The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  XVII

  Nazar’s trip to the country

  Baku, June 1988

  And in search of that egg, Nazar Kallistratovich happened one day to hear in the Prosecutor’s Office that they had discovered an illegal cache of arms in some sovkhoz in the Kobustan District, and in that same sovkhoz, would you believe it, several workers had left their jobs recently and, according to the administration, they had moved to Karabakh, not that anyone can be very sure of these things any more. They now hand out internal passports to almost anyone; as for the residency requirement – well, that is more honoured in the breach than in the observance! And then, listen to this, the sovkhoz is called Armenia – what a wonderful monument to the friendship of peoples… One day in late June, Kandayev took Nazar Kallistratovich out there in the office car. It hadn’t rained for an eternity and the road was a dusty racetrack: as soon as they were past the industrial plant on the outskirts of Baku, with their hellish blast furnaces and the smell of petroleum, the driver embarked upon a madcap race to overtake the greatest possible number of articulated lorries without getting themselves crushed by the ones coming in the opposite direction. The road ran across a landscape of mountains and desert, and to the passenger’s enormous relief the number of lorries quickly began to diminish, so in statistical terms the risk of getting killed was going down all the time and eventually became almost negligible. As for asking Kandayev to interrupt the car chase and be happy with just tootling along behind an artic, that would be just unthinkable. He would have been offended: Are you suggesting that I don’t know how to drive? As they overtook, Nazar turned to look at the lorries as they struggled along next to the car and then were lost behind them. One was loaded with bricks and another with cement, because, as everyone knows, we never stop building here in the Soviet Union, and whenever you think you’ve finished, there’s nothing for it but to start rebuilding the whole lot again.

  Another lorry was laden with goats that looked around with bewildered expressions, numbed by the noise and dust. But you had no idea what most of the lorries were carrying: who knows, perhaps some arms for yet another sovkhoz inhabited by bellicose people. The lorry drivers were of all races with their caps askew or even just a rag worn as headband to soak up the sweat, with moustache or without, and on one occasion an old man wearing a hat and a black suit with a mass of medals on his lapel and in his buttonhole the Order of Lenin! Maybe he was on his way back from a wedding or a funeral. The veteran clearly didn’t have a car, and so had borrowed a lorry belonging to the kolkhoz.

  After an hour on the road, Kandayev pointed to the plain below them where there was a square of white stones calcined by the sun and closed in by a wire fence.

  “Do you see those? Just think, Nazar Kallistratovich, those are the remains of a Roman encampment. From the first century,” he added with some satisfaction, as though that first century meant something particularly significant, and different, say, from the second or third century. Clearly, there too was some record to be claimed. Then he swore violently and swerved the car to avoid a peasant who was peacefully riding his donkey down the middle of the road.

  Nazar asked for the car to stop at the side of the road, and he got out to look down on the plain, while shielding his eyes from the blinding sun with his hand. They had built some shacks next to the archaeological dig, and there was a bulldozer, which in fact looked about as old as the ruins.

  There were no archaeologists about, and clearly there was never anyone about. The dig must have been abandoned who knows how long ago. Just look how far they came, those Romans, the judge ruminated. What worm was gnawing at their insides and driving them so far from home?

  – To march over mountains and deserts! And we must be some five thousand kilometres from Rome, perhaps even more. But while he was reflecting on these things and contemplating that pile of stones, the peasant on his donkey had almost caught up with them, and Kandayev had no desire to let them overtake him: how could he accept such ignominy – and inflicted by some bumpkin! He impatiently intimated to the passenger that it would be better to get back into the car, as the road was long and there was the risk of arriving late. He was lying, however, because the road continued to climb up the barren slope of the mountain for five minutes and then started to descend steeply, and as soon as they were back down in the valley and next to a huddle of prefabricated concrete buildings, Kandayev slammed on the brakes and announced that they had arrived.

  Nazar Kallistratovich soon found himself drinking tea with the farm manager Gasanov at the sovkhoz’s office. Up until a few days before, he had been the mechanic responsible for the state farm’s tractors, but they had promoted him after the arrest of the previous manager, Saidov. It appeared that all sorts of things had been going on under his management of the Armenia Sovkhoz, even though it was a model farm for the production of citrus fruit, and its irrigation system, which made use of a mechanism designed by Saidov himself, had received many prizes and not just republican but also pan-Soviet ones! It also appeared that apart from exporting tangerines, he was not above relaxing the religious supervision, so that someone had come to be registered amongst his labourers who had never had much to do with physical labour, a real parasite called Kadarov. When the Prosecutor’s Office had him arrested, they were at a loss as to how to describe him and in the end they came up with this wonderful professional category: unauthorised priest! This upstanding individual, it was discovered, celebrated Islamic rites for those who had need of them, sang the funeral prayers and, if required, also carried out circumcisions. All that remained for the sovkhoz to do was to build him a mosque and perhaps even a minaret with its own cement. There were no limits to their impudence, so following the arrest of the holy man, the manager in person, with several of his workers as back-up – all clearly anti-social and reactionary elements – went to protest in the main town of the district. They even clambered onto a lorry in front of the party headquarters, where, according to the police charge sheet, they INSTIGATED DISTURBANCES, until it became necessary to arrest the whole lot.

