The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  Galya wanted to boil up the remains of our buckwheat, but her plans had to be postponed. The shaggy-haired tramp Vasya turned up at our wagon, wearing a grubby raincoat and carrying a bucket.

  ‘The lads sent me,’ he said after introducing himself. ‘I went to get some crayfish – take fifteen for yourselves.’

  Petro brightened up when he heard the word ‘crayfish’. He squatted down beside the bucket that was standing on the ground and looked at the green creatures swarming in it.

  ‘Take them, take them,’ grubby Vasya encouraged him. The tramp looked about forty years old. ‘It’s a pity there’s no beer. We finished the beer yesterday. They go down a real treat with beer!’

  Petro collected some crayfish into a bag and thanked Vasya, then went into the compartment. The crayfish were tipped straight from the bag into the boiling water. They slowly turned red, and the way they looked started giving me an appetite.

  But not even crayfish could completely distract me from the uncertainty of our immediate future. While we were still travelling and I could see that we were going to Rostov, my heart had felt easy. A journey is already action in itself. But this dead end?

  But then, the more I thought about the situation and how deserted and strange this place was, the more likely it seemed to me that this was where the event that would simplify the remainder of our journey would take place.

  And that was what happened. We heard the sound of an engine as we were lying on our bunks, resting after lunch.

  I glanced out of the window and saw a military ZIL. It drove past and stopped immediately after our wagon. All this seemed perfectly logical to me. What didn’t seem logical was that a major and two warrant officers with automatic rifles jumped out of the cab.

  ‘Don’t leave the compartment!’ the major shouted, stopping under our window.

  Another three soldiers in camouflage suits jumped down to the ground. We heard the door of the wagon rolling back with a creak and the tarpaulin rustling.

  The soldiers worked as a team and without a pause. It took them ten minutes to unload the white sacks.

  ‘Is that the lot?’ the major’s voice asked.

  ‘Yes,’ someone barked back. Petro and I were sitting opposite each other at the window. He could see more of what was happening.

  When the ZIL left, Petro heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘They left something in the wagon,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s go and take a look!’ I said.

  We clambered through the little door from the toilet to the cargo section of the wagon. The crumpled tarpaulin was lying in the far corner, the sacks of sand were scattered around in disorder, and there was a large bundle wrapped in an oilcloth lying by the closed door.

  We went over to it. The bundle was closed with a zip fastener. When Petro opened the zip we froze and drew in our breath. All we could see through the parted zip was that the body was dressed in military uniform.

  Petro sat down on a sack of sand. The zip whooshed shut again.

  He looked at me in confusion, as if he was asking what we should do.

  I shrugged and spread my arms. It looked as if one unwanted cargo in our wagon had been replaced by another that was even less wanted.

  ‘We have to think of something,’ I whispered. ‘Only don’t say anything to them.’ And I nodded towards the compartment.

  ‘Let’s put him under the tarpaulin for now,’ Petro suggested. ‘And then maybe we’ll throw him out on the way.’

  We stretched out the tarpaulin and tucked its edges into the cracks between the sacks and the walls of the wagon.

  64

  AS EVENING STARTED to come on, we lit a fire beside the wagon and sat around it on empty crates that we had found nearby. The uncertainty of our immediate future was beginning to get on my nerves.

  Petro sat there without speaking, his head in his hands. Galya and Gulya were talking about something, but I was absorbed in my own thoughts, and didn’t listen to their quiet conversation.

  Analysing the events of the last few days, I became more and more convinced that we had already outlived our usefulness. There was only one question remaining: Who had been toying with us, who had directed this entire epic adventure with the sand, under cover of which we had carried guns to the border between Dagestan and Chechnya, and then taken on a load of narcotics to Russia? We were obviously stuck in a dead end now, and not just on the railway. No one needed us any longer, just as no one needed the body that the soldiers had left us as a souvenir. It was stupid to hope that our wagon would set off down the rails again. Except perhaps on a return journey . . . but even that would probably happen without us.

