‘My sons, what a dreadful thing has befallen us, what a dreadful thing… The Lord is punishing us all…’
‘What’s happened, Aunt Marfa? Has somebody died?’ asked Mel.
She looked at him with a grief-stricken expression on her face and said something I’ll never forget:
‘I swear to you by Jesus Christ that even when my son died in prison I didn’t feel so bad…’
Then she started crying and muttering something, but it was incomprehensible; we only caught a few words, ‘residue of an abortion’ – a very bad insult for us, because as well as offending the person who is called that it offends the name of the mother, who according to Siberian tradition is sacred.
When one woman, a mother, insults the name of another mother, it means that the person at whom that insult is aimed has done something really horrible.
What was going on? We were bewildered.
On top of that, a few seconds later all the women in the procession started screaming, crying and uttering curses together with Aunt Marfa. The men, as Siberian law prescribes, let them scream but kept calm themselves: only the angry expressions on their faces, and the narrow slits of their eyes, near-closed with rage, indicated their state of mind.
Uncle Anatoly came over to Aunt Marfa. He was an old criminal who as a young man had lost his left eye in a fight and was consequently nicknamed ‘Cyclops’. He was tall and sturdy and never wore a bandage over that hole where his eye had once been: he preferred to show everyone that terrible black void.
Cyclops had the job of looking after Aunt Marfa and taking care of her family, while her husband, who was his best friend, was in jail. That’s the custom among Siberian criminals: when a man has to serve a long prison sentence, he asks a friend, a person he trusts, to help his family to make ends meet, check that his wife doesn’t cheat on him with another man (something almost impossible in our community) and watch over his children’s upbringing.
Embracing Aunt Marfa, Cyclops tried to calm her down, but she kept on screaming louder and louder, and the other women did the same. So the little children started crying too, and then the slightly older ones joined in.
It was hellish: I felt like crying myself, though I still didn’t know the reason for all this despair.
Cyclops looked at us, and realized from our faces that nobody had told us yet. He murmured in a sad and angry voice:
‘Ksyusha’s been raped… Boys, this is a world of bastards!’
‘Be quiet, Anatoly, don’t make Our Lord even angrier!’ said Grandfather Filat, a very old criminal whom everyone called ‘Winter’, though I never understood why.
It was said that when he was a boy Filat had robbed Lenin himself. He and his gang had stopped a car carrying Lenin and some senior members of the party on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Lenin, the story went, had refused to hand over his car and money to the robbers, so Winter had hit him on the head, and the shock had given Lenin his famous tic of involuntarily turning his head to the left. I was always very sceptical about this story – goodness knows how much truth there was in it – but it was amusing to see grown people telling these tales in the belief that they were true.
Anyway, Winter was an old Authority, and whenever he expressed his opinion everyone took notice. It was his job to rebuke Cyclops, because he had spoken too angrily, blurting out blasphemies which a well-bred Siberian criminal should never utter.
‘Who are you, my boy, to call this world “a world of bastards”? It was created by Our Lord, and there are plenty of just men in it too. Surely you wouldn’t want to insult all of them? Mind your words, because once they have flown they never come back.’
Cyclops hung his head.
‘It is true,’ went on Grandfather Filat, ‘that a great misfortune and injustice has befallen us; we have failed to protect the angel of Our Lord, and now He will make us pay for it. Perhaps you yourself will be given a long prison sentence tomorrow, someone will be killed by the cops, someone else will lose his faith in the Mother Church… Retribution awaits us all, for we all share in the sin. I too, old as I am, will be punished in some way. But now is not the time to lose our heads; we must show the Lord that we are attentive to His signals, we must help Him to accomplish his justice…’ The rest of Winter’s speech I missed, because I had dashed off towards Ksyusha’s house.
*
All the doors and windows were wide open.
Aunt Anfisa was wandering around the house like a ghost: her face was white, her eyes swollen from weeping, her hands shaking so much they transmitted their tremor to the whole of the rest of her body. She didn’t scream or say anything; she just kept emitting a long-drawn-out whine, like that of a dog in pain.
To see her standing in front of me in that state scared me. I was paralysed for a moment, then she came towards me and with her trembling hands clutched my face. She looked at me, weeping, and whispering something whose meaning I couldn’t understand. At the same time, I couldn’t hear anything; in my ears there was a growing noise like a whistle, like when you swim underwater, going further and further down. I had a violent headache; I closed my eyes, squeezing my temples as hard as I could, and at that moment I understood the question Aunt Anfisa kept whispering to me:
‘Why?’
Simply a short, sharp ‘Why?’
I felt sick; I had lost all sensation in my feet. I lost all my strength; it must have been obvious I wasn’t well, because as I tried to walk to Ksyusha’s room I noticed two of my friends holding me up with their arms round my waist, gripping my elbows. Step by step I realized I was swaying, as if drunk; a new pain had appeared in my chest, I felt a weight in my heart and lungs, and couldn’t breathe. Everything was whirling around me; I tried to focus my gaze, but the carousel I had in my head was going faster, ever faster… suddenly, though, I managed to catch the image of Ksyusha. It was blurred, but shocking in its very imprecision: she was lying on the bed like a newborn baby, with her knees tucked right up to her face and her arms wrapped around them. Closed, completely closed. I wanted to see her face, I wanted to stop my head spinning, but I couldn’t control myself; I saw a bright light and lost consciousness, falling into the arms of my friends.
