The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Nazar had been on his guard from the moment the general had appeared in the flat: epiphanies of this kind rarely augur well, but by now he is not only on his guard, he is positively alarmed. In fact, there was hostility in the general’s tone of voice which could not be explained solely by the irritation at seeing someone get in before him, but the tone also had something bitter about it, as though underneath there was an element of – could I possibly be right in this – an element of fear.

  “Well, given that I am in charge of the investigation…”

  “As far as I understand it, the only investigation in Baku that you are in charge of is the murder of Pashayev; nothing else.” “Exactly, and I have well-founded reasons for believing that there is amongst the papers in this flat material pertinent to solving that case.”

  The general takes out a packet of Marlboro, lights a cigarette and throws the wax match on the floor.

  “It so happens, most esteemed Nazar Kallistratovich, that some time ago the KGB initiated our own investigation into this apartment and its occupier, known by the pseudonym ‘Accountant’. And you are well aware that two separate investigations cannot be held on the same case.”

  “That may very well be,” the judge shrugged his shoulders. “But I am not conducting an investigation into this apartment; I am investigating my own case. It is just that those investigations have led me right here.”

  The general flicked his ash on the floor.

  “Let’s not get involved in a legal dispute, your honour. We are both experts in law,” he drawled. “The matter is very straightforward: by virtue of the investigation currently being carried out by my office, I am sequestrating this apartment and everything that is in it. Would you please leave, and I will affix the seals.”

  Nazar slowly gets up from his chair and looks around.

  The general, it appears, has come up on his own, but who knows if he has left someone on the stairs? Sidorov knows that he hasn’t, but he still hasn’t opened his mouth. He’s waiting to see what happens. Another in his place would be cursing his luck, because it is now clear that this is going to be a clash of iron vases, and for an earthenware vase – a mere sergeant in the police force – there is the risk of being shattered into a thousand pieces from one moment to the next. But Sidorov is made of sterner stuff. Would you believe it, he is actually enjoying himself. Reckless fool, you say; well, don’t forget that he’s only a lad. As though in response to the general’s kind invitation, Nazar does in fact go out of the apartment, but only as far as the railing on the landing.

  Down on the first floor, a policeman is casually smoking a cigarette. There is no one else around. Nazar goes back inside; the general is still standing motionless close to the desk, with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth. The judge goes to the window and looks down into the street: the other two policemen are close to the empty car; one of them is chewing marrow seeds and spitting them on the pavement. Nazar exchanges a glance with Sidorov, and notices that he too is quite relaxed. Right then!

  “To apply the seals,” he declares suddenly, “you need a warrant from an investigating judge. Do you have that warrant, general?”

  The general drops his cigarette on the floor and squashes it with his heel. “Ah, so I need a warrant then?”

  “I’m afraid you do need one, comrade general.”

  The general stared at him for a second and narrowed his eyes. “Fine, I’ll go and get one signed. But no mistake about it, I’m coming straight back, Nazar Kallistratovich.”

  The general ran headlong down the stairs, defeated but desperate to get even. What now? Sidorov, completely in the dark, studies Nazar’s face with interest: what will the big man do now – if he is not to waste his victory?

  Lappa sits down heavily behind the desk and drums on it with his fingers. Yes, what should he do? He is sure of one thing: he doesn’t want to leave all the papers in the general’s hands. On consideration, he doesn’t particularly want to remain in that man’s company either. In those narrowed eyes there is too much cold fury – marvellously controlled, it’s true, but that is not at all reassuring. Nazar looks at the time: eight o’clock in the evening. There’ll be no one left in the Prosecutor’s Office, but the general will still get his warrant; there is no use deceiving oneself. What then?

  There is only one thing to do. Nazar lifts the phone and dials Kandayev’s number. The phone rings interminably, but no one replies. Pick it up, damn you, pick it up! If you think about it, there is no reason why Kandayev should be at home. After having driven him about all day, he’ll be wanting to have some fun. He’ll be out drinking and eating.

  He even got a sleep in the afternoon. The bastard, this was the only way out of this…

  “Yes, hello.”