  I thought it best not to share my thoughts with Petro. Let him come to the same conclusion himself, and then we could think about what to do next. But how long would I have to wait?

  I imagined Petro and me as tramps sitting on these same crates round this same fire. Whichever way you looked at things, that was certainly one of the possible outcomes.

  But Galya and Gulya didn’t fit into that outcome.

  Meanwhile, they continued their quiet conversation. Galya was talking about her childhood in a village near Lvov and her parents’ little farm. She spoke Russian with a noticeable accent.

  We suddenly heard several voices laughing drunkenly behind the wagons. ‘More tramps have arrived,’ I thought.

  The stars appeared on the dark sky, the brightest ones first. The fire crackled, diluting the railway-station smell with its smoke. Its flames reminded me of autumn, of the ritual burning of autumn leaves at my parents’ dacha, of my childhood.

  That evening brought more than just nostalgic memories. The sound of an approaching train caught our attention. The women stopped talking. We turned our heads in the direction of the main line to Rostov. The powerful beam of the approaching locomotive’s searchlight reached us, pushing the twilight aside, out of its corridor of light. The train started slowing down about three hundred metres away. The searchlight was so bright that my eyes watered and I turned away and saw our shadows on the dirty ground.

  The train was already crawling on to the only free branch line, between us and the ‘assorted’ train. It went by slowly, followed by a string of covered goods wagons with letters and numbers stencilled all over their sides.

  About five minutes after the train’s arrival we came back to life. Petro put more wood on the fire and went across to the wagon opposite us.

  ‘“Property of Bataisk Goods Station,”’ he said, reading out the stencilled words.

  My eyes had recovered from the aggressive searchlight and were reaccustoming themselves to the gentle light of the fire.

  ‘Do you know where this Bataisk is?’ Petro asked me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A bit further on, about five kilometres from here,’ a familiar male voice said somewhere close by.

  I looked round. I couldn’t see anyone within range of the fire’s ability to illuminate our section of the corridor between the two trains.

  ‘Who’s that? Is that you, Colonel?’ Petro said.

  A bottle of beer came rolling out from under the wagon belonging to the Bataisk Goods Station. And then another one. The glass of the bottles jingled as it went over the stones.

  When the bottles had stopped at our feet and the renewed silence was beginning to seem alarming, another bottle came rolling out from under the wagon.

  ‘Have you got anything to open them with?’ asked the familiar voice.

  ‘Well, you bastard, Colonel!’ said Petro with a sigh.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Vitold Yukhimovich, scrambling out between the wheels of the Bataisk wagon. ‘Got a fright, did you?’

  Petro didn’t answer. He just sighed again.

  ‘Do you have anything to open them with?’ the colonel asked again, looking at me.

  I picked up one of the bottles, hooked the edge of its top on to the iron step of our wagon and slammed my fist down on it from above.

  ‘Welcome!�
�� I said, holding the open bottle out to the colonel.

  The colonel accepted the bottle, took a gulp of beer and wiped off his short moustache with his free hand.

  ‘Why welcome?’ he said, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. ‘I got here before you did!’

  I just shrugged at that. A sudden surge of tiredness had erased any desire to ask the colonel all the questions that had accumulated in my mind.

  ‘He won’t stay long,’ I thought.

  ‘Well,’ said the colonel, surveying us cheerfully after his second gulp of beer, ‘had a rest? Now it’s time to do some work!’

  We all gaped at him confusion.

  ‘Get ready to go,’ he said.

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  The colonel looked at his watch, turning the face towards the fire.

  ‘We’re leaving in forty minutes,’ he declared.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On a train. Only not that one!’ he said, nodding towards our wagon. ‘I’ll explain everything later.’

  This promise from the colonel sounded very apposite to me. Petro got up off his crate and glanced expectantly at the women. Gulya and Galya got up too.

  ‘Well, come on, come on,’ the colonel said to them.

