The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  So there we were, standing on the porch of an ordinary two-storey house. Petro knocked.

  As soon as the door opened, Petro’s fat old mother wiped her hands on her apron and hugged him. Then his father – tall and thin – came out.

  ‘Daughter, a dress like that’s for going to church in, not washing the dishes!’

  ‘Let me switch the television on for you,’ the old man said to Gulya, and without waiting for an answer, he went across to the locker standing in the corner, took the cover embroidered with red cockerels off the television, turned a switch, waited for the image to appear and started adjusting the twin-horned internal aerial.

  Gulya obediently sat on a chair in front of the television and I was left standing by the door.

  Hearing the sound of wooden steps squeaking behind me, I looked round and saw Petro coming down with his pipe in his hand.

  He gestured for me to follow him out on to the porch. I stood under the overhang, watching the monotonous rain while he filled his pipe.

  ‘Galya and I are going to Kiev tomorrow,’ he said eventually. ‘You can stay here with the old folks, no problems. When I find out something, I’ll call you!’

  ‘All right,’ I said with a nod.

  After that we stood there in silence for about ten minutes. I listened to the rain and breathed in the light tobacco smoke from his pipe. ‘Do we really have nothing to talk about?’ I wondered. Whatever way you looked at it, we had spent more than a month together.

  ‘We might not have become friends, but then tying someone up hand and foot isn’t a good start for friendship,’ I thought. ‘What is a good start?’ I asked myself, and instead of an answer for some reason I remembered a song I had known since my childhood: ‘Where Does the Homeland Begin?’ Nevertheless, he had brought us here to his parents’ house. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily friendship. It was simply being humane. But it still wasn’t clear to me what was really more important in this life: being friends or treating each other humanely.

  There was a big surprise waiting for me that evening. As if in mockery of my sweet memories of the only night that Gulya and I had spent together, old Olga Mykolaivna announced that she had made up beds for Petro and me in the sitting room, and for Gulya and Galya upstairs.

  Perplexed, I went up to Petro and asked him in a whisper what this meant. After all, it would surely have made more sense for him to spend the night with Galya too.

  He just smiled into his black moustache.

  ‘It’s their house,’ he said, nodding towards his parents. ‘What they say is the way things will be!’

  I slept badly that night. I woke several times and listened to the rain rustling in the leaves of the trees. Once I got up and went over to the window. I spotted a dark-coloured Zhiguli on the opposite side of the street. The light was on inside the car and the man in it was reading a book that was resting on the steering wheel. I only realised the strangeness of it all in the morning. But in the middle of the night I was haunted by a cold feeling of unnatural loneliness. My hands longed for another’s warmth, I yearned to embrace Gulya and press her tightly to me. That first night seemed so close and at the same time so far way. Then once again the rustling of the rain and Petro’s snoring stilled my thoughts and I lay there as if turned to stone.

  69

  IN THE MORNING after breakfast Gulya and I went to see Petro and Gulya off at the station.

  It wasn’t raining, but the sun wasn’t shining either. The leaden sky was creeping along under the pressure of a wind that we couldn’t feel at all down below. Gulya had put on her jeans and T-shirt, although they weren’t completely dry yet. As we walked along she kept looking upwards anxiously every now and then.

  Several times I recalled the car that I had seen through the window in the middle of the night.

  The train stops for ten minutes at Kolomya, but when we reached the station, it turned out that it was half an hour late. We had time to drink a coffee and eat a salami sandwich each at a little table in the station cafeteria – and we all did this in silence. But just before we got up from the table Petro looked intently into my eyes and said: ‘There’s an envelope with money in it on the table in my room. It’s for you.’

  As we were walking up to the right carriage on the platform, I thought that we were being followed – the two men in brown leather jackets who were standing by the next carriage were watching us really closely. Watching us and talking, without turning towards each other.

  As he was getting into the carriage, Petro said one phrase to me: ‘You’re not such a bad guy!’ Gulya and Galya said goodbye more warmly – they kissed.

