The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  But Petro was still laughing, and Galya was already running out into the hallway.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe he’s smoking something he shouldn’t?’ Gulya suggested.

  I thought about that. Then, reaching across to the lower bunk opposite me in the dim light of the alcohol tablet, I found the pack of tobacco that Petro had bought in the port. I took a pinch of the tobacco, sniffed it and chewed it. As a non-smoker I couldn’t really tell how good or bad the tobacco was. I shrugged.

  ‘Give it to me!’ Gulya said. I handed her the bag.

  ‘That’s not tobacco,’ Gulya declared definitely. ‘But he didn’t ask for tobacco.’

  ‘Then what did he ask for?’ I said in surprise.

  ‘He wanted to buy “something to smoke”, and for us, “to smoke” means something quite different.’

  I understood everything now. And I regretted my part in the conversation on the national theme. It turned out that I hadn’t been arguing with Petro, but with the weed that he had inadvertently got stoned on. And immediately another conclusion sprang to mind – narcotics expel the national spirit from the body. Forever or only temporarily? I didn’t know yet, but I would be able to find the answer to that question the next morning.

  I tied the pack shut and dropped it under the table in the hope that it wouldn’t be required any more.

  Galya brought Petro back about fifteen minutes later. He could barely set one foot in front of the other. Gulya and I helped to lay him out on the bunk. We covered him with sleeping mats taken out of Galya’s bag.

  ‘I feel cold,’ Petro whispered as he fell asleep.

  When he was sleeping, Galya took a sleeping mat in her hand and climbed up on to the upper bunk without saying a word, then lay down quietly to sleep.

  Gulya and I took the camel-hair blanket out of her bundle and settled down together on the other lower bunk. I lay on the outside and Gulya lay against the wall. The bunk was pretty narrow: the two of us could lie pressed up against each other on our backs or our sides, but every time Gulya turned over from one side to the other, I was left hanging over the floor, with one arm stretched out in front of me.

  Realising that if I fell asleep, I would stay asleep only until I fell off, I tried to distract myself with various thoughts and memories. And the first thing I remembered was the stormy night in the cabin on the floating fish-processing plant when the gently snoring Dasha had anchored me down with her strong arm. Had that berth been wider than this one? Probably it had, but not by much. But then, Dasha had been several times wider than Gulya.

  Gulya was already asleep, lying on her stomach with her face turned towards me. The alcohol tablet was burning out on the table – its flame was reduced to the size of a match’s flame now and was about to go out at any moment.

  I got up quietly, trying not to wake Gulya, then climbed on to the upper bunk and lay down on my back. Gazing into the darkness of the wooden ceiling, I suddenly noticed a narrow crack, through which a distant star was trying to peep into our compartment. I attempted to get a better look at this star, but when I raised my head I lost it. The ceiling looked completely solid to me now. I lowered my head back down and fell asleep, lulled by the rhythm of the train.

  57

  WHEN I WOKE up, I realised that it was morning only from the razor blade of sunlight slanting in through the crack in the ceiling. There were thousands of specks of dust swarming about inside the bright blade.

  I glanced down from the height of my bunk. Petro was still sleeping, with his face tucked into the corner of his bunk. Gulya was sitting at the table – all I could see were her arms. I looked across the compartment – Galya was lying on her back with the sleeping mat pulled up under her chin. Her eyes were open. She was staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Good morning then, is it?’ I said, lifting myself up on one elbow.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Galya, turning towards me and then immediately looking under her bunk. ‘Petro, get up!’

  I jumped down and my gaze fell on the place where there is usually a window. In the dull, diffused light I could make out a kind of square on the wooden wall above the table. I stepped towards it, leaned across and snorted loudly in delight at my discovery. I was looking at a window or, at least, a window opening that had been boarded up from the inside. I could even see the heads of the two nails used to secure the screen in place. The energy that had accumulated inside me while I was sleeping required an outlet, so I asked Gulya to move back towards the wall of the compartment, climbed on to the lower bunk and kicked the wooden screen with my right foot. The boards cracked, but the screen didn’t yield.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Petro asked, raising his head in alarm. I kicked the shield again with all my might, and immediately a shaft of light broke into the interior of the compartment. It was a broad, horizontal shaft that intersected with the knife blade of light falling from above. After the third blow, the shield gave a loud crack and went flying out of the wagon, to be left somewhere behind us, and the sun shone in through the window opening so brightly that we all screwed up our eyes, and Petro even put his hands over his.

