at the centre point of the vault of the sky, Galya called us to lunch. We ate insipid unleavened bread cakes that Gulya had brought from the town and washed them down with tea. By that time I had found a brass button from a soldier’s uniform in the sand, with the double-headed tsarist eagle. After lunch I held it out to Petro on my palm, without saying anything. He inspected the button curiously, but his curiosity was short-lived, and he started frowning again as he gave it back to me.

  The work after lunch failed to produce any surprises. Except, that is, for another mummified lizard, only a lot smaller than the first one. I dug it up out of the hole and immediately covered it with sand again without the slightest feeling of regret as I probed deeper with the spade. By evening, the fatigue was getting too much for me. Not only was I absolutely soaking in sweat, the blisters on my palms had burst and the exposed skin smarted at the slightest contact with the spade. In fact, the spade was gradually becoming my enemy number one.

  ‘That’s it,’ I decided firmly. ‘Tomorrow I’m going on sick leave! I’ve had enough! Spartacus would have organised a rebellion ages ago!’

  That evening passed quietly, without any songs. And we didn’t wish each other goodnight.

  I sat there beside Gulya, looking up at the starry sky and waiting for a shower of falling stars, so that I could make wishes. But that night the stars were firmly attached to the sky – they couldn’t give a damn for me and my painful, smarting palms. And probably for the first time I felt the lofty remoteness of the sky. Feeling out of sorts, I turned on to my side with my face towards Gulya, who was already asleep. I put my right hand on her warm shoulder and froze in that position. And I thought that the chameleon Petrovich also probably froze at those moments when he wanted to halt time, in order not to frighten away a sudden feeling of happiness or simply tranquillity.

  45

  ANOTHER THREE DAYS went by, but they brought nothing positive. Every day Petro became more irritable and aggressive. And I, exhausted by the heat and the pain in my hands, was in no state to insist on my rights: despite the pain I carried on digging in the sand with the spade.

  ‘I can tie them up in the night if you like!’ Gulya whispered to me before we went to sleep.

  I shook my head. Previous experience had already demonstrated what tying and untying led to. We simply had to cut ourselves loose from them, but I didn’t have either the strength or the willpower. Somewhere up ahead I could still see a vague hope that the search would be successful after all, and I felt as if only that success could free us of their company.

  The next morning I started coming across a lot of stones in the sand, both ordinary stones and fragments of limestone blocks that had served as the foundations or walls of some kind of structure. I bent down and examined these stones curiously. Petro was not around – he had obviously wearied of following me. In principle, if the well was outside the fortifications, there couldn’t have been any buildings beside it, but then, as I had already seen, a well itself was usually surrounded with stones so that the creeping sand wouldn’t fill it in. In any case, I worked more carefully at this spot, and my care was rewarded. I found a gold crucifix for wearing round the neck. Its edges had been badly worn away by the sand, and the small crucifixion itself had been half erased by time. But the discovery lent me new strength, and I continued digging in the sand at that spot with redoubled energy, examining it carefully as I did so. And while I was digging there, the vigour somehow miraculously returned to my body. I glanced around again, this time with lively anxiety, to make sure that Petro was not about.

  But there was nobody around, and I carried on with the search. I didn’t discover anything else, it’s true, but the hope inspired by the crucifix remained as powerful as ever, making me lean my head down even lower to make quite sure that I wouldn’t miss any important detail.

  There was a surprise in store for me after another half-hour – when I had dug about as far as I could go, I decided to give it just one more shove, and the spade brought up a small yellow key from a depth of almost a metre. I picked it up, rubbed the sand off and inspected it. I was amazed to see that the key was gold – a discovery that naturally brought a smile of ironic mirth to my lips. ‘Well, well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m Buratino . . .’

  Focusing on my own ironic thoughts, I sensed something new in myself. I could feel this new thing physically, like an increase in the speed of my blood or the rate of my heartbeat. It was mine, not anyone else’s, but at the same time it did not depend on me. For a moment I felt afraid: it was probably like the way people realise in their old age that their sick bodies don’t give a damn for the soundness of their minds, their brilliant intellects and their brains that still function perfectly. The body is tired and it wants the soul to clear out . . .

  ‘Maybe I’m ill?’ I thought, and started listening attentively to the life of my body again.

  I didn’t feel any pain and it wasn’t like an illness.

  ‘It must be nervous exhaustion,’ I decided, and turned my attention back to the little key that I had found. I compared it with the crucifix – the same gold, the same shade of yellow and the same traces of wear from the sand.

  I put my finds away and carried on digging, not deepening the hole, but widening it. I was so absorbed in the work that I forgot about the time, and the pain in my palms, and my personal spy Petro, who had gone missing today – which was something I certainly did not regret.

  I was flinging the same rocks and sand away from the centre of the hole for the third time when I heard a shout.