  Squinting sideways, I noticed the two men in jackets get into the next carriage.

  I didn’t like the look of that and I felt concerned for Petro and Galya. But some other part of my mind laughed at me and my almost certifiable paranoia.

  We hurried all the way back to Petro’s parents’ house. The sky seemed to be waking up, ready to shower down more rain at any moment. There were already isolated drops falling to the ground.

  We just managed to walk up on to the porch and stop under the overhang in front of the door before the rain started.

  It’s autumn, I thought. Now the season would keep us under house arrest in a strange house. In our minds we would cross off the days of the month and the weeks. I would wait for a telephone call after which we would be able to move to house arrest in Kiev. No, in Kiev everything would be simpler. In the first place, I had an umbrella at my flat. We would buy another and go walking in the rain. Or perhaps the rain would have stopped by then? Then we would be able to listen to the golden autumn rustling under our feet . . .

  The old man switched the television on again. He himself sat there with the newspaper in his hands, and old Olga Mykolaivna busied herself with something in the kitchen. The endless rain outside the window created the illusion of evening.

  When the evening finally came and we ate supper, I asked the old woman if I could move into Gulya’s room now that Galya had gone.

  Olga Mykolaivna looked at me severely.

  ‘Are you married or registered?’ she asked. ‘No. So how is it possible? It’s not right. What would Gulya’s father say?’

  I heaved a sigh, realising that I could continue this conversation as long as I liked, but the result would still be the same.

  ‘Don’t be miserable,’ the old woman said with a sigh. ‘You love Gulya and she loves you, so you can wait a bit!’

  When I shared the sad news with Gulya, she laughed.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just like back at home.’

  ‘Why, do people get married there?’

  ‘No, nowadays they get registered . . . at the registry office . . . Getting married is more beautiful. When I was studying in Alma-Ata I saw this television programme . . .’

  I realised that I couldn’t live in the same house as Gulya and not be with her at night. All my nights would turn into one endless nightmare. I would embrace the pillow, listen to the rain and feel a lonely chill that not even a pile of fluffy blankets could warm. No, I’d simply go crazy!

  ‘What’s to stop you getting married here, in Kolomya?’ I asked myself. ‘There’s nothing to stop you . . . What do you need to do it? Just a church and the mutual desire.’

  ‘Let’s get married,’ I suggested to Gulya.

  She didn’t answer. She just gave a broad smile and closed her slanting eyes.

  She was obviously imagining our wedding. Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

  ‘All right,’ I thought that evening, as I lay down on the divan in the sitting room, ‘I’ll put up with one more night and then tomorrow morning I’ll start taking measures.’

  In the middle of the night I was woken by some kind of noise. Looking out of the window, I once again saw a car on the street, with a man sitting in it, only this time he was holding a newspaper instead of a book.

  I woke up when the clock sa
id half past six. I got up, got dressed and glanced into the kitchen. Olga Mykolaivna was screwing the top on to a three-litre jar of cucumbers.

  ‘Oh, you’re up already!’ she said happily. ‘Good morning!’

  ‘Good morning,’ I replied. ‘Olga Mykolaivna, Gulya and I would like to get married . . . Here in Kolomya.’

  ‘And why not?’ The old woman’s eyes lit up. ‘We have such a lovely church here! You just have to talk to the priest, he’s the one who decides things! We can go together, after lunch.’

  Like a portent of good things, the sun came out for a short while after lunch. Gulya, Olga Mykolaivna and I set out. The air still smelled of rain and the street was wet. We walked along past the private houses with their different-coloured fences.

  ‘It’s quite close, not far at all,’ the old woman said. ‘About five minutes from here.’

  Soon we saw a blue dome ahead of us. We followed the road, houses and vegetable gardens up the slope of a hill until a small brick church appeared. It had a golden cross gleaming on the top of its blue dome.