  To me the combination of the hammering of the wheels and direct sunlight was like music. I played with the sunlight, not turning my head away or putting my hand over my eyes. My eyes were closed, but the power of the sun pierced through my eyelids, giving birth to fantastical spots of colour. And the new air that had burst in through the window swept away all the odours in the compartment, replacing them with the fresh, damp smell of the sea.

  Five minutes later, we saw that we were travelling along the shoreline, along the Caspian, sometimes rising a little above it, sometimes almost approaching right to the water’s edge. The beauty of what we saw left us speechless.

  The window was not the only discovery we made that morning. By the light of the sun we discovered a box of tableware, spoons and forks under the lower bunk, as well as a Primus stove with a bottle of kerosene and four old camel-hair blankets with faded oriental patterns. And later I noticed that someone had glued a portrait of Pushkin – probably cut out of an old number of Ogonyok magazine – on the wall that was also the door into the cargo section of the wagon.

  We were clearly not the first inhabitants of this wagon, and we were filled with gratitude to our predecessors. Everything had been carefully cleaned and stowed away. Even the copper of the Primus stove gleamed as if it had never been used.

  ‘Well, we paid for a first-class carriage,’ I thought, remembering the dollars we had given to obtain the wagon. Now it felt worth it.

  Petro deftly filled the Primus stove with kerosene and lit it.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday evening,’ he said to me in Russian, which made me realise that he really was feeling guilty. ‘It was the tobacco . . . it’s not the right kind . . .’

  ‘It’s not tobacco at all!’ Galya said in an angry voice that was louder than usual. ‘You were high on drugs!’

  Petro looked round the compartment. Realising what he was searching for, I took the bag out from under the table. He scooped the ‘tobacco’ into the palm of his hand and lifted it up to his eyes.

  ‘Yuck!’ he said with a shake of his head. Then he held his hand out of the window and the ‘tobacco’ was whirled away by the wind.

  ‘The things that happen!’ he said to himself. Then he looked at me again. ‘I’m sorry anyway, Kolya. I don’t remember what I said . . .’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, with a wave of my hand.

  Galya had already set the cooking pot, full of water, on the stove. It didn’t stand very firmly on the flat grille, but fortunately the grille had a round opening in the middle, and the rounded bottom of the cooking pot sank two or three centimetres into the opening, making the overall structure relatively stable.

  Gulya sliced a strip of dried meat into small pieces on the table. I leaned down curiously over the meat.

  ‘The driver gave me it, it’s mutton,’ Gulya
said, nodding towards the paper bag lying beside her on the bunk. ‘We’ll have soup.’

  The atmosphere of domestic comfort continued. I looked out of the window at the sea with the sun rising higher above it. At the vineyards that had suddenly insinuated themselves into the narrow space between the wagon and the sea. The train was moving unhurriedly, allowing me to examine carefully everything that we rode past. I watched as two women in black sprayed the grapevines and then as two young boys sailed their boat out from the shore to go fishing. Their oars dipped into the water in a regular rhythm.

  ‘What do you think, Kolya, what are we going to do with this sand?’ Petro asked behind my back.

  I shrugged, thinking that the question sounded simpler than it was.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It obviously has to be used in some rational way . . . But it’s a big country, and there’s not much sand . . .’

  ‘Not much,’ Petro said, nodding. ‘Not much at all.’

  I looked round and saw that he was deep in thought now.