I woke up outside in the yard, with my friends standing around me. One gave me some water to drink; I got to my feet and at once felt well, strong, like after a long rest.
Meanwhile the people had filled the yard; there was a long queue leading back to the gate and out into the street. Everyone kept asking Aunt Anfisa’s forgiveness; the women kept weeping and screaming curses at the rapist.
I was obsessed by a single thought: that of finding out who could have done such a thing.
Our friend, ‘Squinty’ – who owed his nickname to the fact that he’d been cross-eyed as a child, though his sight had later corrected itself – came over to us boys and told us Grandfather Kuzya was expecting us all at his house for a chyodnyak, which is a kind of big meeting between criminals of all levels, attendance at which is compulsory, even for children.
We asked him if he knew who had raped Ksyusha, and how it had happened.
‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that two women from our area found her in the Centre district. Near the market. Lying among the rubbish bins, unconscious.’
*
As a sign of respect, these meetings are always held in the houses of old criminals who have tied the knot: thanks to their experience they are able to give valuable advice, but since they have retired and no longer have any responsibilities they are in a sense not involved. The holding of meetings in houses that are not their own enables all criminals who hold a certain responsibility to say what they think without being bound by the law of hospitality, whereby the master of the house must avoid contradicting his guests. In this way they can debate freely without having to be absurdly evasive and indirect.
When we reached Grandfather Kuzya’s house, the door was wide open, as usual. We went in without asking for permission. This too is a rule of good behav
iour: you must never ask an old Authority for permission to enter his house, because according to his philosophy he has nothing of his own – nothing belongs to him in this life, only the power of the word. Not even the house he lives in is his: he will always tell you he is a guest. Grandfather Kuzya, as a matter of fact, really was a guest, because he lived in the house of his younger sister, a nice old lady, Grandmother Lyusya.
There were many criminals of Low River in the house, including my Uncle Sergey, my father’s younger brother. We greeted those present, shaking hands with them and kissing them three times on the cheeks, as is the custom in Siberia. Grandmother Lyusya invited us to sit down and brought us a large jar of kvas. We waited until everyone had arrived, then our Guardian, Plank, gave the sign that we could begin.
*
The aim of these meetings is to solve difficult situations in the area in such a way that everyone agrees with the solution and everyone contributes in whatever way they can.
As I have already mentioned, each area has a Guardian. He is responsible to the highest Authorities, who never participate in meetings like this, for the application of the criminal laws. The Guardian’s job is a very difficult one, because you always have to keep abreast of the situation in your area, and if anything serious happens the Authorities ‘ask’ you, as the phrase runs in criminal slang – that is, they punish you. Nobody ever says ‘punish’; they say ‘ask’ for something. Asking can be of three kinds: mild, which is called ‘asking as if one were asking a brother’; more severe, which is called ‘putting a frame round someone’; and definitive and very severe, which changes the criminal’s life decidedly for the worse, if it does not actually eliminate it at the root, and is called ‘asking as if one were asking the Gad’.[10]
The old Authorities don’t usually resolve individual problems themselves; that is the purpose of the Guardian, who is chosen by them and in a sense represents them, at least as long as he behaves properly. But if the situation is difficult and beyond his abilities, the Guardian may appeal to an elder and, in the presence of witnesses chosen from among the ordinary criminals, present the case without mentioning the names of the people involved. This is done to guarantee impartiality of judgement; if the Guardian dares to name someone, or in some way makes it clear who the person is, the elder can punish him, withdraw from the case himself and pass it on to another, usually a person distant from him, with whom he has few connections. The purpose of this is to ensure that the process of criminal justice is as impartial as possible: it focuses solely on the facts of the case.
Clearly, when something happens the Guardian has a strong incentive to clear it up quickly and effectively, so as not to allow the case to become too complicated and not to involve the Authorities.
Plank was an old robber who had been brought up in the old way. To open the meeting he gave a Siberian greeting, as is customary among our people, which consisted in thanking God for making it possible for everyone to attend.
He spoke slowly in a very deep voice, and we listened to him. Every now and then someone would heave a sad sigh, to emphasize the gravity of the situation we were faced with.
The gist of Plank’s speech was simple – something very serious had happened. Any act of violence against a woman is inadmissible for the Siberian criminal community, but an act of violence against a God-willed woman is an act of violence against the entire Siberian tradition.
‘You have one week,’ he concluded, looking at us boys. ‘You must find the culprit – or culprits, if there were many – and kill them.’
The task was our responsibility. Since Ksyusha was below the age of majority, the rules of our district decreed that other juveniles must make the inquiries and carry out the final execution.
They wouldn’t just leave us to ourselves – on the contrary, they would give us a lot of help – but we alone must appear before the other communities, to show how our law worked.
