The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘We can’t really apologise for launching him into space!’ I replied a minute later.

  47

  AS THE TWO men approached us from opposite sides, one in the company of a loaded camel, my inner tension increased. We stood there without moving. Petro’s face was a study in intense resolution. Galya looked bewildered. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands – she kept lifting them to her face, then lowering them and trying to wipe them on her jeans.

  Time slowed down, as if the heavenly projectionist was deliberately stretching out this episode in the movie.

  And now I was concerned about the second traveller, the one walking with the camel.

  We were at the precise geometrical centre of an imaginary straight line running from the colonel to the stranger with the camel. I suddenly had the thought that all this was simply a coincidence. Our position on the two men’s route, that is. And if we moved aside for a while, the colonel and the nomad would meet or, if they weren’t intended to meet, they would walk past each other and both continue on their way. However, logic obstinately suggested that the colonel was coming precisely to see us, because he had something to say to us. But the approach of the nomad really was a coincidence, although the consequences of this coincidence were so far unknown. I could guess what to expect from the colonel. Even when considering a colonel in the abstract, it’s easy enough to imagine the way he will act. But what could you expect from a nomad, and what made me think he was a nomad anyway? Only the fact that he was walking with a loaded camel?

  The sun had already crept a little to one side, abandoning its position at the zenith, and while just recently I had been a man without a shadow, squatting on my haunches and crumbling the sand from inside the rim of the hole, now I had a little shadow anchored to my feet. Time was moving in slow motion, but the sun had not changed its schedule, and the thought came to me that the only clock that would show the right time now was a sundial. Then suddenly I felt like the pointer of a sundial. The pointer has to be the most important thing in a sundial – after all, it stands motionless while time circles around it.

  And now the expression on the colonel’s face was visible. It was as stony as the face of a statue by Kavaleridze. The teeth were clenched, the jaw muscles were tense. I sensed danger in the very way the colonel moved, and then I saw the pistol in his hand.

  ‘Petro, he’s armed!’ I said in a low voice.

  Petro nodded without looking round.

  About twenty metres away from us the colonel stopped, put the rucksack down beside his feet, squared his shoulders and swung his arms, bent at the elbow, through a couple of circles, to loosen up his swollen joints.

  ‘Well!’ he shouted. ‘Did you think you’d got away?’

  We didn’t say anything.

  ‘Slipped something in my drink and thought it was all over? That you’d never see me alive again? Yes? Get your hands up!’

  He pointed the pistol at me, then transferred his gaze and his aim to Petro. I could see his outstretched hand trembling from the constant effort it cost him to prevent the pistol following its own preference to fall sideways.

  I raised my hands above my head, but Petro simply spat good-naturedly on the ground near his feet and smiled entirely without malice as he looked at the colonel, and in this smile, framed by the dangling ends of his black moustache, I saw a benevolence, even sympathy, quite out of character for Petro.

  ‘Vitold Yukhimovich!’ Petro said, speaking loudly so that the distance separating him from the colonel couldn’t swallow up a single letter of the words he pronounced. ‘You ought be resting, not threatening us with your TT! We’re all people, aren’t we? Surely we can reach an agreement?’

  I saw Colonel Taranenko’s eyes almost pop out of his head when he heard these unexpected sentiments from Petro’s lips. As I watched, he took two unsteady steps forward and an expression of bemusement appeared on his face, exactly like the one that Galya’s face had recently worn.

  He stopped again, watching us carefully. But there must have been something preventing him from making us out clearly. Possibly fatigue. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, but still held the pistol up in his right hand, although the barrel of his TT was pointing past us. Petro took out his pipe, lit it and demonstratively released a narrow column of smoke up into the sky.

  I lowered my hands. Something strange was happening again. The colonel’s belligerence and the determination with which he had pointed the pistol at us were evaporating before my very eyes.

  He stopped fiddling with his eyes, rubbed his temple with the fingers of his left hand, looked at the sun and gave us another puzzled look. Then he shook his head in a curious manner, as if he was trying to drive away sleep, and lowered the hand with the pistol.

  He took a few more steps and halted about five metres away from us.

