The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  We drank. She took another gulp from the cup, then went over to the washbasin, got more cold water and came back to the table.

  ‘Don’t get any ideas, I’m not a drinker, it’s just to keep my strength up and help fight the empty time . . .There’s nothing to do here. Float along, work, drink. But when we get home or we moor somewhere – then you can have a bit of culture in your life. Buy a book, watch a movie . . . Do you read books?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, reading books . . .’ Dasha nodded and fell silent, pondering.

  ‘Only that’s not enough,’ she added about two minutes later when she emerged from her deliberations and gazed into my eyes.

  Her eyes were brown.

  Someone knocked on the window of the cabin.

  ‘What?’ Dasha shouted.

  ‘Can I come in?’ a rather gruff woman’s voice asked. ‘For a talk . . .’

  ‘No, you can’t, Katya. We can do all the talking we like tomorrow in the workshop!’

  There was the sound of footsteps that seemed too heavy for a woman receding from the window.

  ‘She wanted to have a talk!’ said Dasha, jerking her chin indignantly in the direction of the window. ‘When she took Vaska from me, she didn’t want to talk then. But as soon as he tells her where to get off, then it’s “Can I come in?” If you want to sleep, don’t mind me, you can get undressed and lie down. I will myself, in about five minutes . . . I’ll just go out first for a cigarette . . .’

  She got up off the bed.

  Left alone, I quickly took off my jeans and T-shirt and climbed in under the light blanket. ‘I wonder,’ I thought. ‘What would Shevchenko have done if he found himself in my situation? How would he have behaved with this Dasha? Would his doleful love for women have extended even to her, this strong young woman with her coarse, motherly kindness? She certainly has something of a “homeland” about her – it doesn’t matter which one. Yes indeed, the comparison seems a perfectly natural one – a country of a woman. Self-sufficient, determined, independent . . .’

  Some man walked by outside the window, swearing quietly. When his hollow footsteps faded away, my thoughts had already turned in a different direction. I was thinking about the future, the near future that I was always heading towards. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought, ‘if only I, a Russian, could find these notes by the Kobza player? What a contribution to the promotion of friendship between two fraternal peoples!’ And with that thought I fell asleep.

  18

  ALL THE NEXT day we floated down the Volga–Caspian Canal, which I at first had taken for the Volga. But Dasha enlightened me.

  ‘Wait till we get out into the Caspian, kitten – it won’t be so calm then,’ she said in the morning as she glanced out of the window, through which the only thing that could possibly look calm was the bright blue sky, since there was nothing else to see.

  Then she went off to her factory workshop and didn’t come back until almost six in the evening. And I stayed in the cabin, either sitting and thinking or dozing. Basically building up my strength. In the evening I wandered round the perimeter of my level, scrutinising the inhabitants of the fish-processing plant as they walked by in groups or one at a time. Just normal people, except that their eyes were red and some of them seemed to be really blazing. I realised that living and working in the same place was fraught with the danger of psychological deviance. I even remembered that they had explained something to us at school about the difficulties of one-man and two-man space flights – to make it clear that, sadly, wanting to be a cosmonaut and being one in reality had nothing at all in common. But it would clearly be quite wrong to compare the difficulties of life on a floating fish-processing plant and those faced by cosmonauts. There were a lot of people here of different sexes and different ages. And they found ways of passing the time to match their own level of development and power of imagination. And the very fact that their glances didn’t even linger on me indicated that they were not suffering from loneliness or a lack of new faces.

  I leaned my chest against the wall of the deck and looked at the grey bank floating past in the distance.

  The swollen, reddish sun was hanging in the sky on the other side of the vessel, so the approach of evening was especially noticeable here. The water down below was silver. The same calm filled the air and my soul. And having clattered their shoes across the ringing iron of the deck, the people had gone off to the various places where they intended to drink or simply talk.

