The tracks were becoming less and less distinct even as I watched. The sand was smoothing out its surface.
When it was almost morning, after Aman had brought us to the fortifications and driven away, taking the sleeping Yura with him, I asked the colonel why the major had been buried there, beside the dervish.
The puffy-faced colonel looked me keenly in the eye, as if he was checking whether I would be able to understand him.
‘They said a grave like that would make a reliable link in the chain of Ukrainian-Kazakh friendship . . .’ he sighed, and then added. ‘And apart from that, our embassy hasn’t got the money to send the body home . . . I’ll take a part of the body to Kiev.’
I nodded. I could see how bad the colonel was feeling. I didn’t want to bother him any more, and I followed Petro’s example – as soon as we got back he had fallen on to his bed mat beside Galya and was already snoring away with all his might.
‘Goodnight,’ I said to the colonel.
He grinned wearily and gestured to direct my attention towards the summits of the hills, with the light of the advancing day already percolating through from behind them.
I fell asleep with my arm round Gulya, thinking about Azra, the good angel of death who took the form of a woman in love with you.
52
I WOKE UP when it was close to midday, clutching the pistol with the silencer.
I glanced round. Gulya and Galya were busy with something by the fire, Petro was still asleep. There was no sign of the colonel. It was a few minutes before I was fully awake and recalled the events of the previous day.
I put the pistol away in my rucksack and did two minutes’ worth of exercise – a couple of squats and a bit of arm-waving to pep myself up a bit.
The sun was hanging directly above us, driving the shadows straight into the sand.
I walked across to the women and out of the goodness of their hearts, they gave me a bowl of tea that was already growing cool – they had obviously just drunk tea themselves, delighting in the absence of men. Galya was wearing her eternal jeans, and the dark red T-shirt above them elegantly emphasised her small breasts. Gulya was wearing her lettuce-green shirt-dress today.
‘I wonder,’ I thought, ‘how she will dress in Kiev. After all, in an outfit like that she won’t even be able to walk down a deserted street in peace!’
‘Did the colonel say where he was going?’ I asked the women when I had finished my tea.
‘He set off a long time ago, about three hours,’ Galya replied. ‘Maybe to the town.’
‘And he didn’t say anything?’
‘He said he’d be back for lunch.’
I nodded. Galya and Gulya were just starting to prepare lunch, so it looked as if it wouldn’t be too long before the colonel came back. Driven by curiosity and a feeling of hunger, I stood beside the fire and watched our cooks closely for a while. Galya rolled out a thin sheet of dough and cut it into little rhomboids, while Gulya cut dried meat into strips on the other end of the same board. There was a pile of purple onions cut into rings lying in a tea bowl beside them. My nostrils were tickled by a pleasant, salty smell. It looked as if lunch was intended to be a special celebration. I gulped.
‘What are we having today?’ I asked.
‘Aman left a little bit of mutton, we’re going to have Kazakh soup,’ Gulya replied without turning round.
I heard a cough behind me. Petro was awake. He propped himself up on his elbows and moved his head left and right. Then he lay back down and gazed with sleepy eyes at the white sky, flooded with the bright midday sunlight.
The colonel really did get back in time for lunch. It was as if his nose had warned him of the possible consequences of being late. The thick mutton soup in the pot was almost ready, and its smell created an atmosphere of anticipation around the campfire. Yesterday’s hundred grams of vodka taken in memoriam was still waiting for the food that should have followed.
After lunch the colonel called me and Petro aside.
‘You need to get some sleep before the evening,’ he said in a kind, fatherly tone of voice. ‘There’ll be a lot of work to do tonight.’
We obediently made for our bed mats. After the delicious and filling lunch, drowsiness fogged my mind as soon as I lay down on my back and covered my face with the Kazakh felt hat that Gulya’s father had given me as a present.
