The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  I remembered the beginning of my flight-cum-voyage. It had begun with three cans of narcotics taken from the ‘baby food’ store and it was ending in a goods wagon carrying ‘heavy stuff’ from the Caucasus in white sacks hidden under sacks filled with our sand. All that cinnamon-flavoured mysticism seemed like a fairy tale for children right now.

  ‘The material manifestations of the national spirit . . .’ I thought, remembering the colonel, and nodded bitterly. A fine colonel, I thought, a brilliant mind, to turn two completely different idealistic idiots into couriers accompanying deliveries of guns and narcotics!

  My thoughts went back to our excavations beside the ruins. There had been a smell of cinnamon there, and a body that smelled of cinnamon. The little gold cross and the gold key that I’d found in the sand there were still in the pocket of the rucksack. Those discoveries were real. And so was the watch that Galya had found. All that was normal, none of it transgressed the bounds of reality. Even Major Naumenko’s funeral had been relatively normal. But the things that had happened after that? Digging out the sand, loading it into dump trucks, the ferry Oilman? And the colonel promising to catch up with us along the way and staying behind in Krasnovodsk on some important business?

  ‘It seems to me that Taranenko set all this up in advance,’ I said to Petro. ‘The sand is a myth! They’ll just stick us in a nuthouse if we start telling anyone about sand that can change a man’s psychology . . . we’ve got involved in criminal dealings . . .’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Petro, speaking Russian. ‘Don’t you remember how the Kazakh trader almost gave us all his goods? And do you think I would ever have spoken Russian to you before? Just because we can’t explain the mystery of this sand in scientific terms doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. We don’t have the knowledge!’

  ‘That’s certainly true,’ I said with a bitter laugh. ‘And it looks like it’s too late for us to be taught.’

  ‘You’re wrong to be cynical – cynicism is probably the greatest tragedy of our generation, and if faith in the sand at least rids us of that misfortune, then there will be some hope for a better future for the entire country.’

  ‘Faith in the sand?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not the sand,’ Petro said, raising his voice nervously. ‘It’s the spirit dissolved in the sand.’

  ‘Well, let’s wait and see, maybe the colonel will turn up after all and tell us the full story in detail. About the sacks of sand, and the other sacks too,’ I said, getting slowly to my feet.

  My coffee was all drunk. I didn’t feel like sleeping, but I had no desire to stay there beside Petro in the hallway either. My nocturnal cynicism had clearly offended his faith and there was no point in continuing with our conversation.

  I went back into the compartment and lay down on my bunk.

  The alcohol tablet was still burning on the table. The women were sleeping.

  When I turned over on to my side, my ribs encountered something that shouldn’t be there. I pulled the pistol out from under the sleeping mat and stuck it into the rucksack.

  62

  IN THE MORNING I awoke to a long-forgotten sound – the whispering of rain. Against the background of this whispering the drops of water seeping through the wooden roof of the compartment fell with distinct, regular blows. Gusts of wind were tossing rain in through the opening of the window and fine drops were falling on my face, but I noticed them only after I woke up. I ran a hand over my cheeks and felt as if I had just washed my face.

  I was the last to wake up – all the others were wide awake. Gulya was sitting beside me on my bunk. Petro and Galya were sitting opposite us. Everything was normal, except for the damp wind that every now and then tried to put out the hot Primus stove, on which the cooking pot was standing.

  Everyone was drinking tea. I sat up and Gulya took hold of the pot with a towel and poured me some too.

  ‘We passed Grozny during the night,’ Petro informed me.

  As I drank my tea I apologised to him for my cynicism of the night before.

  ‘That’s OK, it happens,’ he said amiably. The wet foliage of trees, the roofs of houses and small country roads flashed by outside the window. One of the roads happened to run right alongside the embankment. The grey sky reminded me of autumn.

