Agatha

By Sergey Konyashin

2010. After graduating from university in Moscow, a native of Argentina, Agata Garcia Lopez, should return to her homeland. Before leaving home, she decides to visit Yemen, where her good university friend Andrey Zorin serves at the Russian embassy. However, a few days after her arrival in the Yemeni capital, a war begins in the strife-torn country. To return to Moscow, the girl will have to take part in an operation to evacuate Russian citizens. And at the same time to sort out her feelings for the friend who invited her…

The story is an artistic, not a documentary-historical work. All her characters and the events described are completely fictional. The book may be of interest to fans of adventure prose and fiction about the Arab Middle East.

Translated from Russian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Mar 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215357873

Book preview

2010. After graduating from university in Moscow, a native of Argentina, Agatha Garcia Lopez, should return to her homeland. Before leaving home, she decides to visit Yemen, where her good university friend Andrey Zorin serves at the Russian embassy.

A few days after her arrival in the Yemeni capital, a war begins in the strife-torn country. To return to Moscow, the girl will have to take part in an operation to evacuate Russian citizens. And at the same time to sort out her feelings for the friend who invited her...

The story is an artistic, not a documentary-historical work. All her characters and the events described are completely fictional.

The book may be of interest to fans of adventure prose and fiction about the Arab Middle East.

All the characters in this story and the events set out in it are completely fictional. Any coincidence with reality is nothing more than an unfortunate accident.

Translated from Russian.

Chapter 1

Slightly tilted to the left side, the plane was rapidly rising above the snow-white dunes of thick clouds. The dull blue of the sky above them was thinly pierced by the predawn stars. Tiny white dots slowly dissolved into the rapidly fading distance. Dubai skyscrapers remained behind, and a slightly frightening, but even more exciting unknown awaited ahead.

It was 2010. Moscow was thickly drowned in the suffocating smoke of forest fires, and I was flying to Yemen – on my first long-term business trip abroad in my life. It cost a lot of effort to achieve it.

I did not manage to graduate from MGIMO with sufficient results to enter the service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, it was generally amazing how I managed to get a diploma. Left alone in an unfamiliar city after my parents’ divorce, I was forced to start working in my second year.

There was not enough time to conscientiously master the two languages required for a student of a diplomatic university – Arabic and English in my case –. I barely passed the state exams for weak fours and, naturally, having been refused by the ministry, I went to work in my specialty as an international journalist on a military TV channel.

Two more years of painstaking studies on dictionaries and grammatical reference books after graduation were required to catch up and finally pass – albeit at the minimum acceptable level – language tests at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The choice of countries offered by the Personnel Department was poorer than my vocabulary in Arabic and English combined – Iraq or Yemen. He refused Iraq right away. Not only because I felt sorry for my mother, who had already suffered through experiences during my numerous reporting trips to troubled spots, but also because I myself always valued personal well-being and safety above the dubious opportunity to flaunt tinsel heroism.

Moreover, there was already no one to impress. After all, it was not possible to restore relations with Oksana...

Oksana Romanova was an old friend of mine and one of my first girls. She studied a year younger at the same Faculty of International Journalism as me. She burst into my life abruptly and aggressively, like a scorching-icy polar north-east – as if to match the harsh nature of the Sloutsky Islands, where we met during a humanitarian student expedition.

We stayed together inexcusably longer than the time it took to completely destroy any hopes of resuming a relationship with my previous girlfriend Nasty. However, by the time my registration for a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began, and several years had passed since the breakup of relations with Oksana.

✵ ✵ ✵

– Several is how many?  A precocious, bloated officer in the security department inquired inquisitively.

– Well, if it’s so fundamental, – I began, almost physically creaking my convolutions, to calculate when she got together with that big guy, with whom, by the way, the guys said, she recently broke up, – then about three and a half years, maybe a little more.

– Yes, in principle, actually, not that, – the officer nodded significantly, exploding with a cough of an avid smoker, – but the fact that you are not married. Just like that, do you think Vysotsky has about «spies with a strong body, you put them in the door, they go out the window...»?

– And what to do?  I asked.

– Get married. What else? – as if voicing a well-known truth, the interlocutor threw up his hands. – Then it will be easier for you in many ways in the civil service. Especially on a business trip abroad. Believe me...

– I’m unlikely to have time for the few months remaining before my departure, – I replied in disappointment. – Maybe I’ll try other ways to simplify life in the civil service if there are any?

– Of course there is! – he chuckled derisively. – Admit it, you probably, like all the young people now... are you doing this nonsense, what’s her name... on the Internet?

– What nonsense? – I didn’t understand right away.

– Well, all these sites are yours, damn them, – he impatiently shook his palm in front of him.

I guessed.