  ‘I’m not feeling too good,’ he said in a tired voice and sighed. ‘If not for you, I’d be in Odessa right now, taking a rest in the Chkalov sanatorium . . . I’ve been needing a rest for a long time.’

  ‘Come on then, the girls will make you some tea,’ Petro suggested in a gentle voice.

  Vitold Yukhimovich looked at him suspiciously.

  ‘Your girls made me coffee once already!’ he said, but there wasn’t a hint of resentment or anger in his tone of voice.

  ‘Do you hear me, eh?’ said an unfamiliar voice, suddenly slicing into the calm tranquillity of the conversation.

  I looked round, dumbfounded, and saw the Kazakh with the camel at the other side of the hole. The Kazakh was all-over denim – the shirt and, of course, the jeans, and even the belt with the little bag for money and documents attached to it – everything was a worn blue colour. Fastened between the camel’s two humps was a bundle with lots of little different-coloured pockets sewn all over it.

  ‘Do you hear me, eh? Do you want to buy food?’ the clear-voiced Kazakh continued.

  ‘What kind of food?’ the colonel asked the Kazakh over our heads.

  ‘Canned food, chocolate, Iranian macaroni . . .’ said the Kazakh, screwing up his eyes to get a clearer look at the colonel. ‘I’ve got bullets for a TT too, really cheap, cheaper than hen’s eggs . . .’

  ‘And what can I pay with?’ the colonel asked seriously.

  ‘Whatever you like. Dollars, marks, francs, barter . . . You want bullets, right?’

  ‘No,’ the colonel replied. ‘What have you got in cans?’

  ‘Crabs, very fresh Caspian herring, shrimps . . . all at two dollars a time . . .’

  Again my imagination conjured up an imaginary line running from the Kazakh to the colonel, and again it ran straight through us. I wanted to move aside.

  But meanwhile the colonel pulled a wallet from the pocket of his Adidas trousers, took out a green note and waved it in the air.

  ‘Give me five cans of herring!’ he said to the Kazakh.

  ‘Why give?’ the Kazakh asked, suddenly offended. ‘You’re the customer, I’m the vendor. You come here and buy! The shop doesn’t go to the customer!’

  ‘Comrade Colonel,’ I said, taking advantage of the pause that followed, ‘don’t take the Caspian herring.’

  ‘Why not?’ Taranenko asked in surprise.

  ‘There’s . . . there could be all sorts of things in the can . . .’

  ‘Aha . . .’ said the colonel with a knowing smile. ‘All sorts of things, you say . . . I get it . . .’ And he wagged his thick index finger at me, as if I was a little kid getting up to mischief in kindergarten.

  ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you believe that I’m a shop?’ asked the Kazakh, agitated and upset. ‘Here, look, I’ve got a licence, I’ve got goods . . . Come and buy . . .’

  The colonel smiled, shook his head and then laughed, shook his head again and walked straight by the hole, past us, to the camel-shop, clutching his pistol in one hand and the green banknote in the other, stopping right in front of the camel.

  ‘Five cans of crab,’ he said firmly, holding out
the ten-dollar bill to the Kazakh.

  The Kazakh kicked the inside of the camel’s foreleg with his heel and the camel obediently lowered itself on to the sand, folding first the forelegs and then the hind legs. The shopkeeper opened one of the compartments of the large bundle and almost climbed inside it as he took out the cans. He set them out in a row on the sand.

  ‘There, count them,’ he said, turning to his customer. ‘One, two, three, four, five.’ He seemed to be numbering each can separately as his index finger ran along the row.

  Then he took a calculator out of the pocket of his denim shirt. Muttering something to himself in Kazakh, he performed the calculation, raised his eyes to look at colonel and declared: ‘Ten dollars.’

  The colonel laughed. ‘And what’s this I’m giving you?’ he asked, almost sticking the money under the Kazakh’s nose.

  ‘Ten,’ the Kazakh said with a nod, accepting the note. Taranenko put the cans in a pile and picked them up. He came over to me, put the cans down on the sand and suddenly looked at his right hand, in which he was still holding the pistol.

  ‘Phoo,’ he said. ‘I was wondering why my hand was hurting . . .’

  He unzipped his Adidas tracksuit top and put the pistol in a holster hanging under his left armpit. He closed the zip again and turned to me.

