The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘I remember we discovered a number of so-called sacred sites in Ukraine. Usually these sites were located close to an isolated tree – a lime, a willow or an oak. But in the south, in the Kherson region, they were close to the Scythian burial mounds. We established that in the villages close to these sites, the level of crime was several times lower than the average for the Ukraine as a whole, while the general level of intellectual development was higher. There were many other factors that clearly distinguished the people who lived in these villages from those in all the others. Of course, the entire investigation was conducted in the strictest secrecy. All of our records and our analyses were immediately taken away from us and sent to Moscow. And at the time I didn’t understand how important this research was.

  ‘All I remember is that Major Naumenko discovered something about material manifestations of the Ukrainian national spirit in Kazakhstan. He put in a request to the Kazakh KGB, which was initially approved. The Kazakhs were willing to cooperate. But then suddenly the order came from Moscow to disband the department and transfer all of its members to different cities, so that the team would not be able to continue working on its own initiative. At that point I wasn’t capable of taking any initiative – I was just a dutiful young officer dreaming of a career in the state security services. But I couldn’t help admiring Major Naumenko passionately. He was a man of brilliant intellect and pristine honesty . . . After the department was closed, he was posted to the KGB central organisation in Moscow, but when the official car that was supposed to take him to the station arrived at the building where he lived, he had disappeared. His frightened wife showed the driver a note in which he said he was going away for two weeks on a work assignment . . . You can imagine the kind of uproar there was on Vladimirskaya Street! It took the top brass a full day to decide what to tell Moscow.

  ‘The regional state security services combed the forests and villages – all the places he had visited in connection with his research. All his friends and relatives were checked, but he was nowhere to be found. Eventually the top brass had to decide whether to declare him a traitor who had fled abroad or to tell Moscow that he was seriously ill and wouldn’t be back for at least two weeks. But in any case it was clear that there was bound to be trouble.’

  I suddenly found myself thinking how clearly and concisely the colonel was describing the events of the past. It seemed completely out of keeping with his former shock tactics and clumsy manner of speaking.

  My bowl was already empty. I wanted tea, but even more than that I wanted to find out what had happened to Major Naumenko. I heard a camel snorting and looked round – the head of the ship of the desert was emerging over the sandy horizon and with it the shopkeeper.

  When he saw the Kazakh and his camel approaching, the colonel stopped talking. He promised to tell us the rest later and turned his attention to his rice.

  The Kazakh halted his camel about three metres away from us. He got it to lie on the sand, took something out of his bundle and sat down in our circle. He handed Gulya his bowl, two cans of crab meat and a can-opener. Gulya accepted his contribution without speaking, opened the cans and put some crab meat in everyone’s bowl. And she put rice and crab meat in the Kazakh’s bowl.

  Then she washed out the cooking pot and hung it back on the tripod with water for tea.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Petro asked the Kazakh, unexpectedly speaking in Russian.

  ‘Murat.’

  ‘Do you live far away?’

  ‘Yes, in Krasnovodsk . . .’

  ‘Do you have a wife, children?’

  ‘Yes, I have a wife. And three sons . . .’

  I found this conversation interesting, and I listened attentively. Amazed by Petro’s sudden switch to Russian, I tried to detect an accent, but he spoke without one.

  The chameleon Petrovich distracted me from the conversation by clambering on to my knee and I plunged back into my own thoughts and feelings. Glancing over the people assembled round the fire, I saw that everyone apart from Petro and Murat was absorbed in their own thoughts. The colonel was sitting motionless, staring at the sand in front of him – no doubt he was recalling what had happened twenty years earlier and was in a sad and pensive mood.

  ‘I wonder if he has a wife and children,’ I thought.

  I looked at him more closely. I lowered my gaze to his hands, with their thick fingers clenched together. He was sitting cross-legged, with his elbows resting on his thighs. I saw a wedding ring on one finger and a silver ring with a stone on another.

