Taking the piss out of him seemed a good way of getting him to understand where his naivety might lead him. Another time, when we were already fourteen or fifteen, Mel was at my house, and we were making some tea to drink in the sauna. All at once he started blathering about tropical countries, saying that it wouldn’t be bad to live there; he thought it might suit us, because the weather was never cold.
‘There’s too much humidity,’ I told him. ‘It never stops raining. It’s a lousy place. What would we do there?’
‘If it rained we could shelter in a hut. And think about it – on an island you don’t need a car, you can go around on a bike and there’s always a boat available. And the Indians…’
They were all Indians to him. American Indians. He thought the indigenous people of every country always went around on horseback with coloured feathers on their heads and painted faces.
‘…the Indians,’ he went on, ‘are clever people. It would be great to become like them.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I provoked him. ‘They wear their hair long, like homosexuals.’
‘What are you talking about? They’re not homosexuals. It’s just that they don’t have any scissors to cut their hair with. Look,’ he said to me, taking out of his pocket a little plastic figure with faded colours that he always carried about with him – an Indian warrior in a fighting pose, with a knife in his hand. ‘You see? If he’s got a knife he can’t be a homosexual, or they’d never had given him permission to insult a weapon!’
It was funny to see how he applied our Siberian rules to the Indians. He was right, in our culture a ‘cockerel’ – that is, a homosexual – is an outcast: if he isn’t killed he is prevented from having contact with others and forbidden to touch cult objects such as the cross, the knife and the icons.
I had no wish to dismantle his fantasies about the fabulous heterosexual life of Indians. I just wanted a bit of fun. So I tried another angle of attack, teasing him about a subject that he regarded as sacred: food.
‘They don’t make red soup,’ I said in one breath.
Mel became very attentive. He craned his neck:
‘What do you mean, they don’t make soup… What do they eat, then?’
‘Well, actually they don’t have much food; it’s hot there, they don’t need fat to help them resist the cold, they just eat the fruit that grows on the trees, and a few fish…’
‘Fried fish isn’t bad,’ he attempted to defend tropical cuisine.
‘Forget fried fish: they don’t cook anything there, they eat everything raw…’
‘What kind of fruit do they have?’
‘Coconuts.’
‘What are they like?’
‘They’re good.’
‘How do you know?’
‘My uncle’s got a friend in Odessa who’s a sailor. Last week he brought me a coconut with milk inside it.’
‘Milk?’
‘Milk, yes – only it doesn’t come from a cow but from a tree. It’s inside the fruit.’
‘Really? Show me!’ In five seconds he had taken my bait. All I had to do was reel him in.
‘I’m afraid we’ve already eaten the fruit, but if you want to try it I’ve still got a bit of the milk.’
‘Yes, let me try it!’ He was jumping up and down on his chair, so eager was he for this milk.
‘All right, then, I’ll give you some. I put it in the cellar to keep it cool. Wait a couple of seconds and I’ll bring it to you!’
Laughing like a bastard, I went out of the house and over to the toolshed where my grandfather kept all things useful and useless for the house and garden. I picked up an iron cup and put a bit of white filler and some plaster into it. To give the liquid the right density I added a bit of water and some glue for sticking on wall-tiles. I stirred the mixture with the wooden stick that my grandfather used for clearing the pigeons’ nests of their droppings. Then I lovingly carried the magic potion to Mel.
‘Here you are, but don’t drink it all, leave some for the others.’
I should have saved my breath: as soon as he took the cup in his hands, Mel drained it in four gulps. Then he grimaced, and a timid shadow of doubt appeared in his good eye.
‘Maybe it’s gone off a bit in the cellar, I don’t know; it was delicious when we first tried it,’ I said, trying to save the situation.
‘Yes, it must have gone off…’
From that day on I started calling him ‘Chunga-Changa’, and he never understood why.
Chunga-Changa was a cartoon film which was much loved by children in the Soviet Union. It was rather badly drawn, in the style of a communist propaganda poster: all bright colours, figures filled in without any gradations of tone and very stylized, proportions deliberately not respected so as to create an effect like that of a puppet show.
The cartoon promoted friendship among the children of the world through the story of a little Soviet boy who went to visit a little coloured boy on an island called Chunga-Changa. The Soviet boy had a very determined look in his eye (as did all communists and their relatives), a steamship and a very small dog , and he dressed like a sailor. The coloured boy was as black as a moonless night and wore only a kind of skirt made of leaves, and his friends were a monkey and a parrot; other creatures also appeared – a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a zebra, a giraffe and a lion, who all danced together paw in paw, round and round.
The cartoon lasted a quarter of an hour in all, and more than ten minutes of that were taken up by three songs, with a few very short dialogues in between. The song that became famous, and was loved by all the children of the USSR, was the last one. In it, to a cheerful, moving little tune, a female voice sang of the happy, carefree life on the island of Chunga-Changa:
Chunga-Changa, a wonderful island
Living there is easy and simple
Living there is easy and simple
Chunga-a-a-Changa-a-a!
