The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “What do you mean? Which accountant? We used to have our own chief of the accounts department; Zaynal-zade he was called, but he left.” “Of course not. Not the office manager. No, the Accountant must be a dealer, the boss. And that’s the name he’s known by. He’s been working in this area for some time, and he’s the one who appears to be getting the arms across the border. You’ve never heard mention of him?”

  The manager shook his head again, and he suddenly stopped, “Well, to tell the truth, there was something. It was the evening Saidov was arrested and after the police had taken everything away. They didn’t put a seal on the office door, God knows why. Well, out of curiosity I came up here; I wanted to see what state they’d left it in. I mean…”

  “Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter,” the judge cut him short.

  “I don’t want to hear about it. The Accountant, what about the Accountant?”

  “Well, I’m telling you. I was here, let’s say; I had just come in, and the phone starts ringing. Of course I just put out my hand and reply – without even thinking about it.

  And the guy at the other end says, ‘Hey, Rasul, is that you?’ I say, ‘No, Rasul isn’t here.’ I don’t tell him, you understand, that he’s been arrested – that didn’t even go through my head. And he says, ‘And when will he be back?’ I say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And he says, ‘Listen, when he’s back, tell him that the Accountant rang.’ And he put the phone down. But like an idiot, I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Really? Now tell me, what was his accent like? No, let’s start at the beginning – was he speaking Russian or something else?”

  “Russian!” the manager confirmed. “He was speaking Russian and I would say he was a Russian. Not an Azeri.

  And not an Armenian. No, he spoke Russian just like a Russian.”

  Nazar withdrew into his thoughts and tried to put them in some order as they came one after another. They didn’t put any seals on the office … and the Accountant called … and Gasanov was here by chance, but yes, why not? After all, that is understandable. But if the police didn’t apply the seals, there must have been a reason. Or perhaps not. He went up to the desk, lifted the receiver and put it to his ear.

  He couldn’t hear a thing, but that didn’t mean anything.

  Nowadays the technology can be very advanced. They listen to your calls and you would never know it. Once you could hear the crackle of the recorder and maybe even the breath of the duty officer. But if that’s the case, he should go straight to see Salayev, there’s a chance that he’s the one to authorise the phone taps.

  “And when’s Kadarov coming back?”

  Nazar was dumbfounded; he hadn’t been expecting anyone to question him; he had just been clarifying an idea: yes, he should jump in the car and rush back to Baku and find out if they had been tapping the phones, so why was someone pestering him about Kadarov? It was Rakhimova who spoke – a woman, it should be said, who he had fancied from the minute she had walked in. It’s true that she was not as young as he had first thought, not at all; there was a spray of tiny wrinkles around her eyes, and she had to be at least forty. But even then, her hair was dark, her mouth red and her teeth – well, just one gold one hidden away… Why was she forcing him to say unpleasant things?

  “Your Kadarov will end up with at least five years,” he replied brusquely, “always supposing he is lucky and he can demonstrate that he knew nothing about Saidov trafficking in arms and all the rest, because otherwise there’s a good chance they’ll shoot both of them.”

  “But why? He’s a good man and never harmed anyone.

  Everyone here was so happy to have our own cleric. There’s no mosque here, and you have to go fifty kilometres to get to the closest one!”

  “Really? Everything is so cut and dried for you people.

  But excuse me, Comrade Rakhimova, but I have to tell you this. You say that everyone was happy – by which you mean that you’re all Muslims here. Am I right? Do you have any Armenians or Russians amongst your labourers? I think they would not have been so happy, because we know what these good men, as you call them, have to say about the Armenians and Russians to those who want to listen to them. So go on, tell me if you have a single Armenian working on this sovkhoz called Armenia?”

  The manager was looking elsewhere and his wide jovial face was once again a picture of consternation. Why the hell, he seemed to say, have we brought up this subject. Why do we keep doing that? But Rakhimova was quite capable of keeping her side up.

