The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Or one could go out of this room at the Prosecutor’s Office and go down to the floor below in search of Guseynov, and just bring up another little trifle: the dead man’s funeral. There must have been, I suppose, a very large crowd of mourners – all black rags and wailing. After Ali and Husein, there is now another martyr! But would you believe it, Guseynov knows nothing about any funeral. They buried him without any ceremony, he thinks; indeed, they did it at night. There was a police presence and all gatherings were banned. But surely, I say, there must have been crowds at the mosques; you can’t ban anything there, am I right?

  Visibly upset, and nervously scrabbling around for a packet of cigarettes, he says, Yes, yes, they prayed as they always do. What does he mean – as always? No, no, my friend, something does not add up; don’t try to lead me a merry dance, my dear comrade!

  Simply to test out this idea, I spoke to the commander of the KGB, Yusuf-zade; he must know if there are any divisions amongst the Muslims – serious enough for someone to get the idea of pulling out a knife. At the last party conference, he was the one who declared that there was a need to intensify the teaching of atheism and open new centres for anti-religious propaganda, even though, it seems, no one knew where the money would come from.

  There is a fabulous sum allocated to precisely this activity in the Republic’s budget: so many millions of roubles that you couldn’t even write out all those zeros. And there are meant to be thirty-two thousand specially trained propagandists to further this campaign. What they actually ever do is difficult to imagine, but the important thing is, I suppose, that they are on the payrolls. There are so many people who have to be found a job somewhere, and all are someone’s brother or brother-in-law, and they all have families and what families!

  It is no small expense to bring up five or six children.

  However, General Yusuf-zade is also convinced that only an Armenian could have killed Pashayev. The funeral? Well, he says, that doesn’t mean a thing; those people are very careful and they don’t do things in the light of day! There were more of our people than the faithful, and those people knew it, of course, and they kept a low profile. And their meetings? Well, it is no easy matter to infiltrate them and know what they’re saying. You’d never believe the lengths they go to in order to hold their meetings; they can bring together fifty people in a three-room apartment, but we know of assemblies actually held in schools during the night: the janitors open the doors, the teachers accompany the students and the management know nothing about it.

  There they listen to sermons recorded on cassettes that come in from Iran and there’s no need to translate them as they are already in Azeri. And it seems that they are listening to Arab music, which can also be bought on the black market. If they mourned Pashayev and swore vengeance, then that’s where they did it, and certainly not in the mosque under the nose of the police and the Cheka…

  Well, who would have thought the general would be so good at turning the whole argument on its head; I had been convinced that I was getting somewhere. Time will tell whether they’re right and the knife was wielded by some Avanessian or other.

  At this stage, I felt that something wasn’t quite right: I haven’t found a single Russian amongst the authorities I have spoken with. What the hell is this? Where do they think they are in this Republic? At this rate, they’ll start putting up road signs in their own language. You can’t understand? Well, that’s your problem. But there’s nothing for it. I’ve read and reread the document showing the structure of the Republican central and local authorities: here in Baku all you have is one deputy mayor who, going by his surname, could be a Russian, always supposing this Nordman is not a Jew or even an Estonian; but what use is a deputy mayor to me? No, no, there’s something odd going on here! Fortunately we’ve got the KGB, and they play by the rules. Yusuf-zade’s deputy is a Russian, Major Anisimov. He has been living in Azerbaijan for ten years, I’ve found that out, but he’s a Russian just the same – one of us. I wanted to speak to him without anyone else hanging around. On Monday, there’s a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, and the general is a deputy, of course; I telephoned the office and they confirmed that he will be out all day, and then I asked to be transferred to Anisimov so that I could make an appointment with him. I told Kandayev that I wouldn’t be needing him till the evening. Dzhafar Alyevich has been falling over backwards to help me, but I would not want to have him come along, and besides, I got the impression that he was very happy to have the day off and go somewhere out of the city to load up melons for his brother-in-law’s beachhut business – using the office car, of course.

