Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Andrey Kurkov
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Copyright
About the Book
Igor is confident his old Soviet policeman’s uniform will be the best costume at the party. But he hasn’t gone far before he realises something is wrong. The streets are unusually dark and empty, and the only person to emerge from the shadows runs away from him in terror.
After a perplexing conversation with the terrified man, who turns out to be a wine smuggler, and on recovering from the resulting hangover, Igor comes to an unbelievable conclusion: he has found his way back to 1957 Kiev. And it isn’t the innocent era his mother and her friends have so sentimentally described.
As he travels between centuries, his life becomes more and more complicated. The unusual gardener who lives in his mother’s shed keeps disappearing, his best friend has blackmailed the wrong people, and Igor has fallen in love with a married woman in a time before he was born. With his mother’s disapproval at his absences growing, and his adventures in each time frame starting to catch up with him, Igor has to survive the past if he wants any kind of future.
About the Author
Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin.
Amanda Love Darragh studied French and Russian at Manchester University, then spent the following decade working in Moscow and at BBC Worldwide in London. Amanda won the 2009 Rossica Translation Prize for her translation of Iramifications by Maria Galina, and she has translated works by Ilya Boyasho, Igor Savelyev and Anna Lavrinenko, among others.
Also by Andrey Kurkov
Death and the Penguin
The Case of the General’s Thumb
Penguin Lost
A Matter of Death and Life
The President’s Last Love
The Good Angel of Death
The Milkman in the Night
The Gardener from Ochakov
Andrey Kurkov
Translated from the Russian by Amanda Love Darragh
1
‘MA, YOUR FRIEND’S at the gate, and she’s got another dodgy man with her!’ Igor shouted cheerfully.
‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ said his mother, coming out into the hallway. ‘She’ll hear you!’
Elena Andreevna shook her head as she looked reproachfully at her thirty-year-old son, who had never learned to lower his voice when necessary.
It was true that their next-door neighbour, Olga, did seem to be taking rather too much of an interest in her personal life. As soon as Elena Andreevna and her son had moved from Kiev to Irpen, Olga – who was also fifty-five years old and single – had taken her under her wing. Elena Andreevna had divorced her husband before she’d retired, largely because he had started to remind her of a piece of furniture, being inert, silent, perpetually morose and apparently incapable of helping out around the house. Olga had been smart enough not to get married in the first place, but she spoke about it casually, without regret. ‘I don’t need to keep a husband on a leash,’ she had once said. ‘Put them on a leash and they start to behave like dogs, always barking and biting!’
Elena Andreevna went out to the gate and saw her neighbour. Next to her stood a wiry, clean-shaven man of around sixty-five with an expressive face and a determined chin, closely cropped grey hair and a faded canvas rucksack on his back.
‘Lenochka, I’ve brought someone to meet you! This is Stepan. He fixed my cowshed.’
Elena Andreevna looked sceptically at Stepan. She didn’t have a cowshed, and nothing else needed fixing. Everything was in perfect working order, for the time being, and she wasn’t in the habit of inviting unfamiliar men into the house for no reason.
Although the look of amused indifference in Elena Andreevna’s eyes had not escaped his attention, Stepan politely inclined his head.
‘Do you by any chance need a gardener?’ he wheezed, his voice full of hope.
Stepan was dressed smartly in black trousers, heavy boots and a striped sailor’s undershirt.
‘People usually hire gardeners at the beginning of spring,’ remarked Elena Andreevna, unable to hide her surprise.
‘I prefer to start now and finish in late winter. I can prune the trees and tidy everything up, and then I’ll be on my way. Trees need looking after all year round. My rates are quite reasonable, too – I’ll be happy with a hundred hryvnas a month, plus board and lodging. Mind you, I’m quite fond of cooking myself.’
A hundred hryvnas a month? Elena Andreevna thought with astonishment. Why so little? He looks perfectly strong and capable.
She glanced over her shoulder, hoping to consult her son, but Igor wasn’t in the yard. Which was probably just as well. He might have accused his mother of losing her marbles in her old age.
Elena Andreevna sighed. ‘We don’t really have any room in the house,’ she said, reluctant to make a decision without her son’s input.
‘I don’t need to sleep in the house. I’ll be fine in an outbuilding, as long as I have something to put over myself when it gets cold. I never touch alcohol, and I’m completely trustworthy.’
Elena Andreevna looked at her neighbour. Olga nodded, as though she had known Stepan for years.
‘Well, I suppose you might as well stay for now,’ conceded Elena Andreevna. ‘We’ve got a shed, and it’s empty at the moment. We don’t keep any animals. There’s a bed with a mattress, and an electric socket. I just need to speak with my son . . .’
The shed was just visible behind the house. Stepan nodded and began walking towards it.
‘How long have you known him?’ Elena Andreevna asked her neighbour.
