The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  You must understand that the fish they are canning is not bought from fishermen, no, no! Anyone could do that! They obtain railway wagons full of it from the state market as rotten fish, as certified by the official inspector, who has been appointed by Neporozhny. But this is the good part: they don’t pay a single kopeck for it; in fact, they are paid for taking it away. And where does all the officially rotten fish end up? It seems that no one really wants to know, but the canning factory is working at full capacity… The sale of all this fish is simply child’s play. The certified production all goes to the army where, of course, there is another friend, the chief of the purchasing department at the Military District, and the rest just makes its way out onto the black market. Come on, you’re saying, how could a little matter like that go unnoticed? Look, could you try and understand how this works for once and for all. The important thing is not whether people notice or not; this is of no interest. The important thing is that whoever does notice, keeps their mouth shut, and there are many ways of achieving this, the easiest of which is simply to stuff it with food so that it is too busy eating… And so you just have to get on with the business of handing out brown envelopes – a lot of them and big fat ones too! The fattest one of them all naturally goes to the Party’s first secretary, Abdurrakhman Vezirov: the man Geydar Alyev chose to replace him in the position he held before promotion to the giddy heights of the Politburo…

  Nazar’s first reaction now he has all the tasty morsels set out before him is obviously to slap the handcuffs on the whole damn lot and send them to the gallows. And the first in line would be Salayev of course; just the memory of him is a humiliation. The scoundrel was making fun of me! Just a minute to make a few phone calls, he said. You crook, I’ll give you a phone call: a nice little trial behind closed doors and then off to the prison courtyard – the firing squad… And these were just the ones that were stuffing their faces, but there was worse! The commander of the KGB, General Yusuf-zade, didn’t just pocket the money, although he was taking plenty of that and bottles of cognac – real Napoleon – that came in whole crates from Paris paid for in currency, get it? Well, he was up to his neck in something much bigger. After careful examination and collation of the Accountant’s books, Nazar is persuaded that the general wasn’t simply closing an eye or even two; no, no, he was the one who was organising the gunrunning. Hundreds, and now perhaps even thousands, of assault rifles have been imported from Iran using the same launches and sovkhoz lorries that were bringing in the cocaine and heroin. And these same arms have ended up in the hands of those gangs fighting the Armenians who have rebelled down in their Karabakh. Indeed this whole affair, as clearly emerged from the confiscated accounts, started in January precisely at the time of the demonstration in Yerevan in favour of the secession of that unhappy province. At about that time, the Azerbaijan KGB started to confiscate illegal arms and had considerable success, so everyone in Moscow had little reason to worry. The Organs of State are capable of vigilance and the situation is under control! And this is how they did it: for every five or six loads of Kalashnikovs that they themselves imported and distributed to the terrorists, they confiscated another one and sent in a report: we have disarmed another band… No wonder then that General Yusuf-zade would have quite happily strangled Nazar with his own hands, that day in Barrikadnaya Street, as perhaps he did that unhappy ayatollah – what was his name?

  Pashayev, of course… It is laughable really: the whole investigation started with his murder and now the whole affair has taken on such enormous significance that you occasionally forget all about him. But then these things happen and recent history contains more startling examples. For instance, Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany to defend Poland’s territorial integrity, but by the time it was over, no one cared a damn about Poland: in fact, they picked it up between two fingers and moved it like a rag a hundred miles to the west to satisfy a whim of the Leader and they didn’t ask the Poles for permission…

  In actual fact, the Accountant’s accounts had not yet produced anything to do with the death of Pashayev. Nazar had for some time been convinced that he had been butchered because he was informing the authorities of the smuggling activities of some members of his flock, as was the duty of every good Soviet cleric who respected the laws of the land. Unfortunately it was not at all clear whether the person who ordered the assassination or even carried it out in person was the Accountant whose handwriting was so meticulously sculpted onto the page, or General Zia Yusufzade, determined to maintain the secrecy of his gunrunning antics. Clearly he needed to start arresting some of those good people and interrogating them thoroughly before sending them in front of a firing squad. But Nazar had immediately understood that, before doing this, he needed to offload the responsibility on someone else, or at least share it, to avoid being shattered like a terracotta vase. And that someone could only be Deputy Chief Prosecutor Stepankov, who after all was the man who had given rise to all his troubles by sending him off to Baku to investigate the murder of an ayatollah. So off went our Nazar to Stepankov’s office. We can all imagine the scene: well-polished parquet floor, a portrait of Lenin on the wall, the incumbent sitting behind the desk – a man still young but getting a little chubby, dressed in a nondescript and badly cut suit and wearing his Order of the Red Flag on his lapel. And there, when Nazar opened out his papers and notebooks and the statistical tables he had drawn up himself, the Deputy Chief Prosecutor sat in silence for a long time and then winking his blue eyes and displaying a childlike candour, he blurted out, “Right, we’ve got ourselves in a fine pickle…”

  “But,” Nazar objected, “are you thinking of letting the matter rest?”

  “We could, we could!” Stepankov was getting annoyed.