  Vitold Yukhimovich stood close beside the wagon while we collected our things together. When I looked at him through the gaping window of the compartment I noticed the sadness in his face. The flickering patches of light from the fire created a dramatic, theatrical atmosphere. In this illumination the bags under his eyes looked like bruises, and his face was deathly pale. The colonel’s moustache, usually so neatly trimmed, had lost its fine shape.

  ‘He obviously didn’t have an easy journey either,’ I thought. No, I didn’t feel sorry for the colonel, I didn’t feel any sympathy for him. If I felt sorry for anyone just at that moment, it was our women and the idealist Petro. And I felt sorry for myself, of course. Colonels are never idealists. Our colonel was no exception, which meant that all his problems were merely the concomitant burdens of military service. Or secret service, rather. ‘Perhaps he’s a romantic and an adventurer,’ I suddenly thought. ‘After all, if his age is anything to go by, perhaps he joined the KGB when intelligence officers were the only ones who could travel freely round the world . . . I’ll have to ask him if he’s done a lot of travelling.’

  Our things had been gathered together. Galya and Gulya had tidied up our compartment and carefully put the camel-hair blankets and the tableware away. They had cleaned the Primus stove with a rag.

  ‘Get a move on!’ the colonel’s voice shouted in through the window. At the door of the wagon he took Gulya’s double bundle and flung it over his shoulder. He picked up Gulya’s bag and set off towards the back of the train.

  ‘Vitold Yukhimovich!’ Petro called to him. ‘What about the sacks of sand?’

  ‘That’s not the right sand,’ the colonel said, looking back.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Petro exclaimed. ‘It smells of cinnamon!’

  ‘Of course it does,’ Colonel Taranenko agreed calmly. ‘Five kilograms of cinnamon went into those sacks! Let’s go, I’ll explain everything later.’ And the colonel strode on.

  ‘And then there’s the body!’ Petro said thoughtfully as he set off after the colonel. The colonel stopped.

  ‘What body?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Where from?’

  ‘A sol-dier’s body,’ Petro replied as he walked along. ‘It’s all right, I’ll explain everything later!’

  When we reached the last wagon of our train, we stumbled across a lot of railway tracks and walked past several other goods trains standing as close together as cows in cattle pens.

  ‘That one’s ours!’ the colonel said. He waited for us all to catch up, then ducked into the gap between the trains.

  We obediently followed him. Someone waved a hand up ahead and the colonel, who was walking in front of me, waved in reply.

  We stopped beside an ordinary goods wagon. I was surprised to see that the man waving to the colonel and waiting for us was none other than the tramp Vasya, who had regaled us with crayfish. Vasya helped to carry our things into the cargo supervisor’s compartment of the wagon. When I gave him a enquiring look he just smiled and said nothing.

  ‘Vasya,’ the colonel said a minute later, ‘are there any wagons for Moscow here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vasya, nodding.

  ‘Some soldier’s body has been left behind in our young friends’ wagon,’ the colonel said with a smile. ‘You and your colleagues load it on to the next Moscow train . . .’ He suddenly lost the thread of his thought and turned to Petro. ‘Petya, how was the body packed? Or was it simply . . .?’

  ‘In a bag with a zip,’ Petro replied.

  The colonel thought about that for a minute.

  ‘Vasya,’ he said, ‘hold the train – say there’s a fifteen-minute delay. Then get straight back here!’

  Vasya ran to the locomotive and the colonel clambered back under the wagon without saying a word to us.

  ‘He’s gone to visit the corpse,’ I thought. We looked around the new compartment – there was already a whiff of European civilisation here. The compartment was specially made, with a genuine glazed window, and a toilet with a mirror and a washbasin, and the hallway had a small boiler for water and a box of coal briquettes.

  Petro and I put down our things and left the wagon, leaving the women in the compartment. This wagon was the property of the Baku Depot.

  ‘So our sand’s here,’ said Petro, nodding at the sealed sliding doors.

  ‘Yes, probably,’ I agreed.

  Petro went out into the hallway and tried to open the door into the cargo section of the wagon, but it was locked with a key. We had to return to the compartment.

  A few minutes later Vasya and the colonel came back at almost exactly the same time. There was a radiant smile on the colonel’s face.

