One day she had told us that what she would like more than anything else in the world was to have a lemon tree. We had decided to get her one; the only problem was that we didn’t know where to get one from, in fact none of us had ever seen a lemon tree.
So someone had advised us to try in a botanic garden, because it would have plants that grew in warm countries. After a bit of time and exploration we identified the nearest botanic garden: it was in Belgorod, in Ukraine, on the Black Sea, three hours’ journey from our home.
We set off in a highly organized group. There were about fifteen of us: everybody wanted to take part in the lemon expedition, because everybody liked Aunt Katya and tried to help her and please her in every way possible.
When we got to Belgorod we bought just one ticket for the botanic garden: one of us entered, went to the toilet and passed the ticket out of the window to another member of the group, and so on, till we were all inside.
We tagged on behind a visiting school party and approached our objective. It was a fairly small tree, a little higher than a bush, with green leaves and three yellow lemons dangling in the wind.
Mel immediately said the lemons were fake and had been stuck on with glue for appearance’s sake, and that the tree was just an ordinary bush. We had to stop and quickly examine the tree, to see if those damned lemons were real or not. I smelled all three of them myself: they had a characteristic scent of lemon.
Mel got a cuff round the ear from Gagarin and was forbidden to speak until the end of the operation.
We grabbed the pot and went up to the second floor of a building on the edge of the garden. We opened a window and carefully tossed the little tree on to the roof of a lockup garage. We jumped down from there ourselves and ran to the station, clutching that heavy pot with the tree inside it. In the train we realized that despite all the knocks and shakes the lemons hadn’t come off: we were so pleased not to have lost them…
When we brought Aunt Katya our present she wept with joy, or perhaps she was weeping because she’d seen the stamp of the botanic garden on the pot which we had carelessly failed to remove. At any rate, she was so delighted that when she picked her first ripe lemon she invited us all round for a cup of lemon tea.
So on that day too – my thirteenth birthday – as Mel and I were walking across town on our way to the Railway district, we thought of taking her a plant, and called in at old Bosya’s shop.
We always bought our plants and flowers for Aunt Katya in his shop; since we had no idea what they were called, we always asked him to write down their names on a piece of paper, so that we wouldn’t buy the same thing twice.
Every five plants, Bosya allowed us a small discount, or gave us some packets of old seeds, which were no longer any use because they were all dry. We took the seeds anyway and made a detour via the police station. If we found the police cars parked outside the gate we’d pour the seeds into their petrol tanks: the seeds were light and didn’t sink to the bottom straight away, and they were so small that they could pass through the filter of the petrol pump, so when they reached the carburettor the engine would stall. So we made good use of what in other circumstances would have been thrown away.
Grandfather Bosya was a good Jew, respected by all the criminals, although apart from having a flower shop (which didn’t sell much), nobody knew exactly what he did, so secret did he keep his affairs. It was rumoured that he had links with the Jewish community of Amsterdam and smuggled diamonds. However, we never had any actual proof of this, and we always used to tease him when we went to his shop, trying to find out what he really did. It had become a tradition: we tried to get him to talk and every time he succeeded in avoiding the issue.
We would say:
‘Well, Mr Bosya, what’s the weather like in Amsterdam?’
And he would reply in an off-hand manner:
‘How would I know that, a poor Jew like me who doesn’t even possess a radio? Though even if I did have one I wouldn’t listen to it: I’m so old now that I can’t hear a thing – I’m going deaf… Oh, how I wish I could go back to the days when I was young like you, and just play around and have a good time… By the way, what have you boys been up to lately?’
And it always ended with us, like a bunch of idiots, telling him about our own doings instead of hearing about his, and leaving his shop with a vague sensation of having been tricked.
He had a real talent as a conman, and we fell for it every time.
The flowers in old Bosya’s shop weren’t all that special; I reckon some of them had been there for years. The shop was a long, narrow cubby-hole, with wooden shelves crammed with old plants that no one ever bought. When you entered you felt as if you’d landed in the middle of a jungle; a lot of the plants had grown so much their leaves intertwined with those of the ones next to them, and all the plants together formed a kind of huge bush.
Bosya was a twisted, thin old man; he wore glasses as thick as the armour of a tank and through the lenses his eyes seemed monstrously large. He always wore a black jacket, a white shirt with a black bow-tie, black trousers with impeccably ironed creases and shiny black shoes.
Despite his age (he was so old even my grandfather called him ‘uncle’), his hair was quite black, and he kept it very neat, cut in the style of the 1930s, under a thin layer of brilliantine.
He always used to say that the true weapon of every gentleman is his elegance: with that you could do anything – rob, kill, burgle and lie – without ever being suspected.
When the little bell on the door of the shop rang, Bosya would get up from his chair behind the counter, creaking like an old car changing gear, and advance towards the customer with his hands wide apart, like Jesus does in those sacred paintings, to indicate acceptance and compassion. He looked funny when he walked, because he had a comical face – smiling, but with sad eyes, like those of a dog with no master. And with every step he uttered a sound, one of those groans that old men full of aches and pains utter when they move.
