A short story published in Bandit Fiction online and in a podcast

Whenever my cousin Mark was standing next to someone in public, at the bus stop, in a queue in the post office or supermarket, or in the pub, he turned to them, and started talking, as though they were old friends.

Mark’s choice of subjects were narrow: his lack of a job, his health problems that no doctor could diagnose, and his theories on why people were bad, and could not be trusted. Many strangers approached by him were surprised, and others wondered if they had met Mark before, but had forgotten his face. However, once his dry, slow monotone detailed no more than his personal misfortunes, a few humoured him for a short period, then made an exit at the first opportunity, but most ignored him, or told him to shut up. 

When he launched into a soliloquy to random people in a pub, it wasn’t rare that this really pissed off the customers. Often he was punched in the face, or knocked to the floor. This happened so regularly that his nose was broken in three places, and he was barred from half the pubs in town.

These situations made Mark believe the whole world was against him. Some would call this paranoia.

The truth was that everyone was against him. This was not his delusion. He could not change, and so people would not change their reaction to him. I knew this was unfair. He had issues. We had issues. But it was what it was.

The last time I saw Mark was when he asked me to come round to his flat and unblock a drain. He hated plumbers, as he believed they were too expensive and never solved problems, only created more, so they could be hired again, at further cost. This meant that whenever his drain was clogged, he needed someone to fix it. So he called around his relatives, until one of us said yes.

As I unscrewed a pipe from below the sink and pulled out a knot of hair, ground coffee and potato peel, he told me of his latest plan: he was going on a trip to a small Caucasian Republic called Kirkazstan.

I thought he was joking. Whenever he was angry or frustrated with life, he announced that he was about to fly to Japan, Barcelona or Rio, and was not coming back. I believed he made these threats to test me, and to see whether I would talk about how his friends and family needed him, so he must stay. But I said nothing. I was glad I said nothing. If I had said anything, he would have known I was insincere, which would have made him even more paranoid.

Mark didn’t contact me for several months, and I was glad of the break. But such a long silence surprised me, so I asked our mutual acquaintances, his sister and our other cousins. No one had heard anything from him.

Trying to remember the country he spoke about, I googled my understanding of its name a few times, and the search engine suggested different Central Asian republics, but none were exactly right. Eventually I found a site dedicated to ‘Kirkazstan’, and this spelling seemed to fit. The pages contained closely-leaded writing, and poor quality scans from library books. On a message board, there was disagreement over whether its precise location was the border between Iran and Azerbaijan, the north side of the Caucasus mountains, or closer to Crimea on the Black Sea coast. Here, I could find no accounts of its people or its customs, or pictures of its architecture or landscape. No experts had any idea about the name of its capital, knew of the origin of its people, or could clarify if it was ever part of the USSR.

Most of the references came from over 150 years ago. In the 19th Century, wealthy explorers from Imperial Russia, France and Great Britain declared they were travelling to Kirkazstan, but gave no account of their subsequent exploits. A minor Muscovite writer reported a rumour he had heard from members of the royal court. Apparently, this was the place where nobles went to kill themselves. It was better for victims to do this far from home, as it would cause less distress to their relatives and associates. Suicide itself was so shameful, that if an aristocrat stated he was “embarking on an exploration of Kirkazstan”, it was a dignified euphemism for the act.

A French explorer, Pierre-Louis Toulouse, penned a long essay detailing what he expected to encounter in the country. Firstly, he debunked this Russian myth. Toulouse surmised that if ten people contemplating suicide were to gather in a tavern in Kirkazstan, they would discover much in common. Their shared experiences of depression, anxiety or self-harm would create a sense of camaraderie which, in turn, would give them enough reasons not to cut short their lives. Contrary to accepted opinion, he concluded that Kirkazstan was a place to go to if one wanted to kill oneself, and was looking for dissuasion. However Toulouse himself vanished a few months after writing this, and the route he planned to follow before his disappearance is unknown.

None of this made it clear to me how someone as unhinged as Mark would be able to find out where the damned place was. 

After six months without anyone from my family hearing from him, I received a judge’s approval to enter his flat. This was a small, one bedroom apartment in a ten-storey block from the 1970s, with a tiny kitchenette. The plates and cutlery were put away in the drawers, the space was clean and there was no smell, but it had changed since I last came to fix the sink. 

On the wall was a giant map of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, and the stretch of land between the two was riddled with drawing pins, each one leading to pictures of churches, apartment blocks, cemeteries, cottages and mausoleums. Scattered on the floor were vintage books on esoterica, some borrowed from university libraries. Print-outs of obscure web pages were piled up, many Google-translated from Russian, Farsi, Georgian, Turkish and Arabic, alongside naive drawings of peasants dancing in folk costumes.

A leather-bound book with a broken spine, its edges frayed, was open on his desk, where a sentence was underlined in red:

“Only when you accept there will be no way back from Kirkazstan, 

will the path to the country be open to you.” 

I felt pride in my cousin. It appeared he had set himself a target, and had seen it through to the end. It was something none of our family had helped him with, and he had achieved this on his own.

But if I ever saw him again, I would withdraw this praise.