A week later we told him he could enter the family, provided that he promised to respect our rules and laws, and we gave him back the photo, saying that unfortunately no one had recognized his grandfather. He thought about this for a while and then confessed, in a trembling voice, that the photo wasn’t really his – he had got it from his sister who worked in some historical archive in a university. He apologized to us for deceiving us; he said he really liked us as people, and that that was why he was so keen on entering our family. I felt sorry for him. I understood that as well as being simple, he had a kindly soul, and there was nothing bad in him. In prison people like him usually died after a few months; the luckiest ones were used as puppets by one of the more experienced criminals.
We took pity on him.
‘Shura has become one of us,’ we announced that same evening, and everyone in the cell was very surprised.
We allowed him to live with us, in the family, even though he wasn’t a true Siberian, forgiving him because he had confessed his error.
He soon learned our rules; I explained everything to him as you might to a child, and he discovered them as children do, not concealing his astonishment.
When the time came for me to be released, he bade me an affectionate farewell and said that if it hadn’t been for the story of the tattoo he would never have decided to join the Siberians, and would never have discovered our rules, which he considered just and honest.
‘Perhaps my humble trade has saved his life,’ I thought. ‘Without the family in prison he would have died in some brawl.’
To me tattooing was a very serious matter. To many of my young friends it was a game – they only had to see a few scrawls on their skin and they were satisfied. Others took it a little more seriously, but not very.
Conversations on the subject would go something like this:
‘My father’s got a big owl with a skull in its claws…’
‘An owl means a robber, I assure you…’
‘And what does a skull mean?’
‘It depends.’
‘I know. An owl with a skull means a robber and a murderer, I swear it does!’
‘Don’t talk rubbish! A robber and a murderer is a tiger’s face with oak leaves – my uncle’s got one!’
In short, everyone fired out theories at random.
For me, however, it was a very different affair, a complicated business. I liked subjects which left a trace of the hand that had made them. So I asked my father, my uncles and their friends to tell me about the tattooists they had known. I would study their tattoos, trying to understand what techniques they had used to create different effects. Then I would talk about them with my master, Grandfather Lyosha, who helped me to understand the techniques of others better and taught me to adapt them to my own way of seeing the subjects, drawing them and tattooing them on the skin.
He was pleased, because he saw that I was interested in the subjects not just because of their links with the criminal tradition, but because of their artistic qualities.
Even during the preparatory phase of the drawings, I began to wonder, and to ask him, why each tattoo couldn’t be understood exclusively as a work of art, irrespective of its size. My master used to reply that true art was a form of protest, so every work of art must create contradictions and provoke debate. According to his philosophy, the criminal tattoo was the purest form of art in the world. People, he would say, hate criminals, but love their tattoos.
I suggested it might be possible to establish a connection between high-quality art and the profound meaning – the philosophy – of the Siberian tradition. He would reply to me, with great confidence in his voice:
‘If we ever reach the point where everybody wants to be tattooed with the symbols of our tradition, you’ll be right… But I don’t think that will happen, because people hate us and everything connected with our way of life.’
BORIS THE ENGINE DRIVER
In the mid-1950s the Soviet government declared it illegal to keep mentally ill people at home, thus forcing their relatives to send them to special institutions. This sad state of affairs compelled many parents who didn’t want to be separated from their children to move to places which the long arm of the law could not reach. So in the space of ten years Transnistria was filled with families who had come from all over the USSR because they knew that in the Siberian criminal tradition both mentally and physically handicapped people were considered sacred messengers of God and described as ‘God-willed’.
I grew up among these people, the God-willed, and many of them became my friends. To me they didn’t seem normal, they were normal, like everyone else.
They are not capable of hatred – all they can do is love and be themselves. And if ever they are violent, their violence is never driven by the force of hatred.
Boris was born a normal child in Siberia and lived in our district with his mother, Aunt Tatyana. One night the cops arrived at his parents’ house – his father was a criminal, and had robbed an armoured train, getting away with a lot of diamonds. The cops wanted to know where he had hidden the diamonds and who else had been involved in the train robbery. The man refused to talk, so the cops took little Boris, who was six years old, and clubbed him on the head with a rifle butt to make his father talk. His father didn’t talk, and eventually they shot him.
Boris, having suffered severe brain damage, remained forever a six-year-old.
His mother moved to Transnistria with him. They lived nearby and he was always in our house. My grandfather was very fond of him, and so was I. We flew pigeons together, went down to the river, stole apples from the Moldovans’ orchards, fished with our nets during the summer nights and played by the railway line.
Boris had a fixation: he thought he was an engine driver. In the town, some distance from our area, near the railway, there was an old steam train displayed like a monument, motionless on its sawn-off rails. Boris used to get into it and pretend to be the chief engineer. It was his game. We used to go with him. We would all get into the cabin and he would get angry if we entered with our shoes on, because Boris went barefoot in his train. He even had a broom to sweep up with, and kept the place as clean as if it were his own house.