It’s the Siberian rule: adults never do something which concerns juveniles – they can help, advise and support them, but it is up to the youngsters to act. Even in our fights no adults get involved, whereas the boys of the other districts can call adults in as reinforcements. In Siberia an adult will never dare to raise his hand against a juvenile, otherwise he loses his criminal dignity, and at the same time the juvenile must keep to his place and not bother the adults.
In short, to demonstrate to others that our law is strong, we Siberian boys must show that we can look after ourselves.
‘First of all, you will go from district to district in search of information,’ Plank told us. ‘And this will be useful to you,’ he concluded, handing us a parcel of money. It was ten thousand dollars, a very large sum.
The meeting was over, and with the blessing of our pack we could now leave for the town.
But before I left the house, Grandfather Kuzya beckoned me over, as he always did when he had something to tell me ‘eye in eye’, as we say in our language.
‘Hey, Kolima, come here a minute.’
I followed him up onto the roof, to the shed where he kept the pigeons. I entered after him. He turned round abruptly and eyed me, as if sizing me up:
‘Go into town and check that everything is all right. Let the others do the talking; you just listen. And watch out, especially with the Jews and the Ukrainians…’ He removed a layer of hay which covered the floor and pointed to a small gap between the wooden boards. ‘Lift up the loose plank and take what you find. Never part with it, and if someone gets among you, use it. I’ve loaded it.’ Then he went out, leaving me alone facing the little trap door. I lifted the plank and found a Nagant, the legendary revolver loved and used by our old criminals.
What Grandfather Kuzya had said to me had a precise meaning in the criminal language: receiving a loaded pistol from an Authority is like having permission to use it in any situation. You’re protected; you don’t need to worry about the consequences. In many cases, if the situation becomes critical, you only have to say ‘I have a pistol loaded by…’ and everything will be resolved in your favour, because at that point to act against you would be equivalent to acting against the person who loaded your gun.
Outside Grandfather Kuzya’s house two adult drivers were waiting for us – two young criminals from our area who had been given orders to take us wherever we wanted but not to intervene unless it was a matter of life or death.
Before getting into the cars we talked for a while, to make a rough strategic plan. We decided that Gagarin, the oldest of us, would look after the money, and that he would also have the responsibility of talking to people. The rest of us would split up into two groups: the first would cover Gagarin’s back, and the second, while he was talking, would go round sticking their noses into other people’s business, looking for clues.
‘This is the first time we’ve had to work as cops,’ said Gagarin.
We had a bit of a laugh about this, then set off for our tour of Bender. In reality there was nothing to laugh about: it was like descending into hell.
In the car Mel told me he was a bit worried and handed me a gun, saying:
‘Here – I know you’ll only have come with a knife, as usual. But this is a serious business; take it, even if you don’t like the idea. Do it for me.’
I told him I already had one, and he relaxed, giving me a wink:
‘Been round to your uncle’s, then, have you?’
I felt too important to give away the secret of the gun I was carrying, so I just smiled and sang softly:
‘Mother Siberia, save my life…’
We arrived in Centre, at a bar run by an old criminal, Pavel, the Guardian of the district. Pavel was not Siberian and didn’t live according to our rules, so with him we had to be diplomatic, though not excessively so: after all, we came from the oldest and most important district in the criminal world, Low River, and we deserved respect for the mere fact of being Siberian.
Pavel was in the bar with a group of friends, people from southern Russia wh
o followed no precise rules except those of the god Money – people who flaunted their wealth, wore fashionable clothes and plenty of gold chains, bracelets and rings. We didn’t like this custom: according to the Siberian tradition a worthy criminal has nothing on him but his tattoos; the rest is humble, as the Lord teaches.
We greeted those present and entered. A man got up from the table where the owner was playing cards with his friends. He was a thin man of about thirty, adorned with gold and wearing a red jacket which was as sweetly scented as a rose in springtime or, as my Uncle Sergey would say, ‘as a whore between the legs’. He addressed us very aggressively: his opening remarks alone, according to our laws, would have been enough to earn him a knifing.
He was a troublemaker; men of his kind are like dogs that bark to frighten passers-by. That’s the only function they have. A well-bred, experienced criminal knows that and ignores them; he doesn’t even glance at them, so that it’s immediately clear he’s not a fraer, a clown.
We walked on and headed for the table, leaving the idiot shouting and cursing.
Old Pavel looked at us closely and asked us in a very coarse manner what we wanted.
Gagarin had done three spells in juvenile prison and a year earlier had killed two cops. In his seventeen years of life he had already garnered enough experience to know how to speak to people like that, so he gave him a brief outline of the situation.
He told him about the money, and about the need to find the culprits.
Instantly everything changed. Pavel got up and ripped open his shirt aggressively, displaying his chest, which was covered with tattoos and gold chains. At the same time he shouted:
‘There can be no forgiveness for someone who’s committed such a crime! I swear to God if I find him I’ll kill him with my own hands!’
Gagarin, as cool and calm as a dead man on the day of his funeral, said there was no need to kill him – we would do that; but if he could spread the word around and help us find him it would be very useful. Then he repeated that we would give a big reward to anyone who could help us.
Siberian Education Page 26