  It was midday when I left the hotel and started off on foot in the direction of the KGB offices. It was easy to distinguish the ethnicities of the people crowding the pavement with their bags of shopping: the Russian and Armenian women wear trousers and nothing on their heads, while the Azeri women all have scarves on their heads but do not wear trousers, which they leave to their men. When I’d had enough of breathing exhaust fumes, I stopped a dilapidated Chayka that was going in my direction with the insignia of some ministry or other, and the driver who looked at all the passers-by, as do the unlicensed operators in search of customers. There was already a peasant woman on her way to market, complete with a live chicken in a plastic bag, but he of course had me get in anyway. Come on in as long as there’s room; don’t let’s waste the state’s petrol! Well in the end, I got to the KGB with shoes covered with dust and my jacket over my shoulder, and while I was standing at the reception desk and waiting for the young man to fill in a pass, I couldn’t help noticing his hands; nor could I resist.

  Now do tell me what your father’s trade was; he wasn’t by any chance a butcher? He looked at me sideways: No, why a butcher? He drives a tractor actually… Well, I think the heat had affected my head, and I was for pursuing the conversation:

  But who precisely is the one in your household that cuts the pig’s throat when it comes to that time? Judging by his accent, he must have come from Oryol, where, I think, they produce an excellent salami made with chilli.

  Fortunately Anisimov came down to greet me, and in his office he even had a fridge, which is essential in such a climate. So there we remained happily drinking anisette and water, and if you had seen us there each with a glass in our hand and a straw in our mouth, you would have taken us for two people who in that moment had no desire to do a hand’s turn.

  “Listen, Nikolay Vasilyevich,” I started off. “You know as well as I do that in cases like this you cannot rush to conclusions; you have to think things over carefully. The police in Baku think that the Armenians cut the ayatollah’s throat, or at least that’s what they’ve told me. Now you know these people much better than I do; help me understand what’s going on! I believe that if this opinion was shared by the population, they would have made the Armenians pay for it already. It’s true, you people are keeping a watchful eye, and there’s the police, even though we all know… well, the less said the better. And there are tanks in the streets.

  But the day the word spread that Pashayev had been killed, here you should have been walking up to your ankles in blood, if they really believed that the Armenians had killed him. They would have overturned the armoured cars in the streets, if some officer had tried to block their way. But nothing happened; they didn’t even have a funeral!”

  And here came the first surprise, because what for everyone else was a well-established truth, was for the major nothing less than an absurdity, which wasn’t even worth discussing. I came to the conclusion that here in Baku things can be either black or white according to the language in which one thinks.

  “Of course,” Anisimov drawled. “He wasn’t killed by any Armenian; that much is clear.”

  “Not only that!” I insisted. “Not only did those other people not kill him, but these people didn’t even want to exploit his death as a pretext! They couldn’t have asked for more. Listen, I’ve wandered around this place in the last few days: there
are plenty of young men – good-for-nothings who have no work and hang around the squares all day. You can read many things in their eyes: their desire to smash up everything in sight, set fire to the motor cars, break down doors and get their hands on the women – it’s all there in their eyes, and they’re only waiting for the pretext. But nothing… Now listen, Nikolay Vasilyevich, it’s as though wherever they meet up – for billiards perhaps, I don’t know – someone comes along to warn them: we’re going to kill him, but don’t get alarmed, what is going to happen has been written in the book of God, and he merited nothing less.”

  Anisimov laughed, “You’re a poet, Nazar Kallistratovich.

  And you described it so well: playing billiards, indeed… But yes, perhaps that is how it happened. They’ve started killing each other. Well, what can we say? Let’s hope they keep at it!”

  “But why would they want to kill him in particular? This is what I can’t explain!”