I was woken by the roaring of engines. I raised my head. The noise was coming from behind the close horizon of sand, beyond which lay the slope down to our excavations. I walked to the edge of the high ground and, looking down, I saw an excavator and two large KrAZ dump trucks. One of the trucks was standing a little distance away from the pit and the driver was sitting on the step of his cabin smoking. The other truck was in position for loading, and its driver was wearing a respirator.
The excavator was scooping sand up out of our pit and tipping it into the back of the dump truck, which was already half full. When I looked closer, I saw that the Kazakh in the excavator was also breathing through a respirator. Colonel Taranenko was standing at one side and watching the loading.
I walked slowly down to the pit and approached the colonel.
‘Things are moving,’ he said to me. ‘It’s time you were packing your things.’
‘What?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Are we leaving?’
The colonel nodded. ‘Aman will be here in an hour. We’re going to travel with the load. It’s a long journey to Krasnovodsk, more than six hundred kilometres.’
I sighed. In the desert I had grown unused to sudden movements, so I found the idea that I had to pack my things in a hurry extremely disagreeable.
I walked back up to our camp in a very irritable frame of mind.
I tried to take wide steps, but the sand seemed to be laughing at me, crumbling away under my feet and slowing me down. In the end the sand won – by the time I reached the top I was already calm and a little bit tired.
I told Gulya that we had to pack, and she obediently set off towards our things. She folded up the striped bed mat and put it in her double bundle. Then she went to the fire to collect the tripod, cooking pot and other kitchen accessories.
I looked all around. The mechanical din of the excavator conflicted with the dead beauty of these ruins. I tried to count how many days we had spent here, but the noise distracted me. All right, I thought, we have a journey of six hundred kilometres ahead of us – there’ll be plenty of time to count the days, and to think about lots of other things . . .
53
WE SET OUT as evening was coming on. The two trucks with the sand drove in front. The Kazakh Yura, whom we had already met, was riding beside the driver in the first truck, Vitold Yukhimovich was in the second. The remaining four of us followed on behind in Aman’s Land Rover. Aman switched on all the headlights, and the two dump trucks driving ahead of us seemed unreal, as if we were watching a movie. It was a winding road and every now and then the leading dump truck slipped out of the corridor of light. But soon we were lined up again in a more or less straight column and drove on, slowly making our way up into the Karatau Mountains. Of course, it was purely a matter of convention to call these hills mountains. Compared with the Caucasus, they could easily have been called a plain. But even so, they looked incredibly beautiful in the moonlight, which lent them the unnatural bluish colour of a landscape that was more lunar than earthly.
Sometimes we were jolted quite hard, and I turned anxiously to the rear window to see if our things had been thrown out of the back. But the rucksacks, bags and bundles packed against each other seemed to be less affected by the bumps in the road than we were.
The sky was lit up by more and more stars, but we could see them only through the back window of the Land Rover – the bright light from the double row of headlights rendered everything ahead of us invisible, apart from a section of road and two dump trucks.
We reached the port of Krasnovodsk at about one in the afternoon. There were some twenty vehicles waiting on the ferry dock, most
ly cars. The ferry, Oilman, with its sides covered in rust, did not inspire great confidence. Even the rust on its sides was of two colours: the lower metre and a half had a dirty greenish-brown sheen, but the rust above the waterline, which was now high out of the water, was the traditional brown colour. Aman had already told me that there were only two ferries operating on the Krasnovodsk–Baku routes: the Oilman and the Friendship, so the chances that this ferry would sink on this particular run, taking us with it, were minimal.
The dump trucks joined the queues for embarkation, but the way on to the ferry was still closed off with a red-painted chain.
The ferry was like an ordinary dry-cargo vessel. It was several times smaller than the floating fish-processing plant on which I had sailed from Astrakhan to Komsomolets Bay. In fact, the only thing that really allowed this vessel to be called a ferry was the bow, which could be lowered to make a bridge for vehicles during loading and unloading.
