The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  I slowly got to my feet, but found it hard to stand. The trembling in my hands was still as bad as ever. I wanted simply to sit down on the tarpaulin and stay there, to gather my wits. I’d already realised that I’d escaped with a bump and a bruise on the top of my head.

  I glanced round and saw Gulya standing by the opposite wall of the wagon with a pistol in her hand. It was the pistol with a silencer that I had left on top of my rucksack.

  Gulya was looking straight at me and her unwavering gaze was filled with strength and love. I walked over to her on legs that I could barely control and we put our arms round each other.

  We stood there, embracing like that, for several minutes and then collapsed on to the tarpaulin. Lying there, I noticed that Galya was there too – I saw her back beside Petro’s. They were fiddling with something beside the swarthy guy.

  ‘We have to tie him up,’ Petro said in a quiet voice. Galya went into the compartment and came back with a ball of string.

  ‘Is he alive?’ I asked, lifting up my head.

  ‘He’s alive, the rotten dog!’ Petro answered without turning round. I lay there for another ten minutes or so and then got to my feet. Gulya supported me and we walked across to Petro and Galya.

  The Slav was lying on his side, unconscious. His hands were tied behind his back. His feet were tied together too. I saw a red furrow across his right temple, with blood oozing out of it. Galya took a handkerchief out of the pocket of her jeans and pressed it against the wound.

  ‘Concussion,’ she said.

  In his kitbag we found three clips of bullets, a battered Russian passport with the photograph removed, a notebook, a wad of roubles and a hundred-dollar bill.

  ‘We ought to get rid of him.’ Petro said pensively. ‘He might have escaped from prison – look.’ And he pulled up the man’s dirty blue sweater to reveal a blue tattoo of church domes.

  The tattoo reassured me somewhat. What interest could a criminal have in our sand? It would take an incredible amount of imagination to find an answer to that question, I thought, and then suddenly the answer came of its own accord, from a different angle. The swarthy guy must simply have wanted to rob us. He had figured out, or guessed, that we had money. He had been following us since the ferry, after all. He was probably going to do it at night, when we would be asleep . . . And then I asked myself why I found it reassuring that the sand had nothing to do with this business. I asked the question, but I couldn’t answer it. There was something not right here. Or had the bang against the wooden wall of the wagon knocked all the logic out of my thoughts?

  ‘Give me a hand!’ said Petro, touching me on the shoulder, and I came back to reality.

  Reality looked as follows: Petro had already taken hold of the swarthy guy’s bound legs and waited for me to grab the arms.

  Galya helped us to drag him to the little door that led to the hallway via the toilet.

  There we took a breather and then made another spurt, following which the swarthy guy was left lying in the hallway in front of the open outer door. Outside the door the Caspian landscape drifted past, but now the sea had moved a little bit further away and once again there were rows of vineyards extending between its blueness and us.

  I stuck my head out through the opening of the door and looked down at the embankment of dirty-brown stones that seemed to be sunk into the frozen lava of the clay.

  Galya came out into the hallway. She had a bandage in her hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Petro asked in amazement. ‘What if he’ – he nodded towards me – ‘needs the bandage, or I do?’

  Galya hesitated, but even so she bent down over the Slav guy and bandaged up his head.

  ‘A very fine com-mis-sar!’ Petro drawled, looking at the bound man. ‘Come on, let’s toss the damn swine out!’

  The two of us took hold of the swarthy guy behind the shoulders and pushed him out of the wagon.

  He went crashing into the bushes growing between the embankment and the vineyards.

  Petro closed the door without saying a word and walked back into the compartment. I walked in after him.

  ‘I’m feeling a bit hungry all of a sudden,’ Gulya said with a faint glint in her eyes.