  The train hurtled along as if it was trying to outrun the rain. A wet platform with a squat one-storey station building went flashing past. ‘Labinsk Station.’ There was a bright yellow, warm light in two windows of the little building.

  I realised that we were out of the Caucasus. We were still descending from its foothills, slithering down on to a plain, the name of which we did not know as yet. But the Russian names of the railway stations flying past gladdened my heart. I glanced at Petro – his face was regally calm, the firmness and self-confidence had returned to his eyes. Perhaps he had been calm and sure of himself last night in the hallway too. I was the one who had lost my cool, trying to find an instant way out of the situation that had suddenly seemed clear to me. I was the one who had felt betrayed by everything and everyone – by Colonel Taranenko, and this sand, and my own former idealism – and I had tried to force Petro to share my disillusionment and lack of faith. But he had brought me coffee and lectured me on the harmfulness of cynicism. Yes, cynicism was harmful, especially mass cynicism. But there wasn’t any cynicism in what I had said the night before. At least, it didn’t seem to me that there was. I could probably say the same thing again right now – several hours of sleep had not changed my opinion.

  My condition had not changed. But probably our spiritual condition was far more important at the moment. If a substantial error helped Petro to maintain his composure, there was nothing wrong with that! Let him continue in his error! I would have been glad to be deluded myself, to ascribe a wonderworking power to this sand and rely completely on that power for the future revival of Ukraine.

  ‘Kolya!’ Petro said, distracting me from my thoughts. ‘What if we throw all of these narcotics off while we’re moving?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Galya exclaimed, giving him a stern glance. ‘What if children find them?’

  Petro took no notice of Galya’s response and kept looking at me, waiting to hear my opinion.

  I ran a hand through my damp hair and thought, trying to find an answer to his question.

  ‘You realise they’ll check at the border,’ Petro continued. ‘First the Russian customs and then ours. If any of them look under the tarpaulin, we’re done for.’

  ‘Somebody will look,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe we really ought to throw them off the train.’

  ‘If we could throw them into a river,’ Gulya suggested.

  Petro laughed. ‘That is, ask them to let the wagon stop on a bridge and wait there for an hour!’ He shook his head.

  Fifteen minutes later Petro and I crept through into the cargo section of the wagon.

  We walked across the slippery tarpaulin in the rain.

  ‘Right then, shall we try it?’ asked Petro, stopping by the wagon’s sliding door.

  We tried to open the door, but it was jammed tight. It didn’t have any handles on the inside, and we were bracing our hands against wet wood and our feet against slippery tarpaulin. Our feet just slithered away and the door stayed where it was.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ I sighed, taking a step back in the rain that had suddenly become stronger. I pulled a few splinters out of my hand and looked round at Petro.

  ‘You know, when we push the door, we stand on the sacks, and our weight makes them hold the door even more tightly shut!’

  Petro found the edge of the tarpaulin and lifted it back, exposing the sacks of sand that were bracing the door shut.

  ‘Maybe we could move them?’

  ‘I don’t think that is such a good idea after all,’ I said, stopping my partner. ‘We don’t know who’s meeting the other sacks, and where.’

  Petro looked at me, bemused.

  ‘Maybe in half an hour the train will stop and
a truck will drive up to our wagon. What are we going to do then? They’re not likely to leave us alive.’

  Petro sighed. There was water dripping from the ends of his black moustache. We were both soaked right through.

  ‘All right, let’s go back to the compartment,’ he said eventually. ‘We need to think a bit more . . .’

  Once inside we wrung out our clothes, leaving a sizeable puddle on the floor. Gulya rubbed me down with her sleeping mat and Galya rummaged in the black shopping bag and set a half-litre bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on the table.

  Petro was drying his hair with a towel. He froze and gaped wide-eyed at the bottle.

  ‘You said you hadn’t brought any!’ he said in an angry voice.

