‘Great, let’s go!’ he replied, almost singing. ‘I’ll just have a word with my kontora, then I’ll be with you.’
While Beard was talking in a corner with his group, I told Mel about my worries.
‘I’ll beat them up,’ he said bluntly.
I told him that didn’t seem to me a very good idea.
If we beat them up, we’d have to leave the district at once, without delivering the letter. And how would that make us look in front of our Guardian?
‘Stupid, Mel, that’s how we’d look, bloody stupid. What would we tell him? “We didn’t deliver the letter because we suspected something strange was going on, so we beat up some nine-year-old kids who were so high on glue they could hardly stand upright?”’
I proposed a different, more risky plan: that we get Beard to show us the way and then, in the first convenient place, ‘split’ him, a verb which in our slang means ‘to beat the truth out of someone’.
We had to find out what we were up against, I explained to Mel, and make him give us this Finger’s right address. If we found out there was a serious risk, we could go back and tell our Guardian all about it; but if the risk was low we would deliver the letter, and when we got home we’d tell everyone about it anyway – and so become the heroes of the district.
He liked the last part of my speech very much. The idea of returning to Low River with a glorious tale to tell definitely appealed to him. He clapped his hands in support of my brilliant strategy. I smiled and reassured him that everything would be fine, but deep down I had some doubts about the matter.
Meanwhile Beard’s boys were huddled in a circle around him; one or two of them burst out laughing and glanced at us. As far as they were concerned we’d already fallen into their trap, and it had all been so easy…
I told Mel to act normal, and when Beard came back over to us Mel flashed him a smile so wide and false that my heart sank.
We set off. Beard walked between the two of us, and we chatted about this and that. We passed a dozen or so deserted front gardens: now the weather had turned cold people were staying indoors.
We walked along the side of a closed and dilapidated old school, where in summer the Railway kids used to get together and mess around. There, two years earlier, a teenage girl had been brutally murdered – a poor down-and-out kid with no family who had been driven to prostitution to survive. It had been her friends, other teenagers like her, who had forced her to work the streets for them, and who had then taken what little money she earned. They had killed her because she had wanted to get out of the scene and go to live in another district, where she’d found a job as a dressmaker’s assistant.
It was a shocking story, because they had raped and tortured her for the best part of three days, keeping her tied to an old bed frame which had lost its netting: she had been left hanging there, and her wrists and ankles hadn’t been able to take the strain and had broken. She was found with cuts all over her body and cigarette burns on her face; they’d forced a large hydraulic torque wrench into her anus and pushed into her vagina the spout of an electric kettle, with which they’d burned her little by little, to heighten her sufferings.
At first the people of Railway had tried to hide this horrific murder, but soon the whole town had found out and the criminal Authorities had intervened. They had ordered the Guardian of Railway to find the people responsible within a few days, beat them to death with clubs and hang their bodies up at the scene of the crime for a week, and then bury their corpses in a grave with no cross or any identifying mark.
And so it had been. We too had gone to look at the bodies of those murdering bastards strung up by their legs on the veranda of the empty school; they were swollen up like balloons and black all over from the beating. I averted my gaze, which then fell on the walls: they were very thick; I realized that while the girl was being tortured nobody had heard her screams. It must be difficult and terrifying to die in that way, knowing that only a few steps away from the hell in which you find yourself people are relaxing in their homes, doing the things they always do and not imagining even a fraction of the pain you’re suffering. The tears came to my eyes at the thought of this detail: ‘all the noise that can be made in here stays in here’; and this was nothing compared with what that poor soul must have gone through.
When we reached the front of the school I nudged Mel with my elbow to indicate that it was up to him to make the first move.
‘I can’t wait any longer, boys,’ he said at once, ‘I must have a pee. Let’s go to some place for a moment where I can “wait for the train” in peace.’
Beard looked first at Mel and then at me with a rather worried look on his face; perhaps he wanted to make some objection, but he didn’t, for fear of raising our suspicions, and merely said:
‘Okay, come on, I’ll show you a place. Here, inside the school.’
As soon as we got inside, Mel gave him a shove in the back and Beard fell face down on the frozen floor. He turned towards us with a terrified expression on his face:
‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ he asked in a trembling voice.
‘You’re the crazy one, if you think you can screw us like a couple of whores…’ I said, while Mel opened his flick-knife; he turned it over in his hand almost sadly and longingly, so that the blade threw a thousand reflections on the grimy walls covered with vulgar graffiti.
I walked slowly towards Beard, and he backed away on the floor at the same speed as me, until he came up against the wall. I kept talking to him, pretending I knew everything, to make him feel useless and afraid:
‘We came here specially to make an end of this whole business… You’ll see, it’s not nice to try and cheat the people of Low River.’
‘Don’t hurt me! It’s nothing to do with me!’ Beard started squealing sooner than expected. ‘I don’t know anything about your business, I’m just carrying out the Vulture’s orders…’
‘What orders?’ I asked him, pressing the tip of my boot against his side.
‘If anyone from Low River arrives, we have to take them straight to him!’ He was almost hysterical; he spoke in a hoarse little voice.