  ‘He’s married,’ I decided.

  The water in the pot was boiling. Gulya had moved close to the tripod and was sitting there on watch. Any moment now she would make the tea. Then what would happen?

  ‘Of course it’s hard,’ Murat replied to Petro’s latest question. ‘The tax police here are bandits! If you have a kiosk, they never leave you alone. A camel’s the only way out. Serving the needs of nomads . . . My licence says I’m a mobile sales outlet.’

  ‘See how hard it is for people here!’ Petro said in Ukrainian, turning to me because he’d noticed I was listening to the Kazakh’s story.

  I nodded. I wasn’t surprised that he spoke Ukrainian to me. He knew that I understood the language.

  Gulya was already pouring tea into the bowls.

  ‘Wait!’ said Murat. ‘I’ll be back in a moment!’ He ran to his camel and came back with a box of chocolates. He took the cellophane wrapper off it and offered it to everyone in turn.

  I took a sweet – the chocolate was melting, and I put it all straight into my mouth, then followed it with a gulp of green tea. The resulting sensation was unfamiliar, but pleasurable. I had always liked contrasting combinations of sweet and salty – sweet tea and a sandwich with pickled herring. This time it was the other way round: the tea was salty and the chocolate was sweet.

  ‘Chinese tea?’ Murat asked Gulya. She nodded.

  ‘Wait!’ he said, getting to his feet. He ran to his camel again and came back with a large fancy tin of tea.

  ‘Here, it’s a present!’ he said, handing the tin to Gulya. ‘Vietnamese green tea! Pure velvet. Like drinking silk!’

  The chameleon climbed down from my leg and set off slowly across the sand, following the precise line of a circle round the fire, as if he were keeping a safe distance. When he reached Galya, he clambered on to her leg. Once he settled in and turned blue to match her jeans, he froze, and nothing moved but his protruding eye, which rotated and occasionally stopped. But it was hard to tell where his motionless gaze was directed.

  The Kazakh took a gulp of tea from his bowl, then suddenly seemed to remember something and got to his feet once more. He walked back to his camel and when he returned, he held out a Chinese silk tie in beautiful packaging to Petro.

  ‘Take it, a souvenir of our meeting!’ he said. Astonished at his generosity, I suddenly noticed that the colonel was also watching the Kazakh carefully. I could see alarm in the colonel’s eyes.

  ‘Murat,’ he said in a soft voice, ‘it’s dangerous for you to stay here too long . . .’

  Murat looked at the colonel and smiled, then he jumped to his feet and went to the camel again. He came back with a box of bullets.

  ‘Take them! I can see you’re a good man!’

  The colonel took his wallet from his pocket and held out ten dollars to Murat.

  ‘What’s this, have I offended you?’ the Kazakh asked in fright.

  ‘This is a bad place for you,’ said Taranenko. ‘You must understand! You’ll give all your goods to us, and then how will you feed your children and your wife? Eh?’

  The Kazakh started thinking. His face gradually turned pale, as if he was beginning to understand something.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Take them anyway –’ He held out the box of bullets to the colonel. ‘Thank you very much! I can see something’s not right . . . They told me – don’t go there, that place is cursed . . . you can end up with nothing
. . . Thank you!’

  The colonel made the Kazakh take the ten dollars before he would accept the cardboard box of bullets from him.

  ‘You’d better get away from here,’ Vitold Yukhimovich repeated. ‘Just a moment!’ he took out another banknote. ‘Sell me two Snickers bars.’

  ‘Why “sell”?’ the Kazakh asked, offended. The expression on his face changed, he seemed to be in physical pain, his lips tensed and parted and he brought them back together again.

  ‘Sell them to me!’ the colonel insisted. Murat nodded in acquiescence and brought two Snickers bars. He took the money from the colonel.

  ‘Keep the change,’ said Vitold Yukhimovich. ‘And give the Snickers to Galya.’

