I was speaking absolutely sincerely and the sincerity prevented me from expressing my thoughts more clearly, but Petro suddenly raised one hand to his face, as if he wanted to stop me and I fell silent.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said, speaking in Russian. ‘We’re not Nazis, and there’s no need to be afraid of us. We don’t claim that Ukraine is only for Ukrainians. If you love Kiev, then you have to love Ukraine too. But there’s no need to put on an embroidered linen shirt and hang an embroidered hand towel over your door . . . All of us together – the Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and Kazakhs – will build a European state . . .’
I was stunned by what Petro had said. It was impossible to believe that this was a member of UNA-UNSO speaking. There was something wrong here. Not only had he started talking to me in Russian, he was expressing thoughts that were more in keeping with the United Nations’ declaration of human rights than the ideas of the aforementioned organisation: what I had read in the newspapers about its goals and objectives was the absolute opposite.
‘You have to stay with us to the end,’ he went on. ‘We still have a lot of work to do. When Vitold Yukhimovich comes back later tonight, we’ll tell you everything . . .’
‘Comes back?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Yes, he went to the town. He’ll bring news. Just be patient for a couple of hours . . .’
I was dumbstruck. Apparently, while I had divided our ‘harmonious collective’ into three interested parties – Gulya and me, the SBU and UNA-UNSO – the last two had come to terms and formed a single interested party. And now it looked as if they were about to ask Gulya and me to join them.
‘I’ll go and collect some kindling for tea before it gets completely dark,’ Petro said, getting to his feet. His footsteps slithered across the sand behind my back. I was left sitting by the fading fire. I felt a premonition of emotional relief. The explanation for what was happening was somewhere close now. I could feel it. Of course it was very close, down there behind the line of the sandy horizon. It’s the sand, I realised. It’s the smell of cinnamon, it’s the Ukrainian national spirit that has permeated the area around the Novopetrovsk Fortress. That must be the thing that Taras Shevchenko buried in the sand ‘three sazhens away from an old well’. It was something invisible, floating in the air, something with an incredible power that was capable of improving people, their thoughts and beliefs. Mysticism? Bioenergy? Karma? Radiation? And what would Colonel Taranenko tell us when he got back from the town in the evening? He was going to tell us something, surely, even if it was only what he had been doing there.
I shook my head to drive away the importunate thoughts and listened to the silence of the desert.
I looked up at the sky, where the distant golden grains of the stars were hatching out.
The approaching night was preparing a starry sky for itself.
50
THE COLONEL CAME back very late, when a slim oriental moon was already hanging above the ruins of the artillery battery. The fire was giving out a thin stream of smoke, begging for the brushwood lying in a heap beside it, at Petro’s feet. Once the colonel had squatted down beside him, Petro set about reviving the flames. Now it was time for tea.
Gulya came over and started dealing with the fire. The colonel nodded, inviting Petro and me to follow him. The three of us walked to the edge of the elevation and sat down on the sand. The colonel looked tired.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I’ve managed to reach agreement on a few things, but we’ll still have to monitor everything . . .’
‘What is this everything? What have you reached agreement on?’ I asked, astounded that I was so poorly informed. ‘I don’t know anything about this.’
The colonel looked at Petro in surprise.
‘What, haven’t you explained anything to him?’
Petro shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Colonel, but I can’t bring myself to speak on behalf of the SBU.’
‘I see . . .’ the colonel drawled slowly. ‘You still don’t understand that we have a common goal – a better future for Ukraine.’
‘No, I understand that, but I need time to get used to it.’
‘All right then,’ the colonel sighed and turned back to face me. ‘This is what’s going on: first of all we have to take as much of this sand as possible back to Ukraine.’
‘What for?’ I asked, astonished.
