The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  If anything, this one was even more noxious: the Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow had discovered the Accountant’s papers, the same ones that we had gone to such trouble to take out of Judge Lappa’s hands. “The order to arrest both of us is on the desk of the garrison commander. The person who warned me said that we can stay calm, as they won’t come during the day; people like us are only arrested at night,” Musayev went on. He was shaking like a leaf, and while it’s true there are many things he does not know – for example, the whys and wherefores of Pashayev’s elimination or the arms that were coming into the country on the Accountant’s lorries – he did know that those accounts recorded exactly how many roubles he had been pocketing over the years in return for closing an eye or maybe both of them to Artur Yakovlevich’s many escapades. In the current climate, that could be enough to land a man in front of a firing squad. Yes, he was trembling, but I too trembled for a moment, not because I was afraid of General Romanchuk and his soldiers, or indeed that damn judge over there in Moscow, or all the Chief Prosecutors in the USSR; no, I was fearful because my premonition had proved to be correct, and the prediction contained in the Book had started to come true: what we have done can no longer be concealed…

  Yes, I knew I had sinned and that the Lord’s wrath was upon me, the lowliest of His servants. So I persuaded Musayev to go away: Go home, my friend, I said, prepare yourself, and then come back here. They want to arrest us? Well, God help us, we still have to see if they can manage it! This is what I said, feigning a calmness that I was far from experiencing.

  When he eventually went, I took refuge in the zikr, the repetition of Divine Names, as Hadji Muhammad had taught me. We, his followers, do not carry out this practice as the poor people do – that is the peasants on the kolkhoz and the unemployed in the outer suburbs. Theirs is a zikr of the tongue, accompanied by shouts and songs and even a lewd shaking of the body, but ours is a zikr of the heart, which each of us conducts in a low voice or, even better, in silence. Of course, we all choose a teacher most suited to our own temperament, although family and one’s profession do have a considerable influence on that choice. I don’t believe that I would have approached religion with such joy if I had had to mix with people very different from myself. What is more, I know that amongst the people of a lower condition there are many who are weak and treacherous, and willing to sell information out of greed or fear, so the KGB has always known exactly what they were teaching in those meetings. So often have I been able to thank God for belonging to a very different confraternity, in which my brothers are influential and responsible people who have everything to lose and nothing to gain! Thus I did my ritual ablutions with scrupulous care and then I kneeled down on the prayer mat in the position that Hadji Muhammad recommended specifically for me, as one must bend one’s body in the most appropriate way to create the right tension in the spirit: There is no God but God, I murmured and then I started to repeated the ninety-nine Names. As I was seeking comfort, I attempted to concentrate on those Names that would serve me best: He is the Merciful, the Merciful, the Merciful, I repeated until my throat was dry and my breath rasping; He is the Compassionate, the Compassionate, the Compassionate. But my heart did not want to follow my tongue, and it disloyally continued to remember very different Names: He, it whispered to me, is the Wrathful, the Wrathful, the Wrathful; the Vengeful, the Vengeful, the Vengeful…

  Thus I passed the early hours of the morning in this comfort that became a torment, until I eventually fell asleep on the carpet. While I slept, I dreamt a voice was reading the Koran. I don’t know whose voice it was; I only know it was not mine nor that of any man I have known, so pure was his pronunciation of the divine language, and so free of any accent, whether Azeri, Turkish or Persian. Of course the reading filled me with ineffable joy, as can happen in dreams. One verse in particular echoed through my sleeping mind and consoled my very soul. On reawakening, I was slow to understand why that verse rather than any other had brought me such comfort as I got up all stiffly from the carpet, although every letter or rather every line and every dot of every letter naturally encloses within itself all the comfort that God can give man. Yet there are verses that to our weak powers of reason appear to be laden with glittering promises, while others are less easy to decipher. The verse that resounded through my brain in the dream was the fourth of the Sura of the Bee: “He created man from a drop of sperm.” Now awake, I repeated it respectfully in a low voice, as one would expect, but I was perplexed. If only, I thought, my teacher Hadji Muhammad were here! Then I said to myself, Even if you are not learned, you might nevertheless have the forces to open this door, and I started to reflect. I meditated on a drop of sperm, glossy like a pearl and round like the Earth; from it we all were generated. Yes, I thought, such a little thing is man compared with the immensity of God! And everything that man exudes, be it sperm, sweat or blood, is blended once more by God and is needed to build His construction, so we must not be sparing in our treatment of it, but should shed it and spill it generously.