The train drivers at the station liked him; they had even given him a real train-driver’s hat – it was like those worn by naval officers, white on top, with a green edge and a black plastic peak. It also bore the railway’s golden badge, which shone in the sun so brightly you could see it from a long way off. He was very proud of that present; when he put on his hat he would immediately become serious and start addrressing us like a railway official talking to passengers, saying things like ‘Respectable comrades’, or ‘Citizens, please, I request your attention’. The transformation was hilarious.
My father had once given Boris a T-shirt which he had brought home at the end of a prison sentence he had served in Germany. This T-shirt was emblazoned with two doves: behind one was the German flag, behind the other the Russian one, and it bore the words ‘Peace, friendship, cooperation’, in both languages. Boris had taken it and stood stock still for half an hour, gazing at it. He was astonished by the colours, because there were no coloured clothes in our country in those days, everything was more or less grey, in the Soviet fashion. That garment, however, shone with bright colours, and immediately became Boris’s favourite item of clothing. He always wore that T-shirt – sometimes he would stop abruptly, pull it up with his hands and look at the picture, smiling and whispering to himself.
Boris was a very communicative boy – he wasn’t shy at all and could talk for hours, even with strangers. He was direct; he said whatever came into his head. When he talked he looked you straight in the eye, and his gaze was strong but at the same time relaxed, not tense. He could read; he had been taught by the widow Nina, a woman who lived on her own and whom we boys often went to visit. We used to help her do the heavy jobs in her vegetable garden, and she would give us something good to eat in return. She was a cultur
ed woman. She had been a teacher of Russian language and literature. And so, with the consent of Aunt Tatyana, she had taught Boris to read and write.
Around this time, in 1992, there was a war in Transnistria. After the fall of the USSR, Transnistria stayed outside the Russian Federation and no longer belonged to anybody. The neighbouring countries, Moldova and Ukraine, had designs on it. But the Ukrainians already had difficulties of their own, because of the massive corruption in the government and the ruling administration. The Moldovans, meanwhile, despite the catastrophic situation in their country – the predominantly rural population lived in abject poverty, not so say squalor – made a pact with the Romanians, and tried to occupy Transnistrian territory by military force. According to the agreement with the Romanians, Transnistria would be divided up in a special way: the Moldovan government would control the land, leaving the Romanian industrialists the job of running the numerous munitions factories, which had been built by the Russians in the days of the USSR and afterwards had remained completely under the control of the criminals, who had turned the Transnistrian territory into a kind of weapons supermarket.
Without any warning the Moldovan military swung into action. On 22nd June a division of Moldovan tanks, accompanying ten military brigades, including one of infantry, one of special infantry and two of Romanian soldiers, reached Bender, our town on the right bank of the River Dniester, on the Moldovan border. In response, the inhabitants of Bender formed defence squads – after all, they were not short of weapons. A brief but very bloody war broke out, which lasted one summer, and ended with the criminals of Transnistria driving the Moldovan soldiers out of their land. Then they began to occupy Moldovan territory. At that point Ukraine, fearing that the criminals, if they won the war, would bring turmoil to their territory too, asked the Russians to intervene. Russia, recognizing the inhabitants of Transnistria as its own citizens, arrived with an army to ‘assist the peace process’. This army set up a military regime, reinforced the police stations and declared Transnistria an ‘area of extreme danger’.
Russian soldiers patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and imposed a curfew from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Many people began to disappear without trace; the bodies of the tortured dead were found in the river. This period, which my grandfather called a ‘return to the Thirties’, lasted a long time. My Uncle Sergey was killed in prison by his guards: many people, to save themselves, were forced to abandon their land and take refuge in various other parts of the world.
Boris didn’t know anything about this situation. His brain couldn’t grasp reality, much less a reality made up of brutal violence and politico-military logic. All he wanted to do was drive his train, and he did so even at night, because, like other trains all over the world, his train sometimes had night schedules too…
One evening, as he was walking towards the railway, the soldiers, like cowards, shot him in the back, without even getting out of their armoured car, and left him dead on the road.
When I heard the news I suddenly felt grownup.
It was a watershed – something inside me died forever. I felt it quite distinctly; it was an almost physical sensation, like when you sense that certain ideas, fantasies or modes of behaviour are things you will never experience again, because of some burden that has fallen on your shoulders.
My grandfather turned pale and shook with rage; he wasn’t as upset even when they killed my uncle, his son. He kept repeating that these people were cursed, that Russia was becoming like hell, because the cops were killing the angels.
My father and other men from our district went to the cops’ area, and at dead of night, when the lights went out in their huts, they poured a torrent of lead into the buildings. It was an expression of blind and total rage, a desperate cry of sorrow. They killed a few cops and wounded many others, but in so doing unfortunately they only proved to the whole of Russia that the presence of the police in our country was truly necessary.