  Thank God, he’s answered.

  “Kandayev? Dzhafar Alyevich, this is Lappa. Listen, I need your help.”

  “For you, anything you want – if I can.”

  “I need an air ticket for Moscow. But immediately! This evening! What time is the last flight?”

  At the other end of the phone, Kandayev goes silent. And how could he know the time of the last flight? But admitting that he doesn’t know is simply impossible. He’s more likely to invent some lie. You know how prickly they can be around here. No, I shouldn’t have spoken to him like that; I must make up for it, always supposing he isn’t already offended. “My dear Dzhafar Alyevich, you’ll have to excuse me; I didn’t express myself very well. What I wanted to say was that I know that this is a lot I’m asking of you, perhaps something that is totally impossible, but who knows, perhaps you know someone here in Baku who is capable of getting me a ticket for Moscow. Of one thing I’m sure: you’re the only one who can help me!”

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do!” Thank God, Kandayev’s voice sounds pleased. Judge Lappa has sweetened the pill very nicely. At the last moment he rectified…

  “I do have a cousin who works at the airport. I’ll ring him now. But just one thing: do you have any cash with you?”

  Of course, money. Fortunately Nazar has spent almost nothing during his stay in Baku, and he left home with notes in his wallet – just a habit. You never know when it may come in handy. Having to pay for the flight out of his own money is disagreeable, but back in Moscow one can always put in for the expenses. “Of course I do! Of course, you can’t expect to get a ticket like that at the official price.

  And listen, I’ve got a lot of baggage! Let’s say,” Nazar stops to make a quick assessment by looking at the shelves, “four crates of stuff! All right? What’s that? And I’m paying for every crate – everything that needs to be paid for!”

  Kandayev takes a good ten minutes to call back. Nazar passes them at the window, and with every car that goes by, he feels that it is about to stop and let out a squad of KGB.

  Luckily, the traffic, even now well into the evening, is more chaotic than ever, and all the streets are unanimously protesting with a chorus of car horns. Surely the general must be stuck at some crossroads. In the meantime Sidorov has brought his men back into the building to block the stairs and the lift – to deal with all eventualities. At last the phone rings: let’s hope it’s him!

  “Lappa.”

  “It’s me, Kandayev. I’ve got the ticket. It’s a transport plane that leaves at 11 o’clock and gets to Moscow in the middle of the night, but they can only carry a few passengers, and you have to reach an agreement with the pilot.” “Dzhafar Alyevich, you don’t know what a relief this is!

  But listen, this is not all! So you’re a wizard, then give me a little more of your wizardry! I need someone who can provide a van and some crates! We need to load some heavy stuff – papers! Yes, don’t laugh, paper is heavier than anything else. Really? Your cousin has a van? You’re a marvel. Listen, I’m at Barrikadnaya Street 177, flat number 12. Do you know where it is? Yes, exactly! Directly opposite the October Cinema, but come immediately! A matter of life and death.”

  And Kandayev
really is there a quarter of an hour later, and the van is such a wreck that it cannot possibly have a certificate of roadworthiness, but what can you do? As for the crates, they have the mark of some sovkhoz: clearly they have previously been used for oranges. Once down in the street, Nazar assesses the situation, “Sergeant! Send up your men with those crates, and have them filled!”

  “With pleasure,” replies Sidorov, revealing his teeth in a foxy grin. He has no idea of the identity of that important man who came up to challenge them, but was pleased enough to spite him. As luck would have it, this Sidorov is indeed reckless; he will not go far in life.

  Once in the van, Nazar suddenly remembers that it is late and the airport is distant; with a bit of luck they’ll make it for the plane, but will Kandayev manage to get home before the curfew?

  “Dzhafar Alyevich! How will you get back home in time?”

  Kandayev is driving in his shirtsleeves, and his window is open in spite of the petroleum and diesel fumes that foul the air; he is holding the wheel in one hand and is cutting the corners on the wrong side of the road to gain a little time. He turns towards the passenger and smiles, “Don’t you worry!

