At a certain point five people came into the restaurant. They were young – no more than twenty-five years old – and they spoke to Mino in Georgian. He got up at once and went over to them.
They seemed pretty angry, and a couple of times I saw them point at us. At first they all talked at once, then their leader started speaking, a thin boy with eyes that popped out of their orbits whenever he raised his voice.
Mino, however, was calm; he leaned against the counter with a glass of wine in his hand and listened to them, looking at the floor with an indifferent expression.
The leader suddenly stopped talking, and all five of them left. Then Mino hurried over to our table and explained to us in an agitated voice that they were young members of the Count’s gang:
‘They said if you don’t leave the district at once they’ll come back in numbers and kill you.’
After Mino’s warm welcome this threat seemed unreal.
Before getting up from the table, Speechless, one of our group, said:
‘I’d be prepared to bet my right hand they’ve set an ambush for us outside.’
Speechless was so nicknamed because he hardly ever spoke, but when he did speak he always said true things. Once I spent three days fishing with him, and in three days he didn’t utter a sound, I swear it, not one.
Gagarin gave the signal to get ready to leave the bar. Everyone put their hands under the table and there was a sound of pistols being cocked one after the other.
We took our leave of Mino. He begged us to use the security exit, but we went through the front door, the way we’d come in.
In the square outside the bar there were about fifteen people waiting for us, gathered under the street light.
Mel and Gagarin stepped forward; I walked behind them with Speechless, then came the others. I saw Mel pull out his Tokarev and at the same time Gagarin hide the hand holding his Makarov behind his back. I was clutching Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant in my jacket pocket.
They were blocking our way towards the cars. Our drivers had got out and were smoking casually, sitting on the bonnets.
We stopped a few metres short of the Georgians.
The thin boy, their leader, came forward to challenge us:
‘You’re finished. There’s no escape for you.’
He spoke with great confidence. In his hands I saw a pistol, and behind him there was another guy with a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘If you don’t want any trouble, you only have one chance: lay down your arms and surrender.’
Then he started joking:
‘Aren’t you a bit young to be playing with guns?’
Quite unperturbed, Gagarin explained to him the reason for our visit, and stressed that it had nothing to do with relations between the Georgians and the Siberians.
‘And anyway,’ Gagarin reminded him, ‘according to the criminal law, in cases like this even wars are suspended.’
He recalled a case in St Petersburg, where because of a hunt for a paedophile who was raping and killing young children a bloody war between two gangs – from the district of Ligovka and the island of Vasilev – had stopped, and the two sides had joined forces to search for the maniac.
The Georgians were rather confused now.
I noticed that while Gagarin was talking to their leader many of them had lowered their weapons, and their expressions had become rather pensive.
The Georgian, however, didn’t give up.
‘Well, in that case,’ he asked suddenly, ‘why didn’t you speak to our Guardian? Why did you come here in secret, like snakes?’
On the one hand he was right: we should have gone to see their Guardian, because making inquiries behind his back was against the criminal regulations. But he was overlooking two things.
First, we were juveniles, and according to the law nothing could be ‘asked’ of us: only other juveniles could ‘ask’ us, adults had no power over us. Out of respect and for our personal pleasure we could choose to obey the rules and the criminal law of the adults, but until we came of age we would not be part of the criminal community. If a Guardian had reported our case to an old Authority, the latter would have laughed in his face: in cases like this the Siberians usually say:
‘Boys are like cats – they go wherever they want.’
The second mistake the Georgian had made was much more serious, and showed that he was inexperienced in negotiations and quite incapable of using criminal diplomacy. He had insulted us.
An insult is regarded by all communities as an error typical of people who are weak and unintelligent, lacking in criminal dignity. To us Siberians, any kind of insult is a crime; in other communities some distinctions can be made, but in general an insult is the quickest route to the blade of a knife.
An insult to an individual may be ‘approved’: that is to say, if I have insulted someone and they take me before an old Authority, I will have to explain to him the reason why I did it, and he will decide how I will be punished. Punishment is inflicted in any case, but if the insult is approved, they don’t kill me or ‘lower’ me; I remain myself and get off with a warning. An insult is approved if you utter it for personal reasons and in a non-serious form: for example, if you call someone who has damaged your property an ‘arsehole’. If, however, you offended the name of his mother, they are quite likely to kill you.
Insults are forgiven if they are uttered in a state of rage or desperation, when a person is blinded by deep grief – for example, if his mother or father or a close friend dies. In such cases the question of justice is not even mentioned; he is judged to have been ‘beside himself’, and there the matter ends.
Insults are not approved, however, in a quarrel that arises from gambling or criminal activities, or in matters of the heart, or in relations between friends: in all these cases the use of swear-words and offensive phrases usually means certain death.
But the most serious insult of all is that known as baklanka, when a group or a whole community is insulted. No explanations are accepted: you deserve either death or ‘lowering’ – a permanent transfer to the community of the lowered, the tainted, like the people who lived in the district of Bam.
So from childhood onwards we learned to ‘filter words’, and always to keep a check on what came out of our mouths, so as not to make a mistake, even unwittingly. For according to the Siberian rule, a word that has flown can never return.
The insult the Georgian had thrown at us was quite a serious one: he had said ‘you have come like snakes’, so he had offended us all.