  Petro started, dashed out of the compartment and came back a minute later, carrying a plastic bag. It was the swarthy guy’s stock of food supplies. Three cans of pink salmon, fish mince and a can of ‘Caspian Herring’. I immediately took this last can in my hand and lifted it up to my eyes. ‘The Communard Fish Processing Plant. Astrakhan.’ I flung the can out through the square opening of the window.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Petro asked me suspiciously. ‘Lie down, it must be your nerves. No, wait. Galya, take a look at his head!’

  Galya’s medical inspection left me wearing a bandage too.

  ‘Another commissar!’ Petro laughed. I obediently clambered on to the upper bunk and lay down, listening to Galya and Gulya discussing supper in quiet voices.

  58

  DURING THE NIGHT the train jerked to a sudden halt. I was sleeping on my side with my head thrown back.

  The hammering of wheels outside was replaced by brisk shouts in an unfamiliar language and the rumble of cargo wagon doors being rolled back.

  I glanced out through our ever-open window. The train was standing at a platform illuminated by double lamps on pillars. In addition to the lamps, we were also illuminated by eight searchlights coupled together on a tall mast, the kind you usually see round the edges of a sports stadium. Some distance away from us, men in military uniforms were swarming round the last two wagons in the train.

  The light was so bright that I couldn’t see anything beyond the edges of the platform. It was as if we were stuck in a kind of canal lock, with walls of light on all sides.

  At least an hour went by before the soldiers reached our wagon. By that time we had already realised that the train was standing on the border – beyond two lines of rails at one side of our wagon there was a large board with the words: ‘Welcome to Azerbaijan’.

  ‘Hey, come out!’ shouted a soldier who had approached the wagon. ‘Customs!’

  Petro and I got out. Petro brought the documents for the sand with him.

  The customs officer held out his hand and was immediately given the relevant papers. He glanced at them briefly, returned his scrutinising glance to our faces and paused. Then he smiled. The smile seemed to turn the expression on his face inside out, immediately making it clear that he would be hard to talk to – he had looked far more affable before the smile.

  ‘Well then, “Karakum Ltd”,’ the Azerbaijani said acidly, maintaining his forced smile. ‘What duty are we going to pay? With an inspection or without?’

  Petro and I exchanged glances.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Petro asked.

  ‘With an inspection is cheaper – three hundred dollars. But, you understand, we’ll have to turn everything upside down, unpack everything . . . And without an inspection is five hundred dollars.’

  ‘But all we’ve got is sand . . .’ I said, and immediately regretted having opened my mouth.

  ‘Sand? From Kazakhstan to Ukraine?’ The Azerbaijani’s smile stretched right out to his ears. ‘Tell me, have you run out of sand in Ukraine, then? What kind of fairy story are you giving me? We’ll examine your sand one grain at a time – you’ll be standing here for a year!’

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right . . .’ said Petro, holding up his open hand to stop the customs officer. ‘We’ll pay the duty for no inspection.’

  It seemed to me that the Azerbaijani was actually disappointed, as if he had just been preparing himself to have a good shout at us and put us in our place, but we had already raised our hands up and surrendered, willing to do whatever he wanted.

  ‘All right,’ he said to Petro after a long pause, during which he wiped the smile off his own face. ‘Bring the payment.’

  While Petro was gone the customs officer inspected the bandage on my hea
d curiously.

  ‘Fell off the bunk, did you?’ he asked, smiling again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have to be careful in these wagons. It’s not a sleeper carriage.’

  I nodded, afraid that if I said anything else, the customs duty might suddenly increase.

  Finally, after giving the customs officer five hundred dollars and staying for a few minutes longer while he counted the money three times, we went back into the compartment.

  We sat there in silence, waiting for the train to move off. There were another twenty wagons ahead of us, and we heard snatches of conversation in Russian. We were clearly by no means the only people accompanying loads on this train.

  ‘He didn’t even check our passports!’ Petro exclaimed in amazement.

  ‘Well, we paid for no inspection,’ I said. ‘He didn’t come into the compartment and he didn’t meet our beautiful ladies.’

  ‘And thank God for that,’ Petro sighed.