Mel moved in close and began to tease him with his knife, pushing the blade little by little through his clothes. With each move he made, the boy cried out louder, with his eyes closed, begging us not to kill him.
I waited a while, to let him simmer properly, and when I realized he’d reached the point where he couldn’t refuse me anything, I made my proposal:
‘Tell me where we can find Finger, we’ll deliver the letter to him and you’ll live. But don’t try to trick us – we know this lousy dump of yours, and if you send us to the wrong place we’ll realize it. And if we don’t find Finger we’ll kill you, but not with a knife: we’ll beat you to death, breaking every bone in your body first…’
In a few seconds he sketched in the air the correct route to Finger’s house.
We decided to lock Beard in the school so he didn’t try to double-cross us. In the basement we found a door that could be barred from outside by jamming a wooden plank against the iron handle. The room was cold and dark, a real shithole. Perfect for Beard, who was humbly waiting to know his fate.
‘We’re going to lock you in here, and nobody will find you till summer. If you’ve lied and we have any problems, if they give us any bother or hurt us, you’ll stay here to rot – you’ll die alone. If everything goes well, we’ll tell someone where you are and they’ll come to let you out. Okay? You’ll be able to live and remember this personal lesson we’ve given you free of charge.’
Mel pushed him into the darkness, then shut and barred the door. Tearful screams came from inside:
‘Don’t leave me here, please! Don’t leave me here!’
‘Shut your mouth and be a man. And pray to the Lord we don’t run into trouble, or you’re dead!’
*
Finger’s house was some distance away, a quarter of an hour’s walk. We had to try not to attract attention,
but the further we moved into the district the less chance we had of emerging unscathed from this expedition.
In the meantime I formed a thousand ideas of the kind of surprise that fool Vulture could have planned for us, and strangely I was growing more and more curious. I was dying to know what they meant to do to us in Railway. I wasn’t scared, but excited, as if I were playing a game of chance. Mel was walking along quite calmly and showing no sign of inner conflict. He wore his usual blank expression; now and then he would look at me and snigger.
‘What the hell are you laughing about? We’re in the shit,’ I said, trying to scare him a bit. Not out of malice, just to stir things up.
But it was no use, he was imperturbable, and his smile broadened. ‘We’ll slaughter them all, Kolima,’ he gloated. ‘We’ll carry out a massacre, a bloodbath!’
To be honest, a massacre was precisely what I wanted to avoid.
‘As long as it’s not our blood…’ I replied; but he didn’t even hear me, he was walking along like a man who had decided to exterminate half the population of the world.
Then we came to the apartment block where Finger lived, and went up to the second floor, stopping outside his door. Mel raised his hand to ring the bell, but I stopped him. First I looked through the keyhole, which was pretty big. I could see a dirty hallway, with a light which hung down very low, as if someone had pulled it down deliberately. At the end of the hall, in front of a television, a thin man with short hair was cutting his toenails with a razor blade, as people do in prison.
I took my eye away from the keyhole and said to Mel:
‘Check that the letter’s okay, then ring the bell. When Finger opens the door, greet him and introduce yourself, then introduce me. Don’t mention the letter straight away…’
Before I could finish, Mel interrupted me:
‘Are you going to teach me how to go to the toilet? It’s not the first letter I’ve delivered, I know how to behave!’
He pressed the bell. The sound was strange, it kept breaking off, as if the wires didn’t make perfect contact. We heard the creaking of the wooden floor at every step Finger took. The door opened without any sound of a key: it hadn’t been locked. In front of us appeared a man of about forty, completely covered with tattoos, and with iron teeth which shone in his mouth like jewels. He wore a vest and some light trousers; his feet were bare on the icy cold floor.
Inside the flat it was so cold we could see his breath condense into white vapour. He looked at us calmly; he seemed a normal kind of guy. He waited.
Mel stared at him speechless, and the man raised his hand and scratched his neck, as if to indicate that our silence was making him feel ill at ease.
I gave Mel a gentle kick and he started off straight away, spraying out words as a machine gun does bullets. He did everything according to the rules, and after the introductions he said he was carrying a letter.
Finger immediately changed his expression, smiled and invited us in. He led us to a table on which stood a saucepan full of freshly made chifir.
‘Go ahead, boys, help yourselves. I’m sorry, but I haven’t got anything else, only this. I’ve only just got out – the day before yesterday… What a terrible thing, this freedom! So much space! I’m still feeling dizzy…’
I liked his sense of humour; I realized I could relax.
We sat down, saying he shouldn’t worry about us. While we were passing the cup of chifir round between the three of us, Finger opened the letter from our Guardian. After a few moments he said:
‘I have to go back to your district with you; it says here that they want me to speak…’
Mel and I looked at each other. We would have to tell him about our adventure; it would be treacherous to take a person with you without telling him you were in trouble.
I decided to do the talking; letting Mel talk would only complicate things. I filled my lungs with air and blurted it all out: my war with the Vulture, the trap set by Beard and his gang of young junkies, the school…
Finger listened attentively, following every little detail as prisoners do. Stories are the criminals’ only entertainment in jail: they take turns at telling each other the story of their life, one piece at a time, in episodes, and when they’ve finished they go on to somebody else’s life.