Nobody knew what was really going on in Transnistria; the television news presented things in such a way that after watching their crap even I began to wonder whether everything I knew was unreal.
I remember Boris’s body after they retrieved it from the road and brought it home. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen.
An expression of fear and pain was etched on his face which I had never seen there before. His T-shirt with the doves was riddled with bullet-holes and soaked in blood. He was still clutching his engine-driver’s hat tightly in his hands. The position of the body was shocking: as he died he had curled up like a newborn baby, with his knees tight to his chest. You could tell that during his last moments he must have felt intense pain. His eyes were wide open and cold and they still expressed a desperate question: ‘Why do I feel so much pain?’
We buried him in the cemetery of our district.
Everyone went to his funeral, people from all over Transnistria. From his home to the cemetery a long procession formed, and in accordance with an old Siberian tradition his coffin was passed from hand to hand among the people until it reached the grave. Everyone kissed his cross; many wept and angrily demanded justice. His poor mother watched everything and everyone with crazed eyes.
A year later the situation deteriorated. The cops started eliminating criminals in the light of day, shooting in the streets. I got my second juvenile sentence, and when I was eventually released I no longer recognized the place where I’d been born. Since then many things have happened to me, but through all these experiences I have continued to think that the Siberian law was right: no political force, no power imposed with a flag, is worth as much as the natural freedom of a single person. The natural freedom of Boris.
MY BIRTHDAY
We boys of Low River, as I mentioned before, really lived in accordance with the Siberian criminal laws; we had a strict Orthodox religious upbringing, with a strong pagan influence, and the rest of the town called us ‘Siberian Education’ because of the way we behaved. We didn’t use swear-words, we never took the name of God or the mother in vain, we never talked disrespectfully about any elderly person, pregnant woman, small child or orphan, or anyone disabled. We were well integrated, and to tell the truth we didn’t need swear-words to make us feel grownup, as the kids of our age in other districts did, because we were treated as if we were genuinely part of the criminal community; we were a real gang, made up of juveniles, with responsibilities and the same hierarchy as the adult criminal community.
Our job was to act as lookouts. We would walk round our area, spend a lot of time on the borders with other districts and inform the adults about any unusual movement. If any suspicious character passed through the district – a policeman, an informer, or a criminal from another district – we’d make sure our adult Authorities knew about it within a few minutes.
When the police arrived, we usually blocked their path: we’d sit or lie down in front of their cars, forcing them to stop. They’d get out and move us with a kick up the backside or by pulling us by the ears, and we would fight back. We usually singled out the youngest one and jumped on him as a group – someone would hit him, someone else would grab his arm and bite it, someone else would cling on to his back and snatch off his hat, yet another would rip the buttons off his uniform or take his pistol out of his holster. We’d go on like this till the cop couldn’t stand any more, or till his colleagues started hitting us really hard.
The unluckiest of us got hit on the head with a truncheon, lost some blood and ran away.
Once a friend of mine tried to steal a policeman’s gun from his holster: the cop grabbed his hand in time, but he gripped it so hard that my friend squeezed the trigger and involuntarily shot him in the leg. As soon as we heard the shot we scattered in all directions, and as we fled those idiots started shooting at us. Luckily they didn’t hit any of us, but while we ran we heard the bullets whistling past us. One went into the pavement, chipping off a piece of cement which hit me in the face. The wound was a min
or one and not very deep – they didn’t even give me a single stitch afterwards – but for some strange reason a lot of blood came out of that hole, and when we got to my friend Mel’s home his mother, Auntie Irina, picked me up in her arms and rushed off towards my parents’ house, screaming out to the whole district that the police had shot me in the head. I tried in vain to calm her down, but she was too taken up with the effort of running, and finally, a few metres from home, through the blood that covered my eyes, I saw my mother go as white as death, already looking prepared for my funeral. When Auntie Irina stopped in front of her, I writhed like a snake to get free and jumped out of her arms, landing on my feet.
My mother examined my wound and told me to go indoors and then gave Auntie Irina a sedative, to soothe her agitation.
They sat down together on the bench in the yard, drinking valerian tea and crying. I was nine years old at the time.
On another occasion the policemen got out of their cars to clear us out of the way quickly. They picked us up by the legs or the arms and dumped us at the side of the road; we jumped up and again went back into the middle, and the cops started all over again. To us it was a never-ending game.
One of my friends took advantage of a cop’s momentary abstraction and released the hand-brake of his car. We were at the top of a hill, on a road that led down to the river, so the car shot off like a rocket and the policemen, rooted to the spot but scowling with rage, watched it run all the way down the hill, hit the water and – glug – disappear like a submarine. At that point we too disappeared hurriedly.
As well as acting as lookouts we also carried messages.
Since people in the Siberian community don’t use the phone, which they regard as unsafe, and as a contemptible symbol of the modern world, they often use the so-called ‘road’ – communication by means of a mixture of messages passed on orally, written in letters or encoded in the shapes of certain objects.
Siberian Education Page 10
