The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  And normal life would be restored too, only now everything would be different. Everthing would be good in a different way. Good enough for two.

  77

  THE NEXT DAY we received our first guests – Petro and Galya. I had phoned Petro the previous evening and he had seemed pleased to get my call.

  He had told me he had something to show me.

  I can’t say that I felt very intrigued just at that moment. I was more concerned with the idea of removing the Corsair Charitable Foundation sign from the wall on the left of my door. And in any case, my curiosity had been satiated for a year ahead. Not to mention the fact that during our first supper at home that evening – vermicelli from my old food reserves – I had been assailed by thoughts that I simply couldn’t ignore. I had suddenly realised that all knowledge is an obligation, that any satisfied impulse of curiosity obliges you not only to whoever satisfied it, but also to your newly acquired knowledge or information. I already felt that I owed a debt to Oleg Borisovich. Not for the ten thousand dollars, of which two thousand were either part of some mysterious future payment or, as Oleg Borisovich had said, compensation for enforced absence from work. Or maybe they really were some sort of advance?

  For what? I didn’t know that yet. Was it something to do with his obvious trust in me? After all, he had told me about the men in the photographs. He hadn’t told me a lot, but enough for me to understand that three men who were now in the top echelon of Russian business and politics had been involved in a murder twenty years earlier. Oleg Borisovich probably knew a lot more about those men. He must know what they had been doing back then. Now I thought that it would have been better for me not to know anything about the men in the photographs. But it was too late already.

  It was drizzling outside. Petro and Galya left their open umbrellas to dry in the hallway.

  We sat down at the table and poured wine for the women and vodka for the men. The hors d’oeuvres were modest, but if we had had hors d’oeuvres like that in the desert or later on, in the goods wagon, we would have been absolutely delighted. Lightly salted cucumbers, Borodinsky black bread, ham and Dutch cheese. Even when I was buying all these things in the nearest delicatessen, my heart had sung. This was also a part of coming back home – the return to the old gastronomic values, to the everyday ritual of snacks with drinks. The excision of this ritual from a man’s life is a heavy punishment. Indeed, the punishment of prison, properly conceived, is precisely the separation of a man from his customary rituals.

  We all drank for the occasion. Then we told Petro and Galya how Gulya had been baptised and we had got married.

  ‘Well, now you’ll have to learn Ukrainian!’ Petro said to Gulya. She and I exchanged glances.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if Galya will help me . . .’

  We sat there making half-jocular, half-serious conversation like that for about another two hours. Then, while Gulya was making tea, Petro brought his bag in from the hallway.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we found something there, near the fortress, but we didn’t show you it . . . Take a look . . . Better late than never.’

  He took something wrapped in newspaper out of his bag. Then he unwrapped it. It was a silver casket about half the size of a brick.

  I picked up the casket, feeling the pleasant coolness and heft of silver. On the smooth upper surface there was an engraving in beautiful handwriting: ‘To my dear Taras from A.E.’ I tried to open the lid, but the casket was locked.

  Petro smiled at my enquiring glance and took the casket out of my hands. He shook it and I heard something light shifting about inside it – most probably papers.

  ‘It’s locked. We decided the honest thing to do would be to open it together . . . Do you have any tools?’

  I took the casket back from Petro and looked at the small keyhole.

  ‘Maybe we don’t need to force it,’ I suggested, looking into Petro’s eyes.

  ‘We don’t want to force it, just unfasten the screws so that it will open.’

  I took the golden key from round my neck, then put the key in the keyhole and handed the casket back to Petro.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t show you everything I found either,’ I said to him. ‘Open it!’

  He looked at me in amazement, then looked at the casket. He turned the key, and we heard the quiet click of the lock.

  Lying inside the casket were small pieces of paper covered with writing and folded in half.

  ‘Letters?’ I asked.

  Petro nodded. He took out the top one, ran his eyes over it and glanced into the casket again. I was surprised not to see any joy in his face.

  ‘“Dear Taras Grigorievich,”’ he read out in Russian. ‘“You do not need to fear my husband. He is well disposed towards you and will be glad if you agree to dine with us occasionally. A.E.”’

  He took another sheet of paper out of the casket.

  ‘“I am expecting you at midday,”’ Petro read. ‘“You promised to show me something interesting in the Turkish cemetery. You will be amused to know that Dr Nikolsy tells everyone you are a cashiered major. He also says that you are teaching him to speak Ukrainian.”’

  I took a sheet of paper out of the casket too and unfolded it.

  ‘“My dear Agafya Emelyanovna,”’ I read to myself – it seemed to me that Petro was only reading the notes aloud because of his mood of disappointment. ‘“I do not know what has caused the cooling in relations between us and why you have begun to avoid me. For all my love of solitude, my walks with you brought me genuine pleasure. I only hope that Iraklii Alexandrovich has not been induced by some hostile instigation to prevent you from associating with me. Although in his place, I would abandon my ingenuous attitude for jealousy. With my most sincere regards, Private Taras Shevchenko.”’

