The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “Things change,” the general muttered, and then came his last warning, “and we must see change coming, as it cannot always be prevented. Indeed, it might well be part of God’s plans. Indeed it has been written, ‘The mountains, which you consider to be so solid, shall pass away just as the clouds do.’” In saying these words, he believed that the cleric would reflect on them, but instead the other man just smiled and looked at his gold Rolex watch, as though to remind his guest that they were both busy men. Yusuf-zade smiled in turn – his most candid smile. You are right to look at your watch, he thought, as you don’t have much time left.

  He politely took his leave and went out. After all, in Sura VI, called the Cattle, it is written, ‘Surely, that which you are threatened with shall come to pass, and you shall not be able to avoid it.”

  Once he was out in the courtyard of the mosque and accompanied by the servants’ bows, the heat and the ferocious light of the afternoon struck him and took him unawares. For an instant he was blinded. He went up to the fountain, put the tip of his finger in the water and wetted his forehead. He did not turn to look, but he was convinced that Pashayev was staring at him from the window as the fan continued to hum. If the wind doesn’t change direction, he thought, then we shall have an oppressively hot summer. I do not remember such a hot spring since the one of 1949, and that was a scorching summer if there ever was one. The tarmac was too soft for high heels, and an engineer demonstrated at the Academy of Science that the oil wells would catch fire through self-combustion, but we made him disappear and, as we now know, the petrol did not burn.

  The general laughed at that memory, but then, without his having wanted them, other memories started to flood in, which had seemed equally comic at the time, but now, for some reason, no longer were. Narimanov’s wife had western shoes with stiletto heels, which someone had sent her from Paris, the tart, and when he told her what she needed to do to save her husband, she did not lower her eyes and started with those very shoes, which she kicked away, and had undone two buttons of her suit when he called Geydar; only then when she saw those two laughing did she understand they were making fun of her, and she wept with rage.

  The general was agitated and did not like the frequency with which those memories from a distant past had for some time been coming back to haunt him. One day, he had confessed this to the man he called his Master, Hadji Muhammad, and he asked him whether a man should be ashamed of his memories and attempt to drive them away.

  The teacher replied that he should behave towards them as he would towards an enemy who has fallen on hard times and comes begging before his door. “It is the duty of the believer to welcome him and feed him, but it is not good to treat him with any familiarity or entrust one’s family to him,” he pronounced, and then a great peacefulness descended on the general’s soul.

  And yet he could not avoid thinking once more of that blistering summer of 1949 as he crossed the courtyard towards the entrance to the mosque. In those days there was no air-conditioning and even the fans sometimes stopped working with the power cuts. They had started to plant birch trees along the seafront, and the old men in the tea houses were shaking their heads and predicting that the Russian trees would never survive in our climate. If only they could see Baku now! But then they had only just started and there was no shade from the summer. The dog days breathed on the necks of all those involved in the trials – those who sat at their desks and those who stood before them in the middle of the room – as though it really was the foul-smelling breath of a rabid dog. There were no fans in the cells, and the men came up from them rotten with sweat and overcome by lack of sleep. Anyone who wanted to gain their trust had no need of coffee or cigarettes: a glass of mineral water would do. How they would stare at that glass as they stood in the empty room holding up their trousers with one hand or stumbling in their shoes without laces.

  Sometimes the investigators would leave them on their own for up to an hour before entering to start the interrogation, and they monitored them from the peephole to see if they had the courage to put out their hand. Geydar and Zia took it in turns, an hour or two at the most, but the prisoners would be standing there for ten or twelve hours before they were allowed to return to their cells. A few of them, particularly the women, fainted but it did not happen often; the resistance a human being is capable of is quite extraordinary.

  Martirosyan, who had been deputy chief of the NKVD at the time of the 1937 trials, was one of those who fainted, as did General Tokarev’s wife and they had to kick her to wake her up. There were moments like that, in which the two young men felt their superiors breathing down their necks, and they couldn’t allow time to be lost. Only one man surprised them: he was a petroleum engineer, but the general had difficulty remembering his name – something like Parfyonov or Parsamov. He entered the empty room, heard the door close behind him and then, without asking permission of anyone, he calmly sat down at the desk and drank the water. When the guard came in swearing and knocked him off the chair with his fist, he withdrew to a corner and said nothing. Later he would regret having tried to be clever. For it is written in Sura XIII, called the Thunder: “For a long time I showed forbearance to those who did not believe, but then I punished them and severe was my punishment.” His car was waiting for him in the street opposite the mosque entrance. The driver on duty that day was a Muslim called Kuliev; the general had not recruited him personally and that was enough for him not to trust the man. Anisimov is not stupid and he certainly would not be happy with only employing Russians… The driver was sitting in the car and smoking, and when he saw him coming, he hurriedly got out of the car, threw the cigarette on the pavement and opened the car door for his superior. Well, go ahead and put in your report, Yusuf-zade thought; there’s nothing strange about that visit, and if someone were to ask me what we were talking about, the reply would be very easy: aubergines…

