Siberian Education

by Nicolai Lilin

  Mel was always like that – there was no connection between his body and his mind. When he was thinking he had to stand still, otherwise he couldn’t reach a decent conclusion, and if he was performing any movement he wasn’t able to think. Because of this I used to call him ‘donkey’ – partly in jest and partly seriously. It was mean and despicable of me, I know, but if I resorted to such behaviour it was only because I had to put up with him from morning to evening, and explain everything to him, as if he were a little child. He never took offence, but would suddenly turn serious, as if he were thinking about the mysterious reason why I called him donkey. Once he took me aback, when, quite out of the blue, in a situation that had nothing to do with the fact that I always called him ‘donkey’, he said to me:

  ‘I know why you call me that! It’s because you think my ears are too long!’

  Then he worked himself into a frenzy defending the size of his ears.

  I said nothing in reply; I just looked at him.

  He was hopeless, and he made things worse by smoking and drinking like an old alcoholic.

  Anyway, that February morning Mel and I were walking along the snow-covered streets. When there’s not much humidity the snow is very dry and makes a funny noise: when you walk on it, it sounds as if you’re walking on crackers.

  It was a sunny morning and the clear sky promised a fine day, but there was a light and constant wind which might upset expectations.

  We decided to go through the Centre district and stop for a snack in a little place – a mixture between a bar and a restaurant – run by Aunt Katya, the mother of a good friend of ours who had died the previous summer, drowned in the river.

  We often went to visit her, and so that she didn’t feel lonely we’d tell her how things were going in our lives. She was very attached to us, partly because we’d been with her son, Vitalich, on the day he’d died, and that had united us all.

  Vitalich’s body hadn’t been found immediately. The search had been difficult because two days earlier a big dam had burst a hundred kilometres upstream.

  That’s another story, but it’s one that deserves to be told.

  It was summer, and very hot. The dam burst at night, and I remember waking up because I heard a terrible noise, like an approaching blizzard.

  We came out of our houses and realized that the noise was coming from the river. We rushed to see and found gigantic waves of white water, like breakers on the ocean, coming downriver with increasing force, beating against the bank and sweeping away vessels and boats of all descriptions.

  Some people had torches and shone them on the river. They picked out many objects swirling around in the water: cows, boats, tree trunks, iron drums, rags and pieces of cloth which looked like sheets. Here and there, in that chaos of water, there were pieces of furniture. Screams could be heard.

  Our district, fortunately, was on the high bank, and the wall of water hadn’t been too devastating: everything was flooded there too, the houses and cellars were full of water, but there was no serious damage.

  Next day the river was a complete mess, and we decided to take upon ourselves the task of cleaning it up, of removing everything we could, using our own strength. There were several motorboats still available which had been spared by the waves, because when the dam had burst they had been on the bank.

  My own boats had escaped as well. I had two: one large and heavy, which I used for transporting big loads (we used to spend the whole summer plundering apple orchards and food stores in Moldovan territory…), and one small and narrow, which I used for fishing at night. It was swift and manoeuvrable; I used it to ‘guide the net’ – which means to keep moving against the current, trying to close off with the fishing net the central part of the river, where most of the fish came down.

  The smaller boat had escaped completely because it was at my house, where I had to do a bit of work on it. The other had escaped because it was in a boathouse on the bank: some time ago I’d asked the keeper to restore it for me with a special varnish. The boathouse keeper’s name was Ignat; he was a good man, and a poor one. He’d been promising to paint that boat for me for a month, but had never found the time – he always had something more urgent to do or was getting drunk out of his mind.

  We had eight boats in all, and we split up into two teams: two boats to a team, four boys to a boat.

  The work was organized in such a way as to keep the river constantly ‘blocked’ by two boats, which fished out the rubbish. One team, equipped with long poles with big iron hooks on the ends, retrieved branches and tree trunks, bodies of animals and various large objects. All these things were then tied to the hull with ropes, and when there was no room for any more stuff the crew returned to the bank, where other boys were waiting, who jumped into the water and unloaded it all. On the bank they had created a huge bonfire. We threw the junk on the embers: within half an hour even the most sodden trunks dried out and, doused with some petrol, eventually caught fire.

  By noon the fire had grown enormous; you couldn’t go near it or you’d have been scorched to death. With a large number of us working all together we threw onto the flames the body of a cow, as well as various carcases of sheep, dogs, chickens and geese.

  Then, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, we fished out the first human body.

  It was a middle-aged man, fully clothed, with his skull cracked open. Presumably he had fallen in the river and been swept away and had hit his head against a rock or a tree trunk.

  Another team was equipped with little nets, and fished out the small objects that floated on the surface: jars of preserves, two-litre bottles, fresh fruit and vegetables of various kinds, apples with peaches, water-melons with potatoes, and then children’s toys, plastic buckets and spades, photographs, lots of paper, newspapers and documents, all mixed together in one huge ratatouille.