  ‘Careful, you idiot! Look under your own feet!’ I turned round. Petro was standing not far away. He gestured towards my feet and I saw that there was something black protruding from the sand at a depth of about forty centimetres. We both went down on our knees and started cleaning the sand off the new find with rapid but careful movements of our hands. I noticed that Petro occasionally leaned down and sniffed. I lowered my head too, leaning my palms against the large and so far mysterious object that we had found, and took a sniff. The result was like an electric shock – the smell was so familiar that it was like my own smell.

  ‘Cinnamon!’ I exclaimed in instant recognition and immediately pushed myself back up off the black object with my hands.

  We were looking at the mummified corpse of a man. Petro also froze and stared. The mummy was lying face down, and so far we had only cleaned off the head, neck and part of the back. The black shrunken skin had the texture of parchment. I remembered the sensation in my palms – the surface they had pressed up against was almost springy. But as well as that I realised that the pain from the burst blisters, which had come to seem almost normal, was gone. When I looked at my palms I was stupefied, the skin was smooth and there was not a trace of any blisters to be seen on it.

  Puzzled, I turned my gaze back to the mummy and then looked at Petro. He was cleaning away the sand and stones above the mummy, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  ‘Well, he can manage here without me,’ I decided and simply sat there, watching him work. As I watched, Petro freed the entire black mummy from the sand and called me across.

  ‘Help me turn it over.’

  The two of us carefully turned the mummy over on to its back. Now at last we could get a proper look at it. The arms were tied to the body with a faded strip of leather, on which traces of green paint could just be made out. The mummy’s legs were tied together with a similar strip. The head was bald, and we both looked below the waist to see if the mummy had been a man or a woman when it was alive. But there was a surprise in store for us. The mummy seemed to have been operated on, either during life or after it. We were obviously looking at what had once been a middle-aged man, with the
primary proof of his manhood missing.

  ‘It’s a Ukrainian,’ Petro said in a quiet, pensive voice.

  ‘How do you make that out?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘You noticed yourself that he smells of cinnamon . . . And that’s the smell of the Ukrainian spirit.’

  ‘I smell like that too, and there was the same smell in the late Gershovich’s grave when we dug it up. Was he Ukrainian too, then?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Petro said in an unexpectedly gentle voice. ‘It’s the smell of the spirit, not the nation. It simply means that this spirit entered you and that Jew Gershovich.’ And Petro looked up at the sky darkening in anticipation of evening, as if some portent ought to descend from it in confirmation of his words. ‘Every nation has fools and wise men, angels and bandits, but the spirit touches with its wing only the very best, and it doesn’t look at your passport or check your nationality, it checks your soul.’

  As I listened incredulously to what Petro said, I felt the presence of something other-worldly. I wasn’t the only one with something new and strange happening inside me, Petro also seemed different and he was talking in an unusually gentle voice. And apart from that, there seemed to be someone else there with us. My gaze fell on the mummy. What if it was alive? I put my fingers to my forehead to check if I had a fever. But my forehead was quite normal.

  The darkening sky reminded Petro of the time and he stopped talking.

  ‘We have to get back to the girls,’ he said. ‘How are your hands – not hurting?’

  I showed him my palms.

  ‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ve healed up!

  At supper, as we sat round the fire, we made conversation concerning exalted matters and worldly problems at the same time. Petro spoke more than anyone else, and from the way that Gulya and Galya looked at him it was clear that this was the first time they had ever seen him like this too. That was understandable enough for Gulya – but for his black-haired girlfriend? Withdrawing a little from the general conversation to immerse myself in my own ruminations over a bowl of green tea, I tried to link my curious internal sensations with the change in Petro’s behaviour and almost in his beliefs.

  Something had affected us, but what? Solar radiation? The climate? Vapours from the mummy? My internal sensations could have been affected by any of the aforementioned physical factors or any others that I hadn’t noticed. But what influence had caused Petro’s sudden, surprising eloquence? There was nothing hallucinogenic in the area, and I hadn’t offered him any ‘baby food’ from my cans. What had produced this clear softening of his general attitude?

  And the smell of cinnamon? It was real, and it definitely came from the mummy. The same smell that I had picked up from Gershovich’s body. Only now it seemed to have left me, as if it had been dried out by the sun and driven away by the desert wind.

  ‘Maybe it’s just a smell that’s like cinnamon, but really has nothing to do with it,’ I thought, clutching at a guess that left at least a tiny hope of some answer in the future.

  46

  IN THE MORNING the three of us left Gulya behind with the things and carried on widening the excavation around the mummy. I didn’t show anyone the items I had found the day before – the crucifix and the key. Remembering how rapidly Petro’s interest in the soldier’s bronze button had evaporated, I didn’t think he would pay any attention to them, especially since they didn’t smell of cinnamon, which meant the Ukrainian spirit had never come anywhere near them.

