‘That’s nonsense. There isn’t any old well there . . .’
‘Well, there used to be. We’ll have to look for it.’
‘Then you’ll do the looking.’
I looked Petro in the eye. ‘I shouldn’t have untied him,’ I thought. ‘This joint venture is not going to end well.’
Soon Galya and Gulya came back, each bringing an armful of the meagre desert brushwood. They lit a fire and set the tripod with the cooking pot over it.
The women worked away without speaking, but they worked together, which surprised me greatly. I also spotted a couple of sidelong glances that Petro cast at his girlfriend.
We ate buckwheat again for supper. In silence. We drank tea. It was already getting dark, but something made us reluctant to sleep. Either we were too wide awake or we were afraid of waking in the night to find ourselves tied up and playing the role of prisoners again. We sat there in silence until Galya suddenly started singing a Ukrainian song.
In that desert place her voice sounded strange and foreign, but beautiful. She sang about a Cossack who went off to war against the Turks and was killed and about the black-haired beauty whose husband never returned to her.
Not long after the Ukrainian song, Gulya took me completely by surprise and started to sing in a very pleasant voice. She sang in the Kazakh language and the melody and her voice were both in the subtlest possible harmony with the sand and the mountains. I remembered her sister Natasha’s song. Of course, Natasha’s voice was brighter and stronger, but Gulya’s voice had a hypnotic emotional power. I sat absolutely still, listening without understanding the words. She sang for a long time, and when she stopped, the quality of the silence seemed to have changed, it had become whiter and purer.
‘What were you singing about?’ Galya asked.
‘It’s a song about two nomads who met one day in the desert. One had a son in his family, and the other had a daughter, and they fell in love at first sight. Each set of parents tied up their own child and set off in a different direction. And when the camels had carried them far away from each other, the father said to his bound son: “When I was as you are now, I also fell in love with the daughter of a nomad whom we met by chance travelling across the desert. And my father did the same thing to me. I suffered for a long time, but in the end I forgot my grief. And then my father found me a bride, and she and I were happy. And if it had been otherwise, we would not have had you for a child, but someone else.” And the girl’s mother told her daughter exactly the same story about herself, and about how she had suffered for many years and finally married according to her father’s choice. And there was just one thing that the father of the boy who fell in love and the mother of the girl who fell in love failed to notice: they didn’t recognise each other – for they were the ones who had met in the same way in the desert so many years before, and their parents had bound them and carried them away, just as they had done to their children.’
These two songs not only brought the evening closer, they seemed to dispel our mutual suspicions. We unhurriedly laid out our bed mats and settled down for the night not far away from each other in yet another hollow between two rocky projecting tongues of the Aktau.
Before I fell asleep, I thought for a long time about various ways of overcoming international barriers and mistrust. The atmosphere that the two songs had created no longer seemed magical to me. I could see that the situation was as old as the world itself, that it is the women of warring nations who bring peace and tranquillity into the world with their singing, and this is not surprising, but quite natural. This is the universal, ancient means for pacifying conflicts between nations at every level. Of course, other means do exist. When the Ukrainian Miklukho-Maklai landed on the shore of Papua and found himself facing an agitated crowd of armed natives, he demonstratively lay down to sleep right there on the sand. We shall never know what the Papuans thought about him at that moment. It is hard to imagine Miklukho-Maklai landing on the beach and suddenly breaking into the Ukrainian song ‘Unhitch the Horses, Lads’ for the Papuans. In that case, for everything to end peacefully, he would have needed a simultaneous interpreter. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘songs are good for settling conflicts between nations, but not between races.’
I lay there, tired, with my arm round Gulya, who was already asleep, and looked up at the stars. Petro’s snoring seemed to me like a peaceful melody, setting the mood for good dreams. I lay there and pondered in time to this snoring until I fell asleep.
