Besides doing this, the boys also passed round the latest news: if you wanted to spread some information around, you only had to offer the boys a little money or a couple of packets of cigarettes and within two or three hours the whole town would know about it. They were also very useful in the struggle against the police: if there were trouble in any district of Bender and the police came to arrest someone, the boys would spread the word and the people concerned would turn out to set the arrested man free or to have a little gunfight with the police, just for the hell of it.
We needed the help of Grandmother Masha’s boys now, to spread the news around town about our inquiries and our honest offer, but we were a little tired, and we were hungry.
When we reached the Whistle, darkness was falling. She welcomed us as she always did, with a smile and kind words, calling us ‘little ones’ and kissing us on both cheeks. To her we were all children, even the older ones. We sat down at a table and she joined us; she always did this with everyone: she would chat a bit before bringing you something to eat. We told her about our disaster; she heard us out, then said she’d already heard the story from her boys. We sat for a while in silence while she, with the cloth she always had in her hands, dried the tears from her wrinkled face. To look at that face you felt as if you were in the presence of the incarnation of Mother Earth.
Grandmother Masha started bringing us cutlery and something to drink. In the meantime we called over one of her boys, a thin little lad with one eye missing and snow-white hair, who was the brightest of them all; his name was ‘Begunok’, which means ‘the one who runs fast’. He was a very serious boy; if he said he would do something you could be sure he would do it. We asked him to spread the word among the people he knew in town, and in particular to go round all the bars where people gathered to drink and hang out together. Mel slipped a packet of cigarettes and a five-dollar bill into his hand, and a second later we heard his bike setting off at top speed.
We ate our supper in silence, with none of our usual lively chatter. I was ravenous but found it very hard to eat. As I chewed the food I felt a pain in my chest. I couldn’t swallow anything without washing it down with alcohol, so before long I was drunk and beginning to get maudlin. The others were in a similar state. Supper went slowly, without enthusiasm. Everyone’s eyes became increasingly glazed, and the atmosphere was really gloomy.
Suddenly, amidst the heavy sighs and whispered moans, one of us started crying, but very softly, ashamed at this manifestation of weakness. It was the youngest of the gang. He was thirteen and his name was Lyocha, nicknamed ‘Grave’ because of his cadaverous appearance: he was thin and always ill, as well as being constantly in a bad mood. He had already tried to hang himself ten times, but had always been saved by one of us. Once he had even tried to shoot himself in the heart with his uncle’s gun, but the bullet had only punctured his lung, further seriously impairing his already poor health. Another time, when blind drunk, he had jumped in the river, trying to drown himself, but hadn’t succeeded because he was a very good swimmer, and the survival instinct had prevailed. The only reason he had never tried to slit his veins was that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood: even in fights he never used a knife, but only hit people with a knuckleduster or an iron bar.
Grave was a boy with a lot of problems, but in spite of everything he fitted in well with our group, and he was like a brother to all of us. His suicidal tendency was like a ghost that lay hidden inside him; none of us could be sure when it would pop out, so he was constantly watched over by an older boy, Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Cat’, because his mother said that just after he was born their cat Lisa had given birth to four kittens and at night she used to go into his cradle and suckle him, so that, according to his mother, he had become half cat. The two of them, Grave and Cat, always went around together, and their main occupation was fishing and stealing motorboats; they were the experts on the river, they knew all the particular points – where the water was still or swift, where the current swirled back, where the bed was deepest – and always knew with absolute precision where to find the fish, all year round. They never returned from a fishing expedition with empty boats, never.
At parties, and whenever we drank together, a sudden flood of tears from Grave was a sure sign that he would soon try to kill himself: so, in accordance with a rule laid down by us and approved by Grave himself (who when sober, despite all his psychological problems, had a great zest for life), we would take away his drink, and in extreme cases even tie him to his chair with a rope.
So on this occasion too, at the Whistle, while Grave was trying to stop crying, wiping his face with a handkerchief, Gagarin made a sign to Cat, who instantly replaced the bottle of vodka in front of Grave with a fizzy drink called Puppet, a kind of Soviet Coca-Cola. Grave stopped crying and drained the bottle of Puppet, ending with a long, sad burp.
Gagarin was talking to our drivers, Makar, known as ‘Lynx’, and Ivan, known as ‘the Wheel’. They were in their early twenties, and both had just finished a five-year prison sentence. They were bosom pals. Together they had carried out a lot of robberies, and in the last one, after a gunfight with the police, the Wheel had been wounded and Lynx had refused to desert him and so he had been arrested too, because of his loyalty.
During our mission, according to the rules, they couldn’t help us to communicate with the criminals of the various areas of the town, which was a pity: it would have been very useful, since we were all under age, and the criminals who didn’t embrace our Siberian faith took the idea of dealing with juveniles as a personal insult. What Lynx and the Wheel could do was advise us how to behave, how to negotiate with people who obeyed rules different from our own, and how to exploit the peculiarities of each person and each community. It was important, part of our upbringing, this continual relationship between youngsters and adults who explained each individual situation according to the law observed by our elders.