  Then there were dozens and dozens of bottles of soft drinks, both fizzy and still, because a few kilometres upstream there was a bottling factory. The water had gone through there too, sweeping away the entire contents of the warehouse.

  We decided to retrieve all the bottles, put them to one side and distribute them later among the people who had helped to clean up the river. But by the end of the first hour of work we had already fished out so many that we didn’t know where to put them. So two of our friends carted them away from the bank in big wheelbarrows, to free up the space for others, and dumped the bottles in the front yards of the people who lived nearby. They filled the entire first street of the district – about fifty houses – with bottles, and when they came up again with their barrows full, the people shouted:

  ‘No, there’s no more room here, boys, go on to the next house!’

  We worked all day without stopping for a moment, and didn’t let up till the evening, when it was so dark we couldn’t see a thing.

  We had thoroughly cluttered up the bank, it was almost impossible to walk along it: wherever you put your foot, you trod on something.

  We stayed and slept by the fire.

  Before we went to sleep we had a meal; some people had brought things from home, and there was plenty to drink – I think I drank more fizzy drinks that evening than I have in the rest of my life.

  Afterwards we all lay on the ground, lit up by the firelight. We all kept burping because of all the pop we’d drunk.

  Ten metres away from us lay the body of the man we’d fished out in the afternoon. We put a cross and a candle in his hands so that he wouldn’t be angry. Someone also brought him a glass of mineral water and a piece of bread, in accordance with the Siberian tradition of always offering something to the dead.

  We decided that next day we’d better ask the people of the other districts to help us, since the river was still full of junk, as well as other corpses. With the warmth the bodies would start to decompose, and then it would be unbearable. We thought we’d be able to clear the river quickly with the help of other kids.

  Next day, at around ten, the reinfo
rcements arrived. Many boys from the Centre, and some from Caucasus and Railway: they had all come to help us, and we were pleased.

  To avoid any risk of them falling in the water (many of them couldn’t swim – they hadn’t grown up on the riverside like us), we got them to work on the bank. They carried the stuff away in wheelbarrows or bags.

  We sold a lot of bottles of pop to people who came in cars to pick it up and then sell it on to shops. We asked a low price, basing it not on the number of bottles we gave them but on the number of trips they managed to make in their cars: fifty roubles per trip, and they could take as much as they could carry. If they were quick they would earn three times as much. It was a good deal for everyone – we cleared the bank quickly, and even made a bit of money out of it, they got for next to nothing goods that they could sell on.

  One of the boys who worked with us was Vitalich.

  Although he lived in Centre, we were good friends with him.

  He often came to bathe with us in the river; he was an excellent swimmer. He competed in rowing races, so he had an athletic physique and plenty of stamina, and when we swam together he never got tired; he could keep going upstream for hours.

  Since he was so good, we got him to lead the team of boys who were untying the objects from the boat near the bank. You had to be a good swimmer to do this, because the boat couldn’t get very close to the bank. Once it was untied, the object was carried to the bank by five or six swimmers. This was a tricky operation because it was impossible to see underwater – the river was clogged with earth and leaves and other stuff, so you couldn’t even make out what the thing you were carrying was. One boy had been hurt the previous day – while he was moving a trunk, a branch had impaled his calf, he’d lost a lot of blood in the water, and before he’d even realized what had happened, he had passed out. Luckily the others had noticed immediately and had carried him to the bank straight away, so it had all ended well.

  At noon some relatives of the people who had disappeared in the river arrived. Each of them walked round the body of the drowned man, till a woman recognized him:

  ‘It’s my husband,’ she said.

  She was accompanied by the man’s brother and two other men, friends of the family. There was also a ten-year-old girl, a tiny little thing, with the black hair and eyes that so many Moldovans have.

  The woman burst into tears, screaming and throwing herself on her husband’s body. She embraced him and kissed him. Her little daughter started crying too, but silently, as if she were embarrassed to do so in front of us.

  The drowned man’s brother tried to calm the woman; he took her to the car, but she went on crying and screaming there.

  The three men loaded the body onto the back seat of their car. They thanked us and offered us money, but we refused it. One of us filled the boot with bottles, and they looked at us with a question in their eyes.

  ‘That way you’ll save money on the drinks, at the funeral,’ we said to them.

  At this they thanked us profusely. The woman started kissing our hands and to evade all those kisses we went back to work.

  Other people, in the meantime, were looking for their own dead. One of them offered us his help and we accepted it: poor devils, they hoped they could help us recover the bodies of their dear ones. But it’s not easy to find a drowned person. Usually the bodies stay underwater for at least three days, and only later, when they begin to putrefy and fill with gas, do they rise to the surface. It had been pure chance that we had found the body of that poor Moldovan; he must have been carried up to the surface by a strong current, and if we hadn’t grabbed him straight away he would certainly have gone under again.

  *

  Vitalich, with five other boys, was pulling towards the bank a tree with a lot of branches sticking out of the water – you could tell that underneath it must be enormous.