  The hole had already been widened to five metres in diameter. I was raking away at its crumbling inner edge with my hands. Petro was working with the spade – I didn’t understand why he had taken it: perhaps out of pity for my palms that had healed so unexpectedly, or to take the more comfortable work for himself. In any case, whatever the reasons, the outcome suited me. I carefully crumbled away the edge of the hole, peering intently at the sand. So far nothing interesting had turned up, but an incredibly powerful confidence in success held my lips frozen across my face in a smile that was fixed but at the same time bright and absolutely sincere. Several times, looking up from the sand, I caught Petro’s gaze on me. He was squinting sideways, but I could see that my smile attracted his eyes like some invisible psychological magnet. At one point I even thought that he smiled too. There was clearly something odd happening to him.

  Galya was intently performing the same work as me. But she was even more deeply absorbed in the search for the unknown. For her, as for me the day before, nothing existed apart from the sand in front of her eyes. ‘That’s the state in which the most remarkable discoveries are made,’ I thought, carrying on crumbling the inner edge of the excavation.

  My nose caught the smell of cinnamon again – a strong, persistent slightly moist smell. And it was surprising that the sun, which had risen so long ago, had dried out the air and the surface of the sand, but hadn’t managed to extract the moisture from the smell of cinnamon.

  The smell seemed to be rising from the bottom of the shallow hole, as if it were seeping from below, from somewhere under the mixture of sand and stones that made up the irregular bottom of the excavation.

  After a while I found myself enveloped once again by that smell, the same as the first time, when a mixture of surprise and fear had made me take a long soak in a hot bath and scrub myself as hard as I could with a coarse bast wisp after the night at the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery. And then afterwards, when I realised it was pointless to struggle against this smell, a sudden calm had descended on me. And the smell itself had proved to be very refined and gentle, despite its sepulchral origins.

  Sepulchral origins! There was a possible explanation for the phenomenon. Yesterday we had found a mummified corpse here. In effect, without knowing it, we had dug up a grave. Dug it up and not filled it in. There was the mummy, lying almost at the centre of the excavation. And it was giving off the smell of the spirit that Petro had talked about at such length yesterday.

  I lowered my nose so that it almost touched the sand and sniffed. That same smell of cinnamon . . .

  OK, I could go crazy like this!

  I took a deep breath, switching my attention to focus on what I could see with my eyes. I started crumbling the sand with the edge of my hand. Suddenly I heard Galya cry out. I looked round. Petro was already squatting down beside her and Galya was holding something up on the joined palms of her hands.

  I went over and also squatted down. I looked hard at the long black object that aroused certain vague associations in my mind, trying to link these associations with words. Searching for a name.

  ‘Why, it’s . . .’ Petro drawled in amazement, touching the object with the index finger of his right hand. ‘Why, it’s . . .’

  I had already realised for myself what it was – the separate mummy of the member that was missing from the large mummy.

  ‘It smells of cinnamon too!’ Galya said in a half-whisper, still in the grip of her initial surprise.

  Holding the find in front of her face, she kept on sniffing at it, as if to make absolutely certain.

  ‘Put it over there!’ said Petro, glancing at the mummy lying behind our backs.

  Galya got up slowly, with apparent reluctance, shook off the sand that had stuck to her jeans, carried the small mummy over to the big one and put it down beside it. Then she came back to her place and carried on searching.

  Petro smoked a pipe and then went back to the spade. As I approached my edge of the hole, I glanced along the irregular line of the close horizon and saw that the boundary between the visible and the invisible intersected with something that looked like a camel. Yes, there was no doubt about it, a camel had crossed the boundary of our horizon, and beside it I could see the figure of a man. The flux of the hot desert air made it difficult to determine the distance separating it from us, but the distance was getting shorter. I could already tell that the camel was carrying luggage. I looked round to see if Petro had noticed the camel, but he was digging in the sand. Wo
ndering whether to say anything to him or not, I looked at the opposite horizon, beyond which the Caspian Sea lay hidden from our view. At the most distant point of the horizon visible to the eye, to the right of Petro, there was something else moving – eventually I could make out the figure of a man in the distance.

  ‘That’s a bit too much for this damned place,’ I thought.

  But these travellers were still a long way off, so I couldn’t be completely certain of the final destination of their journey. After all, there was town close by, they were either on their way to it or from it . . .

  Deciding not to distract Petro, I said nothing and went back to my own work post.

  An hour later I remembered the two travellers, one of whom had a camel. I got to my feet and looked. And I saw both of them. The man with the camel was getting close, he had no more than half a kilometre to go before he reached us. Approximately the same distance separated us from the solitary traveller, who was evidently walking from the seashore. On looking more closely, I saw that the traveller was carrying a rucksack and wearing a blue tracksuit. And then, as if the air suddenly became more transparent for an instant, I recognised the man. It was Colonel Taranenko approaching. There was no point in keeping silent now.

  ‘The colonel’s coming!’ I said, and when Petro got to his feet, I also pointed out the man with the camel. Petro was no more interested in the camel than I was. But the approach of Colonel Taranenko set the thoughts in his head moving rapidly.

  ‘I said we ought to tie him up,’ he whispered, and then immediately added in a softer voice: ‘But then he would have died without water . . .’

  Petro spread his hands and shook his head regretfully. Then he turned to me.

  ‘Well, what shall we do?’ he asked. I shrugged.