‘For the revitalisation of the nation,’ the colonel replied. ‘You’ve seen for yourself how it affects people. Not just any sand, of course, but this sand, permeated with the national spirit . . . Anyway, our scientists still have to give their opinion on that question. Our task is to get it to the homeland. And they’ll decide what to do with it after that. To be honest, what I’d do is add it to the sandpits at the kindergartens – after all, the children, the new generations, are our future, they have to be quite different, better than us, more decent and honest than us . . . Do you see?’
I nodded.
‘So that’s why I had a meeting with my Kazakh colleagues today. They promise to help. We’ll have to help them in exchange, but that’ll come later. The documentation for a Ukrainian-Kazakh joint venture trading in building materials will be ready tomorrow. And then we can export this sand to Ukraine as if it had been quarried. And, of course, we’ll have to accompany the consignment.’
‘That’s all fine, but who’s going to decide what to do with the sand after that?’ Petro asked. ‘The SBU? Won’t we be squeezed out?’
The colonel sighed heavily. ‘We’ll have to discuss all that. In Ukraine they don’t know anything about our discovery yet, and I think we’ll be able to get the sand through without being noticed. Then we’ll store it somewhere and decide what to do according to the circumstances.’
Petro seemed to be satisfied with what he’d heard.
‘Major Naumenko’s funeral is tomorrow,’ the colonel said. ‘My Kazakh colleagues will come and help. They promised to be here at twelve.’
I was just about to ask the question that had matured in my mind when Gulya called us to the fire. The tea was ready.
We sat there, drinking tea from bowls, listening to the silence and looking at the stars.
The chameleon Petrovich emerged from somewhere under our luggage that was lying nearby and crept towards the fire. He stopped half a metre away from the flames, then climbed up on to my knee and froze, with his face thrust up into the sky.
When everyone went off to sleep and Gulya took hold of my hand to lead me to our striped bed mat, I realised that I was too agitated. I didn’t feel sleepy. I wanted to be alone and I told my wife Gulya so. She nodded understandingly, kissed me and walked away.
Something forced me back from the fading fire. The air seemed cooler than usual, but it wasn’t cold. I strolled across the sand to the edge of the elevation.
I looked up at a sky glittering with billions of stars. Then I looked down. The moon’s pale yellow light had reached as far as the hollow in which we had dug up the goal of our journey or, to be more precise, the goal of our separate journeys. I raised my left hand to my face and only just managed to stop myself sneezing at the sudden strong smell of cinnamon. Then I sniffed my right hand, with the same result. I looked round at the ruins of the artillery battery in the beautiful light of the moon. A cursed place? What had arisen first – the myth that the place was cursed or the effect of the place, of this sand, on people?
Realising that I couldn’t answer that question myself, I tried to distract myself by watching the sky, and I succeeded. I counted five satellites going about their own business, flying between the stars planted so firmly in the heavens. How many years had they been flying like that, fulfilling their cosmic obligations? I remembered the almost daily announcements in the old news papers: ‘Today the sputniks Soyuz-1554, Soyuz-1555 and Soyuz 1556 were placed in orbit round the Earth . . .’ How many thousands of these satellites were there wandering through space now? And was anyone on Earth keeping track of them? Was there some half-mad
scientist somewhere who worried about them, who had adopted all these orphans after the demise of the great space power?
I walked down the hill and strolled across to our excavation. I stopped at the edge of the broad hole with the mummy of Major Naumenko lying almost at its centre. I sat down and lowered my legs into the hole, but they didn’t reach the bottom – they were too short by about thirty centimetres.
Immediately I felt a peaceful sensation developing in my chest. My heartbeat seemed to slow down and the blood flowed more calmly through my veins.
‘It’s so beautiful and peaceful here,’ I thought in Ukrainian, and I wasn’t even surprised that my thoughts had switched into that language of their own accord. ‘It seems so poor, but it’s so rich. Did I really have to end up here? But then, if I hadn’t ended up here, where would I have been now? Maybe in the next world already? But here I am, alive and happy, and I have a beautiful, intelligent wife . . . I just hope it all works out well.’