  When I raised my eyes from this note, which had evidently never been sent, Galya was already reading the others, with her lips moving soundlessly. The casket on the table was empty.

  I handed the note I had just read to Gulya. The room was unusually quiet. I poured two glasses of vodka for Petro and me.

  ‘Do you know how much this is worth?’ I asked, nodding at the casket.

  ‘Maybe it’s worth plenty, but it doesn’t do anything for Ukrainian culture . . .’ he said and shrugged, with an expresson of profound disappointment on his face. ‘The great Ukrainian poet writes his love letters in Russian . . .’

  ‘The great Ukrainian poet also wrote several novellas in Russian,’ I said. ‘That didn’t make him any less great. It simply shows that he belongs to two cultures.’

  ‘What belongs to two cultures doesn’t belong to anyone,’ said Petro, suddenly switching into Russian himself. ‘You know, two Ukrainian writers bought a house together at Konch-Ozero. Now they’re not writing any longer, they’re too busy suing each other in order to work out who the house actually belongs to . . . If no one has even thought of translating his novellas into Russian yet, then no one is going to be interested in these letters.’

  ‘Then what do you propose doing with them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let’s have some tea,’ Gulya said, in an attempt to distract us from our disagreeable conversation. She succeeded.

  We sat there drinking rather cool tea and eating custard pastries from a little baker’s shop that had opened up two blocks down the road while I was away.

  ‘You could sell it all at auction,’ I suggested to Petro when his mood had improved. ‘You probably need money, don’t you?’

  ‘Well . . . yes,’ he drawled thoughtfully. ‘We need money. They’re putting me forward for election to the Rada.’

  ‘Really?’ I said in surprise. ‘Why didn’t you tell us straight away? It’s a good excuse for a drink!’

  We poured wine for the women and more vodka for ourselves.

  ‘To victory!’ I said, toasting Petro.

  ‘Maybe we really could auction it,’ he said, switching back to his native Ukrainian. ‘Only I
can’t make myself that obvious, some people might not like it . . .’ He looked enquiringly at me. ‘Maybe you could sell it? . . . I’d give you a commission.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I promised.

  I had no idea even where to start looking for that kind of auction. But as they say, nobody had pulled my tongue – not the first time, when I suggested the idea to Petro, or the second time, when I promised to try to make something of it.

  ‘Listen, someone gave us something else for you too,’ said Petro, reaching into the bag again.

  He drew out the folder with Gershovich’s papers, and then a shoebox.

  ‘From the colonel. A man in civilian clothes came. He said Taranenko had sent him.’

  I put Gershovich’s folder on the edge of the table, took the lid off the shoebox and saw a little chameleon inside. He lifted his ugly face and looked at me.

  ‘Gulya,’ I called.

  She came over to me and we gazed at the chameleon in amazement.

  ‘How on earth did he get hold of him?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ Petro said and shrugged.

  When they were leaving we all hugged and kissed and agreed to phone each other regularly. No one had mentioned the sand while we were sitting at the table. It occurred to me only when Gulya and I were left alone in the flat. Maybe Petro had been asked not to bring the subject up with me. If so, we both had something to hide from each other, and yet we could still quite sincerely feel that we were friends.

  That night I was woken by the phone starting to ring and suddenly stopping again. I walked across to the table in the darkness, listening to the silence of the flat, and I heard a rustling behind the door leading into the communicating room. I walked through, and in the moonlight that was falling on the desk I saw a long white tongue of paper slipping out of the fax.

  When it had slipped right out, I turned on the light and leaned down over the desk. The fax, addressed to Nikolai Ivanovich Sotnikov, director of the Corsair Charitable Foundation, was a request to issue three cases of Finnish formula to the Makarov Infants’ Home. It informed me that a certain Pyotr Borisovich Luminescu would collect them tomorrow with a properly executed requisition order. It looked as if my work as a director had already begun. But the one thing I didn’t want was to know the contents of those cases. I couldn’t care less whether the infant formula was past its sell-by date or still good for sale, or wasn’t even infant formula at all! I really couldn’t give a damn. Let it simply drift past me, let them come and collect it, let them take it . . . Just as long as my main life, my life with Gulya, was calm and happy.

  78

  TWO MONTHS LATER, closer to the time when the snow first lingered for a little while, I remembered these thoughts of mine and realised that I had been wrong. By then Taras Grigorievich’s casket and letters had already travelled the long and winding road to an auction in St Petersburg and back to Kiev as a gift from a rich Ukrainian in Tyumen to his historical homeland. The newspapers had even written about the gift.

