The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  ‘It hasn’t got any cover. It’s an ordinary bulk wagon, and they’ve made a compartment inside for people accompanying the cargo, but there’s no roof . . . We could take another one with a roof over the compartment and buy a tarpaulin from them to cover the sand . . .’

  ‘How much does it cost?’ Petro asked in his fatalistic voice.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty . . .’

  Petro looked at me and I suddenly realised that I was finding the responsibilities of treasurer rather burdensome. Why had I kept the envelope in my hands? Now, when the dollars ran out, Petro would look at me as if I was an embezzler, not a treasurer.

  ‘You know what, why don’t you pay for everything?’ I said, reaching into the rucksack.

  I handed him the envelope in full view of the driver. Petro was clearly annoyed. He counted out two hundred and fifty dollars and handed the envelope to Galya.

  ‘Look, you be our bookkeeper, just to make sure everything’s all right!’

  Galya nodded docilely, but I spotted perplexity and concern in her eyes. She put the envelope in her shopping bag, then spent a long time shoving it down deeper between the other things. Eventually she pulled the bag’s zip fastener closed with an effort and looked enquiringly at Petro. He merely nodded his head.

  The second driver was already walking along the massive bulk of the containers towards those sounds so familiar from my childhood – the metallic clanging, scraping and banging of railway wagons being coupled together.

  Looking around, I spotted the swarthy Slav peeping out from behind the base of the nearest port crane about a hundred metres away.

  I nudged Petro with my elbow and directed his gaze towards the stranger.

  Petro whistled thoughtfully and turned back.

  ‘We’re either being escorted or set up . . .’ he whispered towards me.

  When I looked in the direction of the nearest crane again, there was no one there.

  56

  EVENING BROUGHT AN unaccustomed coolness, as if Baku and Krasnovodsk/Turkmenbashi lay on different lines of latitude. Maybe Turkmenistan was closer to the sun than Azerbaijan, or maybe there was already a breath of autumn in the Caspian breeze.

  We sat on our bags, which were set out in a circle on the ground. Once again, just like in Mangyshlak, there was a fire burning at the centre of our circle and water boiling in the cooking pot. Only the fire was a bit stronger – here the broken wooden crates that were lying around in such great numbers served us for firewood. Life in the port had already come to a standstill – the cranes were motionless, with their jibs thrust up into the sky. There were several other fires burning on the quayside, and the passengers who were warming themselves round them would be setting off in a few hours with the ferry Oilman on its return journey. There were about fifteen cars dozing in a queue at the entrance to the quay.

  ‘Kolya,’ Galya said to me, with an unusually serious expression on her face, ‘how many dollars are left in the envelope?’

  ‘We paid eighty for transit, two hundred and fifty for the wagon, another two hundred for the transit of the cargo . . . that makes five hundred and thirty, plus minor outlays, thirty or forty dollars. Three thousand minus five hundred and sixty.’

  ‘Two thousand four hundred and forty,’ Galya said with a nod and wrote the figure down in a little notebook. ‘And was there exactly three thousand to start with?’

  ‘I didn’t count it.’

  ‘You ought to have counted it,’ she said with a sigh. ‘All right, we’ll check it later . . .’

  The relative silence of a port in the evening was broken by the roar of engines as the two KrAZ trucks joined the back of the queue. The doors of the trucks slammed as the drivers got out. They lit up and sat down on the step of first truck, and then one of them came towards us.

  ‘Everything’s in order,’ he said. ‘How about some tea?’ He nodded towards the pot full of boiling water.

  Gulya started, took a pack of tea from her bundle and tipped a handful straight into the water. Then she brought out the drinking bowls.

  ‘Sit down,’ Petro said to the driver. The Kazakh settled between Galya and Petro.

  Gulya wrapped a towel round her hand, lifted the cooking pot off its hook and deftly poured out the tea.

  Then she gave everyone a little salty ball of cheese.