  Besides, many things happen in this world, but when you look at them more closely, there is nothing strange about them at all. The manager of a pipe factory orders the production of a consignment a little different from the usual ones – pipes with a small diameter that can be easily held in the hand and all cut up into sections of no longer than a metre, so they are not too heavy. What of it? Orders are coming in all the time, and they produce all the piping for the Republic in Sumgait. Then, as you would expect, some hot-blooded young lads are working at the factory, and the Armenians provoke them, because they believe they can do so with impunity: Hey, you lot, you Turks! You’re all pigs and always will be! That’s the way of it… Well what do you expect, but the manager cannot be held responsible! Then, the air is not at all good in that area: those who go there by car soon realise this when they see the dark cloud of smog and the chimneys of the petrochemical complex belching out smoke day and night. They planted trees along the seafront there too, but for some reason they never flourished and their leaves turn yellow early… Who knows, air like that might turn your head, and so one fine day, the peaceful people who live in the Avenue of Friendship might just decide that they’ve had enough! Well, forget the pipes, think about what you should be doing for them. But no, you go rummaging around at the factory and get the manager with his back against the wall: Now, my fine fellow, why exactly did you manufacture those pipes? Would you like to show us the order? Oh really, it’s not every day that an order is lost. You can’t blame poor Azizbekov for that. Oh of course, it would have been better if the lads had not shouted “Long live Turkey!” in the middle of the street, but you have to see it from their point of view. As for the Armenians, they have hard skulls, and pipes are just the thing for helping them to reason a little better. But don’t worry, next time there won’t just be metal pipes to worry about…

  It was hot in the car, and at any other time the general would have already been falling asleep in the back seat, but the quantity of tea he had drunk was keeping him awake.

  That, he thought, must have been the drink they were talking about in t
he Sura of the Cattle: “They shall drink scalding water and be severely punished for their disbelief.”

  But Pashayev was the one who could expect a punishment, and after that day’s conversation, Yusuf-zade knew that it would be coming quickly, and the retribution that awaits those who claim to be men of God but secretly assist His enemies, is the most terrible of them all. They had discussed this one evening in the house of Hadji Muhammad, and one of his new friends had said, “Yes, there are plenty of people like that amongst the Muslims. They are the ones of whom it is written, ‘When they meet the faithful, they declare – We too are believers – but when they are alone with their devils, they say to them – We follow none but you; we were only mocking.’” Someone else had added that there can be no pity for such men, and it is of no importance that they have studied and prayed all their lives in the mosques, or if they have said with an air of importance, as Pashayev had once done, “I was not even born when my mother swore, if he is a boy, I shall bequeath him to God.” The general shook his head slowly while staring at the back of Kuliev’s neck. Yes, the punishment would arrive promptly and there would be no cause for remorse. After all, it can be read in the Sura of the Cow, “That nation has passed away. Theirs is what they merited and yours is what you merited. You shall not be questioned concerning their actions.”

  XVI

  Koshchey Bessmertny

  Baku, May 1988

  I’ve been in Baku for a whole week, thought Nazar Kallistratovich as he tossed and turned, a victim of insomnia under the unfamiliar sheets of a hotel bedroom. He could hear the wind whistling outside; for several days it had continued to blow unremittingly from the hills in the direction of the bay, and stirred up swirls of dust and litter in the streets of the capital. It’s a week that I have been investigating Pashayev’s death, and you could say that I know less now than I did before. For the moment we can only be certain of this: they cut his throat with a stainless-steel kitchen knife, trademark Shablya and manufactured at Vyborg – twelvecentimetre handle, sixteen-centimetre blade. This version, the forensics expert assured him, was called “Universal”, while in the catalogue there is the “Meat” model, the “Fruit and Vegetable” one and the “Kitchen” one; a model designed for cutting throats does not yet exist, so they must have chosen the one that came closest to it. The Shablya trademark is sold all over Baku; in fact it is the only one that can be found in the city. Cooks use it for cutting up mutton and dicing it for kebabs, and they are brandished in every beach hut selling water melons along the entire stretch of coast. So they just left the knife behind – didn’t bother to remove it. Actually putting it in their pocket might have been more dangerous: thirty centimetres of knife covered with blood. There was a good chance that some policeman might have noticed, it hardly being the kind of penknife that everyone carries around here. They left it there, and when I say there, I mean in his throat or what was left of it. He grabbed it as he convulsed in his death throes and tried to pull it out, and as the blood flowed out, so did his life.

  To start with, I found out about the precedents; you never know, you could keep racking your brains in the vain attempt to understand the motive and God knows what else, when it is simply that there is someone in the city who every First of May goes out and cuts someone’s throat: these things do happen. No such luck! No one has had their throat cut in Baku in at least the last ten years. Out in the countryside, it is a different matter: those are backward people – peasants and shepherds. For example, the chairman of a kolkhoz found his wife in the shed with a labourer, he dragged her into the kitchen by her hair and there with a knife… And another time, a thirteen-year-old girl lived with her grandfather, a disabled serviceman from the war, and a neighbour had his way with her. He was a bachelor called Mukhamedov, and he wanted to marry her, but the old man did not have the money for the dowry. Well, in the end, it appears it was all the girl’s fault, and the neighbour got drunk and cut her throat. But neither of them were the types to go into the city and cut the throat of the first ayatollah they met in the street. In fact, they were both good Muslims and their fellow villagers were willing to swear to it.