  ‘It would never even enter that customs officer’s head that there were women travelling with us,’ I thought.

  59

  THE TRAIN WAS moving slowly. Outside the window that couldn’t be closed, the night continued.

  Azerbaijan was behind us now, and once again we were lying on our bunks, waiting for morning to come.

  I didn’t feel like sleeping, and from time to time I hung down from my upper bunk and glanced out through the window. Sometimes my gaze picked the distant light of a ship or a schooner out of the darkness. The little lights seemed to lend my thoughts a certain romantic energy, but it was the energy of sleep, not of wakefulness. Eventually I fell asleep with a smile of relief on my face. I could feel that smile. And again I had a strange dream, in which I was a Ukrainian, only this time not a hero, but a ragamuffin fleeing from Turkish captivity. I was walking along the seashore in Bulgaria, picking bunches of wild grapes as I went. Then I joined a band of gypsies and went as far as Bukovina with them, helping the gypsies to steal horses and burn out their owners’ brands with a hot iron. It was a strange dream, but the strangest thing of all was that everyone in the dream – the Bulgarians, the gypsies and me – spoke in beautiful literary Ukrainian, as if we were characters in some novel.

  After I woke up I lay on my back for half an hour, wondering if it was the close proximity of the sand that gave rise to such dreams.

  Outside the window the sun was already rising and once again there were vineyards slowly slipping past between us and the sea.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Petro said with a sigh. ‘We travel on and on, but we don’t know what’s there, on the other side of the wagon. There could be mountains there, and we can’t see them . . .’

  In the morning we ate the stale pitta bread, washing it down with tea. Everyone was in good spirits, as if the worst was already behind us.

  After breakfast, Galya took the bandage off my head. She looked at the bruise and said that everything was all right. The used bandage went flying out of the window.

  ‘You know,’ said Petro, leaning down closer to me. ‘I had a wonderful dream about Shevchenko, only he was speaking Russian. He’d lost some little key or other and he’d been searching for it, searching for a long time . . .’

  The expression on my face must clearly have seemed very odd to Petro. I bit my lip and narrowed my eyes as I drew the parallel between the Ukrainian language that had crept into my dream and Shevchenko starting to speak Russian in Petro’s dream. And I also recalled the little gold key that had been found in the sand and was now lying in the pocket of the rucksack.

  Petro opened his mouth and leaned forward even closer, as if he were about to say something. After pausing for about a minute with his narrowed eyes fixed on me, he asked: ‘What are you looking so surprised about?’

  I smiled. ‘My latest dreams have been in Ukrainian, and I spoke Ukrainian in them.’

  Petro shrugged. ‘Well, so what?’ he said, straightening his back and casting a quick glance at Galya, who was sitting beside him. ‘When I was a child I dreamed that I was singing in English with the Beatles and talking to them in English. But I was studying German at school . . . It’s only dreams.’

  ‘Only dreams,’ I agreed.

  ‘I had dreams in Russian too when I was little,’ Gulya put in.

  ‘That’s because you have too many Russians in Kazakhstan,’ Petro said.

  ‘Petro!’ Galya looked reproachfully at him.

  ‘Well, there are lots of them everywhere,’ Petro said, assuming that by adding that he would somehow soften the meaning of what he had said.

  I was suddenly overcome by an irresistible urge to laugh. Petro looked at me in surprise. For no particular reason, I had suddenly remembered a joke about a New Russian going to an old Jew and saying: ‘Pops, give me some money!’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Petro asked me in Russian.

  ‘Oh nothing,’ I said, struggling to stop myself laughing. ‘I just remembered a joke . . .’

  ‘Which one?’

  And then I thought that if I told him the actual joke that I’d remembered, he would think I’d lost my marbles.