While I was looking around, studying the half-abandoned port, with its dock cranes frozen in a variety of poses, with its rusty structures protruding here and there out of the reddish earth that also seemed to be covered in rust, Colonel Taranenko came over to the Land Rover.
He asked me and Petro to step away from the vehicle.
‘The ferry will leave in about two hours,’ the colonel said. ‘Listen to me carefully. From now on, you are working for the company “Karakum Ltd”. Here are the documents for the sand.’ He handed me a large, thick envelope. ‘There’s money in there too. I’ll catch up with you along the way, I’ve still got business to finish here. You and the drivers will disembark in Baku, they’ll transfer the load and show you which road to take out of the port to carry on. At the Azerbaijan–Dagestan border they’ll take a fifty-dollar transit charge off you, and there will probably be other problems as well. There are three thousand dollars in the envelope, that should be enough to get you to Rostov-on-Don. If it isn’t, then you have guns. But use them carefully.’ The colonel paused briefly to give Petro and me a chance to absorb what he had just said. Then he continued. ‘You’ll have to wait a few days in Rostov. My advice is to send the women on from there on a passenger train. There’s no point in doing that from Baku, it’s too dangerous. Right then, all the best until we met again! Good luck!’
The colonel shook our hands and walked back to Aman, who was standing beside the Land Rover and smoking.
Petro and I stood there, absolutely dumbfounded. I was holding the large envelope in my hands.
I could still hear the colonel’s voice ringing in my ears and I had stopped thinking about the decrepit appearance of the ferry on which we were about to sail across the Caspian. The journey to come was causing me more serious concern now. Not only for myself, but also for Gulya. Above all for Gulya. It would be stupid to expect that we could travel across the Caucasus without any problems, especially in these times, when there was still shooting going on in Dagestan and Chechnya.
I looked at Petro. To judge from his glum expression, he wasn’t particularly happy about the journey ahead either.
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘What can we do?’ he replied fatalistically. ‘We have to carry everything through to the end.’
He took out his pipe and lit it.
I nodded, and thought to myself: If you were a Palestinian, you’d probably be delighted at every opportunity to die for your homeland and Allah.
I looked round at the Land Rover. Galya was sitting on the metal side step, but Gulya was nowhere to be seen, and that made me feel worried. I went over to Galya and asked where Gulya was.
‘She went in there,’ said Galya, pointing to a large shed with its rusty doors standing half open.
‘What for?’
‘To get changed.’
I set off towards the shed, but before I was even halfway there, Gulya come out towards me, wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt. She was carrying her folded dark red shirt-dress.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ I asked her in a whisper.
‘Yes,’ she answered and smiled.
‘Maybe it would be better if you stayed here? And then you can fly to Kiev, when everything’s been sorted out. I’ll meet you there.’
Gulya shook her head.
‘You and I are one now: husband and wife,’ she said. ‘I might get lost without you, you’ll get lost without me. I don’t want to be left alone . . .’
I hugged Gulya, pressing her tightly against myself, and I felt her hugging me back with her strong, beautiful arms.
‘Which of us is going to protect the other?’ I wondered with a hint of irony.
‘Everything will be all right,’ Gulya whispered in my ear, and sealed her words with a kiss.
54
AS SOON AS the two Azerbaijanis in dirty blue overalls appeared beside the red-painted chain cutting off the entrance to the ferry, a sizeable crowd of people who wanted to be passengers gathered at the mooring. The queue of vehicles stretched for about two hundred metres, as far as the rusty shed, and its tail was hidden behind it. The word ‘TURKMENBASHI’ was written on the roof of the shed in white letters a metre high, and this surprised me for moment, until I realised that this was the new name for Krasnovodsk.
Both of the dump trucks were now in the front ten vehicles. I looked round sadly at the Land Rover. It inspired more confidence in me than the KrAZ trucks did. And although I had no particular reason to trust either Aman or Yura, I would have felt far easier in my mind if they were setting out with us. It was entirely logical for them to stop here, though – they were simply staying on their home territory. But why was Colonel Taranenko staying behind with them? What business was it that was keeping him here in Turkmenistan, if the most important task of all was to deliver the sand to the Ukraine?