I sat there until the dawn, thinking in Ukrainian about myself and my life. And when the rising sun had squeezed the thin shaving of the white moon off the sky, the colours I saw took my breath away.
There were only two colours – the yellow of the sand and the blue of the sky.
‘Oh, God,’ I thought. ‘There it is, just like Taras Shevchenko said: yellow and blue! There they are – his favourite colours! The colours that he saw every morning, that reminded him so lyrically of his distant home, the native land that he loved so much and dreamed of returning to!’
The sun rose higher and higher, and I didn’t feel any tiredness after the sleepless night. My body was filled with a calm vigour. I could sense a huge amount of secret energy within myself. I didn’t know what this energy was waiting for, what it wanted to be spent on. But it was there inside me, it was waiting for its time to come. And it didn’t seem to be under my control. It was stronger than me. Perhaps it was a spirit, the same spirit that made people kinder and better despite their own wishes. Or perhaps it was only a small particle of that spirit.
I got up. The sun had not dried out the air yet and it was still carrying a faint smell of the Caspian and a quite distinct smell of cinnamon. As soon as the sun warmed up, both smells would disappear, creep in under the sand, where their moist presence was easier to maintain. And there they would stay until evening, until the heat abated, until the dry air itself wanted to be softened and filled with light moisture, to grow heavier, so that it would not be so easy for the breeze to carry it away from this place further into the desert or the low mountains that framed the desert.
I started climbing the hill, walking towards the thin trickle of smoke rising from the fire that I couldn’t see from below. I knew that Gulya was waiting for me by the fire and the water was already boiling in the pot hanging on the hook of the tripod.
51
SHORTLY AFTER BREAKFAST the silence of the Novopetrovsk Fortress was shattered by the roar of a motor: a powerful, dirty, yellow-green Land Rover stopped beside the fire. It was longer than a usual jeep: behind the two rows of seats there was an enclosed boot about two metres long. I saw a row of searchlights on the roof of the cab. There were identical searchlights on the steel frame that projected half a metre in front of the bumper. Sitting in the Land Rover were two Kazakhs, both wearing Adidas tracksuits, both about forty years old. The one at the steering wheel got out first. He walked over to the colonel and greeted him. Then the other man got out of the car and joined them in a conversation that I couldn’t hear.
Petro and I were sitting by the fire, observing what was going on. Galya was still embroidering something. Gulya had gone to collect brushwood.
When the sportsmen finished whispering, the Kazakhs went back to the car and the colonel came over to us. I could see from his face that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the conversation.
‘Get ready,’ he said drily. ‘We’re going in half an hour . . . First we have to dress the major . . .’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Petro.
The colonel sighed. ‘To some holy spot or other. We’re going to bury Naumenko there. They’ve brought a major’s uniform.’ He nodded in the direction of the two Kazakhs, who were rummaging about inside the Land Rover.
Five minutes later they came over and introduced themselves. One was called Yura and the other was called Aman. Aman was holding a paper bag with a military uniform peeping out of it.
We walked down to the hole in silence. We all worked together, and after about ten minutes the mummy, dressed in a major’s uniform, already looked like a man.
Aman went back up, and in a few minutes we heard, and then saw the Land Rover coming down towards us. At the same moment Gulya arrived, carrying an armful of kindling. She exchanged a few words in Kazakh with Yura and nodded sadly. Then he asked her about something.
‘What next?’ asked the colonel, interrupting them.
‘Gulya knows that place too,’ Aman told the colonel. ‘It’s a good place.’ The colonel nodded.
‘You remember the dervish’s grave?’ Gulya said to me. ‘We spent the night there.’
‘That’s a long way, isn’t it?’ I said, trying at the same time to work out how many days it had taken us to walk from there to the fortifications.
‘We’ve got a jeep,’ Yura put in. ‘It’s about five hours’ driving round the hills . . .’
