The Gardener from Ochakov

5

IGOR DIDN’T SLEEP very well that night. The iron bedstead creaked every time he turned over and kept waking him up. Fortunately it didn’t disturb Stepan, who lay fast asleep and snoring in the other bed.

Eventually Igor opened his eyes, rolled over onto his back and lay there staring up at the low ceiling, which was barely visible in the darkness. He thought about the evening they’d spent with their landlady. He remembered the way she’d broken into an almost girlish smile when she’d been talking about Fima Chagin. It had looked so strange on her wrinkled old face. Later on she’d let slip that she herself had been in love with Fima, as had many of the other girls in Ochakov. Apparently Fima Chagin had been a striking individual – tall and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a sharp nose. He had just turned up in Ochakov one day, after the war. His grandmother lived in a big house, and when she was suddenly taken ill his parents had sent him from Kakhovka to live with her, so that when she died the house would stay in the family. According to their landlady, the grandmother recovered and shared her house with her grandson for the next ten years. They got on well, and their life together was certainly never dull. When Fima first arrived he had sought out the local troublemakers and picked fights, in an attempt to prove himself. He soon earned their respect and they began to consider him one of their own, as though he’d lived in Ochakov all his life. He went fishing with the other lads or down to the port to steal things, taking anchors from boats that belonged to outsiders and selling them at the market. Every now and then he was caught, but he would simply break free and run away. And he kept on running until the divisional inspector got him locked up for two years.

When Fima came out he seemed much older, more aloof. He had stopped running. From that point on he walked slowly, with authority. People came to visit him from all kinds of far-flung places – from Taganrog, from Rostov, from Odessa. Sometimes they would stay at his house for several weeks and then simply disappear, but others came in their place, all of them thin and wiry. He grew rich. The divisional inspector would greet him in the street, turning a blind eye to it all. This went on for five or six years, maybe even longer, until one day he was found stabbed in his own home.

Igor thought of the flame that had burned in the old woman’s eyes when she told them about Fima Chagin’s murder. Fima had been found, she said, lying on his back in the middle of his living-room floor, a knife sticking out of his chest. Near his body they’d found two bundles of roubles and a note that read: ‘For a proper send-off’.

The old woman had promised to show them the house the following day.

Igor eventually dozed off just before morning, but in no time at all the birds began chirping and squawking right in his ear, or so it seemed, and his eyes snapped open. Stepan had opened the window, letting in the sounds of the clamorous autumn morning that was coming to life in the warmth of the rising sun.

Greeting him with a nod, Stepan went out into the yard wearing just his underwear. From the yard came the sounds of a bucket being lifted and water being poured from the well. Then the gardener made a loud spluttering sound and ran straight back inside, wet to the waist.

After shaving, Stepan went out into the yard again. He returned immediately holding two large apples, one of which he threw to Igor.

‘Breakfast!’ he announced, taking a bite out of his own apple.

About quarter of an hour later the familiar voice of their landlady called to them from the yard. She hadn’t asked for their passports the previous day, or even their names. So when she knocked on the window, she just called, ‘Gentlemen!’

The ‘gentlemen’ left their room. Stepan secured the padlock and checked it twice.

‘It’s on Kostya Khetagurov Street,’ said Anastasia Ivanovna, once they’d set off. ‘Not far from here. It’s an office of some kind now, for a pension fund, or something similar.’

They turned left past a small shop and saw a number of two-storey brick buildings, but kept walking until they came to a patch of wasteland and a burnt-out wooden hut. Beyond this vacant plot, behind a low metal fence, stood an unsightly single-storey building with a high socle around its base. Double wooden doors served to emphasise the building’s unwelcoming bureaucratic nature. There were two signs, one on either side of the doors: ‘Organisation of Ochakov Labour Veterans’ and ‘Public Office of A. G. Volochkov, Deputy of the Nikolaev Regional Council’.