  And I should also have said to him: and why in particular did they send me down here? More generally, why can’t you sort out this matter yourselves? You know these people, and could at least try to imagine the reasons behind it? But no, you’ve strung it out as long as you could – until someone had to come down from Moscow! It amounts to this: we’ll not get too excited if this murder remains unresolved, and it won’t be our fault, but that of the people who come down from the capital. No brother, I thought, you aren’t telling me it like it is, either. That, I believe, was the moment – there in Anisimov’s office before lunch with the fan humming but failing to disperse the heat and the now warm remains of the anisette and water at the bottom of my glass – that I first got the idea that this whole thing might be a provocation set up by the KGB in that very building. How? For what purpose? Well, a whole host of possibilities come to mind: for example, to create uncertainty amongst the ranks of the extremists by making them suspect each other and perhaps even in the hope that they would start to kill each other.

  Anisimov even came out with it: Let’s hope they keep on killing each other! What if they didn’t want to kill each other, but instead wanted to wipe out the Armenians or even the Russians, as Krylenko argues? No worries: we’ll think up a way of making them kill each other! So they dish up the first murder, and the next ones will come along on their own accord, perhaps with the odd gentle push… No, this is absurd; they couldn’t have set up something like that. Yes, they could! Try and work it out, if you can! But the upshot is that I can’t even trust Anisimov.

  That’s the way things were until Ryumin turned up.

  Since then, I cannot say that I feel certain of anything, but at least I am starting to come up with a few possibilities that are a little less vague. Thanks to the bag. And while I’m at the Prosecutor’s Office trying to get to the bottom of this conundrum, I at least have the pleasure of knowing that somewhere in the KGB offices there is someone who is asking himself a hundred times a day where the hell he could have lost that briefcase. And who could that be: perhaps Anisimov himself or General Yusuf-zade. And every time, I would think, they tell themselves that whoever found it would have thrown away the useless papers and kept the bag. And strangely it was quite the opposite: it was found by an honest citizen and she ran straight to the police station.

  Here, she says, this is what they left on the bus. I was coming back from the afternoon shift. By now the shops will have closed and I won’t be able to do the shopping, but I wanted… And as soon as they were on their own, I bet the police officers opened it. Hey, there’s probably a bit of money or, even better, a bottle of something decent! But no, there wasn’t, just a great quantity of paper, and so they handed it on to the duty desk sergeant, Ryumin. This is what is meant by good fortune: there could have been any desk sergeant, as they produce them a dozen at a time. You mean I’ve got to close the sports pages, put down my sandwich and all this for what? A bagful of stupid papers some cretin has left behind on the number 66! And he chucks the whole lot in the cupboard or, at best, he sends it off to the lost property office at the main bus station. Naturally this office is always closed or opens every Friday morning from 10 o’clock to 11.45, but today it is open and here is someone waiting for their briefcase. Here you are… But no, thank God, that day Ryumin was on duty. Ryumin Valery Borisovich, who looks through the papers and then finds the file with Pashayev’s name on it, and decides to take it to the Prosecutor’s Office, and there, because he doesn’t know who to ask for, he declares that he wants to talk to the person investigating the Pashayev case, and now the bag is here and on my desk! No, my friends, you mustn’t leave briefcases on the bus.

  Someone did this and came to regret it, only in that case, it was on the underground and it wasn’t just any paperpusher, but a general and what’s more a general from Moscow.