  After filling myself up with the freshness of the damp evening air, I went back to the cabin. We ate canned fish again and drank vodka slowly, washing it down with water. And once again Dasha spoke matter-of-factly about the events of the working day.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re setting the freezer belt and the canning line going,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘There’s fish in the freezer for four days’ work, just enough to last until we start taking in fresh fish – we’ll empty the freezer. Run off about ten tonnes’ worth of cans . . . pity there’s only mackerel and herring in the freezer . . . If a sturgeon ever gets caught, whoever spots it, grabs it. And I’m not on the belt, I’ll be on quality control this time . . . Listen, what are you going to Mangyshlak for? Not some kind of opium courier are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I want to take a look at Shevchenko’s fort . . . and wander round the places he went to . . .’

  ‘And what’s he to you?’ Dasha asked.

  ‘Well, a poet, a champion of the national idea . . .’

  ‘Like Zhirinovsky?’

  ‘No, he was calm and quiet. He wrote poems about women . . . with compassion . . .’

  ‘Did he feel sorry for women then?’

  ‘He did,’ I confirmed.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Dasha said sincerely. She thought about it. ‘I don’t really read poems. I’ve read a few books about Angelique and Gorky’s Mother. I like Gorky more, but Angelique’s more amusing. I don’t remember who wrote it . . . but even when I was a kid I didn’t really like poems. Only when Robert Rozhdestvensky read on TV – I listened then. But he only used to read on 8 March . . .’

  She yawned, covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘I’m feeling pretty sleepy,’ she said in a tired voice. Then, taking no notice of me, she took off her cotton dressing gown with the faded flowers, leaving herself in nothing but beige-coloured pants or shorts and a cotton bra, also with a flower pattern.

  She climbed in under the blanket.

  ‘Turn out the light!’ she told me. ‘And finish the vodka, if you can. It’s not good to leave tears in the bottle . . .’

  There really was a little bit of vodka left on the bottom of the bottle, and I poured it into my glass. Then I turned out the light and, with my glass in my hand, walked along the internal corridor to the outer edge of the deck. I leaned against the deck rail and watched the water shifting between a green patina and shimmering silver.

  There were big, bright stars in the sky. Three of them, hanging low down, and above them all the other small stars, as countless as a swarm of midges in the night clustered round the only lamp lighting up the road.

  Behind my back the window of someone’s cabin was lit up, and there was a loud, jolly conversation going on inside. Glasses clinked and events from the past were recalled – ordinary things that happen to everyone many times in their lives. But here, against the background of merriment and the vodka, it was natural to listen to them with thoughtful respect, and even I stood there, stock-still, for about fifteen minutes. As I listened, I smiled. It was like some evening in a village. A glass with the final drops of vodka in my hand. Stars in the sky. A window behind my back and voices talking behind the window.

  I finished off the vodka. After I got back to the cabin, I gradually fell asleep to the sound of Dasha’s gentle but persistent snoring.

  19

  THE NEXT EVENING the fish-processing plant sailed out into the Caspian Sea. The early stars were g
limmering gently and unobtrusively in a sky that was still bright. The workers of the floating giant were strolling around its outer deck. I was standing at the side and looking at the water – Dasha had told me that as soon as we entered the Caspian, the water would turn green.

  A group of women walked by, laughing, and the smell of fresh fish was left hanging in the air around me. But thirty seconds later, the clear, salty breeze had driven it away.

  The processing plant was swaying on the low waves, and that was a new sensation for me. Earlier I had found it hard even to imagine that any waves could be strong enough to set this massive hulk swaying, but now I understood that the Caspian Sea could do anything: refresh you, feed you or drown you . . .

  ‘Hey, kitten, be careful, don’t go catching cold!’ I heard Dasha’s voice say behind me.

  ‘It’s not all that cold,’ I replied without looking round.

  ‘The winds here on the Caspian are treacherous – they blow straight through you,’ Dasha said knowingly. ‘Let’s go back into the cabin.’