  And so I understood that the dream had also been sent by God, and He after all was not angry with me, and I should not be anxious about the blood I had spilled, and the memory of that dead man would no longer obsess me.

  And so I took my decision. I shall be gone from here before Musayev comes back to get me: indeed it is not with such comrades that you should go into hiding, but on your own. The techniques learnt at the KGB training school will stand me in good stead. Neither judge nor army general will be able to track me down; Anisimov might at least be capable, but I will take good care to keep myself out of his range. My wife and sons are sleeping; not even the arrival of the captain woke them; nor will my departure wake them.

  They are in the habit of rising late in the day. Of course they will suffer, but my absence will not last forever, and in the meantime it is better that they know nothing about this. It means that I will spill no sperm into Amaral’s womb for a few weeks, perhaps even a month, but I will offset the amounts by spilling more sweat and perhaps even more blood – my sweat and other people’s blood. It may be that my disappearance into the ether is not only an escape, but also a means for preparing the triumph of our cause, inasmuch as it depends on my efforts. I will certainly do my utmost to keep my enemies at bay and make them regret the moment they put my back to the wall. Indeed it is written, “They scheme and scheme, and I too scheme and scheme” (Koran, LXXXVI, 15-16). I am well aware that I am alone against many, and all of them shall encircle me, but not in the right place. When the right moment comes, I will reapear where they least expect me, and with God’s help, I shall prevail, because I am Zia! And the man has not yet been born who can get the better of me…

  XXXI

  Foul weather has the wolves wandering in

  Moscow, December 1988

  Six in the morning. Having scrambled blindly to switch off the alarm, Nazar rubbed his eyes swollen with sleep, and then he swung his legs down from the bed and yawned. For some reason, he found it increasingly difficult to get up in the morning, especially in winter… The previous evening it had been snowing, but judging by the noise coming from the street below, the snow had transformed into icy slush – foul weather! While Nazar, still half asleep, was going for a wash, Misha leapt down from his cot: he, for one, was not sleepy and had probably been awake for a bit, waiting for the beneficent alarm bell to bring Mummy and Daddy back to life. Barefoot and dressed in pyjamas, he went to the window, climbed on a chair and studied the dark outside.

  “Look, look! Rain!” he announced. Then he jumped on his parents’ bed and from there he padded off still barefoot to the kitchen, followed by Asya and his missing slippers.

  “Rain in kitchi too!” he exclaimed in astonishment, after having looked out of that window.

  “Mishanya! Come here and put your slippers on!” Asya scolded him, and finally she managed to grab hold of him.

  “You know that you must never go around in bare feet!”

  �
��Why?” asked the child. For a few weeks this had become his stock question; no longer “Wha’s that?” but simply “Why?” He was unconsciously following Aristotle’s philosophical method step by step: after having given a name to things, you need to pose the problem of causes…

  “Why! Why! Because if you don’t, you’ll catch a cold!”

  “Why?” Misha continued his refrain.

  “Because your little feet get cold,” Asya explained. “Now go and get a wash!”

  When they came back into the kitchen, Nazar was slicing bread and the buckwheat porridge was simmering on the cooker. “Try and get a move on, or we’ll be late again,” Asya warned. “Nazar, when he’s eaten his porridge, put his boots and red cape on.”

  Misha frowned on hearing the plan.

  “No like!”

  “What don’t you like?” the father enquired as he poured the porridge into a bowl. “Wed cape!” the boy explained.

  Nazar stood in front of him and looked him up and down with an ironic expression. “Why?” he asked.

  Misha did not find the joke amusing; he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but as prickly as a general’s wife, “Don’ speak to me! Only me speak to me!” he protested.

  His father was about to laugh, but stopped himself. There was always the chance that the child would be even more offended and then start to cry. So he tried to persuade the boy, “Listen, Mishanya, you have to put the red cape on, because mummy said so.”