  In truth, there is almost nothing of great interest in that briefcase: KGB internal memoranda on the canteen timetable and access to the exclusive KGB shop, and an investigation file made out for Pashayev. It is nice and thick, but you wouldn’t credit the rubbish they have stuffed in there! Even newspaper cuttings, and sometimes more than one copy of the same one… The only interesting thing is a series of typewritten transcripts and notes with a few added comments written in pencil: the first is a report from a police lieutenant concerning two kilograms of heroin that his men confiscated while searching a lorry at a road block outside Baku, and the lorry driver had bought it off a dealer who is referred to as the Accountant. And right next to this sobriquet, someone had added in pencil a capital D and a question mark: D.? Another note with the rubber stamp TOP SECRET provides details obtained from an informer on a consignment of assault rifles manufactured in Iran and smuggled over the border. Unfortunately there is no signature or rather, it has been signed off with a scribble that could be anything, but there is another mention of the Accountant. Now, it is hardly news that arms are coming into Azerbaijan in huge quantities; in fact they are also stealing them from the barracks, not only the police barracks but also the army ones. They haven’t yet had enough of beating up the Armenians, but sooner or later they will start to shoot them; in fact they have already started up there in some of those mountains, in that Karabakh of theirs. It is just that up here at the top of the page, someone has made a note, “Sound out Pashayev”. So that removes the nagging doubt that this material might have ended up in the file by mistake. But what does it mean? In reality, I cannot see the dead ayatollah as once a mafia leader involved in the sale of drugs and the smuggling of arms under the neat pseudonym of the Accountant; it is more likely this Accountant was in association with those who killed him. And here is the last in this series of notes showing that this must indeed be the case, because the report of a KGB captain scribbled on two crumpled sheets of squared paper torn from a notebook states, “following conversations with Pashayev, A.S., we wish to point out that the illegal activities of the previously mentioned Mamedov, I.G. also include the recent illegal import of arms and we attach the list of suspects he mentioned.” But the list has not been attached, although I don’t need it: the important thing is to know what kind of man Pashayev was, and who would have been interested in getting him out of the way. He clearly wasn’t one of those priests busy undermining Soviet power; quite the opposite, he was collaborating not only with the republican authorities but also with the organs of Soviet power. Not surprising that they trusted him in the past and sent him to study in Damascus. There was more than enough reason for this other lot having him dispatched into whatever next world awaits him. More than enough indeed, especially if he had started to report some people who saw things differently. I now have something to work on. Here in the Prosecutor’s Office I can go where I want and pull anything out of the archive that takes my fancy, and in the end I’ll know something more about that smuggling.

  Every now and then, however, a chill thought wanders through my brain: what if this is all a stroll up the garden path and the briefcase was not lost at all; someone in the KGB had me find it on
purpose, so that I would end up losing even more time. Perhaps there is no Accountant or, even worse, there most certainly is but he has nothing to do with the Pashayev case. There’s no way out of this labyrinth.

  While I’m here in the office squeezing the juices of my poor brain as hard as I can, with bearded Pashayev smiling at me from his photograph and a pregnant Asya in a loose smock from hers, I am reminded of the fable of Koshchey Bessmertny. During the war when I was six or seven years old and there was nothing to eat but rice and watery soup with a piece of dried bread, I would be whimpering with hunger by the evening and my mother would distract me by reading Afanasyev’s fables. I remember the book very well: bought for a couple of kopecks, its soft cover had been torn off long before. Who knows where it ended up? I think I still had it when I was at university. My poor mother was breaking her back working in the munitions factory, and she must have been as hungry as I was, but when we had had the soup, she would take me in her arms and read: in such and such a kingdom, in such and such a state, there lived a tsar – and I would have my mouth open in wonderment – Ivan the Prince set off and climbed a mountain in search of the princess abducted by Koshchey, the Deathless Skeleton… in my terror I clung to my mother, but the terror was delightful, particularly as she was there and we would sleep together to keep warm, my father being under arms, where he would stay until 1945. Yes, he was away for four years. Many years later when some acquaintance spoke of his recent travels outside the country and eventually asked my father if he had ever been abroad, he replied that he had indeed and had gone to Berlin, all the way on foot… Let’s keep it short, we know what fables are like: when Ivan the Prince meets his mother, he has to hide under the kitchen table, because they can hear Koshchey’s footsteps… Fu, fu, fi, fu, I smell the blood of some Russian crud! But the old woman tricks Koshchey, and cunningly gets him to reveal his secret: Deathless Skeleton, where is your death? My death, he says, is in such-and-such a place, where there is an oak tree, and underneath the oak tree there is a box, and in that box there is a hare, and in that hare there is a goose, and in that goose there is an egg, and in that egg there is my death… That’s the truth about this whole bloody business down in Baku: try to catch it as hard as you can! You’ve found the oak tree; maybe you’ve even found the box, and off shoots the hare from under your nose; if you ever get your hands on the hare, the goose will fly into the air! It’ll be one devil of a job to get your hands on that egg.