Andrey Kurkov - The Gardener from Ochakov

One of the business travellers had already opened a bottle of beer and was pouring it out into the glasses. The movements of his hands were smooth and practised, and his face was frozen in an expression of anticipation.

‘Not for me,’ Stepan said curtly, looking up.

‘Why, are you ill?’

‘Worse.’

‘It’s only a glass of beer!’ The business traveller waved his objection away and looked at Igor. ‘What about you?’

‘Just a little,’ said Igor. ‘We’ve got to work tomorrow.’

‘Really? We’re going dancing!’ The man burst out laughing. ‘This isn’t a holiday for us either, you know. Two days of underwater welding, half a litre each to warm us up, and then back again!’

Igor was impressed by the phrase ‘underwater welding’. The one with the bottle held his hand out to Igor.

‘Vanya,’ he introduced himself. ‘And this is Zhenya,’ he indicated his colleague.

‘I’m going for a cigarette,’ said Stepan. He stood up and left the compartment.

The train began to move. Zhenya poured a shot of vodka into his colleague’s beer and his own, then indicated that Igor should do likewise. Igor declined.

The carriage attendant looked into their compartment and asked for their tickets, greeting the business travellers as though they were old friends.

‘Just do me a favour, OK? No singing tonight,’ he remarked amiably on his way out.

When Igor finished his glass of beer, he decided to go and look for Stepan. He found him standing in the covered section between their carriage and the next one.

‘Surely it wouldn’t have hurt you to wet your lips, just to be polite,’ he said.

‘If I were to so much as wet my lips, as you put it, then no one in the carriage would get any sleep,’ smiled Stepan. ‘No, I’m happy sticking with tea.’

‘What’s going to happen if we find some of your relatives in Ochakov?’ asked Igor. ‘Do you think you might move there and live with them? Or will you stay with us?’ He immediately felt embarrassed by the question.

‘Who knows?’ Stepan shrugged. ‘Well, let’s say I do find someone… But why would they want anything to do with me? I haven’t got any money, and I’m not legally registered anywhere. I’m not looking for help or friendship, or anything really. I learned to stand on my own two feet a long time ago. We can just introduce ourselves, and that’ll be it. At least I’ll know that my daughter and I aren’t alone in the world. But I doubt I’ll discover any relatives there… You don’t need a tattoo to help you find your family. No, it must be to do with something else.’

To their surprise, when they returned to the compartment all the bottles on the table were empty and the business travellers were already lying on the top bunks.

‘Help yourselves to pickles! There are still a few left,’ one of them said.

A row of minibuses stood on the square in front of the train station in Nikolaev, with the names of their final destinations displayed inside their windscreens. Igor immediately noticed that one of them said ‘Ochakov’.

‘What time are you leaving?’ Igor asked the driver, who was noisily cracking sunflower seeds with his teeth.

‘When we’re full,’ he answered.

When they arrived in Ochakov, the sun was shining with all its might over the town. The grey Khrushchev apartment blocks near the unremarkable two-storey, glass-panelled bus station were illuminated in its rays, along with three kiosks and several old women selling apples on the pavement.

Stepan looked around then made straight for the old women. Igor hurried after him.

‘How much for your apples?’ Stepan asked one of them.

‘Two hryvnas a kilo,’ she answered. ‘But I’ll let you have them for one and a half.’

‘Would you happen to know where we could find a place to stay for a couple of nights? Somewhere with reasonable rates…’

Stepan’s abrupt change of subject didn’t seem to surprise the old woman.

‘Why have you come so late in the season?’ she asked, spreading her hands in a gesture of commiseration. ‘The only people in the sea these days are drunks and children.’

‘We’re ice swimmers.’ The gardener smiled. ‘No, we haven’t come to swim – we’re here to see the town.’

‘There’s nothing here to see!’ remarked the old woman. ‘Mind you, the church isn’t bad… and there’s an art museum somewhere in the centre. That’s worth a visit, so I’m told…’

‘We’ll certainly add it to our itinerary,’ nodded Stepan. ‘But first, we need to find a place to stay.’

The old woman looked them up and down.

‘I’ve got a room… But I won’t let it out for less than ten hryvnas a day. And that’s without food, of course.’

‘Fine, we’ll take it,’ said the gardener, giving the impression that he was agreeing reluctantly to her terms.

‘Masha, can you sell mine for me?’ she asked, turning to her neighbour in the makeshift roadside market. ‘I’ll be right back.’

Her neighbour nodded.

Leaving the bus station and the Khrushchev blocks, they followed the old woman past a succession of detached houses.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked as they walked.

‘The capital,’ replied Stepan.

They soon turned into the yard of an old brick house. Igor headed straight for the steps leading to the front door.

‘Hey, not that way!’ the old woman called from behind them. She led her guests round to the back of the house, where they saw two brick outbuildings. She removed the padlock from the door of one of the buildings and gave it to Stepan, along with the key; then she opened the door and showed them inside. The room contained two iron beds, which had been made up neatly. A little table and two chairs stood by the small window, and there was a wooden shelf unit against the wall, which was identical to the one in the shed behind Igor’s house.

‘Well, make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to finish selling the rest of my apples.’

She looked at them on her way out.

‘Would you mind paying me in advance?’

Igor held out twenty hryvnas.

‘That’s for two nights. If we stay longer, we’ll pay you more.’

After Stepan had smoked a cigarette, he and Igor went out to have a look round the town. The road they were walking along seemed to go on for ever.

‘I thought Ochakov was smaller than Irpen,’ Igor sighed.

‘It doesn’t matter which is bigger or smaller – they’re both the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else,’ Stepan declared confidently. ‘Which is not necessarily a good thing. People can immediately spot an outsider.’

Their landlady’s name was Anastasia Ivanovna. That evening she knocked on the window of their room and invited them into the house for dinner.

Anastasia Ivanovna’s house smelt of old clothes. It was a smell that Igor recognised from his childhood. His grandmother in the country had kept an old trunk full of dresses, coats and scarves, and whenever Igor looked inside he had been hit by the same peculiar, musty smell. It wasn’t an unbearable smell, or even particularly unpleasant – it was almost sweet, and something about it reminded him of fallen autumn leaves.

Anastasia Ivanovna fed her guests braised cabbage with mushrooms. She didn’t offer them anything stronger to drink than tea, which she poured straight away from a large glazed teapot.

‘Have you lived here long?’ Stepan asked her.

‘Born and bred here, I was,’ said their landlady.

Stepan’s eyes lit up.

‘You haven’t by any chance heard of Efim Chagin, have you?’ he asked in a clear, dry voice.

‘Fima Chagin?’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course I’ve heard of him! Half the town used to know Fima Chagin!’