  ‘It’s for medicinal purposes, for emergencies . . . It was taped to the bottom of the bag with –’

  ‘Why, you . . .’ Petro said, and his eyes glittered, but then he glanced sideways at me and forced a smile. ‘See how . . . economical she is.’

  Petro ripped off the thick metal foil cap and poured vodka into two bowls, trying to estimate how much went into each one. There was about three hundred grams left in the bottle.

  ‘Come on, warm yourself up,’ he said, nodding at my bowl. We drank briskly with no toasts.

  ‘More?’ Petro asked, lifting the bottle up off the table.

  I nodded.

  Soon the empty bottle went flying out of the window.

  Another station with a Russian name went rushing past. The large drops of rain drummed on the roof of the compartment.

  Petro leaned back against the wall. We sat there, saying nothing and listening to the rain.

  The vodka induced in me a joyful indifference to the immediate future.

  It was obviously good vodka, the kind that our people had drunk both before the revolution and after.

  The train was lulling me to sleep. The hammering of the wheels fused with the drumming of the raindrops on the roof. I lay down on the lower bunk with my legs pulled up under me in order not to get in Gulya’s way.

  As I was falling asleep, I felt Gulya’s caring hands covering me with a blanket.

  The cosy warmth hastened the arrival of sleep.

  63

  I WAS WOKEN in the night by an extraneous noise. The train’s wheels were hammering out a monotonous rhythm on the joints of the rails, but my ears were already accustomed to that rhythm: something else had insinuated itself into the sound of the moving train. And there were spots of yellow light drifting through the darkness of the night outside the window.

  I lowered my feet on to the floor and moved closer to the window.

  Running alongside the railway line was a broad highway, with an endless column of covered trucks driving along it. Their headlights diluted the darkness, lending it a hint of yellow. Each truck’s headlights shone straight on to the back of the one moving in front. I saw soldiers dozing inside one of the trucks, sitting on the benches along the sides.

  The train began slowly overhauling the military transport column. A blue signboard flickered past in the light of the headlights: ‘Tikhoretsk 50 km, Kushchevskaya 120 km, Rostov-on-Don 225 km’.

  The column halted and we left it behind. Now the highway was an uninterrupted belt of black running alongside the railway. There were no more vehicles and the extraneous noise had disappeared.

  I looked at the sky, at the motionless stars. We really had outrun the rain – all the stars were hanging in their right places, with not a single one hidden behind a cloud. There was a fine sunny day waiting for us up ahead, and I wanted to believe that the weather would not be the only good thing about it.

  Before the dawn came I managed to fall asleep again, sitting at the table with my head resting on my arms.

  When I woke up I took my time opening my eyes.

  The sun was rising from behind the train, and not a single ray of its light entered the window of the compartment, but outside the window everything was radiant. And the highway was still running on in the bright sunlight, was once again filled with its own automotive life. An Icarus bus with a sign saying ‘Rostov–Kropotkin’ went streaking by and a heavy refrigerator truck lumbered heavily past our wagon.

  I poured some water from the canister into a drinking bowl, went out into the hallway and had a wash. Setting the bowl down on the wooden floor, I opened the outer door, and noise and fresh air burst into the hallway together. The wind dried my wet face in a moment.

  We were already eating our meagre breakfast in silence when the train slowed down and began pulling left. The highway moved away from us, and so did the rails of the main line, glinting in the sun. Now there were broad fields of maize beside us. Petro and I looked at each other.

  Galya put her bowl of tea down on the table and turned to Petro.

  ‘Did you dump the narcotics?’ she asked with an anxious expression on her face.

  Petro shook his head.

  ‘Well, you say something to your man at least!’ Galya said, looking at Gulya.

  ‘Women shouldn’t interfere in men’s business,’ Gulya said in a quiet voice.

  Galya merely shook her head at that.

  The train swung even more to the left. Petro put his head out of the window and looked ahead, along the line of the train.

  ‘What can you see there?’ I asked impatiently, infected by Galya’s nervousness.

  ‘A depot.’