  “Of course we could; why not? If we want, we could do anything! But listen, Kallistratych, don’t you get on your high horse. I haven’t said that I want to bury the whole thing. Indeed we might actually go the whole way on this one; it might just be the right moment.”

  Yes, that’s exactly what the Deputy Chief Prosecutor said; he too had read the attack on Geydar Alyev in “Literaturka”, and who knows, perhaps some more confidential material…

  “So shall we arrest them?” Nazar asked hopefully.

  “What do you think?” said Stepankov sarcastically. “Are you going yourself to Baku to arrest the Chief of Police and the Commander of the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor and the First Secretary of the Party? Do you have a pistol, Kallistratych? And do you think it will be enough?”

  Of course, Nazar reflected in a sudden state of confusion, this is no joke: it would mean putting half the republic’s leadership in the slammer. Where would you start?

  “No, Kallistratych,” Stepankov expatiated as he lit a cigarette, “for the moment, we’re not going to arrest anyone.

  You have no idea how high I will have to go to get the authorisation to make a move. Although I shouldn’t be telling you this… and make sure you speak to no one else about it… if the situation continues to spiral out of control down there and the Party managers cannot get a handle on it, then we are seriously thinking of imposing martial law on the whole of Azerbaijan. In such an event, we will be able to rely on the army and they will make the arrests, certainly not the police. Apart from the abuse of office, if there is anyone there implicated in illegal arms deals, I can assure you that the generals will not let them get away with it. They might let the others off, but not them. You can be sure of that. But there is something else going on here. This gang – don’t you think? – must have some kind of protection here in Moscow, and damn good protection too, if they can get those papers to disappear and bury them in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, of all the unlikely places.”

  “Yes, I thought about it,” Nazar defended himself, “but I didn’t want to throw stones in the pond; you’ll never catch your pike, you know, if you stir up the bottom and the water turns all murky.”

  “No,” Stepankov acknowledged, “you w
ere right about that, but all the same, you must understand that we have to act with the utmost prudence. Your pool is frozen over, and everything is okay as long as the ice holds up, but if it breaks then we’ll both end up in chilly water. You know what we’ll do? For the moment, I will try to speak about this matter to the people upstairs – but cautiously, you understand! In the meantime, we keep them under surveillance and try to understand how far they have infiltrated up here in Moscow and where they have their accomplices, the bastards!”

  And so it was that the following day, Nazar was visited in his office by a major at the Ministry of the Interior, Ogodayev Mikhail Semyonych. He was the leading specialist in phone tapping, and the Prosecutor’s Office always made use of him when they had to set up a system that was a little more complicated. Being the artful genius he was, they would probably have made him a general and an academician into the bargain, if it weren’t for the fact that he was a Negro.

  Hmm, you’re right, it does sound a little farfetched, but don’t complain to me for Christ’s sake. Is it my fault that during the glorious fifties, one of the first Congolese students – or was it Ethiopian – who came to one of our polytechnics had become entangled in an overly passionate liaison with a Muscovite student, perhaps fascinated by that specimen of exotic virility rarely seen in our Russian lands?

  We all know how these things go: as soon as the catastrophe was discovered, the internationalist student hurried off home to his Limpopo, but this did not stop Masha’s belly from swelling up. The emptying of such bellies was not the trifle it is today. Our very own Negro came to be born under the grey sky of Moscow and his cries gladdened the maternity ward of Gynaecological Hospital No. 11 in the district of Marina Roshcha under Stalin’s benevolent stare from the portrait hanging on the flaking wall… One person, however, was not gladdened and that was his grandfather, Semyon Mikhalych. He didn’t like the idea of a coloured grandson at all, even though, as the law demanded, the new citizen took his patronymic from the grandfather in the absence of a legitimate father. No, Granddad was not happy and as soon as his daughter gave birth, no one could stop him from ripping her skin apart with his belt, so she had to stay indoors for a week until the bruises became less obvious. If they’d let him have his way, he would have beaten her when she had her belly and if that had had its consequences, then the family would have been saved from the shame of it…

  Then the troubles started for the little black boy, and not only with the grandfather whose belt he soon learnt to fear.

  On more than one occasion, he was obliged to show his companions that he had inherited a little of his father’s musculature, the one that in an earlier period had made his mummy lose her head and open her legs. In these cases, however, all he had to do was bash in the faces of one or two of the more irritating bullies, and then the others ceased teasing him. In fact he came to be respected in the neighbourhood, and in the end the hooligans of Marina Roshcha were actually proud of their black companion Mikhail Semyonych… As he grew up, he too became more civilised, and at school he coped well enough. Then to everyone’s surprise, he even gained admission to the polytechnic, the very same faculty in which his father had graduated and which his mother was unceremoniously kicked out of, just as soon as her pregnancy was discovered.