  ‘We have an opportunity to leave a good impression behind us!’ he said gleefully, looking at Vasya. ‘Move the body to the nearest Moscow train and have one of the tramps write a note: “Greetings from General Voskoboinikov”. Put the note into the sack. Let them clean out their own ranks!’

  ‘All right,’ Vasya replied with an eager glance.

  ‘Well, that’s all. Take care!’ said the colonel, offering Vasya his hand. ‘God willing, we’ll meet again!’

  Two minutes later we were sitting on the lower bunks. I was sitting with Gulya, and Petro, Galya and the colonel were sitting on the opposite side of the table. The colonel had taken off his watch and put it on the table, and now he was calmly watching the second hand. He carried on doing that until the train gave a jerk. The wagons of the next goods train crept slowly past our window.

  I suddenly thought that there were only four bunks in this compartment, but there were five of us. I looked around carefully and noticed that the colonel’s rucksack was not there. Out of curiosity I leaned down and glanced under the lower bunks.

  ‘Lost something?’ Vitold Yukhimovich asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘your things.’

  ‘Aah!’ he laughed. ‘What an observant lad! They’re not in here, I’m going to sleep in the wagon. But if you invite me to breakfast, I won’t take offence.’

  ‘And are the sacks in the wagon?’ Petro asked gloomily.

  ‘No, the sacks aren’t in this wagon. They’re in the next one,’ the colonel said without turning round. ‘And there’s no need for you to worry about them.’

  Petro reached under the table and took his pipe and the bundle of Prima tobacco out of the shopping bag.

  He filled his pipe in silence, shook a box of matches in his hand, got up and went out into the hallway.

  ‘Sometimes even I have to do what has to be done, not what I want to do,’ the colonel said as he watched Petro leave. ‘But that’s all right. That’s life . . .’

  65

  AN HOUR AND a half later, when the train had already passed Rostov-on-Don, the ho
t water from the boiler melted the ice of mistrust. The colonel was in charge of the boiler, and he carried five glasses of boiling water into the compartment and dropped an identical tea bag into each one.

  ‘I even have sugar,’ he said, extracting several small packets of ‘railway sugar’ from the pocket of his denim jacket. ‘Help yourselves!’

  ‘And what’s in this wagon?’ Petro asked him after we had drunk our tea.

  ‘Chinese toys and Vietnamese balsam,’ the colonel replied with an amicable smile.

  ‘Toys?’ Petro echoed incredulously and chortled.

  ‘Come on!’ said the colonel, getting up from the table. He stopped at the door of the compartment and looked back. Petro and I followed him out into the hallway. He unlocked the door into the cargo section with a key and let us through ahead of him.

  The wagon was stacked up to the top of its walls with cardboard boxes and plywood crates. A narrow passage between the boxes and crates led to a small area free of cargo next to the sliding doors. By the dim light entering from the small ventilation window we saw two pallets lying there, with a blue sleeping bag spread out on top of them. Beside them were a plywood crate that obviously served as a table and the colonel’s rucksack.

  We stopped in front of this sanctuary.

  ‘I didn’t bring you here to show you round,’ Vitold Yukhimovich said behind us, and his voice sounded unusually dry and severe.

  He took a seat on his improvised mattress and narrowed his eyes as he looked up at us.

  ‘I have no intention of explaining myself or apologising to you,’ he declared in rather sombre tones. ‘You got involved in this business of your own free will, so don’t go playing the victim! If it wasn’t for me you’d be sitting somewhere with the Kazakh secret service and answering their questions all night long. Concerning illegal excavations and narcotics in baby-food cans. When I came round in the desert with a splitting headache and my feet tied together, I didn’t take offence. I simply wanted to catch up with you and give you a good beating, and that’s what would have happened, if not for that sand. Or perhaps it was just fatigue, and not the sand at all? I give you two minutes to decide how we’re going to talk to each other from now on: on equal terms, with total mutual trust, or like a colonel talking to a couple of privates who have ended up in the guardhouse?’