  ‘The last ones,’ she said with a sigh. We held the tea bowls in our hands. The tea was still too hot. I had already popped the ball of cheese into my mouth, and its salty flavour spread across the roof of my mouth, making me feel thirsty. I wanted to wash the saltiness down as quickly as possible, but I forced myself to wait patiently until the tea had cooled a bit.

  ‘Here are the documents,’ the Kazakh said, handing the papers to Petro. He took a gulp of tea, and only then popped the ball of cheese into his mouth. ‘We’re going back now. When we finish our tea, I’ll show you to the wagon . . .’

  I took a small sip – no, it was still too soon to drink it. The Kazakhs’ throats were obviously more resistant to heat, I thought, looking at our driver. We hadn’t even asked him his name. Now he and his partner would go away and remain in our memories simply as two Kazakh drivers who had transported our sand from Mangyshlak to Baku. And maybe that was right, after all, the only conversations we’d had with them had been brief ones about the job. We had nothing else in common. And anyway, if you asked every chance acquaintance that destiny brought your way what his name was, you couldn’t possibly remember all the names . . .

  The wind off the Caspian was blowing more strongly now, and I started feeling cold. My hands held the bowl and absorbed its warmth, but the warmth didn’t move beyond my wrists. It would make sense to get my windcheater out of my rucksack, I thought. But the thought remained a mere thought. I found a more rational way to get warm – I simply got up and moved the rucksack I was sitting on closer to the fire.

  Now, although the wind was blowing on my back, the heat from the fire was stronger. I was already drinking my tea, and the ball of cheese was losing weight, getting smaller and smaller as it rolled around on my tongue and transmitting its saltiness to the bitter green tea.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ the Kazakh said, putting his empty bowl down on the ground in front of him.

  He walked over to the trucks and came back with a paper bag in his hands.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding out the bag to Gulya. She looked inside it and smiled.

  She said something to the driver in Kazakh. Probably thanking him. He answered her in Kazakh too. Then he turned to us.

  ‘Let’s go, or they’ll move the wagon – then it’ll be hard to find.’

  Petro scattered the fire with his foot and then stamped out the burning boards. Gulya gathered up the tea bowls and the tripod and put them away in her bundle. The Kazakh easily tossed her double bundle over his shoulder and strolled off along the wall of transport containers. We followed him.

  About two minutes later we stopped in front of two wagons coupled together.

  ‘That one’s yours,’ said the Kazakh, pointing to the wagon on the left. It looked like an ordinary goods wagon. But when I tried to slide its door open, the Kazakh stopped me.

  ‘The compartment has its own entrance,’ he said, pointing to the left side, where I saw a rather strange little door that looked as if it had been carved bodily out of the wooden wall of the wagon. ‘If you roll this one back’ – he pointed to the centre of the wagon – ‘the sand will fall out.’

  I walked up to the side door. Two small steel steps had been welded in place underneath it, with the lower one a good fifty centimetres off the ground. I opened the door and glanced inside, but I couldn’t see anything except intense darkness.

  ‘Here, take the torch,’ the Kazakh said.

  I ran the torch beam over the interior of the compartment for accompanying personnel. The door led into a little hallway. I could see two doors at the end of it – one leading into the toilet, that is, into a small square space with a r
ound hole in the wooden floor and an old door handle nailed to the floor on the left of the hole. On the right of the hole there was a ten-centimetre nail protruding from the wall, evidently for spiking newspapers that had already been read. I remembered the solitary newspaper that was lying some where on the bottom of the rucksack, the one I had found together with the Smena camera in the tent that had almost become my grave.

  The second door led into a compartment with four bunks and a small table.

  The lower bunks were made of wood, covered with imitation leatherette. But the upper ones were clearly imported items. They had been torn out of written-off German wagons and nailed to the wooden walls of this compartment. Somehow it seemed clear to me that Petro and I would be inhabiting the hard lower bunks. ‘All the best for women and children,’ I thought and laughed to myself at the old Soviet slogan.

  ‘Hey, Kolya, where are you in there?’ I heard Petro’s voice call from outside.

  I went back to the open door and was immediately handed the shopping bag by Petro.

  When I’d loaded all the things inside, I went back to the Kazakh standing by the wagon.