38
MY SLEEP WAS leaden and its conclusion was repulsive and sickening. I was woken by pain in my arms and legs. My hands were tied behind my back again, and my wrists were aching where my skin was twisted by the rope, which restrained them far more tightly than the previous time. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘that’s what you get for believing in songs.’ I rolled over on to my side and for a while I couldn’t understand a thing. There in front of me, also bound and lying in the same position, were Gulya, and Petro, and Galya. I was so astounded by this sight that I forgot about my own bonds for a while. We were awake but in a state of shock, and none of us said anything as we mentally digested what had happened. All kinds of guesses flashed through my mind, most of them best suited to movies about Red Indians in America. I couldn’t see anyone else around who could be the owner of the ropes restraining us. And the silence was beginning to give me the jitters, making me afraid of the unknown.
I forced my thoughts to slow down. I tried to analyse things calmly. If the Ukrainians had been tied up as well as me, perhaps it was Kazakhs who were responsible?
But then, they had tied Gulya up too. Perhaps they had tied us during the night and not got a good look at her. And they would come back soon, and then, if they were Kazakhs, Gulya would find a way to talk to them. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to sing.
The silence was suddenly broken by loud footsteps from behind the nearest tongue of stone. It sounded as if someone was deliberately stamping as he walked in order to make us feel afraid. Petro heard the steps too and turned his head in their direction.
The man who emerged from behind the tongue of stone was not an Afghani mujahedin or a Kazakh, but a strapping Slav in an Adidas tracksuit. He looked about fifty years old.
His well-tended moustache and the gleam of his smoothly shaved cheeks didn’t really fit in with the wild beauty of the desert or even with our own rather wild appearance.
‘Mafia!’ I thought, but then almost immediately I felt a sense of bewilderment. Who were we? What had we done to deserve the honour of being ambushed and bound in the night? Nobody would pay a ransom, at least not for me, and almost certainly not for Galya and Petro either. That left Gulya, but although it seemed to me that she at least was worth taking captive without any prospects of a ransom, wouldn’t it have been simpler just to kidnap her while we were sleeping, if they were so crafty?
The Adidas man with the moustache stopped, looking down at Petro with a spiteful glance that bored right through him.
‘Well then?’ he asked in a surprisingly velvety voice, leaning down until his face was just above Petro’s head. ‘It wasn’t enough for you to organise rallies and arrange other disgraceful incidents all over Kiev, you had to come to Kazakhstan as well! Just you wait – when we get back home, I’ll teach you a lesson! We have an entire video about you already!’
‘Phooh!’ said Petro and spat off to the side. ‘Just look who’s come visiting! Mr Colonel . . . what’s your name and patronymic?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘I know, but Rooski over there,’ said Petro, with a nod in my direction, ‘might not have seen you before.’
‘My name is Vitold Yukhimovich Taranenko, Colonel of the SBU,’ the Adidas man declared, glancing in my direction with no particular interest. The person he was interested in was obviously lying on the mat in front of him with his hands and feet tied. ‘And who are your chums here?’ he asked, half squatting down and leaning even closer to Petro.
‘T
hey’re no more my friends than you are, Mr Colonel.’
‘A pity,’ Taranenko drawled. ‘And I was hoping you would make friends! You made friends with Captain Semyonov! Politics is all well and good, but human relationships are quite a different matter! Right, Galya?’ He turned to look at the black-haired Ukrainian woman.
She turned her head away without saying anything. Although until then she had been watching the colonel attentively.
‘Well, OK,’ the colonel chuckled, then got up and came over to me. ‘Right then, Nikolai Ivanovich Sotnikov, I’m pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t shake hands,’ I said, trying to be impertinent.
‘You can do that later,’ he said, leaning down and peering into my face. ‘How excellent that we’ve all met up today like this,’ Colonel Taranenko said in a sing-song voice as he unwrapped a stick of chewing gum.
He popped the gum into his mouth, chewed it and continued in a quite different, serious voice.
‘Well now, whether you like it or not, we’re all one big happy family now. Although first of all we’ll have to learn to trust each other. We have a single assignment . . . that is, you have an objective, and I have an assignment. But in the given situation it comes to the same thing.’