The old woman stopped. ‘There it is,’ she said. ‘It looks exactly the same!’ Her voice sounded tearful. ‘In Fima’s day the house used to be divided into just four big rooms with old stoves, but there must be at least ten rooms in there now. I came here once, to the veterans department. I thought they might be able to help me get some extra money on top of my pension.’ She waved her hand sadly. ‘And about five years ago, it must have been, I saw Egorov here, the divisional inspector who got Fima locked up. He must be dead by now.’

Stepan stared at Anastasia Ivanovna with interest.

‘Divisional inspectors usually live to a ripe old age,’ he said pensively. ‘Maybe we ought to check… Where did he used to live?’

‘I don’t know the address, but I know which house it is. It’s down there.’ She waved her hand along the street. ‘Towards the sea. It used to have a red fence.’

‘Maybe we could call on him now?’ suggested Stepan. ‘We really do need to speak to him, if he’s still alive.’

It took about five minutes of gentle persuasion before Anastasia Ivanovna agreed to take them to Egorov’s house.

They arrived at a small stucco house with a red fence around it. The door was opened by a young girl with freckles, who must have been about six years old.

‘Is your grandfather at home?’ the old woman asked her.

‘Grandad!’ the girl shouted back into the house. ‘It’s for you!’

A wizened old man looked out into the hallway. He was wearing a dark blue woollen tracksuit emblazoned with the Dinamo football club logo. At the sight of two strange men on his doorstep he froze. Then he noticed the diminutive figure of Anastasia Ivanovna beside them, stooping beneath the burden of her years, and his expression softened.

‘Nastya, is that you?’ he asked, unable to take his eyes off the old woman.

‘Yes, and these two lodgers of mine twisted my arm until I brought them to see you,’ she said, indicating Stepan and Igor. ‘Can we come in?’

The old man nodded.

He led them into the living room, trying on the way to capture a moth that had flown into the hallway. He invited them to sit down at a table covered with a velour cloth.

‘So, what can I do for you?’ he asked, sitting down opposite them.

‘Well,’ began Stepan, ‘I think Fima Chagin was either a relative, or a friend, of my father’s… I just want to find out for sure. That’s why I’ve come to Ochakov.’

‘And what does this have to do with me?’

‘Well, you were the one who put him away, so you must know something about him,’ said Stepan. ‘What about his friends, for example? He must have had friends. Who were they?’

‘Friends?’ repeated the old man. ‘Maybe he did have friends. I don’t know. As for what he got up to… how can I put it? Let’s just say he had his fingers in a number of pies. He sold stolen goods, he had suspicious visitors… His house was like a kind of “poste restante” service. People used to leave things with him to look after for a year or so, sometimes longer. They would pay him for this, of course. People reported him, and the police came with search warrants, but they never found anything. So he just carried on like that, right up until he was killed. Would you like some tea?’

Anastasia Ivanovna brightened and nodded on behalf of herself and her lodgers. While they were drinking their tea Stepan tried his best to find out more, but the old man had nothing further to tell.

‘My father must have been one of his visitors,’ Stepan reflected that evening, when they were sitting on the beds in their little room. ‘And I bet he left him something to look after as well… So he was a thief, after all.’

The following day they went to a hardware shop near the market, where Stepan bought a crowbar and two torches. Igor paid, albeit reluctantly.

His apprehensions proved to be well founded. That evening, the gardener grabbed the torches and crowbar and led him out onto the street.

‘We’re just going to scope out Chagin’s house for a bit first… Get a feel for the place,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Then we’ll take a look inside.’

The dark southern sky hung low above them, and the smell of the sea tickled their noses. Somewhere nearby, a radio was blaring out Turkish music.

After walking past Chagin’s house several times, they went into the yard and hid behind a tree to the right of the doorstep.

‘We could get locked up for this!’ Igor panicked. He knew what was coming next.

‘For what? For trying to understand my childhood? It’s not like we’re robbing a bank,’ Stepan reassured him.