  I woke up in the morning with a thick head. The processing plant was still swaying – no doubt that was the reason for my restless night and the difficulty I had in waking up. Dasha was already in her workshop. There was a can of ‘Caspian Herring’ on the table, with the familiar short knife and a pickled cucumber.

  ‘Considerate,’ I thought, looking at the breakfast that had been left for me.

  I ate and then got washed. I looked out past the curtain – the sky had a leaden shimmer. The weather seemed to have changed for the worse.

  How much longer would I have to keep sailing with them? It wasn’t as if the journey was actually unpleasant, but I was starting to tire of its sheer monotony: always the same canned food, the same sea. Only the sky actually changed colour, but otherwise everything was always the same.

  Somewhere in the corridor a muffled but incredibly loud mechanical voice started speaking. I bounded over to the door, opened it and listened.

  ‘Medical assistant report immediately to workshop 3!’ the loudspeaker repeated.

  The voice summoned the medical assistant to workshop 3 another three times, and then everything went quiet again.

  Twenty minutes later Dasha suddenly arrived back at the cabin. She was dressed in overalls that had once been white and she had a green headscarf over her head. Her face was red and her eyes were sparkling.

  ‘A short day!’ she said with a little smile, pulling off the headscarf and letting her chestnut hair tumble down on to her shoulders. They’ve stopped the belt . . .’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘An emergency. The girls forced that drunk Mazai into a corner and sliced the top of his prick off. While the others held him down, Mashka tossed the knob into the batching bin, so it went to get canned with the fish . . .What an uproar there was!’ Dasha laughed. ‘Him dashing around the place, stopping the belt and opening the cans – looking for his knob in the herring . . .’

  ‘Well, did he find it?’

  ‘How could he? Five hundred cans had come off the line – you couldn’t open them all, and if he did find it, what would he do, sew it back on? Eh?’

  I shrugged. ‘The doctors can sew anything back on now, except a head,’ I said.

  ‘And where will you find any doctors here? We’ve got one medical assistant, Kolya, he used to be a vet, then he retrained to deal with people. He just came, poured some antiseptic over Mazai’s stump and bandaged it up – so much for sewing anything back! Someone will buy that can! Ha, they’ll think they’ve got a cod’s liver!’

  I was unable to share Dasha’s merriment. I even felt rather sad.

  ‘And who is it that goes digging up graves in the middle of the night?’ my own mind sneered spitefully in response to my change of mood. ‘Ah, but graves are a different matter altogether,’ I objected. ‘Anyone lying in a grave is already dead, they couldn’t care less if the grave is dug up or not. Perhaps they might even be glad to see someone taking an interest in them even after they’re dead . . .’

  Completely unembarrassed by my presence, Dasha changed into a pink sarafan, and washed her hands and face. Then she sat down on her bed, still with that smile on her round face.

  ‘There’s going to be a gale tonight, so we can’t drink today,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’

  I thought about it. And meanwhile she leaned down under the table and took out two cans of Caspian Herring.

  I must have pulled some kind of face at the sight of those cans. Dasha giggled and said: ‘Don’t worry. This is an old lot, the girls didn’t throw anything in here . . .’

  We dined, but I didn’t really enjoy the food.

  ‘I’ll go and have a smoke,’ said Dasha. She stood up and went out of the cabin, taking the empty cans with her.

  The gale struck at about eight o’clock. It blew up suddenly and powerfully. Dasha was already lying in her bed, but I was standing at the side, clinging on tight to the rail. I watched the bituminous black water rear up to a height of several metres. The waves didn’t strike against the side, as I expected, instead they tried to toss the floating fish-processing plant up out of the water.

  At first this happened lightly and gently, but after a little while the swell picked up momentum and began lifting the plant and tossing it around like a little toy boat. In my fright I almost tumbled overboard and I retreated, locking the heavy iron door with its side clamps behind me. I went back to the cabin.