  The road came to an end at the gates leading into the small churchyard. There was a wooden bench on each side of the church gates.

  On the left I could see a well with a separate brick-paved pathway leading to it.

  Further on, beyond the well, there was single-storey house with a red-tiled roof.

  ‘That way, that’s where we need to go,’ said Olga Mykolaivna, pointing at the house. ‘That’s where our Father Oleksa lives.’

  The priest was thirty-something years old. Skinny, with long hair tied back with a rubber band and a high receding hairline. He received us cordially.

  He sat us on an old sofa in the drawing room and sat down himself on a chair, making it quite clear that he was ready to listen to us.

  ‘These two are friends of my son,’ the old woman told him. ‘They want to get married . . .’

  ‘Are you baptised?’ Father Oleksa asked, looking at me.

  ‘I was baptised as a child,’ I replied.

  He looked at Gulya. ‘And what faith are you?’ he asked in Russian.

  ‘None . . .’ she answered. ‘I’m a Kazakh . . .’

  The priest laughed. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he left the room.

  ‘He’s a good man, everyone here loves him,’ the old woman said.

  Ten minutes later we were all sitting at the table drinking tea. The sun was shining again outside and it looked as if it was set to shine until the evening.

  ‘She has to be baptised,’ Father Oleksa said, nodding at Gulya as he sipped his tea.

  ‘All right,’ Gulya said willingly.

  ‘You have to choose the godparents,’ the priest went on. ‘Then we’ll name the day . . .’

  The mention of godparents gave me pause for thought. Choose godparents in a town where we knew only one old couple? That wouldn’t be so easy.

  I cast an anxious glance at the old woman. She nodded reassuringly to me, as if she had guessed what I was thinking.

  At supper that evening Olga Mykolaivna declared that she wanted to be Gulya’s godmother.

  ‘And the old man can be the godfather,’ she said, looking at Yury Ivanych. ‘He doesn’t have a daughter of his own, so let him have a goddaughter, and such a lovely one, such a beauty.’

  I was glad that what was happening meant I would become Petro’s relative. But did he want that? What would he say when he found out? I let these questions go unanswered. I wanted Gulya. Every ‘I want’ has to be paid for, and the payment I would have to make was not so very great. Although it was a bit unusual, this price. The Asian bride-price would have seemed more natural to me just then. But like the result of my journey which, contrary to all my partly material expectations, had proved to be exclusively spiritual, the price of the chance to be united as soon as possible with the one I loved could not be measured in money or valuables.

  I had to accept two new relatives and call on God to witness the purity of my intentions. I think I would have paid more to achieve my goal.

  ‘Grand,’ said Yury Ivanych, and I abandoned my thoughts to look at him.

  Either he had taken a long time to think about it, or the thoughts had moved through my head with the speed of light, but I didn’t immediately realise what he meant.

  ‘All right,’ he repeated, ‘I’ll be the godfather . . .’

  70

  THAT NIGHT I didn’t sleep soundly, but at least I did sleep.

  I dreamed of the she-camel Khatema, to whom I owed my life. In my dream I seemed to see the entire story of my rescue from the outside. I saw myself being dragged out from under the sand in the tent, and then the order of events became confused, and although I had been saved, somehow I had been abandoned in the desert and I was walking barefoot over the hot sand, all on my own. As I walked along I saw a piece of faded canvas sticking out of a low sand dune. I pulled on it, then went down on my knees, worked away with my hands until I pulled out the same tent in which I had settled down to spend the previous night. Once again I found the old newspaper and the Smena camera in it. After that I dreamed of heat, endless heat, the sun from which it was impossible to hide and the hot T-shirt I had used to cover my head. The heat was becoming unbearable and I even woke up covered in sweat.

  It was dark. I got up off the divan and went across to the alarm clock on the sideboard, feeling the chill of the wooden floor on my feet. Four o’clock in the morning. I went to the window and saw a car again. This time it was a Volga standing in front of the house and there were two men sitting in it with the dim light turned on. I had no doubt at all that their presence was connected with us in some way. But in what way exactly?