He went back behind the tongue of rock and re-emerged carrying a tightly packed canvas rucksack. He set it beside our things, opened it and took out a small folding chair. He unfolded the chair and sat down.
My neck started to hurt – in order to see the colonel I had to lie in a twisted position. And there he was, sitting on his little chair in laid-back style with his legs stretched.
‘Well now, let me you inform you in more specific terms about the present situation,’ he began. ‘First of all, you have to understand that the financial difficulties of the country have inevitably affected the SBU. We now have to get by with less manpower and rely more on outside help. But, as you no doubt understand, no one offers us help of their own accord. And so we exploit the passive assistance of our citizens. This approach is entirely justified when the interests and objectives of potential helpers coincide with our own. Effectively we – that is the SBU – provide far more help to our helpers than they do to us, but then it’s the result that’s important, not who helps whom the most! If not for us, no one in UNA-UNSO would ever have known that Shevchenko’s secret treasure existed, or that the Russian citizen Sotnikov had already set out to search for it! The important thing is to keep abreast of events and to keep the most capable potential helpers informed. But unfortunately, not once have our helpers been able to help us without our help.
‘It’s like the unity of the army and the people. If we work together, then inevitable success awaits us. But, as I have already said, first of all we have to learn to trust each other. And so, I beg your pardon, but . . . we must have no secrets from each other . . .’
The colonel sighed heavily, got up and went across to our things. He began methodically laying everything out on the sand, first of all from Gulya’s double bundle, where he found her bright-coloured shirt-dresses and packages containing our reserves of tea and cheese balls. He was clearly dissatisfied with what he found, and so he set about my Chinese rucksack with redoubled energy and zeal. Casually tossing the cans of ‘baby food’ on to the sand, he pulled out the plastic bag containing the folder with Gershovich’s manuscript. He extracted the folder and lifted it up to his eyes. He sneezed and moved it away from his face. He sniffed at it again, cautiously at first, and then as if his mind had been set at ease.
The colonel opened the folder and leafed through the pages, then cast a satisfied glance at me.
‘You’ve carried it a long way. From the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery all the way to Mangyshlak . . .’ he drawled in the voice of a man who is saying far less than he knows. ‘Now it’s my turn.’
‘Well, well,’ I thought. ‘It seems like everyone and his mother was following me around in Kiev! The UNSOvites, and the SBUniks, and the Finnish-baby-food fanciers. It’s amazing that I actually managed to get this far alive.’
Once again I recalled the tracks in the sand that I had seen several times since I landed on the shore of the Caspian.
‘Colonel,’ I asked, ‘is it you who’s been following me through the desert?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Several times in the morning I’ve seen tracks at the places where I spent the night.’
‘Maybe it was them?’ he said, with a nod towards Petro and Galya.
‘No,’ I replied.
Colonel Taranenko frowned. ‘Actually, I know it wasn’t them – I’ve been following them myself.’ He thought about it, then he shrugged and spread his hands. ‘There shouldn’t really be anybody else here – all the interested parties are already assembled . . .’
He said nothing for a while. Then he put the folder down on the sand beside the little chair and set about Petro’s and Galya’s things. He turned out their shopping bag with the long handles, inspected the items that came tumbling out and grunted in satisfaction. He picked up an aluminium djezva, a tin of Jacobs ground coffee and a Snickers bar. He cast a cunning glance at Petro and Galya. Galya was lying on her side, looking away from him, and Petro was lying in the same twisted position as me, silently following the colonel’s movements.
After going through his prisoners’ things and spending about fifteen minutes studying a notebook that apparently belonged to Petro, Colonel Taranenko sat back down on his little folding chair. His face now expressed total self-confidence.