  Dasha seemed to be asleep, although I couldn’t hear her usual snoring. In any case, she wasn’t making any sound, just lying there with her face to the wall. The cabin staggered and I staggered with it, trying to keep my balance. I quickly got undressed and lay down under the blanket, but almost immediately a blow from the storm threw me out on to the floor. I grabbed hold of the iron leg of the table, got up and lay back down on the bed. But five minutes later another blow threw me on to the floor again.

  ‘Come here, kitten!’ I heard Dasha’s voice say gently. ‘You’re too light. You haven’t got enough weight to keep you on the bed!’

  That was when I realised why most of the women working in the processing plant were so large and rotund. I took my blanket and moved across to Dasha’s bed, and although it was cramped in there, that side of the cabin proved to be ‘less dangerous during artillery bombardments’, as they used to write on the streets of Leningrad during the seige.

  And Dasha put her heavy arm round me, tenderly restraining my light body and so protecting it against the fearsome Caspian storm.

  I woke up thoroughly impregnated with Dasha’s warmth and the smell of fish that was exuded, for some reason, by her armpits. Dasha was sleeping sweetly, and I didn’t want to wake her, so I lay there without moving. And to escape from the smell of fish, I stuck my left hand under my nose. Enveloped in the scent of cinnamon, I felt free of all irritation.

  20

  THE STORM ABATED by noon the next day. Its place was taken by the military monotony of endless low waves moving in unison. These waves were weak, and even en masse they were unable to set the processing plant swaying. It proceeded confidently about its industrial business, firmly on course to celebrate the achievement of ever-new production targets, which must have provided a pleasant contrast to the background conveyor-line monotony of its life. Its double existence continued to astonish me. Even though it was a clear and obvious fact, the very concept of a floating or wandering factory seemed absolutely fantastic to me. And even my personal presence on board still did not prove to me the reality of my surroundings and what was happening in them. Although, you might say, what was really so very surprising about it? The factory ship goes sailing on, the captain chooses his course, the factory director takes care of production, and the two of them together feed the country with canned fish. But no, it still doesn’t sound real . . .

  I took a can of Caspian Herring out of the locker under the table, opened it, inspected the contents to make sure they included no foreign bodies an
d then had lunch.

  Dasha was in the workshop. I still didn’t know where her workshop was, above this deck or below it. But it wasn’t that important. I didn’t work there.

  After lunch I stood at the side, watching the junction between sea and sky. Every now and then the dots of ships appeared on the hazy, quivering line of the horizon, and that made the sea seem small and cramped to me. I wasn’t afraid of this sea – surely it would be hard to get lost in it . . . But then, who could tell, better not try . . .

  A couple of days later Dasha announced that the following night there would be a schooner that would drop me off at Mangyshlak. I was absolutely delighted by the news and began waiting impatiently.

  What I remember most vividly about the night-time transfer to a fishing schooner are the strange metallic noises. The schooner came right up alongside, and sacks full of something metal were tossed down on to it from the lowest perimeter deck. At first I thought the sacks contained cans of fish, but when they started tossing down canned fish, not in sacks, but in cardboard boxes tied round with string, I immediately realised I was wrong.

  Meanwhile, the nocturnal loading operation continued. I stood beside the stocky Vanya, whom Dasha had charged with putting me on the schooner. He kept a careful eye on what was going on, every now and then exchanging shouts with two fishermen on the schooner. Finally he yelled: ‘That’s it. All debts are paid. And you can take this lad ashore!’ So saying, he slapped me on the shoulder, which made me start. A man down below nodded. Vanya threw my blue-and-yellow rucksack down on to the schooner. The rucksack clattered heavily against the deck – Dasha had filled it generously with cans of fish as a farewell gift, and now it probably weighed fifteen or twenty kilograms.

  ‘All right, now jump!’ said Vanya, looking at me. It was three metres down to the schooner, and it was swaying slightly with the waves. I felt a little afraid.

  ‘Come on, come on, stop playing the coward,’ Vanya urged me. I clambered over the side wall and froze again, suspended above the schooner’s deck.