‘He was here before, about two years ago. He didn’t steal anything, he fixed everything I asked him to and he did a bit of gardening. I wouldn’t think twice, if I were you! He’s a useful chap to have around.’
Elena Andreevna shrugged and went into the house to look for Igor. He was greedily smoking a cigarette when his mother told him the news. The gardener’s arrival didn’t seem to interest him much.
‘He can dig up the potatoes,’ said Igor. ‘It’s more work than the two of us can manage.’
Stepan dug the potatoes up, single-handedly, in no time at all. Then he laid them out in the yard to dry. Seeing this, Elena Andreevna was quietly glad of his help and gave him a hundred hryvnas straight away – a month’s salary in advance. She cooked some of the potatoes for supper that evening and served them with braised beef.
In the morning Igor was woken by an exuberant spluttering and snorting outside his window. He l
ooked out and saw Stepan standing there in nothing but a pair of black underpants, pouring cold water from the well over himself. What piqued Igor’s curiosity was the top of Stepan’s left upper arm. It bore a number of blurred dark blue marks, as though someone had tried to cover up or remove an old tattoo. Igor went out into the yard and asked Stepan to pour a bucket of water from the well over him too.
The water burned Igor, in a good way. He too gave a loud and exuberant snort. Then he asked Stepan about the marks on his shoulder.
Stepan contemplated his landlady’s pale, skinny son, wondering whether or not to give him the time of day. Igor’s piercing, light green eyes seemed to invite honesty.
‘You know,’ Stepan said quietly, ‘I wish I knew. I was about five years old at the time. It hurt, I know that much. I can remember crying. Apparently my old man included some kind of secret code in the tattoo. Either for me, or for himself. My uncle never really explained it. He just said that my father sent me to him on the train, and then he went off somewhere and disappeared. I never saw him again. I was brought up by my Uncle Lev and Aunt Marusya in Odessa. They told me that my mother left my father when I was about three. I was forever asking my uncle to tell me more, but he took the full story to the grave.
‘All I learned was that there was more to my father than met the eye. He was sent to the labour camps in Siberia three times. What for? No one knows. Maybe there’s some important information contained in the tattoo, but as I grew my skin stretched so that the ink blurred, and it’s impossible to make any sense of it all!’
Stepan glanced at the marks on his shoulder. Igor moved closer and inspected the blurred tattoo. It was made up of a number of dark blue blotches, which didn’t appear to form either letters or a recognisable image.
‘Where’s your old man?’ Stepan asked suddenly.
Igor looked into the gardener’s eyes and shook his head.
‘Somewhere in Kiev. My mother left him a long time ago. She did the right thing,’ said Igor. ‘He wasn’t interested in either of us.’
‘Don’t you ever see him?’ Stepan asked with a hint of disbelief.
Igor thought about it. Then he shook his head again.
‘Why would I want to? We’re all right, just the two of us. I’ve got a couple of scars to remember him by.’
Stepan’s face flushed with anger. ‘Did he beat you?’
‘No. My mother used to send me off with him to the park or the fairground rides. He would always let me go off by myself, so he could go and drink beer with his friends. Once a cyclist knocked me over and broke my arm. The second time was even worse.’
The gardener frowned. ‘All right,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively, ‘that’s enough about him!’
Igor was amused by Stepan’s desire to change the subject. He grinned and his eyes returned to the tattoo.
‘It might be worth trying to decipher it, you know,’ said Igor, after a few moments’ reflection.
‘And how do you suggest we go about that?’
‘We need to take a photo first. Then we can play around with it on-screen. It might work, you never know! It’s worth a try. I’ve got a friend who’s great with computers – he might be able to help us.’
‘Well, there’s a bottle in it for you if you manage to figure it out,’ grinned Stepan.
Igor fetched his camera and took several photos of Stepan’s shoulder.
2
IGOR DRANK A mug of coffee, then sat down at the computer and merged the photos together. He zoomed in on the composite image, zoomed out again, rotated it this way and that, but the blurred tattoo remained incomprehensible.
‘All right,’ Igor murmured to himself, ‘I’ll go and see Kolyan in Kiev. If he can’t do anything with it either, then I’ll have to admit defeat. And I guess I can forget about that bottle from the gardener!’
He downloaded the photos onto a memory stick and put it in his jacket pocket.
‘Ma, I’m going into town,’ he said to Elena Andreevna. ‘I’ll be back some time late afternoon. Do you want me to pick anything up?’
Elena Andreevna looked up from her ironing. She thought about it.
‘Some black bread, if they’ve got any fresh,’ she said eventually.
The sun was climbing into the sky. The pleasant, warm smell of summer lingered in the air. It didn’t feel at all like autumn – it was as though the seasons were deliberately disregarding the calendar. The grass was still green, and even the leaves still clung to the trees.