They stood there for about twenty minutes, just listening. The silence was broken only by a single car going past. The town was obviously early to bed as well as early to rise.

Stepan deftly forced open the padlock with the crowbar, then levered the door up until the built-in lock disengaged from its mortice. The door opened.

Stepan slipped through the gap with Igor close behind him. They shut the door and immediately found themselves in pitch darkness. Stepan switched on his torch, and Igor did the same.

‘The police aren’t stupid,’ whispered Stepan. ‘If they came here with search warrants they would have checked under the floorboards, and in the attic. They must have searched the old stoves too… I bet they’ve all been ripped out, though.’

They were in a kind of hallway, with various doors leading off it. Stepan shone his torch along the walls and over the cast-iron radiators, which had been painted white. He approached the closest set of double doors, which were marked ‘Public Office’. Before Igor even noticed the doors opening, Stepan was inside, illuminating the walls and floor with his torch.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We need a system, otherwise we’ll be here all night. You stay here while I go back and open all the other doors, then we can start working our way round clockwise.’

Igor switched off his torch and stood motionless in the darkness, listening to the hushed whispering of the doors as they opened one by one, yielding to pressure from the crowbar.

It wasn’t long before Stepan returned. He touched Igor on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow. Together they went back into the hallway and then walked around each of the rooms in turn, shining their torches over the floors, the walls and the unprepossessing Soviet-style furniture. They ended up back in Deputy Volochkov’s office.

‘Right, here’s what we’re going to do,’ said Stepan, voicing his thoughts aloud. ‘We can rule out the attic and the floors. There are no stoves. That just leaves the walls. Do you know how to sound out walls?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Igor.

‘Like a doctor. Rap on them with your knuckles, and if they sound solid keep going. But if they sound hollow, then stay where you are and call for me. We’ll do it together. I’ll start to the right of the doors, and you can start to the left.’

In the pitch-black silence, they started knocking on the walls: right up to the ceiling, and right down to where they met the floorboards. In the third room, to the right of an enormous, brooding safe, Igor thought the wall sounded different.

‘Stepan!’ he whispered urgently. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

Stepan went over to check.

‘Yes, it does sound empty just here,’ he said, although he sounded unconvinced. ‘I’ll go and check from the other side.’

He came back pleasantly puzzled.

‘The wall sticks out strangely on that side,’ he said, grasping the crowbar in his right hand. ‘Right then, here goes!’

The exertion was reflected on his face as he smashed the crowbar into the wall. After a certain amount of resistance the crowbar plunged deep inside.

‘Now, that’s interesting,’ whispered Stepan, shining his torch onto the wall.

He widened the hole he had made. Igor noticed pieces of dark plywood sticking out of the plaster. It took the two of them them about ten minutes to open up a section of the wall big enough to shine their torches inside.

‘Well, fancy that!’ exclaimed Stepan. The light from their torches fell on three old-fashioned leather suitcases, covered in dust and building rubble. ‘All that time they spent searching for left luggage, and we’ve finally found it!’

Stepan dragged the suitcases out one at a time. He blew the dust and debris from them, then brushed his clothes down and switched off his torch. They left the building carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible. Stepan even managed to close the front door silently behind them.

The streets were equally deserted on the way back to Anastasia Ivanovna’s house. What a lovely little town! thought Igor.

They put the suitcases on the floor in their room. Stepan wiped them with the cloth rag that served as a doormat.

‘We’ll have to leave early, before the market opens,’ Stepan said firmly.

‘Aren’t we going to see what’s inside?’ asked Igor.

‘We’ll open them up back at your place, when we can take our time over it. Let’s just concentrate on getting them there, for the time being.’

Igor was not inclined to argue. They had two hours left before sunrise. Stepan was already packing his rucksack. He paused and looked at his young companion.

‘Put twenty hryvnas on the table,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to leave a good impression.’