Chunga-Changa, the sky is always blue
Chunga-Changa, continual merriment
Chunga-Changa, our happiness is incomparable
Chunga-Changa, we know no difficulties!
Our happiness is never-ending
Chew the coconut, eat the bananas
Chew the coconut, eat the bananas
Chunga-a-a-Changa-a-a!
After the food warehouses the first houses of the Railway district finally began. This district belonged to Black Seed, and had different rules from our own. We would have to behave ourselves, or we might not come out alive.
The boys of that area were very cruel; they tried to earn the respect of others with the most extreme violence. Power among juveniles had a symbolic value: some kids could order others about, but none of them was respected by adult criminals. So, naturally, boys couldn’t wait to grow up, and to achieve this more quickly many became absolute bastards, sadistic and unjust. In their hands the criminal rules were distorted to the point of absurdity; they lost all meaning, and became little more than excuses for violence. For example, they didn’t wear anything red – they called it the communists’ colour: if anyone wore any red garment the Black Seed kids were quite capable of torturing them. Of course, knowing this rule, none of the people who were born there ever wore anything red, but if you had it in for someone, all you had to do was hide a red handkerchief in his pocket and shout out loud that he was a communist. The hapless individual would immediately be searched, and if the handkerchief was found, no one would listen to anything he had to say in his defence: in everyone’s eyes he was already an outcast.
This sense of a constant struggle for power, or, as Grandfather Kuzya called it, ‘contest of the bastards’, was essential to the ethos of the district. In order to be a perfect Authority among the youngsters of Railway you had to be always ready to betray your own people, not have ties of friendship with anyone and be careful you weren’t betrayed in your turn, know how to lick the arses of the adult criminals and not have any education received from any form of human contact that was deemed
to be good.
Those boys had grown up thinking they had nothing but enemies around them, so the only language they knew was that of provocation.
If it came to a fight, however, they behaved in various ways. Some groups fought with dignity, and many of these we were friends with. But others always tried to ‘strike from round the corner’, as we say – in other words attack from behind – and didn’t respect any agreement; they were perfectly capable of shooting you even if you’d previously made a pact with them not to use firearms.
They were organized in groups which, unlike us, they didn’t call ‘gangs’, a word they considered a bit offensive, but kontory, which means ‘bureaus’. Each kontora had its leader, or, as they called him, bugor, which means ‘mound’.
I had a long-standing quarrel with a bugor of that district: he was a year older than me and called himself ‘the Vulture’. He was a lying buffoon, who had arrived in our town four years earlier, claiming to be the son of a famous criminal who went by the nickname ‘White’. My uncle knew White very well; they had been in jail together and he had told me his story.
He was a criminal of the Black Seed caste, but one of the old guard. He respected everyone, and was never arrogant, but always humble, my uncle said. In the 1980s, when a group of young Black Seed men ousted the older Authorities (with the sole aim of making money and setting up as businessmen in civil society), many old men tried with all their strength to prevent it. So the young men started killing their old folk: during that period this was happening all over the place.
White fell victim to an ambush. He was getting out of a car with his men, when some men in another passing car opened fire on him. When they fired with their Kalashnikovs, a lot of people were walking along the street, and some were wounded. White managed to take refuge behind his car, which was armoured, but he saw a woman in the line of fire and threw himself at her to cover her with his body. He was badly wounded, and died in hospital a few days later. Before he died, he asked his men to seek out that woman, ask her forgiveness for what had happened and give her some money. This gesture of his made such a great impression in the criminal society that his killers repented and apologized to the old men, but then they went on killing each other and, as my uncle said, ‘at that point Christ only knew what was in that salad’.
Anyway, in our community White was very highly thought of. So when I heard that his son had arrived in town and that he’d had to leave his village because a lot of people had wanted to take revenge on him after his father’s death, I was dying to meet him. I told my uncle about this at once, but he replied that White hadn’t had any sons, or indeed any family at all, because he had lived according to the old rules, which prevented the members of Black Seed from marrying and bringing up children. ‘He was as lonely as a post in the middle of the steppe,’ he assured me.
Some time later I met the Vulture, and without wasting many words I went straight to the point and unmasked him. We had a fight, and I came off best, but from that day on the Vulture hated me, and tried to get revenge in any way possible.
One winter evening, in 1991, I was returning home dead drunk from a party. I was with Mel, who was even drunker than I was. Around midnight, on the border between our district and the Centre, the Vulture appeared with three of his friends: they overtook us on their bikes and stopped in front of us, blocking our way, and the Vulture pulled a 16-bore double-barrelled shotgun out of his jacket and fired two shots at me. He hit me in the chest; the cartridges were filled with chopped-up nails. Luckily for me, however, those cartridges had been carelessly filled: in one there was too much gunpowder and only a few nails, and the stopper had been pushed too far down; so it exploded inside, and the backfire scorched that poor fool’s hand and part of his face. With the other the opposite mistake had been made: it had too many nails and too little powder, and evidently the stopper hadn’t been closed properly, so the nails came out at a lower velocity and only tore my jacket a little; actually, one got through to my skin, but it didn’t hurt me, and I only noticed it a couple of days later when I saw a slightly red blister. Mel threw himself at them barehanded and managed to knock one of them down and break his bike, so they made off.