  And these were the only cases in the last ten years in the whole of the Republic. But we did at least learn this: a knifing is the punishment for shame and dishonour. When in Rome do as the Romans do: the Blacks in Soweto put a tyre round the neck, pour petrol and add a lighted match; in ancient Judea, they were happy with what magnificent God had put at their disposal, for instance they would pick up whatever stones happened to be lying around. But what was the dishonour here? Could Pashayev have been considered dishonourable?

  Judging by what they have told me, it appears to have been quite the opposite. The Muslims rushed to kiss the hem of his clothes when he passed: a spiritual guide, and therefore the killer must have been an Armenian. This was the argument the Chief Prosecutor, Guseynov, put to me; there only remained the small matter of deciding exactly which Armenian. There is, of course, a choice to be made as, to avoid any surprises, they have already arrested a dozen of them. Don’t worry, he says, all people who have been carefully chosen, and who perhaps in any case are more deserving of being inside rather than outside: refugees from Sumgait without homes or work, who knows what they live on or rather the police know that only too well. Kamo Avanessian was already inside for car theft, but he was out at the time of the murder; he was a welder in Sumgait and here he gives a hand at the market and sleeps at his cousin’s house in a cellar. The cousin, Levon Akopyan, was also already in prison: it was okay while he was dealing with oranges on the black market, but now what’s he up to? But don’t you worry. And believe me, they all know how to use a knife – the lot of them, and they’ve been bottling up their rage for as long as I can remember; you only have to hear them talking about the Turks, because that’s what they call them, and you immediately understand that they wouldn’t have any scruples…

  But for some reason, I can’t imagine them cutting Pashayev’s throat with a kitchen knife. They would be quite capable of shooting him, or perhaps, you never know, pilfering a bazooka from the nearest barracks, after having persuaded the sentry with a bottle and a wad of banknotes, and then shooting a rocket at him while his car is passing along Boulevard of the Petroleum Workers. Yes, they could have done that, and it would not surprise me at all, but cut his throat? Only populations of goatherds kill people like that, not dealers on the black market.

  Perhaps I’ve got it wrong, and if so, I’ll be the first to admit it: I made it clear to the Chief of Police that I did not find the Armenian revenge attack very credible. I said nothing to Guseynov; in fact I said well done, you’ve got the right men, and of course they’ll confess – such a cretin that man! But the other man is not a cretin, and when I told him that, in my opinion, their Avanessians and Ter-Osepyans had not cut anybody’s throat, he turned his back on me and went to the window, and for a while he didn’t say a thing, and then he opened it – the window, that is – and the roar of traffic invaded the office. He went back to his desk and lit a cigarette… Of course, he said, you might be right. Then he started to laugh. We’re here scratching our heads, and maybe he fucked some girl – the daughter of the khadim, for example! I did, of course, question the khadim, called Kassumov, and he does have a daughter, but she is a little retarded and grew up in an institution; now she’s back home, weighs a ton and talks to no one. That’s not all: he’s got a paralysed arm, and earns his living cleaning the mosque and selling herbs at the market. He wouldn’t even be able to hold the knife. It’s true that he has a brother living in the countryside, a labourer on a sovkhoz, in the district of Bebek… And of course, that’s not the only girl in the world, but I still don’t find it a convincing theory. I look at the photograph of Pashayev which I put up on the wall above the desk, next to Asya’s, in the office they gave me in the Prosecutor’s Office. I open the records of the interrogations randomly: the ones Guseynov did and the ones I have done again in the last few days. There’s
nothing for it: that guy never fucked any girl! There is, however, something that doesn’t quite add up: the point is that he was killed by his own people or, in my opinion, by one of his own – by a Turk, as he would be defined by Kamo and Levon and the others who will rot in prison for quite some time.

  And they killed him in accordance with their own justice, not for with any criminal intent. That’s why they left the knife there, as though they were saying, “We’re not hiding ourselves. Catch us if you can!”

  So the motive was to implement justice and not retribution for some young girl, or boy for that matter. How do we get to the bottom of this? We could, for example, open up Pashayev’s study at the mosque, not to go through the drawers once more, after the Prosecutor’s Office, the police and the KGB have already done so, but to look around. On the wall, there’s a photograph of the dead man, third from the left with his fellow students when he was studying theology at Damascus; higher up, some porcelain tiles with an Arabic inscription – who the hell knows what that’s all about – and the books, which cover an entire wall, mostly in Arabic, but others in our alphabet – Saint Cyril’s – but the language is Azeri: there too, we have no idea of what is written. The secretary brings in the tea: the late Ayatollah, he explains, was in the habit of offering it to his guests, and most certainly he would want this custom to continue, because good treatment of a guest is sacrosanct, and he smiles. Hmmm, he has strong hands and keeps a vegetable garden in his free time, and yet he pours the tea with grace, like a woman; but he could well be able to hold a knife to butcher some animal.