  Five minutes later, after nodding instead of saying goodbye, Murat ran away from our campfire, dragging behind him the camel that stubbornly refused to move fast.

  We watched him go until he finally disappeared behind the crest of a sand dune.

  ‘There,’ the colonel said with a sigh, ‘that’s what Major Naumenko was studying. The material manifestation of the national spirit. The Ukrainian national spirit . . . A weak Kazakh . . .’

  ‘But where does it come from?’ Petro asked.

  ‘Where from?’ the colonel echoed. ‘Where from? Well, basically it’s clear enough. Although it still hasn’t been proved yet. An analysis of the sand in this area indicates a high level of crystallised sperm. It’s fertilised sand, so to speak. Twenty-five years of serving in the tsarist army . . . no women, no joy . . . That’s not easy . . . The amount of unused human energy that has gone into this sand . . . You understand me?’ The colonel ran a questioning glance around everyone there.

  ‘But surely the soldiers here were not just from the Ukraine?’ Petro asked.

  ‘There were soldiers from all sorts of places here, but the victory of a national spirit is determined by its intensity, not its total mass, just like radiation. I think that Taras Shevchenko transmitted his spiritual strength to this place. And when we talk about that strength separately from the man to whom it belongs, it’s called the national spirit. It is like the smell of cinnamon in the air. It makes you want to breathe it in . . .’

  ‘But then what happened to Major Naumenko?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid all that’s left of the major is the mummy. After he left the note for his wife he came here. He set out in secret, in order to verify his conclusions. But by that time this place was carefully guarded – the major wasn’t the first one who had wanted to solve this mystery. He didn’t come here by the usual route, where he could have been followed, he came via Astrakhan instead. But they were waiting for him here. I’m afraid that first they tortured him, and then just killed him . . .’

  ‘How do you know he was tortured?’

  ‘His severed male member tells me a lot,’ the colonel said with a sigh. ‘A year earlier Major Naumenko’s only child had died of diphtheria. He suffered very badly. He said that life without children was meaningless. He and his wife dreamed of having another child. Whoever was waiting for him here must have known what they could blackmail him with . . .’

  ‘Then,’ said Petro, looking the colonel straight in the eye, ‘why don’t people speak Ukrainian? The national spirit is the expression of the national language!’

  ‘No,’ the colonel replied. ‘The national spirit is higher than the national language. It changes a man’s attitude to his surroundings, to everything around him and to himself as well. The spirit affects a man of any nationality, arousing only the good in him. But language is only the external sign of nationality. The president and a homicidal maniac can both speak it equally well. If you make language the most important aspect of the national spirit, it will become an instrument of segregation and a modern inquisition. A rapist who speaks Ukrainian will suddenly be better than a rapist who speaks Russian. Do you understand?’

  Petro listened attentively. He answered the colonel’s question with a barely perceptible nod.

  ‘The national spirit teaches us to love the members of all nations, not just our own,’ Vitold Yukhimovich added, gazing expectantly at Petro, who was sitting there pensively.

  ‘That’s something I still need to understand,’ Petro said quietly. He rubbed his right temple with his fingers and started filling his pipe with tobacco.

  ‘You’ll have time enough to understand everything,’ Colonel Taranenko said with paternal condescension and turned to look at me. ‘There’s a lot we still need to understand . . .’

  ‘But what are we going to do with Major Naumenko?’ I asked.

  ‘All that we can do . . . He has to be buried with full honours.’

  The sound of paper tearing distracted me from my thoughts about Major Naumenko. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Galya rip open the wrapper of a Snickers bar, then divide it in two and hand one half to Gulya.

  49

  EVENING ARRIVED UNNOTICED. We didn’t go back to the excavation site; in fact, we didn’t even talk at all after lunch, as if there was no longer any point to our joint undertaking.

