Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
A Militia major is driving
along when he sees a militiaman standing with a penguin. "Take
him to the zoo, " he orders. Some
time later the same major is driving along when he sees the
militiaman still standing with the penguin. "What have
you been doing?" he asks. "I said
take
him to the zoo." We've been to the zoo, Comrade Major," says the
militiaman, "and the
circus.
And now we're going to the pictures."
A few weeks ago I was struck by a story in the news
about how, after massive flooding in the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, some zoo
animals were on the loose. The residents, many of them homeless,
had been warned of lions and tigers afoot. Included in the article was a
photograph of a hippo standing bewildered in the street. What had struck me most
about the st0ry was not the event itself, surely a sad and sensational one, but
the fact that it had seemed familiar to me, as though I had read about something
like it before, though for the life of me I could not remember what. Then it
struck me this morning: Death and the
Penguin! Where the hell was that book? Had I leant it, lost it; had I given
it away, but, no, there it was, covered with dust and old spider webs, on the bottom
shelf behind my chair.
As the novel opens,
Viktor, a lonely, desperate young writer living with his pet penguin in a small
apartment in Soviet-controlled Kiev, has just been offered the opportunity to
write copy for a major national newspaper. Excited by the prospect of money,
and eager to finally see his name in print, he readily accepts the position,
only to discover that the job entails writing obituaries, pithy, thumbnail
biographies of many of Kiev's doyens, kingpins, and politicians—each of them
still very much alive. As one character puts it to Viktor, he is "writing
for the drawer," a troubling euphemism soon compounded by the more
sinister description of the work as 'obelisk jobs', his task: "painting
vital images of the future departed." Not surprisingly, in a city then ruled by
violence and corruption, his work proves predictive. Shortly after submitting
his first obituary about a well-known State Deputy named Aleksandr
Yakornitsky, he is informed by his delighted Editor-in-Chief that (miracle of
miracles!) the very same man has just died: "Fell from a sixth-floor
window—was cleaning it for some reason, apparently, though it wasn't his. And
at night." While frightened, aghast, Viktor continues to write. It is only
when a recently acquired friend of his disappears, and he is forced to assume
responsibility for his daughter, that the stakes of the game become clear.
At the heart of this
darkly pleasing satire of life in Soviet Ukraine is Viktor's depressed and
insomniac penguin, Misha. Rescued by Viktor from the bankrupt city zoo, which
could no longer afford to feed him, Misha spends most of his time "roaming
the flat, leaving doors open, occasionally stopping and heaving a deep sigh,
like an old man weary of both life and himself." He eats frozen fish, he
stares at the wall, he splashes around in the bathtub; and, sometimes, when
Viktor is restless, when Misha gets too hot, the two of them venture outside at
night, exploring the grim-faced streets
and wandering back and forth across the frozen Dnieper.
Andrey Kurov was born in St. Petersburg and
now lives in Kiev with his English wife and her three children. He has
published numerous other novels, including Penguin
Lost, A Matter of Life and Death,
The Case of the General’s Thumb, and The Milkman in the Night.
Peter Adam Nash