‘Right then, we can carry on talking!’ he declared decisively. ‘Beginning with a presentation by the Rooskies . . .’ – he peered shrewdly at me. ‘No need to tell me your life story, we’ve read that already. Let’s start with something else – what gave you the idea of interfering in matters that are sacred to every Ukrainian?’ He grinned and glanced at Petro.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, your interest in Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko, of course, on such an international scale, so to speak.’
‘There’s nothing illegal in that, is there?’
‘And who said there was? Not me. But I would say that these are rather delicate matters, especially when they extend beyond certain acceptable limits and begin to impinge on the interests of another state . . .’
‘You know what,’ I said – I had a sharp pain in my neck again and my hands were aching worse than ever. ‘It’s hard for me to talk in this position –’
‘Then turn over into a different one, you don’t have to look at me, you could break your neck like that . . .’
I rolled back on to my stomach, with my chin resting on the edge of the bed mat.
‘I don’t see what boundaries I have crossed, apart from geographical ones . . .’ I said, forcing the words out with difficulty, since it was not easy to speak in this position either – I was very short of breath.
‘Well, all right, we’ll come back to that, but for now, let’s have a word with Petro Yurievich Rogulya.’ He shifted his gaze to Petro.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you!’ Petro hissed through his teeth. ‘Especially in Russian. As a Ukrainian aren’t you ashamed to speak a foreign language?’
‘And isn’t a Ukrainian patriot ashamed of drinking Jacobs coffee and eating Snickers bars?’ Taranenko retorted. ‘You ought to have brought sweets from Lvov and our own domestic coffee-flavoured beverage!’ The colonel sighed heavily. The conversation was going nowhere. He picked the folder with Gershovich’s manuscript up off the sand and began turning the pages again, bringing one or another close to his eyes. He found Captain Paleev’s denunciatory report, read it carefully and started thinking.
He thought for a long time. I was even starting to nod off – it was the easiest way to distract myself from the aching in my bones.
‘Well, what now?’ the Adidas colonel’s voice said, bringing me back to reality. ‘We have to decide what to do next . . . I’ve already figured that out, so no long discussions
are required . . . We have to dig. Only we have to decide how. I don’t intend to carry you all the way . . .’ The colonel was thinking out loud rather than talking to us. ‘So perhaps I’ll untie your feet . . . Only not straight away . . . But then . . .’ He looked at the can of ground coffee lying among the contents of the empty bags. ‘A cup of coffee would be rather nice . . .’
He chewed on his lips.
The sun was rising higher, and the atmospheric warmth of the day was moving down from the sky on to the sand, drying out the pitifully meagre moisture that the night had given to this dead land.
‘How do you make coffee here?’ the colonel asked, looking at me.
‘The women gather kindling and light a fire, then they hang the pot full of water on the tripod,’ I replied in a monotone.
‘Kindling?’ the colonel echoed, looking around. ‘Where can you collect that here? I was heating my food with solidified alcohol, but I’ve run out . . .’
A possible plan of escape took shape in my head, although I still couldn’t imagine any way to get rid of the entire group. At least, not just at that moment.
‘Gulya knows where to look for kindling, she’s from round here.’ I indicated my bound wife with a movement of my eyes.
Colonel Taranenko also looked at her and chewed on his lips pensively, ran his hand over his smoothly shaven cheeks and checked with his fingers to make sure that his thick, carefully tended moustache was jutting at the correct angle.
‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll untie her, she’s a foreign national, she can boil the water . . . But you just lie there for now, there’ll be plenty of coffee for you too . . .’
The colonel leaned down over Gulya and untied her hands, then her feet.
I thought that as soon as he untied Gulya’s hands, she would slap his face. But she rubbed her wrists, sat up and calmly looked around.
‘Go and fetch some kindling!’ the colonel said to her, and she obediently set off.
‘Maybe that’s for the best,’ I thought about Gulya. ‘At least when the moment comes she’ll untie me, and then perhaps we can leave the colonel with Petro and Galya. They’ll have fun together. And to hell with that diary, they can dig for it themselves – they’ve got a spade!’
The Good Angel of Death Page 14