  I looked out of the window too and saw that we were approaching a goods train halt. I could count dozens of trains on our right. We couldn’t see how many there were on the left. Every few metres a new line branched off to the right, taking us further and further away from the fields of maize.

  The train slowed down as if the driver was afraid of missing the side branch that he needed. It stopped. It set off again. We were pulling into the lines of trains. There was one more branch line still unoccupied between us and the nearest one.

  I looked at the next goods train as we slowly crept past it. It was a complete assortment – refrigerator wagons alternating with dirty tank wagons and ordinary goods wagons like the one that we were riding in.

  ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll go on from here without any excess cargo,’ I said, hoping to reassure Galya. After all, it was during the last halt like this that the night crew had turned up and let us know what we were carrying.

  But that time, of course, the train had stopped in a deserted spot and it had happened at night, whereas now the joyful sun was rising higher and higher above the newly awoken earth. So it was illogical, to say the least, to be thinking about deliverance from our unwanted cargo just at that moment.

  The train stopped and Petro and I watched the locomotive leave. It was strangely quiet on all sides.

  Petro filled his pipe and got out of the wagon. He stopped under the window.

  ‘It’s really warm!’ he said.

  We got out too. There was a warm wind roaming through the open corridors between the rows of goods trains. There was rubbish crunching under our feet. There was that familiar railway-station smell of burned rubber. There were birds singing in the sky above us. And somewhere nearby there was a grasshopper fiddling away. This mixture of wild civilisation and wild nature, in which sound contradicted smell, gave me a chilly feeling in my soul. I looked round at Gulya.

  She was standing with her eyes closed and her face turned towards the sun.

  ‘Can you hear anything?’ Petro asked me. I listened. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the rhythmical sound of a train. When the sound stopped, I heard voices. The breeze died down for a moment and the voices sounded a little bit louder, but still too quiet for me to be able to make out anything.

  We left the women by the wagon and set off along the next train, listening. Somewhere nearby there was a clinking of glass and we stopped. I dropped to the ground and looked under the wagon. My eyes encountered the frightened gaze of a thin black cat, who immediately leapt back and ran away, leaving an empty beer bottle behind. I was about to stand up again,
but my attention was caught by a movement within the limited field of view from under the wagon. Three rows of iron wheels away I saw two crates and two pairs of legs in the gap between trains. There were two men sitting there, talking about something calmly, although I could only judge that from the calm inflections of their voices.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ I said to Petro.

  He squatted down too and glanced under the wagon.

  ‘Go and take a look!’ he said.

  I crawled under one wagon and then another, then stopped.

  ‘Vasya’s been gone a long time,’ I heard a man’s voice say. ‘That’s not right . . . That’s the way to get a smack across the head!’

  When I crawled out from under the wagon, the two ragged tramps sitting on the empty crates stared at me in amazement. An old man and one who was fairly young. The ground beside them was littered with numerous cigarette ends, two empty beer bottles and one wine bottle.

  There was a dirty sleeping bag lying behind the crate on which the old man was sitting.

  ‘Hey!’ said the young man, getting up off his crate. ‘We’ve only been here since yesterday. We haven’t stolen anything or broken anything . . . Don’t throw us out!’

  Realising immediately that I was hardly likely to learn anything from these two, I crawled back under the wagon.

  ‘Tramps,’ I told Petro. He nodded without taking the pipe out of his mouth. Looking round, I saw Gulya and Galya shaking out a blanket by all four corners. Every flap sent a cloud of dust rising up above us.

  Petro and I watched our women for about ten minutes, until they had shaken out all the blankets and sleeping mats. Then they went back into the compartment but, to judge from the rubbish that came flying out of the window every now and then, the clean-up was continuing.

  ‘Kolya,’ Gulya called to me.

  When I walked over I was handed the empty five-litre canister. With the tramps’ help I located a tank of drinking water at the edge of the fields of maize.