The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  I took the present to our room. I opened one of the cans and realised that the powder inside had nothing at all in common with dried milk. I opened the box of sweets, expecting a similar piece of deception. But the sweets proved to be genuine. I left them on the table and hid the cans under the writing desk.

  I looked round at Gulya – she was sleeping sweetly on her side with her beautiful face turned towards me. I only had to look at her for all my anxiety to fade away and be replaced by an unquestioning belief in happiness.

  Outside the sun was shining and the green leaves were rustling. The alarm clock said ten o’clock.

  Five minutes later the house was as silent and still as in the deadest, darkest night. I went back to bed and we slept pressed close against each other, and once again the old one-and-a-halfsize bed didn’t seem narrow.

  71

  THE NEXT DAY Olga Mykolaivna freed part of the sideboard and half of a wardrobe for our things. Gulya hung her clothes up on hangers and arranged our things on the shelves. I took over the upper drawer of Petro’s writing desk and put the trophies from our expedition into it – the Smena camera and the old issue of the Evening Kiev newspaper: God only knew why I hadn’t thrown it out.

  One evening several days later, when, for lack of anything else to do, I was inspecting the camera I had found in that tent yet again, I was overcome by curiosity. I closed the curtains tightly, opened the back of the ‘Smena’ and felt for the film.

  ‘What could there be on it?’ I wondered. ‘If all this belonged to Major Naumenko, then why did he take such a cheap children’s camera with him? Why did he leave it in the tent? Why was the tent buried under the sand?’ Of course, I knew myself what a sandstorm in the desert was like. It could easily have been that he barely managed to scramble out of his half-buried tent and wouldn’t have had time to worry about his belongings. But then all of his things would have been under the sand. And how far could he have got without any food and water?

  The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that there was no connection between Major Naumenko and the tent that I had given to Gulya’s father. But that did nothing to reduce my curiosity. Even if the camera belonged to a simple tourist from Kiev (to judge from the newspaper, he must have been simple), the intervening twenty years had lent my discovery more than mere historical interest. If that man had disappeared, his family or some of his friends must still be alive, and they should know where he had intended to go. And surely there was an old tourist club somewhere, with its old-timers and veterans, for whom my discovery would be a genuine gift, an occasion for remembering the past and even, perhaps, solving some mystery – after all, a man’s disappearance is always a mystery. Of course, I might just happen to find the actual owner of the camera, the man who had abandoned everything as he fled from the sandstorm.

  My thoughts led me back to the events preceding my own journey. I remembered how I had looked for Lvovich and Klim. I remembered how curiosity and the desire to solve a mystery that I still didn’t understand had led me to the Pushche-Voditsa cemetery.

  Basically, my presence in Kolomya was also the result of that curiosity.

  I took the yellowed newspaper out of the drawer, opened it up and switched on the table lamp. I looked through the headlines, which mostly reflected the everyday working life of Kiev and the achievements of the hero-city, and was disappointed not to discover anything interesting. I picked up the camera again. There were still two frames that had not been exposed yet.

  ‘I have to finish the film and have it developed,’ I decided. When Gulya came upstairs to our room, I switched on the light and sat her down on a chair.

  ‘Smile,’ I said, winding the film on with one finger.

  I took two snaps of Gulya and put the Smena away in its case.

  ‘Where did you get the camera from?’ she asked in surprise. I told her and reminded her about the tent.

  ‘And you think something will come out?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe it will.’

  She smiled.

  The next morning we took the camera and went for a walk round the town. The weather was delightful – the sun was shining and there was a light, gentle breeze blowing into our faces.

  We walked to a new housing estate where there were a few nine-storey buildings. On the ground floor of these ugly structures there were shops. We walked past a furniture shop and an auto-spares shop. We drank a cup of coffee in a delicatessen and asked the saleswoman where the nearest photo studio was. It turned out to be very close.

  The photographer – a man of about fifty, wearing a blue overall coat, tracksuit bottoms and old trainers on sockless feet – was more of an enthusiast than a businessman. When I asked him how much it would cost to develop the film, he chuckled and said: ‘You can give me a bottle of vodka if anything comes out.’

  Then he went into his darkroom, which was closed off by a heavy black curtain as well as a door. When he came back out he handed me the camera and wrote his telephone number on an envelope for prints.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Give me a call in a couple of days. If a woman answers, ask for Vitya.’

  I phoned two days later.

  ‘Come and take a look,’ said Vitya. There was no emotion in his voice, but it had a note of ambiguity that I found intriguing.

  I went to the photo studio on my own. Gulya stayed behind to help the old woman bottle tomatoes.

  On my way there, I noticed that the same white Zhiguli overtook me twice. I looked round before entering the photo studio, but didn’t see anything suspicious.

  ‘Come through here,’ said the photographer, peeping out of the darkroom when he heard the ring of the little bell attached to the door. He reinforced his invitation by beckoning to me.

  I went in and closed the door behind me. The red photo lamp standing on a shelf at the level of my head filled the room with a rather mysterious illumination.

  There was a pile of empty developing trays of various sizes on a table. Large prints were drying on strings hanging just below the ceiling, like washing hung out to dry. I looked closely at one of them, thinking that they were the prints from my film.