  ‘Listen, sell me the torch, will you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Better take my matches, my torch won’t be much good to you. It’s Chinese, you won’t find any batteries for it.’

  ‘Is there any door between the compartment and the sand?’ I asked, stuffing two boxes of matches into my pocket.

  ‘Of course, from the toilet.’

  I shook the Kazakh driver’s hand in farewell and went back into the wagon, closing the door behind me. I walked through into our compartment with a lighted match – Galya, Gulya and Petro were already sitting on the lower bunks. I sat down beside Gulya and blew out the match. The darkness was immediately unbearable. I put my arm round Gulya and pulled her against me. Then I found her warm, smooth face with my hands and kissed her. These embraces calmed me and made the darkness surrounding us less ominous.

  ‘They could at least have made a window,’ Petro’s voice said in the darkness.

  We heard a ship’s whistle in the distance. Then silence fell again and lasted for twenty or thirty minutes, until it was replaced by a dull hissing sound that grew louder and louder. As the noise approached, it acquired rhythm. The blow, which could not have been called unexpected, almost threw Gulya and me off the bunk. The wagon jerked and began creeping slowly along the rails. The iron wheels counted off the first joint and then stopped. There was another blow, and this time Gulya and I were thrown back against the wooden wall of the compartment. The railwaymen had obviously set to work sorting out our train. There were indistinct shouts, punctuated by blows and jerks that felt less palpable now. We were somewhere in the middle of the future train.

  A match flared and lit up Petro’s face. In that light the long sides of his black moustache looked even longer. He took from the bag his pipe and the pack of tobacco bought in the port. The match went out, but he didn’t need light any more. I heard him open the pack and fill his pipe. The air was infused with an unfamiliar acrid smell.

  Another match flared up. He was already gripping the pipe in his teeth.

  ‘Petro, go and smoke in the toilet, please,’ Galya said to him. Petro got up without a word and left the compartment, lighting his way with the same match, which was still burning. The three of us were left there. We heard more shouting outside and someone ran past our wagon with a stamping of feet that seemed unnaturally loud to me. The hollow, rhythmic tapping of a hammer on axle boxes approached our wagon and moved past it.

  ‘Are we going to leave now?’ Galya asked.

  ‘Probably,’ I replied.

  My mood had really improved. I felt like a little pick-me-up, and I asked Galya to brew us some coffee. I held the box of matches out to her and our hands sought each other ‘by voice guidance’. Eventually she struck a match and the small flame illuminated our faces and the table made of tightly packed wooden boards.

  Galya took out a block of solidified alcohol, set it in the centre of the table and lit it.

  When the match went out, we were still illuminated by the blue flame of the alcohol, only it was not as bright. Galya set a wire stand over it and put a djezva on the stand. Gulya took the bowls out of her bundle.

  My God, I thought, when was the last time I sat at a normal table?

  My heart was warmed by a feeling of domestic comfort.

  Petro came back into the compartment just as Galya was pouring the coffee into the bowls. The compartment was filled with the aroma of coffee, but there was more of that aroma in the air than there was coffee in my bowl. I took very small sips, trying to make the pleasure last.

  The alcohol tablet carried on burning, performing the function of a candle.

  Petro coughed and picked up his bowl.

  ‘It’s the wrong tobacco,’ he announced sadly and sighed. He took a sip of coffee and started coughing again. I heard Galya give him several thumps on the back.

  ‘Not so hard, not so hard!’ Petro exclaimed and stopped her. ‘Why don’t you make more coffee instead?’

  Galya obediently started rustling the packet of ground coffee.

  ‘A little glass would go down well now,’ Petro declared cheerfully.

  ‘You’re not allowed,’ Galya replied.

  ‘We don’t have anything with us anyway . . .’ I said.

  The railwaymen started shouting again on the other side of the blank wall and we fell silent and listened. They were shouting at each other in Azerbaijani, so we couldn’t understand them anyway. Soon everything went quiet and the only sound in our ears was the rhythmic clattering of a train in motion.