– These nets are yours, yes... they are the very ones! The officer pointedly pointed at the ceiling, which had not been whitewashed for a long time. – When I graduated from college, the most difficult task was to make someone’s psychological portrait. And now what? I opened the Internet, viewed the person’s page – and everything is ready!

– And now what? Delete? – I asked, overpowering myself.

– Clean it up, – he advised in a fatherly manner....

✵ ✵ ✵

When I returned home and decided to postpone deleting accounts in social networks, I wrote to Oksana in one of them. I gave her my phone and asked her to call me back if she hadn’t forgotten who I was yet.

A call from an unknown number rang out an hour later: «Andrew, you won’t believe it! Just this morning I reread your poems.» As it turned out, she rented an apartment not far from me – also in Southern Butov.

In the evening we sat in a cafe and looked at each other with very curious eyes.

– Start from scratch?  She repeated my question thoughtfully.

I shrugged vaguely.

– Well, you know, why not?  She said, not too confidently. – Only the guys told me that you were going to leave soon. I just don’t quite understand then, why do we need all this?

I looked closely into her blue eyes. No one knew yet that I was applying for a job in the Foreign Ministry. I didn’t tell anyone anything on purpose. Not because of superstition, but just so that you don’t get bored with annoying questions. Although, whom I kidding? Of course, and because of superstitions too...

– Where do you think I’m going? – I asked her as casually as I could.

– Swim. A sailor. Is not it so?

Ah, that’s the thing! It’s been so long since we’ve talked to her.

It was a year and a half ago when my stepfather, a senior mechanic of a commercial Greek ship, offered to get me into his office. At that time, I remember, I moped a lot in Moscow from the sudden rush of life failures and lack of money. I decided to return to my native Novorossiysk and master the maritime profession I had chosen in my early childhood.

There was nothing to lose in bored Moscow. There are no close friends left. The salary on television was only enough to pay for rented housing and minimal food. Languages – despite constant cramming – were decidedly not given. And it did not seem to leave any hope for the foreign service.

Then everything was already decided – the date of dismissal was set, the courses of lower-level sailors in the Novorossiysk seafaring school were paid. It remains only to write a letter of resignation two weeks before the departure date. It was already poorly printed on the railway ticket, which was also already purchased in advance at the Kazan railway station...

✵ ✵ ✵

I was standing in front of the Department of Postgraduate and doctoral studies of MGIMO, waiting for its head to take a sabbatical. I didn’t dare to quit working on my dissertation just like that. I was hoping that maybe someday I would finish my research on the influence of social stereotypes on mass consciousness.

Hope, of course, was illusory. There was definitely not enough time for full-fledged scientific activity even then. What can we say about a naval career, when I will be lost on a ship in the middle of the ocean for six months.

My supervisor liked to repeat that «work, study and family are connected only in pairs.» However, in my case, neither the second nor the third has been connected to work (both on television and on myself) for several years, no matter how hard I tried.

There was a soft knock on the door to my side. I turned my head and came across the piercing gaze of her eyes, black as a tropical night. In the dim twilight of the narrow corridor, her dark skin seemed even darker. Her large teeth and the whites of her large, curious eyes shone all the more brightly on her high-cheek boned African face.

After we greeted each other with barely noticeable nods of long-time acquaintances, I said:

– Pavel Andreevich is not here yet.

– Will he come soon? – she asked almost without an accent.

– Yes, I promised in half an hour.

Throwing her purse off her shoulder and taking it in her hands by the thin straps, she stood next to me. She smiled shyly and with a graceful movement of thin fingers pushed a strand of unruly curly hair behind her ear. However, she immediately, like a straightened spring, fell back.

She always smiled so shyly and always tucked her hair behind her ear in the same way, and they always fell back just as quickly and widely. The only thing that has changed in her during the whole time of our acquaintance – long and superficial at the same time – is her knowledge of the Russian language, which she mastered almost perfectly. «Everything else was completely original, – – I joked recently during our last meeting in a circle of mutual acquaintances, which once again caused her to have the same shy smile.

Her name was Agatha Garcia Lopez. She was a petite mulatto, the daughter of an Argentine immigrant who taught Spanish at our institute. She studied at the Faculty of Economics, but had many friends in our journalistic department. Perhaps that is why she now worked in the Latin American edition of an international radio station, where she conducted her own program about Russia in her native Spanish.

– How are you, Andrey? «What is it?» she asked softly.

– I’m taking a sabbatical, – I replied, sitting down on one of the desks displayed from the next classroom. I’m going back to my small homeland. And how are you?

– And I pass candidate minimums. I came to approve the topic, – she said the cunningly twisted title of her dissertation: something about the impact of ecology on the economy, or vice versa. – And why are you leaving us?

– Like Napoleon, Moscow did not submit to me, – I laughed.

She didn’t get the joke.

– It’s a pity. I thought you had a good job here and a lot of friends.