  ‘Just a moment, just a moment,’ said Vitya, standing with his back to me. He opened a drawer, and took some photographs from a small envelope made of photographic paper.

  ‘I think that twenty years ago someone would have killed for these photographs,’ he said, stepping away from the table to make room for me. ‘The quality’s lousy, of course. Very grainy.’

  I took a few photographs and laid them out. Then I leaned down and looked at them. On one I saw a schooner, photographed from the highest point of the shore, then I saw the same schooner from a different angle, simply a shot of the line of the seashore that I knew so well from my recent journey, and then two group photographs of five men, with four standing and one sitting in the centre.

  ‘What is there here to kill for?’ I asked, looking round at the photographer.

  ‘Take a look at these ones. A close look.’

  I took the prints. The one on top was already familiar: four men standing, one sitting. I looked more closely. It seemed to me that the man in the centre was sitting on the sand in a rather odd position, but nothing else caught my eye.

  ‘Take this,’ said Vitya, handing me a magnifying glass.

  Through the magnifying glass the meaning of the photo changed abruptly. I saw that the man sitting on the sand was tied up. His ankles were bound together and his arms, tied at the wrist, seemed to be pulled down over his raised knees. The four standing men were gazing into the camera lens with confident smiles. The seated prisoner was looking off to one side, his head was inclined slightly and his mouth was slightly open.

  ‘Is he alive here?’ I asked.

  ‘He might be there. But in the shots that follow – I don’t think so.’

  I looked at the next photo: two men in boots and long black jackets with hoods were carrying the prisoner along by his arms and legs. His head
was dangling limply. In the third photograph I saw the four men standing by a small hillock of sand. There was a sapper’s spade stuck in the sand next to one of them. A stick was thrust into the top of the hillock and a pair of field glasses were tied to it by their strap. The structure seemed like a parody of a cross on a grave.

  ‘Well then, you owe me a bottle,’ Vitya said pensively. ‘We can consume the contents at my place – I live close by.’

  I put the photographs down on the table. The photographer slipped them back into the envelope of photographic paper and handed the envelope to me. Then he gave me a little box with the exposed film.

  ‘Wait in there,’ he said, nodding towards the studio’s reception area. ‘I’ll get changed.’

  We stopped at the wine counter in the delicatessen.

  ‘What shall I get?’ I asked.

  ‘Port, red,’ said Vitya. ‘Up on the shelf over there. Where it says “Massandra”.’

  We took the bottle to his place. He lived in a small private house with chickens strolling around in the yard.

  ‘I’d rather drink vodka,’ he said, sitting down at a table with a tablecloth covered with dirty blotches, ‘but I can’t.’

  ‘The liver?’

  ‘A wedding,’ the photographer sighed. ‘I have to photograph a wedding tomorrow, and you can’t do that when your hands are trembling . . .’

  He moved to open a tin of something, sliced some bread, took out plates, forks and basic wine glasses.

  While we were drinking and eating, he didn’t mention my film and the photographs once. He told me about himself. About how he used to live in Uzhgorod, how he used to be a high-class photographer, but he drank too much and eventually his wife had thrown him out of the house. At first he had lived with a friend, and between them they drank away the proceeds from the sale of his two best cameras, a Pentax and a Nikon. Then his mother had died in Kolomya and left him this little house. At first he was going to sell it, but feared the money would have been spent on vodka, so he had decided not to.

  He had given up drinking and moved here. He found a job straight away in the photo studio and sometimes he earned a bit on the side with the militia – they picked him up from home in a car and took him to photograph crime scenes.

  When the port was finished, Vitya pulled himself together and got up from the table.

  ‘So now I have to catch up on my sleep before the wedding. And your wife’s probably waiting for you. Who is she, a Tatar girl?’

  ‘Kazakh,’ I replied.

  ‘Well done,’ said Vitya, with a brisk shake of his head.

  I didn’t understand what the precise object of his approval was.

  As he saw me to the gate, he said: ‘Mine was Hungarian. May God preserve you from that nationality . . .’

  72

  IT TOOK ME about twenty-five minutes to walk home. It was still light, although the sun was already sinking towards sunset. On the way I checked the envelope of photographs and the box with the film in it several times.

  The door was opened by Olga Mykolaivna, who caught the smell of drink immediately and her face took on a severe expression. She glanced round to make sure there was no one nearby and whispered to me strictly: ‘You shouldn’t go drinking with our menfolk. They’ll lead you into bad ways, and you’re young and have a beautiful wife!’

  ‘I won’t do it again,’ I whispered jocularly and glanced into the kitchen, then into the sitting room.

  ‘Gulya’s in your room,’ said the old woman, nodding towards the staircase. ‘She’s reading. There’s Santa Barbara in half an hour – come down!’

  The next morning it was raining again. I woke up feeling hungry, with a heavy head. Gulya was already pulling on her jeans.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ she asked, turning towards me. ‘You came back merry and untalkative, and went straight to sleep.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was at the photographer’s place. Let’s have a bite to eat, then I’ll show you something!’