While Gagarin listened to what Lynx and the Wheel had to say to him, the others started talking amongst themselves; perhaps Grave’s crying had woken us all up and somehow helped to make us united and focused again.
Suddenly Mel started telling me a story he always repeated whenever he got drunk, and had done since the age of ten – a childhood fantasy of his. He had met a girl, he claimed, on the river bank, and had promised to take her to the cinema. Then they had made love; and when he reached this point in the story he always commented:
‘It was like screwing a princess.’ Then he would launch into a detailed description of the sex they’d had, Mel depicting himself as a vigorous and expert lover. The story ended with her weeping on his shoulder and asking him to stay a little longer, and him reluctantly having to leave her because he was late for fishing.
It was the most incredible, ridiculous nonsense, but since Mel was a friend I listened to him with feigned interest and genuine patience.
He would talk to me with such rapture that his only eye became as thin as a scar. He would accompany the story with ample gestures of his gigantic hands, and whenever one of his hands passed over the bottle of vodka I would have to grab it, to stop it falling over.
The supper, as always, turned into a drunken binge. We went on and on drinking, and to stop us getting too drunk, Grandmother Masha kept bringing us plates of the food we ate as an accompaniment to vodka.
Shortly before midnight Begunok returned, with some news: a group of boys from the district of Caucasus, during the very hours when Ksyusha had been raped, had seen some strangers wandering about in Centre.
‘They were hanging around near the phone boxes,’ said Begunok, with a serious expression on his face, ‘pestering a girl.’
Without waiting to hear more, we dashed out to the cars.
Caucasus was a district almost as old as our own. It was so called because many of its inhabitants came from the Caucasus, but also because of its position: it stood on a cluster of hills. The criminals of Caucasus belonged to various communities, bu
t the leading one was the so-called ‘Georgian Family’. Then came the Armenians, who formed the Kamashchatoy – Armenian organized crime – and lastly people from many other regions: Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The Georgians and Armenians got on well together, being united by the fact that they were both Caucasian peoples of Orthodox Christian religion, whereas the other inhabitants of the area were either Muslims or atheists of Islamic tradition. The criminal communities of the Georgians and Armenians had a family structure: in order to become an Authority you didn’t need to earn the respect of others, as among us Siberians; you merely had to be in the right family. The clans were made up of the members of the families, and they dealt in various kinds of criminal business, black marketeering, protection rackets, minor thefts and murder.
Because of their way of operating the Georgians were viewed with distaste by our community: often our criminals refused to communicate with them simply because they introduced themselves as the sons or relatives of some Authority. Among the Siberians such behaviour is unacceptable, because in our culture everyone is judged for what he represents as a person, and his roots come second; in Siberia you appeal to the protection of the family when you really can’t avoid it, solely in matters of life or death.
For these and other reasons there was a lot of friction between us and the people of Caucasus: if we met up somewhere in town, it always ended in a fight, and occasionally someone got killed.
Two years earlier a friend of ours, Mitya, known as ‘Julich’, which in slang means ‘little criminal’, had stabbed a Georgian because he had insulted him by speaking the Georgian language in his presence. Julich had warned him, saying he was behaving in an offensive manner, but the other had made it clear that he intended to go on speaking Georgian because he despised the Russians, whom he called ‘occupiers’. That was a political provocation: Julich reacted by stabbing him, and he later died in hospital. After his death the Georgians appealed to the old criminals of Black Seed for justice, but the verdict went against them, because according to the criminal law the Georgian had committed two serious errors: first, he had been discourteous to another criminal for no reason; secondly, he had dared to make a political allusion, which is condemned by the criminal regulations as a grave form of insult to the entire criminal community, because politics is cops’ stuff, and criminals must have nothing to do with it.
After the verdict, however, the Georgians didn’t calm down at all. They tried to get revenge a couple of times: first they shot a friend of ours called Vasya, who fortunately survived, then they tried to kill Julich in one of the discotheques in the town. They started a fight to tempt him outside the disco, where a number of them then attacked him. Luckily we were with him on that occasion, and we plunged into the fray to cover his back.
While we were fighting we noticed that they kept launching ‘torpedoes’ at Julich: that’s what we call a method of killing a particular person during a fight, while pretending that it’s an accident. Some guys, two or three of them, bump into the person – the victim, or ‘client’ – as if by mistake, and in the confusion they give another guy – the torpedo – the chance to make a precision strike to kill him, after which they merge back into the crowd; and in the end, if the torpedo has been skilful, nobody will have noticed anything and the whole action will have been carried out in a swift, professional manner. The client’s death is treated as a normal consequence of the fight, and therefore forgotten immediately afterwards, because a fight is considered to be an extreme method of obtaining satisfaction, and every participant knows from the outset the risks he is running. But if during the brawl someone is caught launching a torpedo, he must be killed for violating the rules of the fight: his action is interpreted as outright murder. The premeditated murder of a colleague, a criminal, is considered an act of cowardice. The murderer’s criminal dignity dies at that moment, and as the criminal law says, ‘when his criminal dignity dies, the criminal himself dies too’.