  “There very probably isn’t one. So what! This is after all our land; Saidov was right! Look, I’m a woman, and I can’t abide weapons. I want to live in peace with everyone, but this is our land and we want to live in our own way!” Nazar shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? In a country like ours, these arguments always lead to people taking up arms; how can you possibly not realise that? We simply cannot tolerate such opinions, because anyone who listens to them immediately starts calculating when would be the most opportune moment to grab a rifle. You say that this is your land. It might well be! But the Armenians who have been living here for two thousand years might be entitled to think the same thing? And the Russian engineers and workers who built the petroleum plants, do they not have a right to live here? And perhaps, God forbid it, there are also a few Jews. Under the Tsar they all lived together, and they still live together, with the one difference however: under the Tsar all the clerics, whether Christian or Muslim, were permitted to incite hatred against other peoples. Now, I’m afraid, they are not!”

  “In other words,” Rakhimova interrupted him sarcastically, “religion is the opiate of the peoples, is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Nazar quite happily. “You can say that again.”

  At the same time he thought about Kadarov, and how the holy man had irritated him when summoned to his office for questioning. He wouldn’t even condescend to defend himself. He didn’t care a damn about whatever would happen to him at the hands of Soviet justice. Not once did he answer a question. Nazar asked about arms, drugs and Saidov, and the other man just answered with a sermon.

  “Everyone knows,” he would say, for example, “that today communism is a piece of old junk; they should put it in a museum. But the reason is not the lack of private property or any of the other inanities people come up with! The cause is your senseless, stubborn and vain campaign against God!

  You communists say that you’re materialists. But you’ll never get anywhere with materialism! The world is not just what you perceive with the senses; it is also what reason experiences. We don’t see God, but we know that he exists and that he can see us. As the Koran says, “No eye can see him, though he sees all eyes. He is the subtle, the aware.”

  “Kadarov!” Nazar interrupted him. “Don’t make me lose my patience in this manner; I’ve been round the block a few times. I’d rather we talked about guns. We know they come from Iran, and if you do not confirm this, the manager will, so why waste our time?” But the guy could lose as much time as he wanted. He was enough to get you worked up into a fury: he sat there in his tattered jacket and with his carefully trimmed beard, and spouted philosophy.

  “Materialism will get you nowhere,” he insisted. “And I’m not the one who’s saying it; many many others have said it before me. I don’t think you have much desire to get involved in philosophical subtleties; you have other things to think about, I know. Otherwise I would suggest that you study, and you would see that our understanding of the Universe is rational and not sensory. This was clearly stated by Avicenna and Al Farabi, may peace be with them! They demonstrate that no thought shall ever be subject to the laws of matter.”

  Just look at how sure he is of himself, Nazar mused. No thought shall ever be subject…! A hundred grams of vodka certainly has some influence on our thought processes. And if you’re sent before a firing squad, you’ll find out for yourself whether or not your thought will be subject to the material world! When they put twenty gra
ms of lead in your brain, goodbye to all that! And he was just about to enter into the argument, but stopped himself just in time. What an idiot I am. I’m about to start a debate with my prisoner.

  “I won’t irritate you with further details,” Kadarov continued dauntless. “But if you show some interest in these matters, I would happily put together a list of works you should consult, and you too, God willing, could learn these subtleties within a few years. Man, after all, was created with the capacity for learning, and I earnestly exhort you to read up on Islam.”

  “What can I say? I’m not interested,” came Nazar’s defence, now that he had decided that he should bring the interrogation to an end.

  The cleric looked at him with a smile of contempt, “But I don’t say this because Islam and Muslims have any need of your interest, but because their values alone are universal and could open your eyes.”

  Well, that was Kadarov for you, and it also seems that his seed did not fall on stony ground; his loins had produced their fruit.

  “Ah, so that’s how it is!” Rakhimova pressed her argument. “A religion that wishes to bring justice to the world and free man from his chains is an opiate of the peoples? The religion that gave a single country, Iran, the strength to stand up to the whole world is an opiate of the peoples?”