  It’s not the first time, and one way or another I’ll get back home.”

  At the airport, Kandayev’s cousin and the Aeroflot pilot are waiting for them in a filthy little office. Nazar takes his money out, the cousin counts it, removes his cut and passes the rest to the pilot; then he calls two men in oily overalls and has them take the crates to the aeroplane.

  “We were just waiting for you,” the pilot grumbles. “Now we’re off, okay?” Nazar turns to Kandayev.

  “Dzhafar Alyevich! How can I thank you enough? How much was the hire of the van?”

  “Well, let’s say ten roubles,” says Kandayev. Hell, that’s steep. Nothing for it. “Listen, Dzhafar Alyevich, I advise you not to tell anyone of this little trip.

  Understand?”

  It is not the time for extended goodbyes, everyone understands this. They shake hands, and each goes off on his own way. And you too, my most esteemed readers, say your goodbyes to Kandayev; you will not meet him again. He has played his part.

  Now there is one more problem for the judge: something apparently quite laughable, but put yourselves in his shoes.

  Nazar is scared of flying – and on a battered old transport plane, he is even more so. In vain he tells himself that there is no reason to be afraid: every day hundreds, indeed thousands, of planes loaded with people fly and they never or almost never crash. But out of such an enormous quantity an exception is quite insignificant. This is confirmed by the theory of probability. Yes, some hope; I couldn’t care a toss about the theory of probability. From the moment he sat down on a bench in the belly of the Antonov, without even a safety belt, and the plane started up its engines and taxied towards the runway, Nazar has understood the nature of what is happening to him: it is not nausea or indigestion; no indeed, it is quite simply fear. His hands have been sweating and will continue to do so until the plane shuts down its engines on the landing strip at Vnukovo, quite a few hours away. This is a curious matter: when do your hands ever sweat? There can be no reason!

  But sure enough they’re sweating. At some stage in the night, Nazar takes out a book: he has no choice; he cannot spend the entire journey clinging on to the sides with his eyes shut. A pilot is sitting next to him and is also travelling as an unofficial passenger. He has finished his shift and is going home; it is as clear as daylight that travelling by plane is for him like travelling by underground: he is happily reading the paper, and you feel that he might even take off his shoes. So Nazar takes out a book himself – a detective story by Lipatov. He has had it on his bedside table in the hotel for weeks, but he has never managed to finish it, and besides, he has never read anything else by Lipatov; it was just that Asya liked it a lot. Well, he has now read a page, and by the middle of the second one, the letters are beginning to dance in front of his eyes. He has closed it and cannot read another word. But that is not all: in those five minutes he has developed a profound and uncompromising dislike for Lipatov. I believe, in fact, that he will never finish this book, and has no desire to read any of his others, even though the author has written many of them and very successful they were. He puts the detective story back in his bag, and looks out of the plane, which is flying through the night over a sea illuminated by the moon – a wonderful sight – but Nazar has only one thought in his brain: right, it’s flying, but it’s clear that it cannot, it cannot fly and therefore it must fall. And then his reason goes off on its own trajectory – i.e. it continues to reason – but you don’t agree with it, do you? You find it an irrelevance. Of course it can fly perfectly, says reason, but you in your heart of hearts know that this is not so. Planes should crash. And the same thing happens with Lipatov. He’s a famous writer, says reason, it’s just that you shouldn’t have tried reading him just now. If you read him at another time, you’ll probably like him. But in your heart of hearts, you couldn’t care a fuck: no, Lipatov is shit and I’ll never read him again; in fact, my hands start to sweat at the very thought of it! That’s how much Nazar likes flying.