All in all he filled me with sadness: a mixture of melancholy, nostalgia and pity.
When we entered his shop old Bosya would emerge from his jungle and, not seeing who had come in, set off as usual with a saintly aspect, but as soon as his eyes fell on our disreputable faces, his expression would instantly change. First the smile would disappear, to be replaced by a weary grimace, as if he were having difficulty in breathing, then his whole body would become twisted, his legs a little bent, and he would start waving his hands as if to refuse something that we’d offered him. He would turn his back on us and return to the counter, saying in a quavering voice and with a slight hint of irony, in a Russian accent contaminated by the Jewish dialect of Odessa:
‘Shob ya tak zhil, opyat prishli morochit yayza…’
Which meant, ‘What a life I have to live!’ – a Jewish expression, which they stick in everywhere – ‘You’ve come to pester me again…’
That was his way of welcoming us because, in reality, he was very fond of all of us.
He too enjoyed not letting us trick him. We always tried, but Bosya, with his wisdom and his Jewish cunning, which in his case had something humble and worldly-wise about it, would get us to fall into his trap, and sometimes we would only realize it later, after we’d left the shop. He was a genius at mind games, a real genius.
Since he always complained that he was blind and deaf, we used to provoke him by asking him what the time was, hoping he’d look at the watch he wore on his wrist. But without batting an eyelid he would reply:
‘How can I know what time it is if I’m a happy person? Happy people don’t count time, because in their lives every moment passes with pleasure.’
Then we would ask him why he wore a watch, if he never looked at it, and if he didn’t care about the passing of time.
He would put on an astonished expression and look at his watch as if he were seeing it for the first time, and then reply in a humble tone:
‘…Oh, this isn’t a watch… It�
��s older than I am; I don’t even know if it works…’
He would put it to his ear, hold it there for a moment and then add:
‘…Well, I can hear something, but I don’t know if it’s the ticking of the hands or that of my old heart running down…’
Bosya’s wife was a nice old Jewish lady called Elina. She was a very intelligent woman who had worked as a schoolmistress for many years and had taught my father and his brothers. They all spoke of her affectionately, and even many years later they still respected her authority. The first time my father killed a policeman – in fact he killed two – she boxed his ears, and he knelt down at her feet to ask her forgiveness.
Bosya had a daughter, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Her name was Faya, and she too was a schoolmistress. She taught foreign languages, English and French. But she had grown up with the idea that she was ill, because Bosya and Elina had forbidden her to do all the things that normal children did. She was unmarried and still lived with her parents; she was a calm and very cheerful person. She had a gorgeous figure: hips and curves that seemed to have been drawn with a pencil, so perfect were they, a fabulous mouth, small and with the lips slightly parted and well defined, big black eyes, and wavy hair, which hung down to her bottom. But the most spectacular thing was the way she moved. She seemed like a cat; she made every gesture with a grace all of her own.
I was obsessed by her, and whenever I saw her in the shop I tried to find some pretext for standing near her. I would go and talk to her about the plants or anything else, just to feel her close to my skin.
She would smile at me; she was happy to talk to me and she understood that I liked her. Only later, at sixteen, did I pluck up the courage to get really close to her, by talking about literature. We started seeing each other, and exchanging books, and before long we developed a relationship which polite people usually call ‘intimate’, but which in my district was described with a different phrase altogether: ‘dirtying the sheets together’.
But that’s another story, which deserves to be told separately, and not here.
The story that should be told here is that of old Bosya’s life.
In his youth old Bosya was a bander – the term used at the beginning of the century for a member of Jewish organized crime. The word is derived from banda, which in Russian means ‘gang’.
In the 1920s and 1930s, in Odessa, the Jewish gangs were among the strongest and the best organized: they ran all the smuggling operations and the affairs of the harbour. Their members were united by strong religious feelings and by a code of honour, a kind of internal set of regulations called the koska, a term which in the old Jewish dialect of Odessa means ‘word’, ‘law’ or ‘rule’. In short, contravening the koska was a good way of committing suicide.
In the mid-1930s the Soviet government began systematically combating crime all over the territory, and they dispatched to Odessa – which was deemed to be one of the towns worst affected by rackets and organized crime – special squads which devised a battle tactic called podstava, which means ‘done on purpose’. Through infiltrators they provoked internal conflicts within the gangs themselves.
Donnie Brasco, the famous movie gangster played by Johnny Depp, certainly couldn’t have imagined that his Soviet precursors had exploited the work of undercover agents not in order to obtain information but to create by artificial means situations where criminals went to war against each other and killed each other on an industrial scale. No, Donnie Brasco would never have dreamed of it.
In this way many of the gangs and criminal communities in Odessa were eliminated. Only the Jewish community managed to survive, because there were no Jews in the police force and no one else knew the Jewish culture, language and traditions well enough to be able to pass for one of them.
Later, when the power of the police grew in Odessa and began to threaten the Jews as well, they pooled their forces to form two big gangs, each with thousands of members.
One, the more famous, was led by the legendary criminal Benya Krik, alias ‘the King’, and specialized mainly in robberies and burglaries. The other was headed by an old criminal called Buba Bazich, alias ‘the Squint’, and dealt only in illegal financial dealing.