  Each of us was left to his or her own devices. From time to time Petro fed the fire with the meagre desert brushwood, although the hook on the tripod was bare – the empty cooking pot was lying beside it on the sand. At first I felt like reprimanding Petro for this – the desert had already taught me to be economical with everything, especially water and kindling. But Petro’s eyes were so thoughtful and sad, that I couldn’t bring myself to disturb him. I was also under a gloomy cloud of thoughts and feelings: the colonel’s story about the tragic fate of Major Naumenko, and my future, which had retreated even further into the mist – everything made me feel anxious and alarmed. I suddenly felt envious of all the people who lived boring and monotonous lives: the very monotony of their lives, consisting of the five-day working week, parents’ meetings and borscht once a week, seemed to me to be a guarantee of a stable and equally monotonous future and a peaceful death. Ah, but come on! What did I want with this monotony? I stopped my snivelling. I had never longed for tranquillity, and I had always been rewarded for its absence. Tranquillity brings nothing but silence and loneliness.

  I started thinking about Gulya. Although I had been given to her by her father, she was my most precious reward for not coveting a quiet life.

  I glanced round, searching for her. She was sitting on the sand with her back to me, rearranging something in her double bundle. Her emerald-green shirt-dress had a pearly shimmer to it in the warm evening air.

  ‘My future is with her now, and it is no longer mine, but ours,’ I thought, gazing at her back. ‘We will always be together now, and the very fact that we are so different will save us from the monotonous tranquillity of family life. Where will we live? In Kiev, of course . . . where we have a place to live . . .’

  Thinking of Kiev brought back my state of alarm. I wanted to get back there, back home, as soon as possible, but at the same time I felt afraid, more for Gulya than for myself. I was just as defenceless too, but I was far less worried about my own safety. I intended to go back to Kiev with the woman I loved in this strange way. I still wasn’t fully aware of how much I loved her – all I knew was that she was the most precious thing I had. In all ages, the one condition required for a calm life has always been the same – don’t become necessary to anyone, that is, as they say nowadays, keep your head down. Unfortunately, I had stuck my neck out from the very beginning, and probably too far. If a young fledgling had stuck his head that far out of the nest, he would have fallen and been eaten by a cat long ago.

  ‘Maybe not Kiev. Maybe Astrakhan or any other place where the two of us can settle in at first without much baggage, in some hostel, and then start arranging our lives properly? No,’ I realised, ‘that’s nothing but a fantasy. I can’t avoid going home. And there’s no point in frightening myself ahead of time – maybe the “baby food” dealers whose plans I spoiled are already lying under the ground at the depth of one and a half metres required by public health legi
slation. Maybe the people who put them there are already lying there too, and the only difference between them and the first lot is in the dates on the marble tombstones.’

  Life is always more interesting than death.

  I looked around, Galya was sitting on her bed mat, embroidering something.

  In the darkening evening air the only thing my eyes picked out was the ball of red thread on her knees. I found the idyll that had arisen after lunch on that day alarming and moving at the same time. But where was the colonel? I looked around again.

  I couldn’t see him anywhere. Perhaps he had gone down to the mummy?

  Feeling curious, I walked to the edge of the sandy hill and glanced down. The sun’s weakened rays no longer reached the site of our search. Down below I could make out the black mummy, but I couldn’t see Colonel Taranenko.

  Puzzled, but not perturbed, I went back to the fire and sat down beside Petro. I listened to the sound of the fire.

  ‘Petro,’ I said five minutes later, ‘I want to talk to you . . .’

  Petro glanced at me enquiringly. His face was dappled with firelight, which emphasised the black moustache that drooped down to his chin.

  ‘You know,’ I began, ‘it seems to me that Gulya and I are superfluous here . . . This is more your business than mine – yours and Galya’s and the colonel’s . . . I feel . . . well, how can I put it? I’m Russian. Gulya’s a Kazakh. I’ve only just begun to understand that for you this is a contact with something sacred . . .’