The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov

Author:Andrey Kurkov [Andrey Kurkov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

47

AS THE TWO men approached us from opposite sides, one in the company of a loaded camel, my inner tension increased. We stood there without moving. Petro’s face was a study in intense resolution. Galya looked bewildered. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands – she kept lifting them to her face, then lowering them and trying to wipe them on her jeans.

Time slowed down, as if the heavenly projectionist was deliberately stretching out this episode in the movie.

And now I was concerned about the second traveller, the one walking with the camel.

We were at the precise geometrical centre of an imaginary straight line running from the colonel to the stranger with the camel. I suddenly had the thought that all this was simply a coincidence. Our position on the two men’s route, that is. And if we moved aside for a while, the colonel and the nomad would meet or, if they weren’t intended to meet, they would walk past each other and both continue on their way. However, logic obstinately suggested that the colonel was coming precisely to see us, because he had something to say to us. But the approach of the nomad really was a coincidence, although the consequences of this coincidence were so far unknown. I could guess what to expect from the colonel. Even when considering a colonel in the abstract, it’s easy enough to imagine the way he will act. But what could you expect from a nomad, and what made me think he was a nomad anyway? Only the fact that he was walking with a loaded camel?

The sun had already crept a little to one side, abandoning its position at the zenith, and while just recently I had been a man without a shadow, squatting on my haunches and crumbling the sand from inside the rim of the hole, now I had a little shadow anchored to my feet. Time was moving in slow motion, but the sun had not changed its schedule, and the thought came to me that the only clock that would show the right time now was a sundial. Then suddenly I felt like the pointer of a sundial. The pointer has to be the most important thing in a sundial – after all, it stands motionless while time circles around it.

And now the expression on the colonel’s face was visible. It was as stony as the face of a statue by Kavaleridze. The teeth were clenched, the jaw muscles were tense. I sensed danger in the very way the colonel moved, and then I saw the pistol in his hand.

‘Petro, he’s armed!’ I said in a low voice.

Petro nodded without looking round.

About twenty metres away from us the colonel stopped, put the rucksack down beside his feet, squared his shoulders and swung his arms, bent at the elbow, through a couple of circles, to loosen up his swollen joints.

‘Well!’ he shouted. ‘Did you think you’d got away?’

We didn’t say anything.

‘Slipped something in

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