  After breakfast we went back up to our room. I took out the photographs and laid them out on the table, then I sat down comfortably and switched on the lamp.

  ‘Where are my photos?’ Gulya asked. I ran my eyes over the rows of prints, but I didn’t see Gulya’s portraits. I counted the photos – there were only thirty-four.

  ‘They probably didn’t come out,’ I said. We looked at the photographs together. I found the three that Vitya had pointed out, gave them to Gulya and looked through the rest. I was quite sure now that all the photographs had been taken on the shore of the Caspian, not far from the place where I had found the tent. There was the fishing schooner, at first far away from the shore, then getting closer and closer. Then a boat with men in it between the shore and the schooner. Men on the shore, dragging something out of the boat. It was like frames from an old movie, and if not for those three photographs, my interest in the film would have evaporated completely.

  ‘Yes,’ Gulya sighed. ‘Did they kill him?’

  She gave me back the photos and hugged me from behind.

  ‘Probably. Or he died after they beat him . . .’ I said, looking at a photo in which four men were dragging the boat on to the shore. There were sacks of something lying in the boat.

  ‘You know,’ I said, looking up at Gulya, ‘something’s not right here . . . All the photos except those three are perfectly objective. They’re taken from the outside – nobody is posing. But here every one is looking into the lens. Everybody except the prisoner.’

  ‘Maybe they were taken by different people?’ Gulya suggested.

  I thought about that. There were six men in the photographs, including the bound man. But in any one photograph there were no more than five.

  In the ‘grave’ photograph there were four men standing, and the fifth must have taken it. That meant the sixth man really was buried under the sand, below that improvised, almost comical cross. So it seemed that the photos of the schooner and the men in the boat and the five men on the shore had been taken by the prisoner. Evidently before he became the prisoner.

  I shared my thoughts with Gulya.

  ‘So he was following them?’ she asked. ‘What for?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Kolya, let’s lay the photographs out in the order in which they were taken.’

  I liked Gulya’s suggestion. I took out the film and the two of us stretched it out in front of the table lamp, searching for the frame that corresponded to each print and laying the prints out in order on the table. When we reached the last two frames, we looked at each other. Instead of portraits of Gulya, they were blank.

  ‘Never mind, we’ll get ourselves photographed at the studio,’ I promised.

  Laid out in order, the photographs confirmed our conclusions. The man with the camera had been waiting for the schooner to arrive, then he had shot the boat, in which five men had brought something on shore. Then they had spotted him, taken away his camera, tied him up and photographed themselves with him. But obviously not as a memento, otherwise they would have taken the camera with them.

  ‘It’s strange that the Smena was lying in the tent,’ I said. ‘In their place I would have kept it, or thrown it into the sea . . .’

  ‘The desert’s as good as the sea,’ Gulya said. ‘Anything you drop on the sand is buried in an hour or two. There are no people there, nobody lives anywhere nearby . . .’

  ‘I wonder if they’re still alive?’ I said, looking closely at the faces of the men in the photographs. They were thirty or forty years old. ‘Probably they are.’

  ‘Then we ought to hand the photos over to the militia.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I said, turning to Gulya. ‘What will the militia do with them? We don’t even know where it happened. Obviously it’s somewhere abroad. Who’s interested in delving into events that happened twenty years ago, and in a different country?’

  I slipped the prints back into the envelope and placed it in the drawer of the desk.

  ‘It was
only a suggestion,’ Gulya said in an apologetic tone. ‘Perhaps that prisoner has relatives and they don’t know what happened to him . . .’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I agreed.

  That was the end of the conversation, and we went downstairs.

  We ate lunch with the old couple. Potatoes, salad, meat rissoles. Compote for dessert. I felt as if we’d been living there for several years, that we were Olga Mykolaivna’s and Yury Ivanych’s natural children. That we were going to carry on living in this house in Kolomya until we died . . .

  I shook my head sharply and looked at the tears of rain running down the window.

  Yury Ivanych got up from the table and put on his jacket.

  ‘I’ll go to the post office, maybe they’re paying the pensions,’ he said as he went out into the corridor.

  The rain that had put us under house arrest again reminded me of Kiev. The three of us sat at the table in silence.

  ‘Maybe I should start keeping chickens?’ the old woman asked thoughtfully and then shrugged in answer to her own question.

  Rain prompts different thoughts and questions in everyone. I looked at Gulya.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she suggested in a quiet voice. ‘There are two umbrellas hanging on the hallstand.’

  ‘Yes, go for a walk, why don’t you?’ Olga Mykolaivna said to me. ‘I’ll stay at home. Sitting at home is good for the health too!’

  When we got back from our walk we were staggered by news that Yury Ivanych had brought back from the post office. The night before a photographer who worked in Kolomya’s only photo studio had been murdered. They had found him dead this morning. And all his cameras and equipment had been stolen.

  I was struck dumb by the news. That night I got up carefully, so as not to wake Gulya, and went over to the window. I saw a car on watch in our street again.

  It wouldn’t have been logical to link the presence of the car with the murder of the photographer. It was clearly just the times that we lived in. Tense times, with lots of murders.