– That’s not the main thing. Apparently, I will definitely not become a diplomat. So, I will look at distant countries from the side of the ship...

Briefly told her about the painful and planned.

– I understand, – she shrugged her plump lips. «Maybe you’re right. In my opinion, no language can be learned without live practice. I, too, no matter how much I struggled with my Italian at the institute, I could not speak it until I went to practice in Sicily. Perhaps if you had an Arab teacher, your studies would have been more successful.

– Maybe, – I agreed. – But where can I find an Arab teacher in Moscow?

– Oh, you can find anyone in Moscow!  Agatha smiled. – My father has no end of private students. After all, everyone wants to study with a native speaker. And demand always gives rise to supply.

– And how do your father’s students usually find him?»  I asked.

– There are a lot of specialized sites, – she listed some of them.

I looked thoughtfully at the end of the corridor over her curly head. From there, the lanky figure of Pavel Andreev ich was already approaching us with crane steps.

– Come in one at a time, – he boomed, unlocking the door of his office.

Agatha took a step back, making way for me as the first in line. I waved her ahead and went to the institute library, where there were computers with Internet access. And then I had to get to the Kazan railway station in time to hand over my tickets home.

✵ ✵ ✵

I took Oksana’s hand and smiled:

– That was a hundred years ago. I changed my mind a long time ago and didn’t go anywhere.

– Well, thank God! At least I am spared from the fate of the wife of a long-distance sailing captain.

– But from the fate of my fate – not yet!

Before I realized that I had gone a little too far with pathos, she laughed out loud.

– My God! What are you talking about again, Zorin? – in moments of intense emotional excitement, she always called me by my last name.

Oksana took her hand away from me and coquettishly pushed aside her blonde bangs that had fallen over her eyes.

– So, let’s quickly explain to me what’s going on in general? Hell knows how long I haven’t heard from you. Then–bang!– he showed up. Let’s meet right away!.. My destiny!.. Where have you been before?

– I always thought about you, but I didn’t show it. I didn’t want to interrupt, – I answered as simply as possible. – After our breakup, I continued to be interested in you and always believed that we would be together again. So as soon as you broke up with this yours, I immediately...

– With this one of mine, – she mimicked, «whose name you don’t even know, we broke up more than a year ago. You’d know if you were really interested. Listen, let’s be honest. What do you really want from me?

– Absolutely only what I said – no more, no less. Restore our relationship and stay together forever.

She listened attentively and shook her head in disbelief. Slowly she pulled an advertising flyer out of the stand on the table and stared at it with a detached look. An icy glint hardened in her narrowed eyes.

– Suppose I agree, – she said slowly, as if talking to herself. – What’s next?

– Nothing, – I breathed out contentedly. – Let’s go somewhere? Where would you like to go?

– It doesn’t matter, – she said indifferently. – It seems like a good movie.

She put the flyer in front of me and reached into her purse for her wallet to pay her part of the bill. However, after holding it in her hand for a few seconds, she threw it back.

– I guess you’ll pay? Since we’re with you now again...

✵ ✵ ✵

When I got off the subway, I called her.

– Oksana, hi. I bought tickets. I hope nothing will go wrong this time for sure...

– Listen, Andryush. Can you go without me sometime tomorrow? I don’t want any movies.

– Is everything okay?  I asked. – We have already postponed so many times.

– Yes, everything is fine. But I just wouldn’t go if I could.

– Okay, let me come and talk now. Are you already at home?

– At home, – she said hesitantly. – But... at home. I decided to move back for now.

– For now?»

– Listen, don’t torture me, please. Let’s take a little break from each other?

– Oksana, I’m not tired of you at all these two weeks. What’s happening?

– Well, I’m tired. I need to be alone and get my thoughts in order.

– Okay, bye.

It all started to strongly resemble the situation of four years ago. The same hard-to-explain actions, the same illogical explanations. Even the intonation is the same. She doesn’t seem to have changed at all since then. And I, I suppose, hardly. Is it worth continuing to test fate, knowing in advance how it will end? And one day it’s already over.

When I got home, I left a post on social networks that there are two movie tickets that I am ready to give to anyone who comes to pick them up from Butov.

I called Oksana again.

– Listen, I want to apologize for starting this story with the restoration of relations...

– Don’t worry, everything is fine. It’s a matter of time...

– I’m afraid we don’t have much of it left, Oksana.

– What are you talking about?

The situation, of course, required the utmost clarity, but I still wasn’t ready to make it. Maybe because I didn’t fully believe that the dream of diplomatic service had finally begun to come true, and I was afraid to scare off the shadow of fortune that hung timidly over me. Or maybe – I suddenly caught myself thinking – just because I never really trusted Oksana.

– In general, let’s finish everything now as we started. Let’s just be friends again. I’m sorry again for pulling you.

– It’s nothing scary. Whatever you say. Bye, – she chuckled into the phone and hung up.