  “But… he not want!” the child objected, referring to himself. It might have just been a simple misunderstanding – that habit of using the third person instead of the first, but it did give his assertions an appearance of unarguable impartiality.

  “Really, doesn’t he want it? Well, you just eat up your porridge and daddy will tell you a story. It’s about a cape. So once upon a time, there was a little boy who had a red cape…”

  “Like one I got?”

  “Just like yours. Only he had decided that he didn’t like the cape, and he never wanted to put it on. The red cape was very sad, because the boy didn’t want it and it had to spend the whole day shut up in the wardrobe and never got out of the house. Now in the wood, close to where he lived, there was a wolf who has just got it into his head that he wants to eat the little boy up…”

  Asya, who had just come back into the kitchen, listened to the new version of Little Red Riding Hood, curious to know whether this ploy would make the well-known cape acceptable, but at that moment the doorbell rang. Nazar and Asya looked at each other. Who could it be at this time of day? Not perhaps – no, surely not in these more liberal times! And yet that fear remains. It is too deeply rooted in every one of us – the doorbell early in the morning makes your blood run cold. It would have the same effect even if you moved to Switzerland or Vermont…

  “Who can that be?” Asya muttered. Misha looked up and encountered his mother’s worried looked and smiled mischievously, “Peraps it a WOLF!” On seeing that his mother wasn’t laughing and nor was his father – in fact both their faces suddenly looked very tense – he regretted his playfulness.

  “But no – don’t wowwy, not wolf, not wolf,” he reassured them and stretched his arms towards them.

  “No, it’s not the wolf,” Nazar muttered and he got up to open the door.

  On the landing, he found a familiar figure: Andrey Antonovich Panfilov, the chairman of the Housing Committee.

  “Good morning, Comrade Lappa. Can I come in?”

  Nazar asked him in and Andrey Antonovich did not look very relaxed. He shook his head when Asya offered him something to eat, a coffee or perhaps a little shot of something stronger.

  “No thank you, I… Listen, I wanted to come here in person, and I knew if I came later, I wouldn’t have found you. That explains the unusual time to come calling…”

  Nazar and Asya looked at each other in amazement.

  “In short,” declared the chairman of the Housing Committee, “this is how things stand: we have received a report that states that you are living here without a proper entitlement…”

  “But you must be joking, Andrey Antonovich!” Nazar exclaimed. “You know perfectly well that I have been here for twenty-five years, since…” and he wanted to say, since I married my first wife, but for some reason he went silent.

  Misha didn’t know anything about that story and for the first time since the child was born, Nazar realised that he was listening to everything and understanding it…

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Panfilov nervously agreed. “But the query concerns the grounds on which the accommodation was allocated.”

  “What grounds?” Nazar was losing his patience. “It was allocated and that’s that!”

  “Excuse me, Comrade Lappa, do you have the relevant documents?”

  “Off the top of my head, I have no idea where they are,”

  Nazar acknowledged. Lost, he thought to himself, twentyfive years have gone by! Who knows where the documents ended up? Perhaps Nina took them.

  “Excuse me,” Asya butted in aggressively, “could we perhaps know the reason for this interrogation?” “This is how things stand,” Panfilov started to explain, not without a trace of embarrassment; “the committee has received a report… what I mean is that we have been asked to gather information, because the allocation does not appear to have been registered properly.”

  “And did you have to come at this time of day to check this out? We have got to go to work, and our child is already late for nursery school!” Asya pressed the unwelcome visitor.

  “No, but it has been put to us as a matter of some urgency,” Panfilov sought to justify himself.

  “Andrey Antonovich, you know very well where I work. If we have to produce the documents, you can be assured that we will find them, but do me a favour, submit your complaint in writing in the appropriate form,” asserted Nazar, who was now recovering from his initial disorientation.

  Now it was Panfilov’s turn to back down, “What do you mean, in writing? There is no form for this,” he tried to explain. “I simply wanted to verify… I understand, we’ll see what we can do!” He was now in disorderly retreat.