  ‘How about sprinkling a little bit it into children’s sandpits, like the colonel said?’ he suggested, then scratched the back of his head and ran his fingers down the sides of his moustache, as if he were smoothing them out. ‘We can’t spread it right across Ukraine in any case . . . Maybe the colonel will think of something? They’ve got plenty of clever people working in the SBU. And since they’ve been dealing with this business before, maybe they know what to use it for . . .’

  ‘Yes, the colonel has probably thought of something,’ I said, agreeing with Petro in words, although I didn’t really believe that Vitold Yukhimovich had any specific plans for the sand.

  After lunch we all lay down on the bunks, intending to take a ‘quiet hour’, like in a kindergarten.

  It was several hours since the sun had peeped into our window. It was hanging somewhere high up in the sky above the train. But the warmth that its morning rays had left inside the compartment was still present in the air that we were breathing.

  Gulya was lying on the upper bunk now, and I was below her, on the hard boards covered with imitation leatherette. I didn’t feel like sleeping, but it was pleasant just to lie there, swaying in time to the rhythm of the moving train. I closed my eyes as I lay on my back and I imagined I was a hero returning home from a war. In some strange fashion this hero acquired the appearance of one of the Zaporozhian Cossacks engaged in the collective composition of a letter to the Turkish Sultan in the well-known painting by Repin. I had a long topknot on my head.

  My steed, weary of the boundless steppes, could barely move its feet. Of course he was struggling, for there was a beautiful Turkish girl with slanting almond-shaped eyes sitting behind me – an exotic reward, won in battle with the janissaries.

  Actually, I had found her after the battle, when all the janissaries were lying dead beneath the walls of the small Turkish settlement. We had walked through the village, collecting all the gold and silver that we could find in the houses and the courtyards, and I spotted her hiding behind a trunk in one of the houses. At first my brother Cossacks had laughed at me – after all, each of them was carrying home a kilogram or more of jewels – but gradually the note of envy in their mocking comments became clearer and louder, especially in the evenings, when we sat round our campfires, after the large communal mug of vodka had already been passed round the circle and was about to go round again.

  Then I had realised that it would be safer to continue my journey alone than with all the others. And, waking at dawn, I had woken my captive, whom I never allowed to leave my side for a moment. And my steed had carried us on towards Kiev, away from Secha and its laws. ‘My days as a Cossack are over,’ I thought gladly, holding the reins with my left hand and patting my Turkish girl on the thigh with my right.

  As I dozed, I got so carried way with this fantasy that I didn’t notice when the sound of the train disappeared.

  ‘Kolya,’ Petro’s voice said somewhere above my head.

  ‘What?’ I said, half sitting up and immediately sensing that something was missing.

  It wasn’t just the sound that was missing. The train wasn’t moving. Outside the window there was a frozen square of sky, sea and dirty-yellow seashore.

  ‘It must be the border,’ I suggested as I got to my feet.

  ‘What border?’

  ‘Between Azerbaijan and Dagestan.’

  Petro looked bewildered. He stuck his head out of the little window.

  ‘There’s nothing here!’

  Suddenly someone sneezed close to the wagon. Petro stuck his head out again, then looked back at me in astonishment.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ he whispered.

  We froze and listened. We could hear the sparse calls of gulls from the sea. Some insect or other trilled outside the window. Then once again there was the sound of a dull thud from somewhere close by.

  Petro’s tension was transmitted to me. Beginning to feel nervous, I opened the rucksack, found the pistol on the bottom, took it out and laid it on top of the other things. I glanced out of the window myself, but I couldn’t see a single living soul.

  ‘We ought to check the sand,’ Petro said, nodding towards the wall separating us from the cargo section of the wagon.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said in a whisper.

  In the toilet we stopped in front of the low door locked with a bolt – the way through into the cargo section. After opening the door and bending over double to squeeze through, we found ourselves directly below a blazing sun, facing a hill of sand covered with a single piece of tarpaulin and moulded into a rectangular shape by the walls of the wagon. The summit of the hill was precisely at the centre of the wagon. The tarpaulin crackled under our feet and I felt the sand moving beneath it.