At the end I told him that if he didn’t want to run a risk by coming with us, he could put off his visit to the next day.
He opposed this:
‘Don’t worry, if anything happens I’ll be with you.’
I wasn’t happy, because I knew that in Railway the young didn’t respect the old. Often they would lie in ambush for them outside their houses, when the old men came home drunk, and beat them up to get something they were carrying, and afterwards show it off to the others as a trophy. Moreover, Finger wasn’t an Authority; from what could be read in his tattoos he was a guy who had for some reason joined up with the Siberians in jail: he had a Siberian signature on his neck, which meant that the community protected him, perhaps because he had done something important for us.
While I was thinking about all this, Finger had got dressed, in a jacket covered with sewn-up tears, battered shoes, and a green scarf that almost touched the ground.
Along the way we got talking. Finger told us he had been in prison since the age of sixteen. He had been sent there because of a stupid incident: he had been drunk, and without realizing it had clubbed a cop a little too hard, killing him stone dead. In juvenile prison he had joined up with the Siberian family, because, he said, they were the only ones who stuck together and didn’t beat people up; they did everything together and didn’t take orders from anyone else. He had arrived in the adult prison as a member of the Siberian family, and the others had welcomed him. He had served twenty years in prison, and when he was about to be released an old man had suggested he go and live in the apartment we had seen.
Now he wanted to move closer to the people of our district: they, he said, were his family. So he had asked the old Siberian Authorities in prison to contact the Guardian of Low River.
He felt part of our community, and this pleased me.
While we were walking, I had an idea. Since we needed reinforcements, I had decided to drop in at the house of a friend who lived nearby. He was a boy called ‘Geka’, which is a diminutive of Evgeny. He and I had known each other since childhood; he was the son of an excellent paediatrician called Aunt Lora.
Geka was a well-read, intelligent, polite boy; he didn’t belong to any gang and preferred a quiet life. He had many interests and I liked him for this; I had been at his house several times and had been fascinated by his collection of model warplanes, which he assembled and painted himself. His mother allowed me to borrow some books from her library; that’s how I got to know Dickens and Conan Doyle, and above all the only literary upholder of justice I had ever found congenial: Sherlock Holmes.
Geka would spend the whole summer with us on the river; we taught him to swim, to wrestle and to use a knife in a fight. But he wore glasses, so my grandfather felt desperately sorry for him: to Siberians wearing glasses is like voluntarily sitting in a wheelchair – it’s a sign of weakness, a personal defeat. Even if you don’t have good eyesight you must never wear glasses, in order to preserve your dignity and your healthy appearance. So whenever Geka came to our house, Grandfather Boris would take him into the red corner, kneel down with him in front of the icon of the Siberian Madonna and that of the Siberian Saviour, and then, crossing himself over and over again, say his prayer, which Geka was obliged to repeat word for word:
‘O Mother of God, Holy Virgin, patron of all Siberia and protectress of all us sinners! Witness the miracle of Our Lord! O Lord, Our Saviour and Companion in life and death, You who bless our weapons and our miserable efforts to bring Your law into the world of sin, You who make us strong before the fire of hell, do not abandon us in our moments of weakness! Not from a lack of faith, but in love and respect for Your creatures, I beseech You, perform a miracle! Help
Your miserable slave Evgeny to find Your road and live in peace and health, so that he can sing Your glory! In the names of the Mothers, Fathers and Sons and of those members of our families who have been resurrected in Your arms, hear our prayer and bring Your light and Your warmth into our hearts! Amen!’
When he had finished the prayer, Grandfather Boris would get up off his knees and turn towards Geka. Then, making solemn, spectacular gestures, like those of an actor on the stage, he would touch Geka’s glasses with his fingers and, saying the following sentence, slowly remove them:
‘Just as many times You have put Your strength into my hands to grip my knife against the cops, and have directed my pistol to hit them with bullets blessed by You, give me Your power to defeat the sickness of Your humble slave Evgeny!’
As soon as he had taken off the glasses, he would ask Geka:
‘Tell me, my angel, can you see well now?’
Out of respect for him, Geka couldn’t bring himself to say no.
Grandfather Boris would turn towards the icons and thank the Lord with the traditional formulas:
‘May Your will be done, Our Lord! As long as we are alive and protected by You, the blood of the cops, the contemptible devils and the servants of evil will flow in abundance! We are grateful to You for Your love.’
Then he would call the whole family and announce that a miracle had just occurred. Finally he would return Geka’s glasses to him in front of everyone, saying:
‘And now, my angel, now that you can see, break these useless glasses!’
Geka would put them in his pocket, mumbling:
‘Don’t be angry, Grandfather Boris: I’ll break them later.’
My grandfather would stroke his head and tell him in a gentle, joyful voice:
‘Break them whenever you like, my son; the important thing is that you never wear them again.’
The next time, so that he wouldn’t be angry, Geka would turn up at our house without his glasses; he would take them off outside the door before coming in. Grandfather Boris, when he saw him, would be overcome with joy.
Siberian Education Page 19