When Major Naumenko was put into a black canvas ‘sleeping bag’ and securely zipped in, tears glinted in the colonel’s eyes. We stood beside the bag for a few minutes. Then we loaded it into the back of the Land Rover, in which there were already several limestone blocks, evidently taken from the foundations of the ruins of the Novopetrovsk Fortress
Gulya went back up to the fire. Aman, Yura and I got into the car. The colonel was left alone, standing over the spot where the major had been lying only a few minutes earlier.
‘Vitold Yukhimovich!’ Aman called to him from the driver’s seat. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Do you happen to have a piece of cloth?’ the colonel asked, speaking slowly.
While Aman was rummaging in the glove compartment, I got out of the car. It was immediately clear what was bothering the colonel: the major’s mummified male member was still lying on the sand.
‘Here!’ said Aman, holding out a dark green velvet rag through the open window.
The colonel took it and squatted down on his haunches. He carefully wrapped the male member in the rag and put it in his pocket. He got into the car.
We drove for an eternity. My backside was aching from the constant jolting and evening was already descending on to the hills. Eventually Aman stopped the Land Rover and I immediately recognised the place, the cleft in the hills with the dervish’s grave in the centre.
The vehicle swung round to face the grave and all the searchlights were turned on, lighting the place up more brightly than the afternoon sun.
The load was taken out and the ‘sleeping bag’ with the mummy of the major in it was laid down, touching the dervish’s grave, and limestone blocks were set around it. Then Aman took a strip of green cloth out of his pocket and tied it round the top of the stone column on the dervish’s grave, beside the one that was already faded.
Petro watched what was happening with a distrustful air, but he did everything he was asked to do.
Yura took five pistols with silencers out of the Land Rover. He kept one and handed out the others, so now we were armed.
The colonel hefted the pistol in his hand, as if he were assessing its weight. His face took on a harsh, steely expression. He raised his hand, pointed the pistol upwards and looked at us. We followed his example. I just had time to glance up at the sky, and I spotted a satellite drifting slowly past above our heads.
The colonel pulled his trigger. There was a gentle click and a shot. We all fired too. Three times each.
‘Keep the pistols,’ the colonel told me and Petro.
Then we all drank a hundred grams of vodka, sitting there on the hard sal
t crust beside the dervish’s grave. In memory of the major. In all my life I couldn’t remember a silence that had been so funereally solemn.
When I walked away a bit to take a leak, I spotted the small hollows of tracks in the sand. Someone had come out of the desert, very recently, on to this strip of salt crust that served as the foundation of the hills. I immediately remembered the tracks I had seen at the places where I spent the night. I looked around, feeling tense. Suddenly I was afraid. I felt as if someone invisible was following me. I gripped the pistol with the silencer in my hand and felt how useless it was.
I went back to the grave, brightly lit by the searchlights of the Land Rover, and called Aman aside. I showed him the tracks.
‘That’s Azra,’ he said calmly. ‘The good angel of death.’
‘The angel of death?’ I echoed, trying to remember which of us had drunk more.
‘Yes,’ said Aman, ‘the angel of death. The angel that accompanies solitary travellers and sometimes appears to them in the form of a scorpion or a chameleon.’
‘Is this some kind of legend?’
‘Yes. But when there’s no other possible explanation, legends come to mind.’
I pondered that.
‘Then does this angel bring death?’ I asked after about a minute.
‘This angel is a woman. She follows the traveller and protects him on his journey. She follows him and decides whether to help or hinder him. If she doesn’t like him, she sends a scorpion, and the traveller dies. If she likes him, she sends a chameleon, and the traveller lives. A chameleon brings good luck . . .’
‘And what’s she like, this Azra?’
‘Do you think I’ve actually seen her?’ Aman said with a shrug. ‘They say that the spirit of a woman who loves the traveller settles in her temporarily. Sometimes she can come to him in the form of this woman . . .’
‘Interesting,’ I said in a quiet voice and glanced at the tracks.
The Good Angel of Death Page 20