  ‘Tell me, you left Kiev on your own. Where did the Kazakh girl come from?’

  ‘I found her in the desert,’ I replied. ‘I fell asleep alone, and woke up with her.’

  The colonel chuckled and then ran his eye round the edge of the expanded excavation, which had now reached a diameter of ten metres. He saw the mummy.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘A mummy,’ I replied. ‘An old one. It smells of cinnamon . . .’

  ‘Cinnamon?’ The colonel took a step towards the mummy. ‘Cinnamon . . .’ He sighed heavily.

  I looked at Petro who was standing there with a laid-back air, watching the colonel.

  Galya was squatting to the right of him with her back to us, taking no notice of anyone and still crumbling the edge of the hole.

  ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘our colonel doesn’t seem to inspire fear in anyone any more.’

  Meanwhile, the colonel squatted down beside the mummy, examined it carefully and sniffed at it. Then he noticed the mummified male member. To judge from the fact that he didn’t ask any questions, he must have understood everything, or reached some conclusion that he found satisfactory.

  ‘Seems like everything round here smells of cinnamon,’ he said thoughtfully as he got up. ‘It’s a strong smell . . . Very strong . . .’

  I sniffed. Either my nose was already so accustomed to this smell that it took it for pure fresh air, or the colonel’s sense of smell was a lot keener than my own.

  ‘Strong . . .’ he repeated thoughtfully, and I suddenly realised what Colonel Taranenko meant – that the smell of cinnamon possessed some mysterious power, and it was this power that had changed Petro, mellowed his personality and taken away his attitude of aggressive suspicion. The power of the Ukrainian spirit, transmitted by this smell, which had previously held nothing but culinary associations for me – this was the power that the colonel could feel affecting him.

  ‘Petro, look!’ Galya called out in a voice of quiet surprise.

  Petro squatted down beside her and they both examined something. The colonel went over to them and stopped. I hurried after him to the site of this latest discovery.

  Galya was holding a watch with a leather strap. Petro took it from her, cleaned away the sand clinging to it and looked closely at the dial.

  ‘“Po-be-da,”’ he read out, then twirled the watch in his hands, studying it. His face wore an expression of total bewilderment.

  I noticed an engraved inscription.

  ‘Petro, there’s something on the back of it,’ I said.

  He raised the watch to his eyes and squinted at it. Its steel back glinted in the sun.

  ‘“To Major Vitalii Ivanovich Naumenko from his colleagues. Kiev, 1968,”’ he read.

  I glanced at the mummy. I suddenly suspected that there was some kind of connection between it and the watch. Could it possibly be Major Naumenko in person? But who was he and what was he doing here?

  The colonel took the watch out of Petro’s hands without saying a word and abruptly moved away from us. He stood with his back to us and I thought I saw his shoulders tremble.

  Petro looked at the colonel’s back too. We exchanged glances. But Galya stayed where she was at the edge of the excavation. Apparently she wasn’t interested in men’s business.

  I heard the sound of a zip fastener opening and saw the colonel’s raised right elbow. I was rooted to the spot by tense anticipation – I realised that the colonel was taking the pistol out of its holster. If he swung round now and started shooting, we were done for. At that distance a professional soldier would put us all away in three seconds.

  ‘It’s a good thing Gulya’s not here,’ I thought rapidly, before the silence was shattered by the sound of shots.

  I shuddered, but stayed on my feet. Holding the pistol high in his right hand and aiming it at the sky, the colonel fired a few more shots. Then he lowered his hand and his head – I got a good view of his powerful neck.

  The silence waited for the echo to fade away and then resumed its rightful place.

  We stood there without moving.

  Colonel Taranenko turned round slowly. There were tears in his eyes, but his smoothly shaved cheeks were dry. He looked straight through us, as if we weren’t even there. He walked across to the mummy and stood over it in silence. Then he went down on one knee.

  I thought the funereal silence was never going to be broken. It seemed to have turned to glass. And at the same time the tension mounted. That silence hung over us like the sword of Damocles, rising higher and higher and all the time increasing in size. What would happen when it fell? What would this silence explode into?