  Petro gave a sigh of relief, then climbed to the top of the mound and stopped. His head was now higher than the sides of the wagon. He glanced around, then suddenly froze and raised his hands in the air.

  I didn’t understand a thing. Petro stood there motionless, with his back towards me, holding his hands up. His head was inclined slightly downwards. I immediately squatted on my haunches, trying to make sense of what was going on. But so far there was nothing else happening. Trying to move as quietly as possible, I crept a little higher up the tarpaulin hill and stopped about a metre and a half away from Petro.

  ‘Get up!’ said an unfamiliar, harsh voice. I froze.

  ‘You get up, or your buddy will fall down!’

  I realised that these words were addressed to me. I paused for a few more seconds, but then got to my feet anyway. Standing down in the far corner of the wagon was the same swarthy Slav with the short, uneven haircut whom I had seen on the ferry and at the port. He had a pistol in his right hand and a half-eaten sandwich in his left – we had obviously interrupted his lunch.

  ‘Hands!’ he shouted at me, and I raised my hands, inspecting his lair as I did so.

  We had clearly been travelling together from the very beginning. He had stamped flat an area in the corner that was about the same size as a bunk in our compartment and laid out a large fluffy blue towel on top of the tarpaulin. Lying right in the corner was his kitbag, a plastic bag with tins of food and a pitta bread broken in half.

  ‘When the train starts to move,’ the swarthy guy said sombrely, ‘you’ – he jabbed one finger towards Petro – ‘will help your friend here to jump over there!’ He nodded towards the side wall of the wagon. ‘And then I’ll help you myself.’

  Keeping his eyes fixed on us, the swarthy guy raised the sandwich to his mouth and took a bite.

  As he chewed, his jaw muscles moved in a regular rhythm, like some well-tuned mechanism. The upper part of his face remained as motionless as his gaze.

  I don’t know how much time passed before the train suddenly jerked and started slowly gathering speed.

  I lowered my hands and the swarthy guy immediately shouted at me, still chewing.

  ‘Come on!’ h
e yelled, pointing his pistol at Petro. ‘Stand with your back to the wall and give your comrade your hands.’

  Petro looked at me, perplexed.

  I wouldn’t have liked to be in his place at that moment. But, to be quite honest, I didn’t like my place all that much either.

  After the next yell, Petro leaned his back against the inside wall of the wagon and locked his hands together in front of himself.

  I glanced at Petro. I didn’t want to fall outside the wagon, but I resented the swathy bastard disturbing our cosy domestic arrangement. Resentment transformed my fear into fury at the Slav. Resentment for the way he had spoiled the holiday that our journey home was just about to become.

  Petro seemed to understand what I wanted to do and he gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  I squinted at the man. He had finished his sandwich and was glancing at the plastic bag of tins. The barrel of his pistol was pointed at Petro. It seemed like the right moment to me and I raised my foot, set it in my partner’s locked hands and took hold of his shoulders. I squinted sideways at the swarthy guy again – he was squatting down beside the bag, but his eyes were still fixed on us.

  ‘OK,’ I thought. ‘Now lose your concentration for just a moment!’

  But he didn’t – he did something else. He transferred the pistol from his right hand to his left. I noticed that the handle of the pistol was wrapped in blue electrical insulating tape. And then I gathered myself and straightened up, pushing off from Petro’s hands. The swarthy guy was about two metres away. I saw him open his eyes wide and take the pistol back into his right hand, I saw his forefinger reach for the trigger. The barrel was pointed at me.

  Suddenly there was a loud shot. I fell straight on top of him, pinning him against the wall of the wagon. And I heard a scream. At first I thought it was me who had screamed because of pain that I wasn’t yet aware of. I lay on top of the Slav, with my head pressed against the wall of the wagon. There was a sharp pinching pain in the top of my head. ‘Surely he didn’t shoot me in the head?’ I thought, feeling alarmed. There was a roaring inside my head too. And my hands were shaking. I raised my head with an effort and saw Petro standing there. He grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me off the swarthy guy.