  “What is the situation like at the moment?” Nazar asked as he peeled a tangerine. The new manager in shirtsleeves scratched his beard and then spread his arms. “What is the situation like? We know what it’s like! Here I am the only technician left; three or four were arrested and the others have left their jobs! There is no shortage of labourers, although we have more women than men. That we can deal with, but I need to recruit some technicians, and until they unfreeze our funds, there’s little we can do! Besides, I’m no expert.”

  Of course, when the police discovered what was going on at the sovkhoz, the first thing the Prosecutor’s Office did was to confiscate all the company accounts and freeze its bank account. And now, day by day, they were sifting through the whole thing and were fairly sure that something would come out of it. Even at a cursory glance, what didn’t those accounts contain! There was no way to get the figures to balance, no matter how many times you recalculated them.

  And what did not appear in numbers, was written in some other language: you’d need a linguist to get to the bottom of this one. These people didn’t seem to know that the Russian alphabet existed. Nevertheless it was clear that something was not right: the expenses paid to the sovkhoz’s lorry drivers were too high in relation to the volume of business, and the diesel consumption was also too high. In another situation, you wouldn’t scratch your head for too long: the drivers were declaring more hours than they had actually worked and the sovkhoz management was paying out, and selling off the extra fuel on the side. Indeed, is there a single farm in our country where these things are not going on?

  People have to live off something. Yet Nazar was willing to bet that that diesel actually had been used; after all it only took a few hours to drive to the Aras River, and there of course, the border guards cannot keep an eye on everything.

  A motor-launch leaving from the Iranian coast can get there in no time and offload crates filled with all manner o
f things, but most probably guns and drugs. When the police went to take a look after the manager’s arrest, they found a warehouse full of assault rifles, and as for drugs, well they didn’t exactly find them in industrial quantities. Actually they just confiscated a small amount of grass, but the sniffer dogs brought in by the drugs squad went completely mad, and the experts who analysed the warehouse dust said that a lot of other stuff had been going through there: cocaine without doubt, and perhaps some heroin. In the meantime, they managed to get the accusation against the unauthorised priest for illegal possession of narcotics to stick.

  When Nazar went to inspect the warehouse along with the new manager, it turned out to be a quite unexceptional store which hadn’t been repainted since before the war and had a corrugated-iron roof. Hens were scratching about outside. The original investigators had found the door locked with an American combination padlock, and all the sovkhoz employees had sworn that only Saidov could open it. When Nazar got to it, the padlock had long been removed with a hacksaw and the door was open, but there was nothing inside. Anything that could have been of interest to the investigation had been collected and sent off to Baku. The judge wandered around the empty warehouse, and went to the only window, which was small with a grille. He could see their vegetable garden, and tomatoes were already ripening on the plants that clung to their wooden trellises. There’s nothing like the climate of the south; in Moscow they couldn’t even dream of such bounty coming from the earth!

  Lappa tried to imagine the holy man, Kadarov, digging the vegetable garden and tearing up the weeds. He would give a hand when he didn’t have more important things to do, and in the meantime he kept an eye on the warehouse… But whether he really knew what was going on in there, no one could really be sure, and on the whole the other arrested men were not confessing, curse their mothers, or at least not enough. Only one of the lorry drivers had admitted: Yes, I went to pick up those crates from a place on the border, and a boat came in from Iran, but I had no idea of what was in them. Saidov had organised everything. And it appeared that was how it was: who had been working with the manager, how he had paid off the border guards and above all what had heroin and cocaine to do with the whole affair?

  Well, only Saidov knew this, and he was a hard man. He never opened his mouth, the bastard!

  “Let’s go back.”

  In the manager’s office, Nazar had just sat down and was peeling another tangerine when the door opened and a woman came in without knocking. She had brown hair, an olive complexion and a hooked nose, and she was wearing, he wondered why, a white hospital overall. In truth this detail was about to be explained.

  “This is our health worker,” Gasanov declared.

  “Rakhimova,” the woman introduced herself and held out her hand.

  “Lappa. Do you work here?”

  “Yes, I run the first-aid unit. Excuse me, comrade manager, do you know if that consignment of disinfectant has come in? You know that we have been without for three days,” the woman cut him short to speak to Gasanov.

  “It should be in this evening. I’ll have it sent across as soon as it arrives. But sit down, have a cup of tea. Have you got any patients at the infirmary?”

  The woman collapsed into a chair. “Hell no, not a soul.

  The heat, though!”

  She poured a glass of tea and on drinking it, she displayed her very white teeth. She had rolled up the sleeves of her overall, and Nazar noted that she had hairy arms like his wife. In fact, she was a desirable little woman.

  “Have you been working here long?” he enquired.