  Were they protecting us? Or spying on us? I decided not to say anything to Gulya about them just yet: with our wedding so close, their regular presence seemed an unimportant detail.

  A couple of hours later I greeted the dawn. Olga Mykolaivna came downstairs and went straight into the kitchen. As the morning began, it acquired sounds. Outside, birds started singing; in the kitchen, Olga Mykolaivna clattered dishes.

  I didn’t want to distract her, and so I sat on a chair by the window. I looked at the leaves touched by the sunlight but not yet touched by autumn. I thought about Gulya.

  The next day Father Oleksa baptised Gulya and hung round her neck the little gold cross with the half-effaced crucifixion that I had found in the sand beside the Novopetrovsk Fortress. The silver chain was a gift to Gulya from her godmother, Olga Mykolaivna.

  I bought myself a silver chain and cross in the church. But when I got home, I replaced the cross with the little golden key found at Mangyshlak and hung the little key on my neck. ‘Pinocchio probably wasn’t baptised,’ I thought to myself with a smile. I remembered our little chameleon, who had disappeared somewhere, and felt sad. If I allowed myself to be superstitious, then his disappearance meant the end of all my good luck.

  Two days later we got married. Gulya put on her emerald-green shirt-dress for the church, but the old woman persuaded her to put a raincoat over it, so that curious neighbours wouldn’t trail after us to the church. She knew that we wanted to get married without any strangers present, and in that little town everybody except Petro’s parents and Father Oleksa was a stranger to us.

  Father Oleksa locked the doors of the church from the inside and married us. He read the service in Ukrainian, but afterwards, when we were already husband and wife and had exchanged rings, he congratulated us in Russian and invited us to drink tea.

  That was how we celebrated our wedding – by drinking tea in Father Oleksa’s house and eating supper with the old couple. I bought a bottle of champagne in a shop for supper, and after the champagne, at Yury Ivanych’s insistence, we each took a hundred grams of vodka.

  I thought that Yury Ivanych would have been glad to carry on sitting at the table for a while, but at half past six Olga Mykolaivna began clearing the plates off the table.

  ‘The
young people want to make love,’ she told her old man, and her eyes glinted as she said it.

  That night the old one-and-a-half-size bed in Petro’s room didn’t seem narrow to us. Gulya went down to the bathroom and doused herself with water several times. She came back wet, and I dried her with my own skin again. The sheet was warm and wet, and the light blanket lay on the floor until eventually, when I got up off the bed yet again, I kicked it under the writing desk. Several times when our passion abated we lay on our backs with our shoulders pressing against each other, listening to the night. When I was tired, I even started to doze. But the sound of her footsteps, the squeak of the door and the distant creaking of the stairs roused me before her wet hands touched my chest. Gulya lay down on top of me, kissing me with her moist lips, rubbing her wet cheeks against my face. The cool moisture invigorated me. I pressed Gulya against myself and stroked her back, her arms, her thighs.

  ‘Stroke me again!’ she begged me in a whisper, and I stroked her, stroked her endlessly, until we both exploded with love, which dried us better than any towel and then made us wet again. The alternation of water and heat seemed to go on forever.

  After the sleepless night we felt more hungry than tired. I went downstairs and found Olga Mykolaivna in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, good morning. Why have you young people got up?’ she asked with a smile as she tossed a thick pancake on to a pile that was already quite high. ‘I’m cooking breakfast for you . . . And there’s a present for you over by the door.’

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have bought anything for us,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘It’s not from us. Some young lad brought it earlier.’

  I went to the front door and picked up a cloth shopping bag from the floor. Looking inside, I saw two cans of infant formula like the ones I used to guard at the store not so long ago, and a large box of sweets. I took the box out. The sweets were called ‘Evening Kiev’ and on the lid there was a picture of Kreshschatik Street, with its bright lights.