  They had decided to turn it round back to front, with the foliage towards the bank, so as to create more handholds for those who had to grasp it from the land.

  While they were turning it, Vitalich got his foot tangled up in the branches. He managed to shout, to let the others know that he’d got caught, but suddenly the tree worked like a propeller: it rolled over with all its weight, pulling Vitalich under.

  We couldn’t believe it.

  Everyone jumped into the water to get him out, but he was no longer there, either close to the tree or anywhere else, for several metres around.

  We immediately blocked off the surrounding area with the net, to stop the current carrying him away. Then we started to search the river bed.

  We dived into the dirty water, where you couldn’t see a thing, at the risk of crashing into something. One of us did indeed get hit by a trunk, but luckily not too hard.

  Of Vitalich, however, there was no trace.

  I remember continually diving into the water: I went right down to the bottom, some five or six metres, and groped with my hands in the void.

  Suddenly I found something, a leg! I gripped it tightly, resting it against my body, and bending down I put my feet on the river bed; I gave myself a hard shove, as if I were suddenly releasing a spring, and a second later found myself back on the surface.

  Only then did I realize that it was Mel’s leg I had grabbed. His head was sticking out of the water and he was looking at me in bemusement.

  I lost my temper and punched him in the head, and he responded in kind.

  We didn’t manage to find Vitalich’s body in the first hour of searching.

  We were all tired and irritable, many had started quarrelling among themselves, insults flew, and everyone wanted to shake off the blame by putting it on others. At times like these, when everyone is totally disloyal, you begin to see what people are really like, and you feel disgust for what you are and where you are.

  I had lost all feeling in my arms and legs and couldn’t swim any more, so I returned to the bank and lay down.

  I don’t remember how, but I fell asleep.

  When I woke up it was evening. Someone was asking me if I was okay. It was my friend Gigit; he had a bottle of wine in his hand.

  The others were sitting round the fire getting drunk.

  I felt full of strength again and asked Gigit if Vitalich’s body had been found. He shook his head.

  Then I went over to the others and asked them why they were drinking, when our friend’s body was still in the river.

  They looked at me indifferently; some were pissed out of their minds, most were tired and depressed.

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I’m going to cast the nets at the Scythe.’

  The Scythe was a place about twenty kilometres downstream. They called it that because at that point the river described a wide curve resembling a scythe. On that bend the water stopped and flooded the bank, so that the current seemed almost stationary.

  Everything carried away by the current fetched up there sooner or later. By blocking the passage along the river bed, we could recover Vitalich’s body.

  The only problem was that with the flood the river had filled up with all that junk, so the net would have to be changed continually, otherwise it would get too full and there would be a risk of breaking it when you pulled it up.

  Mel, Gigit, Besa and Speechless came with me. We went in my two boats, taking my net and Mel’s.

  Nets that are used for fishing out drowned people are thrown away afterwards, or kept only to be used on another sad occasion.

  I had a dozen different nets for different uses; the best were the river-bed ones, which could support heavy weights and stay in the water for a long time. They had three superimposed layers, for more effective catching, and were very thick.

  I took the best river-bed net that I had and we set off.

  We cast the net all night, and kept clearing it of rubbish: there were all sorts of things at the bottom of the river, including many carcases of various kinds of animal. But the worst problem was the branches, because when they got stuck in the net i
t was hard to get them out, and they broke the mesh.

  Our hands remained wet until morning; we hardly had time to dry them before they got wet again, because as soon as you finished clearing the net on one side it was already full on the other, so you would rush over there, and as soon as you emptied it you would have to go back to where you’d been before.

  Eventually Gagarin arrived with the others to take over from us. We were exhausted – out on our feet. We threw ourselves down on the grass, and fell asleep instantly.

  At about four o’clock in the afternoon Gagarin and the others found Vitalich’s body.

  It was covered in scratches and cuts; the right foot was broken, and a bit of bone was sticking out. Vitalich was blue, like all drowned people.

  We called the people of our district. They took him home to his mother. We went with them, to tell her how it had happened. She was distraught; she wept continuously and embraced us all together, squeezing us so hard that it hurt. I think she understood of her own accord, or perhaps one of the boys of the Centre had told her, how hard we had worked to find her son’s body. She kept thanking us, and I was touched to hear her say: ‘Thank you, thank you for bringing him home.’

  I couldn’t look her in the face, I was so ashamed at having slept when I should have been searching for her son’s body.

  We were all shocked, shattered. We couldn’t believe that fate had taken a person like Vitalich away from us.

  And so, whenever we were anywhere near the Centre, we would always drop in on Aunt Katya, Vitalich’s mother.

  She wasn’t married: her first partner, Vitalich’s father, had been on the point of marrying her when he’d been called up into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, where he had been reported missing when she was still pregnant.

  Aunt Katya ran that little place I mentioned earlier, a kind of restaurant, and lived with a new partner, a good man, a criminal, who dealt in various kinds of illegal trade.

  Whenever we went to see her we always took her some flowers as a present because we knew she was very fond of them.