After that episode, with the help of the whole gang I caught the Vulture and gave him three stab wounds on the thigh, as was the custom in our community as a sign of contempt. He didn’t give up, but kept saying to everyone that he wanted revenge. But back then he was still a nobody, just one of the many teenage delinquents in Railway. Later though, the Vulture had succeeded in building a successful career, and now he was the leader of a bunch of thugs with whom he did things for which we in our community would have had our balls cut off at the very least.
That February day, as we entered the Railway district, I was only thinking of getting the job done quickly and not running into this fool of an enemy of mine. So as not to bother Mel with that story and not make him anxious – because it was a very serious matter to see him looking worried – I tried talking to him about the birthday party I would be having that evening, and the dishes my mother had prepared for us. He listened attentively, and from his expression it was clear that he was already there at the table, eating it all himself.
In Railway, as in our district, the boys acted as lookouts: they observed the movements of anyone who came in or left and then informed the adults. So we were immediately spotted by a little group of boys aged six or seven. We were crossing the first yard of the district and they were sitting there in a corner, a strategic point from where they had a good view of each of the two roads that ran from the park to the district. One of the boys, the smallest, received an order from another bigger boy, whereupon he got up and started running like a bullet towards us. In our district we didn’t do that: if you had to approach someone, you went in a group; you never sent just one boy, let alone the smallest. And usually you didn’t go towards anyone at all; you organized things so that the outsiders came to you, so from the outset you put yourself in a position of superiority.
The little boy looked like a little junkie. He was thin and had two blue rings round his eyes, a clear sign that he sniffed glue – a lot of kids in Railway used to get high like that. We took the piss out of them, calling them ‘boyfriends of the bag’, because they always carried a plastic bag around with them. They would put a bit of glue into it and then stick their head in the bag. A lot of them died like that, asphyxiated, because they didn’t even have the strength to take the bag off their heads; an incredible number of them were found in various little hiding places around town, in the cellars or in the central heating boiler rooms, which they turned into shelters.
Anyway, this little boy stood in front of us, wiped his snivelling nose on the sleeve of his jacket and with a voice ravaged by the residue of glue said:
‘Hey, stop! Where are you going?’
To let him know who we were, I gave him a crash course in good breeding:
‘Where have you put your manners? Have you left them in your pocket, along with your dear little bag? Has nobody ever taught you that there are places where if you don’t say hello to people you can end up as a baklan?[9] Go back to your friends and tell them to come all together and to introduce themselves properly, if they want to talk. Otherwise we’ll go on acting like we haven’t seen them!’
Before I had even finished his heels could already be seen kicking up the snow.
Soon the whole delegation arrived with its leader at its head, a small boy aged about ten who to give himself the air of a criminal was turning over in his hands a chotki, a piece of equipment made of bread used by pickpockets for exercising their fingers, to make them more supple and sensitive.
He looked at us for a while and then said:
‘My name’s “Beard”. Good morning. Where are you going?’
There was a lifeless note in his voice. He too must have been ruined by glue.
‘I’m Nikolay “Kolima”,’ I replied. ‘This is Andrey “Mel”. We’re from Low River
. We’ve got a letter to take to one of your elders.’
Beard seemed to wake up.
‘Do you know the man you have to deliver it to?’ he asked in an unexpectedly polite tone. ‘Do you know the way, or do you need someone to show you?’
Strange, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone from Railway offering to show you the way; they’re famous for their rudeness. Maybe, I said to myself, they’ve been told not to let anyone who enters the district go around on their own. But it would be crazy trying to follow everyone – they’d be going backwards and forwards day and night.
We didn’t know the addressee or the way to his house.
‘The letter’s for a guy called Fyodor “the Finger”; if you tell us the way we’ll find him on our own, thank you.’ I was trying to get out of his offer to show us the way. I don’t know why, but I felt there was something wrong with that offer.
‘I’ll explain it to you, then,’ said Beard, and he started saying that we had to go that way, turn off there, then again there, and then again there. In short, I realized after a few seconds, since I knew the district well, that he was trying to make us take a needlessly long route. But I couldn’t make out why, so I heard him out to the end, feigning ignorance. Then I said deliberately, as if agreeing with him:
‘Yes, it does seem very complicated. We’ll never find the way on our own.’
He lit up like a coin fresh from the mint.
‘I told you, without the help of a guide…’
‘Okay then, we accept,’ I concluded, with a smile. ‘Let’s go. Lead the way!’
I asked him to take us himself so that I could assess the gravity of the situation. No leader of a group guarding a district will ever leave his station; he will always send one of his underlings. My proposal was a kind of test – if he refused to accompany us, fine, I could relax, but if he agreed, it meant he had orders to take us somewhere, and that we were in for serious trouble.
Siberian Education Page 18