  I gave all the six thousand dollars in proceeds to Petro – his opponent in the election was some businessman with unlimited financial resources. Petro won. When he paid a brief visit to us with a bottle of good cognac after his victory, I noticed that he had trimmed his moustache a bit shorter. That was when he told me about his recent meeting with Colonel Taranenko. According to the colonel, part of the sand had been sent to the Crimea for testing. We could only guess at what the nature of this experiment might be.

  Winter was setting in. Gulya and I looked out of the window and watched the white snowflakes slowly floating down to the ground. The chameleon stood motionless on the windowsill, staring fixedly at the glass as if he were stuffed.

  ‘Azra,’ I said, looking at him and remembering our second night beside the dervish’s grave, when we buried Major Naumenko.

  ‘What?’ Gulya said.

  ‘Azra, the good angel of death . . . Aman told me the legend . . .’

  ‘Azra,’ Gulya repeated thoughtfully. ‘That was what my mother wanted to call me. My father was against it. He liked the name Gulya.’

  I started thinking, and remembered those tracks in the sand.

  Gulya told me again that she wanted to work. And I nodded without saying anything.

  But I thought to myself that it would be better for us to remain inseparable, to be together day and night until spring came. To go out into the streets sometimes, to listen to the snow crunching under our feet, and then come back to our cosy home. To talk at night when we were tired after making love. And to dream out loud. To dream about anything at all.

  I was alarmd by the presentiment that someone or something would interrupt the tranquillity of our winter. That circumstances would prove stronger than love. That I would have reason to curse my curiosity and pay the bills presented to me by life over and over and over again.

  I put my arms round Gulya and squeezed her tight. I tried to make myself not think about anything, just watch the snow.

  I succeeded.

  Epilogue

  A few days later I was leafing through Gershovich’s manuscript. Outside the window the snow was still falling.

  Gulya was in the kitchen, making Kazakh soup.

  The little chameleon, who had become attached to his window sill, was lying there on a tiny cushion that Gulya had sewn especially for him out of an old flannel shirt of mine.

  My gaze came to rest on a page with a diary entry. The date at the top of it was: ‘21 June 1969’.

  ‘“Seek the spiritual, and you find the material,”’ I read. ‘“Seek the material, and you find either death or nothing.” I was telling Naum about that today. We were drinking coffee in the “aquarium”. He only laughed. He’s in good spirits – he’s been made a captain in the State Security Service. Now how will he manage to split himself between his old passion for philosophy and his new operational reality?’

  ‘The circle is closed,’ I thought, glancing at the motionless chameleon. ‘Gershovich was friends with Captain Naumenko, and I met the deceased Major Naumenko . . . also thanks to Gershovich. One dead man introduced me to another . . .’

  Outside the window the snow was falling and I was in a profoundly wintry mood. I recalled the part of the major’s body that Colonel Taranenko had taken with him. He had brought it back to the homeland. I wondered if that body part had already been buried. Or cremated. Had there been a guard of honour and shots fired up into the sky, as there ought to be at an officer’s funeral? Had the deceased man’s brother, Oleg Borisovich, been present? Had there been a smell of cinnamon at the funeral?

  I suddenly realised that I was indebted to Gershovich for more than just my acquaintance with other dead men. I was also indebted to him for having met Gulya, Petro and his parents, Galya and many others. The late Gershovich had managed to introduce me to lots of people. Although he himself had apparently been an extremely solitary individual. The rusty cross on his grave, which I had disturbed, betrayed an acute lack of near and dear ones.

  My rational gratitude to Gershovich gradually transmuted into a feeling of pity for him and remorse for his death. I remembered the dervish’s grave in Mangyshlak, the small white stone column with the strip of green cloth tied to its top. And I remembered the second strip of green, tied there by Aman in memory of the major who was buried close by.

  It seemed to me now that the major had also been a dervish in some ways. And so had Slava Gershovich. They had both sought something and both, apparently, failed to find it. Had I found what I was seeking? No, I had found something quite different. I had found Gulya, and I was glad of it. I was happy.

  A couple of days later Gulya and I took a trip to the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery. We laid a bouquet of carnations on Gershovich’s snow-covered grave and I tied a strip of dark green velvet to the top of the rusty crooked cross.

  We stood in silence by the grave for a few minutes and walked back through the deserted cemetery towards the exit. Towards the tram stop.


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  Epub ISBN: 9781407013459

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  Published by Vintage 2010

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  Copyright © Andrey Kurkov 1999

  Copyright © Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich 2000

  English translation copyright © Andrew Bromfield 2009

  Andrey Kurkov has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published under the title Dobryj Angel Smerti in 2000

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Harvill Secker

  Vintage

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