The red-painted chain clattered to the ground. One of the Azerbaijanis lazily hauled it away, shoving it against the side of the ship with his feet. The other stood in the middle of the opening and waved for the first vehicle to move forward. A red Zhiguli drove up to him and stopped. The driver – a short, skinny Caucasian – got out of the car, counted out the right number of banknotes to the guy in overalls, went back to his car and drove on to the deck.
The supervisor watched carefully to see where the Zhiguli went and where it stopped, then turned back and waved for the next vehicle to move up.
The sun was scorching. I took the pointed felt cap out of my pocket, opened it out and put it on my head. Then I went back to Gulya.
‘Hasn’t Aman told you anything?’ I asked.
‘About what?’
‘About our journey . . .’
‘No,’ said Gulya. ‘He just wished me good luck. Three times.’
‘Three times?’ I asked.
She nodded.
I looked round and glanced at Aman, Yura and the colonel, who were standing between the jeep and the shed, calmly discussing something or other. I looked at Petro and Galya, who were sitting silently on the steel step of the Land Rover. Despite my own inner tension, there was an incredibly calm atmosphere that enveloped everything in the port. I couldn’t help noticing the cool, calm expressions on the faces of Petro and Galya, and the carefree air of the colonel and his colleagues. Even the loading of the ferry was some how proceeding too calmly, with no hurry, no fuss or shouting. The pedestrian passengers were waiting patiently as the vehicles drove on to the deck one after another.
The second Azerbaijani in blue overalls started helping the first: he walked on to the deck and watched to make sure that the drivers parked their vehicles closer to the centre of the tightly packed rows, without leaving any space unused.
The tail of the queue of vehicles moved into view from behind the shed, and soon this snake on wheels had crept all the way on to the ferry’s deck, filling up all the space.
Half an hour later, after boarding the ferry and piling our things together on the upper deck, the four of us watched the port of Krasnovodsk moving away, and the brown La
nd Rover gradually being transformed into a dark blob.
The sea was calm. The dirty, dark green water, covered with a mother-of-pearl film of crude oil, swayed gently as the ferry sailed unhurriedly on its way.
The seagulls called loudly as they alternately overtook the ferry and flew back to its stern.
But no one threw them any food. The passengers, most of whom were Kazakhs and Caucasians, sat on their bags and suitcases without speaking.
‘Let’s take a stroll,’ I suggested to Gulya.
Leaving Petro and Galya to keep an eye on the things, we walked across the deck and round the sides of the ferry, studying the horizon on all sides.
The damp air smelled of salt and iodine. And the sun, which was hanging between us and the shore, didn’t feel hot.
We stood at the stern with our arms round each other, watching the low waves creep away from behind the ferry towards the shore that was retreating into the past. From that distance we could make out the part of the town that had been hidden behind low yellow hills to the right of the port. Ordinary five-storey blocks of flats.
‘Have you ever been to Krasnovodsk?’ I asked Gulya.
‘No.’
‘Neither have I,’ I laughed.
There was a Kazakh family beside us, sitting on a camel-hair blanket spread out at the edge of the deck – a husband, a wife and three little girls, the youngest of whom was about three and the oldest about eight. They were dressed in city clothes, without any bright colours. Dull dresses. And the parents, who were about thirty years old, were dressed modestly, as if they deliberately wished to avoid attracting attention.
Suddenly another girl of about ten sat down beside them and I realised that she was also a member of this family. She had brought a two-litre can – the same kind that I used to take to collect the milk in my childhood. There was steam rising out of it.
‘There’s hot water here,’ I said to Gulya and nodded at the can.
I set out, carrying the cooking pot in my hands. When I finally found the place where you could get hot water, it turned out that on this ferry you had to pay for everything. The cooking pot held two litres.
The Good Angel of Death Page 21