  The woman looked at him with surprise, “Yes! It’ll soon be six years.”

  “And what’s it like?”

  “What can one say? It’s a peaceful enough job. What a laugh, eh? After all that has happened recently! But, believe me, no one here had any idea. On the other hand, I used to work at a factory infirmary in the city, and there was much more to do there: every day there was some accident.

  Someone would put their hand in the machinery, perhaps losing a finger or worse. But here everything was absolutely peaceful until last week. Who knows how all this is going to end up!”

  She said these words with her mouth full, as she too had peeled a tangerine. There was a plate overflowing with them on the manager’s table. Nazar stood up, and took a few steps around the office. He looked around: there was a portrait of Lenin on the opposite wall, decorated with a little crown of dried up ears of corn and bay leaves, held together with a faded red ribbon. Beneath it there was a bookcase with a dozen books, leaflets and a record player, and underneath some partially hidden records. He kneeled down next to the book case and flicked through the printed material, but of course there was nothing of interest there: handbooks on irrigation and the cultivation of citrus fruit, and a couple of leaflets containing anti-religious propaganda, of the kind distributed free of charge by the Regional Committee. Nazar turned to Gasanov.

  “Is the record player yours?”

  “You mean does it belong to the sovkhoz? No, I believe it’s all Saidov’s stuff,” replied the manager, showing little interest. Nazar looked through the records: Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Glinka. Obviously a music lover. With a sigh he opened the briefcase he had brought from Baku, took out another record and went up to the table.

  “And what about this? Was it also Saidov’s property?”

  Because the police had confiscated it right there, but the bastard was denying everything! The manager turned the record over in his hands, with curiosity. The writing on the cover was not in Russian but Turkish. Nazar put his nail under the copyright to bring his attention to it: Istanbul 1981, Made in Turkey.

  “A-ah,” Gasanov stuttered. “A foreign record, right?”

  “Well, there’s no ban on owning Turkish records, God forbid,” said Nazar curtly. “But you understand Turkish, so tell me what it’s about.”

  The nurse came closer and took the record from the manager’s hands.

  “Folk music,” she declared with her eyes wide open.

  “That’s right,” Nazar confirmed. “That’s what they told me, and they translated it for me too. Would you like to translate it for me too? That way, I can check whether they got it right. Look, the lyrics are printed on the back. But wait: let’s put it on first!”

  A second later, the record was turning. A male voice started up with a bold rhythm, as for a military march, and a fanfare quickly took up an echo. The woman listened for a second with a furrowed brow, then she went up to Lappa and translated, following the printed text with her finger.

  “It is the Song of Plevna. This song goes back to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. This is what it says, ‘The place they call Plevna is a small town, the Russian soldiers cannot be counted, there is not enough room in the town for their severed heads.’”

  Nazar looked into her sweet black eyes, but she was laughing. What did the nurse find so amusing! The manager was not enjoying himself; he was sweating underneath his unbuttoned flower-patterned shirt, and didn’t know where to look. The song was short, and after an instant the record player went silent, so Gasanov could finally breathe, but the singer was off again with another, even more martial song.

  Once again the woman translated and looked increasingly amused by it all.

  “This song is older and goes back to the Crimean War and the siege of Kars. It says, ‘Don’t come, Moskof, don’t come here to Kars.’ Moskof, we know, is the Muscovite, in other words the Russian and the infidel.”

  “Many thanks,” Nazar snapped unsmilingly. “Nice songs your Saidov liked to listen to!”

  “What can you do!” the manager replied weakly. “That’s the way he was; he always had these things in his head.”

  “What things?” Nazar interrupted and immediately exploiting the situation.

  “Well, you know… our land, he would say, is a Turkish land, and we will never give it up to anyone, especially not to the Armenians.”

  “Oh really? And
what else did he say?” urged the judge.

  Gasanov was embarrassed.

  “Well, he would say, the Soviet Union is our country.”

  “You surprise me,” Nazar interrupted. “A fine patriot!”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what he would say. It is a state, these were his words, made up of Muslims and Christians, or rather shall we say of Turks and Slavs, and our task, he would say, is to arrange things so that one day the Turks count for more than the Slavs. We, he would say, will be stronger, because we have more children.”

  “Quite, and in the meantime he was buying rifles: who knows, he must have said, these might come in handy too!

  No, Comrade Gasanov, all this is beyond belief! And why didn’t you report what was going on?”

  The manager spread his arms again; the poor man already had problems enough, and he’ll have had a few before when he was only chief of the tractor repair workshop. Besides Saidov was the boss there, and on his lapel he didn’t only have the party badge, but also some medals, and down in the city he was completely at home.

  Now it all seems so straightforward. The man says I should have reported him, but he should put himself in my shoes…

  Nazar sighed, “Okay, forget it. Another thing, did he ever talk about a certain Accountant?”

  Because this was the point! Ryumin’s bag had contained papers about an illegal trade in arms and drugs, and in both cases the nickname Accountant had come up. And here we have arms and drugs.