These two organizations worked very well together, and the police could do nothing against them. Before long they had taken over Odessa, and the Jewish community became one of the most powerful throughout the southern USSR, and especially in Ukraine.
In October 1941, when the German and Romanian occupation forces entered Odessa, most of the Jews were deported to the concentration camps and exterminated.
The criminals joined the partisan units, hiding in the underground tunnels which ran all the way across the city and right down to the sea. They hit the enemy at night, with sabotage actions: they blew up their railway lines, derailed trains carrying arms and provisions, torched and sank ships, and kidnapped and killed senior German officers, often capturing them while they were intimately engaged with the prostitutes of Odessa, who for the occasion had turned into skilful spies.
Bosya was there, in those underground tunnels.
Sometimes, when we dropped in at his shop, Bosya would tell us about the Odessa resistance; he said that for several years they had all lived in the tunnels under the city, without ever seeing the light of day. The Germans, he said, were constantly blowing up the tunnels to prevent the partisans from carrying out their sabotage attacks, but each time they shook off the dust and dug new passages.
Bosya had met his wife in those tunnels. Elina had been with her Jewish family, who had been freed by the partisans: they had fallen in love and got married there, underground. He used to say – perhaps joking, perhaps not – that when they had finally come out of the tunnels they had forgotten what the sunlight was like, and his young wife, after taking a good look at his face, had said to him:
‘I’d never noticed you had such a long nose!’
They wanted a child, but for years after the war didn’t succeed in having one, and were sad about this. They tried all the treatments, but in vain. So one day they decided to go and see an old gipsy woman who lived with her blind niece. People said this gipsy woman could cure diseases with magic and with folk remedies – that she was a kind of witch, but very knowledgeable. The gipsy told Bosya that neither he nor his wife had any disease, that they were only suffering from unpleasant memories. She advised them to leave Odessa and settle somewhere else, in a place where there was nothing that linked them with the past.
For a long time they didn’t take this advice from the gipsy seriously, and besides, it was very difficult for them to break away from the community. Only in the late 1970s did they decide to leave Odessa and move to Bender, our town, where Bosya set up his little business and devoted himself to those mysterious activities about which nobody knew anything precise, but which soon made him rich.
And then, when Bosya and his wife were at an age when people usually become grandparents, Faya was born.
The three of them made a lovely family, and as Grandfather Kuzya often said, they were ‘people who know how to live happily’.
So – to return to our story – on that cold February morning Mel and I called in at Bosya’s shop to buy a plant, and he, as always, welcomed us with kind words:
‘Dear me, haven’t you got anything better to do in such cold weather?’
It was better for me to do the talking, because a dialogue between Mel and old Bosya would have been rather complicated.
‘We’ve come about Aunt Katya. On business.’
Bosya peered at me over his spectacles and said:
‘Thank goodness somebody still manages to do a bit of business! I’ve been knocking my head against these walls all my life and have never managed to do any at all!’
I gave in at once, without even attempting any repartee; trying to get the better of him was like trying to outrun a cheetah.
As always, pushing a plate towards us, with a somewhat nonchalant gesture, h
e offered us his revolting, ancient sweets. He knew perfectly well that they were awful; it was a ritual piece of mockery. We took them every time: we would fill our pockets and he would watch us, smiling, and repeating the words:
‘Eat them, boys, eat them! But mind you don’t break your teeth…’
When his wife caught him playing that cruel trick, she would get angry with him and insist that we empty our pockets and throw the sweets in the rubbish bin. Then Elina would take us to her house and offer us tea with biscuits filled with butter cream, the best biscuits in the world.
A few months earlier I had let Bosya in on the secret of his sweets, and he had been astonished, because he had thought that through all those years we had eaten them. ‘We used them as stones,’ I told him, ‘to fire with our catapults.’ At the windows of the police station, to be precise: they were deadly, especially the raspberry-flavoured ones. One evening I had fired one at Mel’s knee as a joke: it had swollen up, and for six months he’d had to keep having the water drained from his knee with a syringe.
Mel and I took our sweets in silence and chose a small plant to give to Aunt Katya.
But I can’t mention catapults like that without explaining exactly what our catapults were like.
Each of us made his own catapult, from start to finish, so they were all different and reflected in some way the individuality of their owners. The frame of the catapult had to be made exclusively of wood. A particular luxury was a thin frame, made of a pliant but strong wood. Everyone had his own little tricks which he kept to himself, but if someone liked another boy’s catapult he could buy it or be given it as a token of friendship.
The catapult always had to be kept in your pocket, like your knife; not until the age of thirteen or fourteen was it replaced by a gun. But I carried my catapult around with me even later, till I was eighteen.
When my grandfather had been in Siberia he had made pipes for tobacco, using the roots of local trees, or various kinds of bush. With his help we had found a type of wood that was perfect for catapults and this was my great strategic secret; my friends tried repeatedly to make me talk but I always held out, like a brave Soviet partisan in a Fascist prison.
Siberian Education Page 13