  Strained to breaking point by the colonel’s shots, my nerves refused to settle down. Then suddenly I heard the Kazakh’s loud, clear voice again.

  ‘Buy bullets! You’ve run out, haven’t you?’

  The colonel turned towards the one-man shop and looked at him sadly with his eyes narrowed.

  ‘How much are your bullets?’ he asked in a low voice.

  ‘Three for a dollar . . . ai!’ The Kazakh gestured briefly with his hand. ‘For you, I’ll give four for a dollar!’

  The colonel pulled the wallet from the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms, took out another green bill and walked up to the shop, holding it in his hand. The shopkeeper was already rummaging in his bundle to find the required goods.

  A jangling sound sliced through the already weakened silence. The iridescent trilling hung in the air, faded away and was then repeated. The Kazakh hurriedly drew his hands out of the bundle, reached into the furthest pocket and took out a mobile phone.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said in Russian and then immediately switched to Kazakh.

  He spoke calmly at first, and then nervously and abruptly. His face turned dark.

  Eventually he put the phone away in the appropriate pocket of the bundle, chewed thoughtfully on his lips for a while and went back to selling bullets. He took out a small cardboard box.

  ‘Listen, there’s fifty here, take them all!’ he told his customer.

  ‘OK, and will you let me make a call? I’ll pay.’

  ‘Where do you want to call?’

  ‘Kiev. I’ll be quick . . .’

  ‘Twenty dollars then.’

  The colonel agreed and when he was given the phone he walked about twenty metres away.

  The Kazakh watched him go, and then his face was clouded by thoughts again, no doubt as a result of his phone conversation. He shook his head ruefully.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked. I felt I wanted to be neighbourly with him.

  ‘Ai-ai,’ the man-shop said, nodding. ‘There are camel races today in Krasnovodsk
. . . My camel lost, and I took bets, you understand . . . I’ll have to pay . . .’

  Petro laughed in surprise when he heard what was wrong.

  ‘Come on then, we’ll have lunch together.’

  The Kazakh looked at Petro in amazed gratitude.

  ‘Galya,’ said Petro, turning to his girlfriend. ‘Go back to Gulya and get lunch ready straight away. Say we’ve got guests!’

  As I watched Galya go, I tried to catch at least something of the colonel’s telephone conversation. But he was talking quietly and very intently.

  48

  SOON WE SET off after Galya. The Kazakh was the only one who decided to stay back for a moment – he said he needed to take an inventory of his stock and bring his records up to date.

  There was a surprise waiting for us at lunch – boiled rice. We sat round the fire in a wider circle, so that there would be room for Colonel Taranenko as well. Gulya was not at all surprised to see the colonel. I even thought that when she spooned the rice into the bowls, she gave him more than anyone else.

  When the sight of the rice had been transformed into its taste and I was rolling the pleasantly hot, crumbly grains around on my tongue, Petro cautiously asked Vitold Yukhimovich about Major Naumenko.

  The colonel halted a spoonful of rice in the air halfway to his mouth, then lowered it back into the bowl squeezed between his legs. He sighed and looked around.

  ‘I knew him well,’ he said eventually in a quiet voice, nodding to himself. ‘He was a good man. He was carrying out secret research into material manifestations of the national spirit. The organs of state security in every Soviet republic set up departments dealing with that back then. Moscow allocated big money for the research. The ones who got most were the Baltic nationalities, the Tadjiks and us. The Belorussians got the least – apparently they had nothing to investigate . . . I’d just been made a lieutenant and I was assigned to his department . . .’

  All of us, even Gulya and I, listened to the colonel attentively and completely forgot about our rice. Noticing this, the colonel paused for a moment.

  ‘Eat, or it will get cold,’ he said in a gentle voice. Then he waited until he could see that we had all gone back to eating our rice, which really was getting cold, and continued. ‘The department didn’t exist for very long. A year, maybe eighteen months. It was very interesting: we studied esoteric Ukrainian folklore, mythology, old manuscripts, even the materials in the archives of the tsarist Okhranka – it turned out that the secret police was interested in this question even at that time. We called in nationalists from the prison camps and interviewed them . . . we kept an eye on groups of harm less nationalists and Gershovich’s group.’ When he mentioned Gershovich, the colonel looked at me.