  In the end, tiredness wins the battle. Indeed, what a day that had been. Enough to lose your sanity: is it possible that only twelve hours ago, I was drinking tea with Gasanov in the sovkhoz office, while Saidov’s favourite songs were screeching on the record player? Oh yes, the songs. We cannot really say that Nazar is properly asleep, it is more that certain images and certain sounds that continue to agitate in his brain have suddenly become real, more real than the badly-lit and uncomfortable fuselage. The Turkish music, for example, does not want to stop, but it is no longer on the record-player. It’s like an orchestra in a restaurant: it’s hot, the orchestra itself is too close to the table, and the food has too much pepper, so Nazar, who knows that his hosts like these things, eats and drinks without complaint – out of good manners. The smoke is so dense that he can no longer see the faces of his fellow diners. The only person he can distinguish with any precision is the woman seated next to him; she has brown hair, an olive complexion and an aquiline nose, and is wearing, for reasons that are not altogether clear, a white hospital overall. Nazar, on the other hand, knows that she is an Islamist and has in fact been sent there by the Central Committee to give him assistance. The woman pours herself a glass of red wine and displays her white teeth. She has rolled up the sleeves of her overall, and Nazar notices that her arms are hairy, like those of his wife. But why this foreboding, why this sense of some imminent threat? But look! Here is General Yusuf-zade seated amongst them.

  Unctuously charming, he slips his hand into his pocket and produces these figurines, which he lays out on the table.

  The figurines represent, it appears, Turkish sultans in full regalia, and on each one a label indicates the sultan in question, but in Arab lettering. The general shows Nazar the first figurine. “Sultan Mahmud,” he says, and then begins to explain that sultan’s posture. The strange thing is that, although he is speaking Turkish, Nazar understands every word he says. Then the general moves on to the second figurine. “Sultan Mehmet,” he exclaims in a cordial voice, as though he were introducting him. In that moment, Nazar is inexplicably overcome by a potent sense of terror, and with an enormous effort he wakes from his dream. The plane is landing at Vnukovo.

  Nazar, with his eyes swollen with tiredness, is in the line of passengers, about a dozen in all, waiting to collect their baggage. The Antonov, it appears, was officially travelling without passengers, so the pilot was pocketing quite a tidy sum. And how am I going to carry away those four crates of documents? This sudden doubt hits Nazar at the moment in which there is only one person ahead of him in the queue.

  Up to that moment, it seemed that all his problems would be over on arriving in Moscow. Take a taxi? But where are you going to find a taxi that can load all that stuff? How about going home, getting the car and coming here to pick up one crate at a time; that’s f
our journeys. Unthinkable. Nazar can hardly stand up and there is only one thing he can do: go home and sleep. He’ll leave the crates here to be collected, and tomorrow we’ll drive out from the Prosecutor’s Office with a jeep.

  “Well then?”

  Nazar gives a start and the man in front has wandered off with his cases. Behind the counter, a woman in a blue overall and with her hair wrapped up in a grimy scarf is staring at him severely. “Yes, that’s it, I – I should be collecting the crates, the four crates. But could I leave them here in the warehouse?

  I’ll pay.”

  “Give me the receipt,” the woman drawls, closed within her complete indifference.

  Oh Lord, the receipt. But hold on a moment, what receipt? I haven’t got any receipt; the pilot doesn’t issue receipts – we were travelling illicitly.

  “Excuse me, what receipt are you talking about? I …”

  “If you don’t have a receipt, do not hold up the queue!” the woman orders fiercely. Nazar is confused and moves aside, and the man behind him, an elderly gentleman in civilian clothes but nevertheless with something military about him, puts out his hand to tender a yellow receipt.

  “Excuse me,” Nazar asks him, “but you’ve got a receipt?”

  The man looks at him quizzically.

  “Clearly,” he declares after a pause.

  Nazar remembers now: the man was seated at the end of the aeroplane on a folding chair.

  “Look,” he whispers, “that plane was a transport plane, and we travelled, how can one put it, off-the-books.”

  “Of course,” the other man replied in the same tone as before. “We were travelling without a ticket, but the baggage was travelling in accordance with normal procedures. That’s why I got this receipt.”

  “But they didn’t give me any receipt,” Nazar protested. In the meantime the woman has with great difficulty lifted onto the counter a large cardboard box with foreign script on it and containing at least a video recorder, or perhaps a television. The elderly man grabs it without the slightest embarrassment, loads it on his shoulder and heads for the exit without saying goodbye.