  We were moving. The port must have been left behind now. The compartment was filled with a strong smell of coffee – Galya was pouring the second djezva into the bowls. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the diffuse light from the blue flame of the alcohol tablet, so that I could make out Galya, Petro and Gulya’s faces and even the expressions on them.

  This time Petro drank his coffee without hurrying, keeping the bowl in his hands for a long time.

  Not even the gloom in the compartment could conceal the confident joy in his eyes. Galya was pensive and Gulya, when I turned to look at her, moved her face close to mine – her beautiful slanting eyes looked deep inside me with an expression of love and devotion. Unable to resist, I leaned forward and touched my lips to hers.

  Petro smacked his lips noisily, which stopped me short.

  ‘You’re a fine grown man,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you behave just like a teenager! Can’t you understand that we’re dealing with matters of state importance here?’ He raised one arm in a gesture that lent additional weight to his words.

  ‘Listen, she’s my wife and I have the right to kiss her whenever I want. You might be dealing with state business, but I’m on my way home.’

  ‘We are also going home, to our fatherland,’ Petro said, nodding. ‘But never mind, kiss as much as you like, or as much as she likes!’ He waved one hand through the air. ‘For indeed, you have already done a great deal for Ukraine, you may kiss . . .’

  Petro spoke these final words without the slight trace of mockery and my momentary annoyance evaporated. Just as my desire to kiss had evaporated. What was left was a certain puzzlement. Those resounding words spoken by Petro – ‘we’re dealing with matters of state importance’, ‘we are going home to our fatherland’, ‘you have already done a great deal for Ukraine’ . . . All these common-place newspaper and street-banner clichés had suddenly given my thoughts an untypical emotional colouring. I started thinking about the immediate future, about Kiev. The job we were doing would soon be done, and when we arrived and delivered this sand to the right place, we would be heartily thanked by the state.

  Maybe they would give us some kind of reward too? Well, at least they would do the one little thing that I would ask them to do: free me of the threat that might not even exist any longer. What would it cost them to give a guarantee of m
y safety? The SBU had its hooks into everybody; even those who were still free. If the SBU told them: ‘Don’t touch him!’ then no one would lay another finger on me! And Gulya and I could have a happy, peaceful life. A joyful life.

  ‘We’ll have to take a little bag of that sand for ourselves,’ Petro said in a low voice, turning towards Galya. She nodded.

  ‘We’ll take a bag of sand, and when we have a son, we’ll put a little bit of sand in the pram, so he’ll grow up a real Ukrainian. It’s not so important for you,’ Petro said, looking from Galya to me, ‘you’re Russian; no matter how much you might want it, you’ll never be Ukrainian . . .’ And Petro sighed, as if he found it unbearably sad that I would never be Ukrainian.

  ‘But why would I want to be Ukrainian, if I was born Russian?’

  ‘Do you live in Ukraine?’ Petro said, answering a question with a question.

  ‘What of it? I have a Ukrainian passport too.’

  ‘A passport’s one thing, the soul’s another. The soul inside you is Russian, a wide, massive soul . . .’ Petro said and laughed.

  I looked carefully at his face and his eyes. His eyes seemed hazy and unfocused to me. There was something wrong with him. Even Galya was looking at him in alarm.

  Petro laughed again and fell silent.

  ‘I need a smoke,’ he said after a couple of minutes. He took his pipe off the table, stuffed it with tobacco from the bag again, lit it directly from the alcohol tablet and went out into the hallway.

  ‘We should sit him on the sand,’ I joked, looking at Galya. ‘The Ukrainian spirit will teach him to love foreigners!’

  Galya was just about to reply when we heard Petro laughing in the small hallway. He laughed for several minutes without stopping, choking on his own laughter, while we sat there, stupefied.

  The sound of the train’s wheels and Petro’s laughter were so discordant that I was visited by thoughts of a lunatic asylum. Then suddenly these two sounds were joined by a third – several blows on the wooden roof of the compartment. Winding my acoustic memory backwards, I counted the blows – there had been four or five of them. Heavy and hollow, like footsteps amplified by the enclosed acoustics of our compartment.