A new incoming message beeped from the laptop.

Agatha: Hi, Andrey. I would take one ticket from you if you haven’t given it to anyone yet.

Me: You can have both.

Agatha: I don’t need the second one.

Me: Will you go alone?

Agatha: Yes, I was told that this is a very good film. I’ve been wanting to see it for a long time.

Me: Only you’ll have to take it from me yourself. Nothing?

Agatha: And where do you live?

Me: In Southern Butov.

Agatha: Yeah! This is far away for me. I have to go from Dolgoprudny. Maybe we’ll meet in the city?

Me: Come on. After six, for example, I’ll be at Arbatskaya.

AGATHA: Good.

Me: Agreed. Till tomorrow.

✵ ✵ ✵

In the middle of the pandemonium at the exit of the underpass, she asked:

– So you didn’t go anywhere after you left graduate school?

– Not yet, but I may be leaving soon, – – I said with mock mystery and, after a significant pause, added. «And it probably won’t be a ship.»

– Really?  Agatha was surprised, flashing the motion beads of her wide–open eyes, as always. – Did they take you to the Foreign Ministry after all?

– Not yet, but there are already considerable reasons to expect success. Thanks to the Syrian tutor, the case really got off the ground. Thank you for your advice.

– Great! I am so pleased that I was able to help, – she admired. – And how did you manage to find him in the end?

The unbearable noise of the subway, the hum of an accelerating train and the strong accent of Mustafa, whose phone number was found on one of the sites recommended by Agatha, resolutely did not allow to make out a single word of his.

– To the last car and to the left? Or to the right? – I threw him ready-made options, hoping to orient myself by his simple answers like «yes» or «no».

However, it was these two words that he carefully avoided for some reason. A stream of unintelligible syllables and interjections quickly poured out of the tube. When I went up from the tunnel to the street, his speech became a little clearer.

– Go straight down the street. See, an elite residential complex? Go even further. It is impossible not to notice it... He’s so handsome! Go straight to him... See, right? Modern all such! Twenty-four stories. With panoramic windows. With two-storey penthouses on the upper floors. A beautiful black fence around it... yes, it’s a parking lot behind it. And you go along the fence around the corner ... yes, where is the barrier to the underground parking. There’s a security guard sitting nearby... Yes, straight to the entrance booth. Did you come up? And if you stand facing her, my Khrushchev will be on your right, the third entrance...

For the first time in my life I saw Agatha laugh like that. After getting out of the crowd, we walked towards the cinema.

– Is he a good teacher?

– Frankly speaking, nothing outstanding for the money that he takes, but the main thing is that he got me talking, and this is already important. On one cramming, of course, you will not get far.

– Well, then, good luck to you in the last exams.

– Thanks. And how is your dissertation?

– It is progressing, but very slowly. Almost all of my free time is taken up by a program on the radio. Recently, I was given extra airtime, which needs to be filled with something.

– Oh, congratulations! Is your own program probably worth a lot?

– Judging by the salary, not very much, – joked Agatha.

We came to the cinema.

– Okay, see you later, – I said, handing her the tickets. – It was nice to see you.

– And what, the second one was not useful to anyone? «What is it?» she asked.

– No, let you get both. Choose the best place.

– Don’t you want to see it yourself?»

– No, I guess not, – I said. – I was planning to study Arabic tonight. By the next lesson with Mustafa, it is necessary to disassemble two complex texts. And anyway, to be honest, I’m not a big fan of movies.

– Me too, – smiled Agatha. – It’s just that this is the movie I was advised to watch on the big screen. They say it’s very beautifully shot.

– Oh, you know how to intrigue, – I doubted. – Okay, let’s go together. A couple of hours probably won’t really solve anything. If anything, I’ll sit up and study at night.

✵ ✵ ✵

A week later she called.

– Andrey, weren’t you planning to go to the festival in Tsaritsyn tonight?

– No, what’s there?

– Russian fair, kites, concert...

– For the first time I hear.

– Would you be interested?

– To be honest, not really. And why do you need it?

– I have to record a report for my program, and my father won’t let one go, because it will last late. And I thought, if I say that I will be with a friend...

– You’re not like a little girl anymore, so that your parents don’t let you go somewhere?

– Oh, you just don’t know my father!  she sighed. - He’s very strict.

– Agatha, I’m sorry, but, frankly, I’m living in a big economy mode right now. A lot of money and time is spent on Arabic classes. I’m afraid I won’t pull any concerts...

– Yes, it’s all free. I just need company.

I was silent for a long time into the phone, then I answered:

– Okay, tell your father that I’m coming. Only with you then – my synchrony in your program. I have to be famous for it somehow. Even in distant Latin America...

In the evening we met in Tsaritsyn. The park was full of people. Ruthless Russian merriment raged everywhere. When Agatha finally put the recorder