The minibus taxi to Kiev picked Igor up about five minutes after he reached the stop. It set off again as though it were being piloted by a Formula One racing driver, rather than an unshaven old man wearing a cap who happened to be the husband of the local pharmacist.
The driver turned on the radio, which was tuned to his favourite station, and looked in the mirror to see whether any of his passengers would object. It did happen. The former head teacher at the school, for example, couldn’t bear Radio Chanson. But she obviously had no business in Kiev today, so he could listen to whatever he liked.
Igor started thinking about Stepan’s tattoo, and he was seized by a sudden moment of doubt: maybe Stepan was lying? Maybe the tattoo was some kind of prison ‘badge’ and he’d tried to get rid of it himself to cover up his shady past? Igor should have asked Stepan whether he’d been inside himself. Didn’t he say that his father had been imprisoned three times? Well, the apple never falls far from the tree, or so they say . . . Although come to think of it, what did Igor know about his own apple tree? Enough to hope that he wouldn’t turn out the same way.
Coincidentally, and rather appropriately, the song that came on Radio Chanson at that moment was a prison ballad about a mother waiting for her son to come back from a labour camp. It distracted Igor from his thoughts, and he continued his journey in a blank reverie, just staring out of the minibus window and not thinking about anything. He arrived in Kiev half an hour later and took the metro to Contract Square.
His childhood friend Nikolai, otherwise known as Kolyan, worked as a computer programmer in a bank. Well, maybe not a programmer but an IT specialist of some sort – he was responsible for troubleshooting, or monitoring the programs, something like that. Like many computer experts he was distinguished by certain idiosyncrasies, as though he himself had been infected at some point by a computer virus. He had a tendency to change the subject at the drop of a hat, and instead of answering a specific question he would often start rambling on about something completely irrelevant.
He’d been the same ten years ago, and he’d been the same twenty years ago. The two of them had grown up together and attended the same school. Even the army hadn’t separated them – they had ended up in the same military unit just outside Odessa. Military service had been like a holiday for Kolyan. The unit commander had just had a computer installed in his office, and Kolyan taught him how to play games on it. From then on the colonel would send Kolyan to Odessa once a week to fetch new games. Kolyan wasn’t stupid – he never brought back more than one game at a time.
Igor often went to see him when he was in Kiev, just to catch up over a beer. Kolyan’s working hours were pretty flexible. Only once had he been summoned back to the office, when one of the programs had frozen.
Kolyan emerged from the depths of the bank holding an umbrella.
‘It’s not raining,’ said Igor, looking in surprise at the umbrella.
‘You’re right,’ agreed Kolyan, unperturbed. ‘But in half an hour’s time, who knows? The weather’s like the dollar exchange rate at the moment. It can change several times a day.’
They walked to Khorevaya Street and sat down at a table in a small, cosy cafe.
‘What are you having, then?’ asked Kolyan. ‘I’m funding the refreshments today.’
‘You’re a banker – funding things is your job! Let’s have a beer.’
‘I’m not a banker, I just work in a bank. So don’t get any ideas about a side order of caviar.’
‘Can you do anything with it?’
‘I’ll try,’ nodded Kolyan. ‘The computers are all behaving themselves today, so I haven’t got much on. Why don’t you hang out in Podil for a while? Stay local, and I’ll call you on your mobile if I have any joy. If not, well, I’ll call you anyway!’
As they left the cafe, it began to drizzle. Kolyan shot a triumphant look at his friend. He opened his umbrella, waved goodbye and walked off in the direction of his bank.
Igor didn’t feel like wandering about aimlessly without an umbrella, even though it wasn’t raining very hard. He headed for the Zhovten cinema and got there just in time to see Shrek the Third. The film made him laugh out loud. Part way through the film, he noticed that there wasn’t a single child in the cinema – only old people.
When Igor came out into the foyer after the film had finished, he saw a notice on the wall that explained the strange audience demographic: ‘Free admission for pensioners and disabled individuals of all three categories on Tuesdays at 11 a.m.’
It had stopped raining, but the sky was still full of heavy clouds. Igor started walking towards Kolyan’s work. As soon as the bank sign came into view, his mobile rang.
‘Right, you can come and meet me at the bank,’ Kolyan said cheerfully.
‘I’m already here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m standing outside,’ explained Igor.
Kolyan came out a couple of minutes later. Igor noticed that he was holding a piece of paper rolled up into a tube.
‘Come on then, show me,’ he said, burning with curiosity.
‘Ha! As if I’m going to show you straight away!’ retorted Kolyan. ‘No, you’ll have to be patient – you owe me now. And it just so happens that I’m hungry. And hunger makes me mean – well, at least, not very cooperative.’
Kolyan dragged Igor towards a cafe. On the way, they passed the Petrovich nightclub.
The Gardener from Ochakov Page 1