  When the door closed behind him, Nazar and Asya looked at each other, and he exploded, “But this is incredible! On what grounds, he says, was it allocated…”

  “You know what I think?” Asya said slowly, resting her hands on the table. “There must be someone after this apartment…”

  Nazar shook his head, “Do you know what I think it is?

  Someone wants to create trouble for me. They want me to know that I am standing on their toes, but they have the means to make me regret it.”

  “You’re joking?” Asya opened her eyes wide.

  “No, I’m not joking… It has already happened, you know?

  A colleague of mine was investigating some business with the mafia and he actually lost his flat. He was wandering around Moscow for a couple of years and sleeping in the stations… But, don’t upset yourself!” seeing Asya go pale. “It couldn’t happen now; the press would get hold of it and they would defend us… But they wanted to warn me – that much is clear.”

  In that moment, they realised that Misha was standing between them and following their arguments open-mouthed.

  “What Mama say?” he asked pulling at his father’s jacket. “Nothing, Misha,” replied Nazar, bending down and stroking his head. “Don’t you worry. It is nothing important.”

  But the child was not convinced. He understood very well that his parents were worried, and it was all the fault of that strange man who had just left. He went up to his mother and touched her hand. “Come here I tell you something.

  Something you like.” And when Asya bent down to listen, he said, “Now I wear the wed cape. You happy now?”

  Asya, of course, wanted to cry. This can easily happen with the parents of small children. They don’t react like normal people, for whom such baby talk is little more than an insignificant, perhaps even mawkish, babble, but
they, the parents find that it contains endless gems of innocent wisdom… Without any embarrassment she sought out Nazar’s eyes and found they were glistening. She squeezed his hand forcefully.

  “I am so happy,” she said and then turned so that the child did not see her crying, otherwise who knows what he would have thought. “Come on, let’s get going; we’re already late. Say goodbye to Daddy. You won’t see him till the evening…”

  When Nazar got out on the sleety street, he realised that the early morning visit had in fact unsettled his nerves. He tried to convince himself that what he had told Asya was true: those days were over and now there was transparency and even, one might say, democracy. The methods of the past are no longer acceptable… However, the fact that Andrey Antonovich came in person meant that behind the so-called report there was someone who needed to be listened to. The chairman of the Housing Committee would not have gone to all that trouble for any old anonymous letter! And now that he thought about it, it was quite possible that Dyakonov or perhaps even Polad-zade had friends, shall we call them, on Moscow council… Nazar was about to get into his car, but then stopped and put his keys back in his pocket; he leaned down to look at the front lefthand wheel and checked the bolts, and then he slowly went round his Moskvich and repeated the same check on each of the other wheels. No, it appeared that nothing had been touched. Another judge had got into his car one day and as soon as he drove off, he saw one of his wheels shooting off on its own, because some of the bolts had come loose during the night. That colleague nearly crashed his car, and he too had been investigating some traffickers, just like the other colleague who lost his house and slept in the stations…

  An increasingly anxious Nazar drove off to the prison where Dyakonov was being held on remand. The investigation into the trafficking organised by the Accountant could now be considered over, and the operation’s main purpose of interrupting the illicit import of guns across the Iranian border had been achieved, although the failure to arrest General Yusuf-zade, who had literally disappeared from under the noses of the soldiers sent to arrest him, had somewhat detracted from its success. Yet to Nazar’s way of thinking, there were too many loose ends that had to be cleared up before they could close the file. Why, for instance, would the Commander of the KGB, one of the most powerful men in the Republic and closely linked to Geydar Alyev, compromise himself with gunrunning, and do so, it should be noted, before Alyev’s power started to crumble? Certainly not for money, as he could have pocketed much more just by turning a blind eye to the Accountant’s extortion and drug trafficking. No, there must have been another, perhaps more personal, reason which Nazar was unaware of… And when we’re talking about truths that haven’t turned up for the roll-call, who killed Pashayev? The investigation was originally into the dead ayatollah, and you couldn’t in all fairness close it without charging someone in court for having committed the crime! So Nazar had decided to interview the Accountant one last time, and with the agitation he now felt over Andrey Antonovich’s visit, this further investigation seemed more pressing than ever.