  “So you don’t like opiate?” an exasperated Nazar retaliated. “Shall we call it the heroin of the peoples or the cocaine?”

  The woman turned pale, “So it’s true what they’re saying?

  That they found drugs here? No, I don’t believe it – it’s a set up!”

  “Believe what you like,” Nazar shrugged his shoulders and turned to Gasanov, “Manager, do me a favour and send someone to bring my driver. By the way, where has he gone?”

  “Immediately!” the manager rushed to lift the phone. “He has a cousin who lives here. He went to see him; I’ll ring him at once.”

  Ten minutes later, Kandayev turned up at the office somewhat out of breath. They had woken him: clearly he had been eating and drinking at the cousin’s house and afterwards he couldn’t resist a little snooze. His suit was creased and his eyes were swollen with sleep. Nazar hardly said goodbye to Gasanov and Rakhimova before rushing out.

  He was in a hurry to see Salayev. Why he was in such a hurry was difficult to say; if there had been a phone tap, it would have been days ago, immediately after Saidov’s arrest, according to the manager. But Nazar did not want to wait for the next day; he wanted to find the chief of police in his office and immediately verify if it was possible to trace the phone from which the call was made.

  “Did you find anything?” Kandayev asked his passenger in a confidential tone. Nazar was no longer irritated by this over-friendly approach. Much had changed over the previous weeks, and now it even gave him a little pleasure.

  “Perhaps. Listen, Dzhafar Alyevich, I’m in a great rush, so get me back to the city as fast as you can?”

  Almost immediately he realised that they were not taking the same road as in the morning. The landscape was completely different and the road ran through verdant countryside with lines of mulberry trees.

  “Beautiful, is it not?” said Kandayev, indicating the scenery with a grand sweep of his arm. The window was open and he was holding a cigarette in his other hand: the car, it would appear, could even drive itself, so straight was the road that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  “This,” the driver added, “is the fastest road; we’ll save twenty or thirty kilometres.”

  Now he tells me! Nazar could not fail to investigate, “Why then did we not come this way this morning?”

  “The ruins!” came Kandayev’s brief reply. “You can’t come to this area without seeing them.”

  Nazar took a few seconds to remember the Roman encampment. So that interminable trip up and down the desert plateau was just for that reason: to show the man from the capital the vestiges of conquerors from a distant land – now dead and buried some two thousand years ago.

  Why had Kandayev had to take him there at all costs? Just so that he could admire his nation’s wonders, or for some more allusive purpose? Never mind, thought Nazar, let him stew in his own juice.

  It was six in the evening when Kandayev came to a halt outside the police headquarters in Lenin Square, and the judge rushed up the stairs to the chief’s office. It was indeed a lucky day: Salayev was still there and what was more important, it turned out that a phone tap had been requested at the appropriate time.

  “Of course,” Salayev chortled. “The seals were not applied precisely for this reason. No one at the sovkhoz has their own phone at home, and if anyone does have one, they think it more prudent to phone from the office line. It’s incredible what people will get up to when they believe they are more cunning than we are.”

  “And who receives the texts of the phone taps?”

  “Shepilov. In the drugs squad. He was the one who asked for them; he was hoping that something might come of it.”

  “And where is he now, this Shepilov? In the office, I mean?”

  “Let’s see!”

  Salayev phoned, but no one replied. He rang another number, but the phone rang out. The chief of police shrugged his shoulders, “You see how it is! It’s six o’clock and there’s nobody left! A copy of all the phone taps is held at the communications centre. We can go there now.”

  When he had the file of the phone calls to the sovkhoz in his hand, Nazar impatiently turned the pages from the back until he reached the first one, which carried the date of Saidov’s arrest. He read almost exactly the same words that Gasanov had reported:

  “Hello.”

  “Hello. Who’s speaking? Rasul, is that you?”