On this occasion there were far fewer of us than there were of them. They intended to beat us up and launch the torpedo at Julich, but unfortunately for them, after a couple of minutes we were interrupted by the boys of Centre, the district where we were at the time. Exercising their right as the ‘owners’ of the area, they ordered us to stop fighting.
Just at that moment the Georgians’ torpedo charged at Julich in full view of everyone, trying to stab him, but Julich managed to ward off the blow. The torpedo fell on the ground and started screaming something in his own language, ignoring the requests of the owners of the area that he calm down and put away the knife. In the end he actually cut the hand of one of the Centre boys, who had only asked him to give him his knife.
About three seconds later the Georgians were attacked en masse by the Centre guys, about thirty of them, and savagely beaten.
We apologized and explained the situation. Then we made an orderly retreat, taking a lot of bruises and plenty of cuts home with us.
When we got back to Low River we told the Guardian what had happened. To obtain justice against the Georgians we needed an external witness, someone who was not part of our group. Luckily three people of Centre testified to the old Authorities that they had seen the torpedo with their own eyes.
So a week later the Siberians made a punitive raid into the Caucasus district, which ended with the death of eight Georgians who had participated in the plot against Julich.
Naturally this unpleasant episode considerably worsened our already difficult relations with the Georgians. The Georgians started going around saying we Siberians were murderers and unjust people. We knew we were in the right and that the situation had been resolved in our favour; the rest didn’t bother us very much.
We drove to a joint in the Caucasus district called ‘The Maze’. It was a kind of bar-cum-restaurant, with a room where you could play billiards and cards.
Begunok had been very specific: he had said the people who had told him the story about the phone boxes were the sons of the owner of that restaurant. And they were Georgians.
We arrived at the Maze at about two in the morning; there were lots of cars outside and the shouts of the gamblers could be heard outside. They were shouts in Georgian, interspersed with a lot of Russian swear-words with Georgian endings.
We got out of the cars – our drivers said they would keep the engines running just in case – and entered all together.
When I think about it now it makes my hair stand on end: a bunch of juveniles – snotty-nosed kids – not just boldly walking around in a district full of people who want them dead, but actually entering a bar packed with real criminals who were far more dangerous than them. And yet at the time we weren’t in the least afraid because we had a job to do.
As soon as we entered the Maze the owner’s eldest son, a boy named Mino, came over to us. I knew him by sight; I had heard he was a quiet guy who minded his own business. He greeted us, shaking us by the hand, then invited us to sit down at a table. We did so and he asked a girl to bring wine and Georgian bread – it was on the house. Without our even asking him, he started telling us what he had seen in Centre.
He had been with some friends, including three Armenian boys, one of whom ran a flower stall in the market, not far from there. They had been standing near the phone boxes – where people often arrange to meet – when they had seen about ten youngsters, drunk or high on drugs, pestering a girl, trying to pick a quarrel in a rough and threatening way. One of the Armenians had asked them to stop it and leave her alone, but they had insulted him, and one had even shown him his gun, telling him to get lost.
‘At that point,’ said Mino, ‘we decided to back off. It’s true, we left the girl in the hands of those thugs, but only because we weren’t sure who they were. We were worried they might turn out to have links with the people of Centre, and you never know, they might have closed down my friend’s flower stall…’
Judging from Mino’s description, though, the
girl didn’t sound like our Ksyusha.
Meanwhile the waitress had brought to our table some Georgian wine with some of their traditional bread, which is baked in a special way, spread on the walls of the oven. It was delicious, and we drank and ate with relish, together with Mino, talking about all sorts of things. Including our relationship with the Georgians.
He said we were right, and that his fellow-countrymen had behaved shamefully, like traitors.
‘Besides, we’re all Christians, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘We all believe in Jesus Christ. We’re all criminals, too, and the criminal law applies to everyone – Georgians, Siberians and Armenians…’
He told us the Georgian community had recently split in two. One part supported a rich young Georgian of noble blood who liked to be called ‘the Count’. This Count spread a hatred of the Russians and forbade Georgians to marry Russians and Armenians, to preserve the purity of the race. Mino called him ‘Hitler’, and was very angry with him; he said he had weakened the whole community. The rest of the Georgians supported an old criminal whom we also knew, because he often came to Low River: Grandfather Vanò. He was a wise man; he had spent a long time in prison in Siberia and was highly respected by the criminal community. It was mainly the old folk who liked him. He wasn’t so popular among the young because he stopped them living a life of pleasure and opposed nationalism, which the boys didn’t like at all.
From Mino’s account we understood that the situation was more difficult than it might seem at first sight, because the division cut across families, and many sons, brothers and fathers had lined up on opposite sides of the barricade. A war in those conditions was impossible, so everything was in a state of suspense, which according to Mino was even more dangerous than open warfare.
Siberian Education Page 28