  Of course, Daddy-engineer was never heard of again: he was lost who knows where, building power stations or leading guerrilla bands through his native forests, and maybe somebody had already bumped him off or he had been eaten by his compatriots. Whatever the case, his son followed in his footsteps and graduated to the delight of his mother – after all those sacrifices. Yes, Freud would have had a field day, but who knows if even he would have been able to explain why our Mikhail Semyonych wasn’t happy just to become an engineer, but decided upon this bizarre specialisation, phone tapping technology… Well, I have strayed perhaps too far from my original subject. Indeed, who is interested in this affair? It is just that I thought that I could sense – how could I put it? – a degree of incredulity when you were introduced to the black major. But no, you can believe in everything. I am not inventing a damn thing!

  Let me tell you, that in recent times you can see our Soviet blacks all over the place: one of them, for example, was in the national fencing team at the Olympics – I think it was the one in Seoul, where he picked up the bronze in the foil, and another was even a second lead in a film… And excuse me, there is just about everything in a country like ours. A few years ago there was even a Jewish general, Dragunsky he was called – or was it Dragunov or something like that. He was to all effects and purposes a major-general and still a serving officer! They even sent him around the world to be interviewed by foreign journalists: living proof that there is no discrimination here in Russia…

  Forgive me, I am still digressing and yet none of this is of any interest to us. The only thing of any significance here is that Nazar and the black engineer put together an extraordinarily complex system of intercepts, which made it possible to record not only the local calls those good people were making all day and night, but also all the long-distance calls to Moscow both from their workplaces and their homes, and all without having to stick their noses into those offices in Baku where they didn’t want to raise the slightest suspicion. It took ten days or more to get the system running, mainly because they had to obtain the necessary authorisations albeit with the fast-track procedure, because the Prosecutor’s Office could not listen in to the phone calls of such big fish without permission from the highest authorities. Eventually – one fine day – Major Ogodayev called Nazar on the phone and asked him to come to his office at the Ministry of the Interior.

  “Now you’re going to listen to a delightful little conversation,” he suggested once the judge had sat down at the desk, on which a large and impressive tape recorder took pride of place. “Yesterday, Comrade Vezirov phoned Moscow from the office of the Party’s First Secretary. Let’s hear what fascinating things he has to say.”

  “Who was he talking to?”

  “Let’s see if you recognise him, Nazar Kallistratovich.

  With a little effort, you should get there,” the black man chortled. He pressed the button and the tape recorder started to turn silently. Nazar heard a crackle and then suddenly a high-pitched voice, which he did seem to recognise but he could not put his finger on it, however hard he tried.

  “If not, there’s no point in going to see Salayev,” the voice said. And without letting him finish, another voice butted in; this is Vezirov, the engineer intimated in a whisper.

  “Yes, if we don’t solve that problem for him – the one I mentioned, which is all to do with the Guseynov question, besides we need him because Savostyanov is leaving on the 16th, you know, Savostyanov’s replacement also depends on ministerial support.”

  Who are all these people? Hold on, I’m beginning to remember: Guseynov is the Chief Prosecutor of Baku, and so far so good, but who is this Savostyanov? Lord, this life is complicated…

  “Yes, but Guseynov’s standing is going down,” continued the unknown Muscovite.

  “Yes, Guseynov is a fucking nobody. The only name I have got hold of came from Semyonov, the prison governor, who spoke of… a fellow citizen of Krasnodar, who is a reputable person; but who the fuck knows? …”

  So that’s how the fathers of the people talk to each other!

  In spite of his hundred kilos and his greying hair, Nazar was naive and was astonished to hear such expressions.

  “Hmm, we need to ask…”

  “… for information, of course. Semyonov would like to become the commander of the border guards here.”

  “Huh…”

  “All things considered…”

  “Yes, yes, better him than anyone else… better him…”

  “Fuck it… the argument we want to put across is basically about going to Moscow and saying: all right then, if you want to fuck us over with those cuts in funding, well go ahead, but you’ve got to give us something to tak
e home, otherwise they’ll tear us limb from limb! And then the Committee for Hydrometeorology and the Environment… well really, it’s time Dyakonov pulled his finger out on that one… the other day Guseynov said: but we’re friends of Livshic! Who cares a fuck about Livshic!”

  “He never understood shit!”

  “Well, you tell him, otherwise we’re going to lose a golden opportunity.”

  Nazar’s ears pricked up at the mention of Dyakonov. “Just listen to them cooing, our little doves,” the major quipped.

  “Yes, but he said Dyakonov,” Nazar said in a low voice to avoid blotting out the recorded ones.

  “Wait, you’ll soon hear.”

  Vezirov was speaking once again; he’d stopped, who knows, to make a note or simply puff on his cigarette, “On the question of the tender, we have got that other guy in hand. In the sense that he went to the minister and said:

  Listen here, couldn’t we meet up with Dyakonov and Vezirov? Because you shouldn’t get the idea that I don’t know what’s going on, and stuff like that. In my opinion, we could make use of him for the moment, and then we really screw him, but for the moment, especially with those positions coming up for new appointments, well, he could be useful. You get me? Instead of having one cooperative, we’ll have two of them, that’s more in line with the regulations…”