  ‘This Georgian traffic cop stops a Russian driving a Zhiguli in Tbilisi,’ I began, telling the first joke that came into my head. ‘“You”, he says, “exceeded the speed limit. Write an explanation in Georgian.” “In Georgian?” the Russian exclaims in amazement. “I don’t know Georgian.” But the traffic cop just stands there without saying anything, waiting. The Russian thinks and puts fifty bucks into his driving licence, then hands it to the Georgian, who takes it and puts the money in his pocket. Then he says: “There, you see, and you said you didn’t know Georgian! But you’ve written half the explanation already!”’

  To my surprise the joke didn’t raise a smile from my listeners. Petro looked at me expectantly. I could see either pity or unease in his eyes.

  ‘I don’t like jokes about nationalities,’ he said in Russian after a few minutes. Then he switched back to Ukrainian and said: ‘Probably when we get to Kiev, I’ll have a laugh over a glass of vodka. But it’s too soon to laugh yet . . .’

  That made me feel sad. It’s never too soon to laugh, I thought, disagreeing with Petro. I could have imagined a situation in which it was too late to laugh. But even when it’s too late to laugh, laughter can simply change its meaning, transforming itself from the laughter of merriment to the laughter of despair, the laughter of a madman.

  I glanced out of the window and saw that little holiday homes, gardens and grape-green courtyards had appeared between us and the sea. And everything was such a bright green that it was hard to imagine that the calendar autumn was already near. It was hard to imagine that this mass of green could turn yellow and red, or even completely colourless once the leaves had dropped to the ground.

  Something soft struck me on the face and dropped on to the table. I shied back from the window.

  There was a fig lying on the table. Then several more came flying into the compartment.

  ‘Kids having fun,’ said Petro, glancing out.

  I glanced out too and saw some grubby boys standing along the embankment, waving to us.

  Gulya took a fig from the table and put it in her mouth.

  The attack put us in a good mood again. We picked the figs up and rinsed them in the cooking pot and threw the water out of the window.

  ‘Not very many,’ said Petro, staring at the underripe fruit lying in two rows on the table.

  Then he took one and popped it into his mouth too. He chewed on it with relish.

  ‘We need a drink of coffee,’ he declared in a loud voice full of life and looked at Galya.

  60

  ANOTHER TWO HOURS went by and the train stopped again. Looking out, we saw another goods train between us and the sea. But between us and that train there was a space of about fifteen metres covered with rails and more rails. The place resembled a marshalling yard.

  A panting locomotive went by between the other goods train and us.


  ‘I wonder where we are?’ I said. Gazing out of the window again I saw a fat little railwayman moving towards us from the tail end of the train, carrying a long-handled hammer and tapping on the axle boxes with it.

  ‘What station is this?’ I asked him, when he got close to our wagon.

  ‘Derbent goods station,’ he replied, jerking his head up and looking at me curiously.

  Petro immediately squeezed in beside me.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘is there a shop near here?’

  ‘Yes, just outside the fence,’ the Dagestani replied.

  ‘And how long are we going to be waiting here?’

  The Dagestani checked his watch and thought for a moment. ‘An hour, probably. What is it you want to buy?’

  ‘Tobacco.’

  ‘I can sell you mine,’ the Dagestani suggested. ‘For a good price. I grow it at my dacha . . .’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Petro, shaking his head. ‘I think I’ll go to the shop . . .’

  ‘Why take the risk?’ the Derbent railwayman said.

  ‘What risk?’ Petro asked in surprise.

  ‘You see,’ said the Dagestani, twisting his lips into an ambiguous smile. ‘You are an individual of Slavonic nationality, and there aren’t any individuals like that here any more. They all left. Do you understand? They’ll take you for a tourist or a deserter from Chechnya. And that would be bad!’

  Petro heaved a sigh.

  ‘Don’t get the wrong idea, they’re good people here,’ the Dagestani went on. ‘It’s the times that are bad now. Come back in ten years and you’ll be an honoured guest! Ask where Musa Gadjiev lives, anyone will show you. Come and stay here, swim in the sea. Only later, in about ten years’ time! Would you like me to go to the shop myself, so you won’t too think badly of me?’