  “What? No, Rasul is not here.”

  “What do you mean he isn’t there? But who are you?”

  “Gasanov speaking.” “I want to know when Rasul will be back.”

  “Well, I don’t know. He …”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. As soon as he comes in, tell him that the Accountant has called. Did you get that, Gasanov?”

  Here it is! The judge felt the exultance taking over his being. Gasanov wasn’t lying! The Accountant actually exists.

  And I’ll hold onto it, because the phone tap procedure automatically makes it possible to identify the phone that makes the call and to get to the address: 177 Barrikadnaya Street, flat no. 12. The flat is in the name of Pankratov, D.M., who probably does not exist, but Barrikadnaya Street most certainly does, and we need to go there immediately!

  “Salayev! Would you give me a squad? We’re going to get a big fish. What do you think of that?”

  Salayev, who had a cigarette hanging from his mouth, meditated on what to do.

  “Seems to me that it’s worth a go,” he finally acknowledged. “We have been keeping an eye on this Accountant for some time.” Just look at you, the judge thought, you never thought of telling me. How many other things have they not told me? No, this is a complete sham. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have stayed in Moscow…

  “I can’t imagine how Shepilov didn’t notice it!” Salayev continued to consider the various ramifications. “The bastard has a drink problem, but he’ll pay for this. Yes, there must be a squad we could use; I’ll go and make the call. But hold on, Nazar Kallistratovich, what about the search warrant?”

  “What warrant? I’ll sign the warrant myself! You have the forms here?”

  Salayev spread his arms to signify his desolation.

  “Then we’ll go without one,” the judge entreated, but the other man shook his head.

  “No, no, Nazar Kallistratovich, these guys are smart. He’ll probably stand behind the door and shout, ‘Do you have a warrant? Show it to me!’ They know the law better anybody else, and at the trial, his lawyers would just pull us apart.”

  “Well then?”

  “First we go to the Prosecutor’s Office, and there you can sign the warrant. Wait here – just enough time to make a few phone calls.”


  The chief of police disappeared into another room and Nazar was on his own in his office. So long as he’s quick about his phone calls. Suddenly a shiver went down his spine. But who exactly is Salayev phoning? He’s calling for the police car, okay, and perhaps to the Prosecutor’s Office so that they can prepare the mandate, but why did he go through there? No, the guy is stitching me up… Ah, but here he is, thank God. He couldn’t have had time to phone Barrikadnaya Street and tip off our quarry. Or could he?

  “Here I am! Let’s go?”

  “We’re off. You’ve phoned?”

  “Yes! I got Sidorov’s squad, he’s a bright lad. They’ll go directly to the Prosecutor’s Office, and we’ll go in my car.”

  Down in the street, Nazar found Kandayev waiting for orders. For a moment he hesitated: should he bring him along? No, he wanted to keep an eye on Salayev.

  “Dzhafar Alyevich! Thanks for your assistance. I have no more need of you today. You can go home.”

  Ten minutes later, Nazar and Salayev were both at the Prosecutor’s Office and filling in the search warrant. The clerks had gone home, as had the typists: the judge dictated and the chief of police typed. Suddenly a perplexed Salayev looked up at Nazar; he had come up with another difficulty.

  “Hold on!” he cried. “You’re not the investigator responsible for this case! Your authority only concerns the Pashayev case! If you have any reason to believe that the Accountant was involved in that case, then it’s fine with me, but strictly speaking you weren’t allowed to look at those phone taps.

  There’s not a single piece of paper in the records. We’re going to have trouble!”

  “Comrade Salayev, I will take responsibility for everything, and you’ll not lose your armchair over this one! I will declare to whoever I have to that I got a tip-off, and I won’t even mention the phone taps. But please, get a move on!”

  In that moment, a police sergeant appeared at the door; the beanpole with freckles was Sidorov. Salayev explained what needed to be done, and then held out his hand to Nazar.