So we performed the typical scene known in slang as ‘purchase’. This is one of the many tricks that are used among criminals to conclude a negotiation favourably; we Siberians are adept at these tricks. The principle of the ‘purchase’ is that of convincing your adversary that he is in the wrong and making him yield little by little, until you utterly terrorize him and take complete control of the situation, which in slang is termed ‘purchasing’.
Our whole gang, following Gagarin’s example, turned their backs on the Georgians. This gesture rendered them powerless, because it meant we had deprived them of all rights of criminal communication, even that of starting a fight.
It is normal to turn your back on people who are described as ‘garbage’, policemen or informers – those you despise so much you think they don’t even deserve a bullet. But if you turn your back on another criminal, it’s a different matter. You’re sending a definite signal. You’re telling him his behaviour has cost him his criminal dignity.
On the other hand, turning your back is always a risk. A true criminal will never attack someone who has his back to him, but if the person is not familiar with criminal relations, or if he’s treacherous, you might get a bullet in the back.
As we stood there with our backs turned, Gagarin explained to the Georgians that they had committed a serious error of conduct: they had insulted the juveniles of another district while they were carrying out a task that their community regarded as sacre
d, a task that must be respected by every criminal community.
‘I renounce the responsibility of holding negotiations with you,’ he added. ‘If you want to shoot us in the back, go ahead. Otherwise, withdraw. In the next few days we’ll present the question to the Authorities of Low River and ask for justice.’
Gagarin concluded with a master-stroke: he asked what their names were. In so doing he underlined another error committed by the Georgians, which was less serious but quite significant. Dignified criminals introduce themselves, exchange greetings and wish each other every blessing even before they start killing each other.
The Georgian spokesman didn’t reply at once: it was clear that the purchase was working. Then he introduced himself as the brother of another man, a young criminal very close to the Count, and said:
‘I’ll let you go this time, but only because I don’t want to complicate relations between our communities, which are already difficult enough.’
‘Well,’ Gagarin rebuked him sardonically, ‘I think you’ve already done enough to worsen the situation – for yourself and for your superiors.’
Without saying goodbye to them we walked towards our cars.
When we left they were still there under the street lamp, talking among themselves. Evidently they still couldn’t understand what had happened.
But it would all become clear very soon.
Three days later, to be precise, when Gagarin, Mel, Speechless and I made a formal ‘request’ to Grandfather Kuzya for the insult to the group and threats.
After diplomatic negotiations with the criminals of various areas of the town, those louts were punished by the Georgians themselves, who were tired of the burden of being boycotted by the communities of other districts. I know for a fact that some people of Centre threatened to close all the shops the Georgians owned in their area.
The thin boy who had spoken to us vanished into thin air. Some said he had been buried in a double grave: that was how troublesome corpses were hidden, by putting them in the same grave with another person. It was a certain way of making people disappear. The grave of one ordinary old man might contain several people who had been given up for lost by their community.
Leaving Caucasus, we headed for Centre, where we wanted to get some more information about the strangers who had been seen by Mino and his friends. We needed to find out if they had anything to do with our own sad case.
The road from Caucasus to the heart of Bender passed through a district called Balka, which in Russian simply means ‘wooden beam’, but in criminal slang means ‘graveyard’. It had earned that name because it was the former site of the old cemetery of the Polish Jews. The Jewish quarter, my grandfather told me, had grown up around the cemetery and then expanded, from the 1930s onwards.
I could never go through Balka without remembering a beautiful and terrible story which my grandfather used to tell me. And which I will now tell you.
*
The spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Balka was an old man called Moisha. According to the legend he was the first Jew to arrive in Transnistria, and through his character and his strong personality he had earned everyone’s respect. He had three sons and one daughter, who was, as we say, ‘preparing for marriage’ – that is, she was a young woman who had no other social task than that of looking after the house and learning how to obey her future husband, bring up his children and, as we say, ‘cough into her fist’ – that is, show total submission.
The rabbi’s daughter was called Zilya, and she was a really beautiful girl, with big blue eyes. She helped her mother run a draper’s shop in Centre, and many a customer would enter simply for the joy of spending a few moments in her company. Numerous Jewish families had asked the rabbi to give her in marriage to their sons, but he wouldn’t accept any of them, because many years earlier, when Zilya was only a baby, he had promised her hand to a young man of Odessa, the son of a friend of his.
It was customary among Jews to make arranged marriages, on the initiative of the fathers of families that were interested in uniting their stock; on these sad occasions the bride and bridegroom knew nothing of each other, and they rarely agreed with their parents’ choice, but they didn’t dare to contradict them, and above all they didn’t dare to break the traditions: for anyone who did so would be permanently expelled from the community. So they accepted their destiny with heavy hearts, and their whole life would become an eternal tragedy. It was such a well-known custom that even we Siberians used to joke among ourselves about the unhappiness of Jewish women, calling any hopeless and sad situation a ‘Jewish wife’.
Zilya already seemed completely convinced. Like a good Jewish girl she accepted, without rebelling against her father, the idea of marriage to a man twenty years older than her and – to judge from what people said – one with many faults.
Then one day into the shop came Svyatoslav, a young Siberian criminal who had just arrived in Transnistria. He belonged to the gang of a famous criminal called ‘Angel’, who had terrorized the communists for more than ten years, robbing trains in Siberia. Svyatoslav had been wounded in a gun battle, and his friends had sent him to Transnistria to convalesce. They had given him some money to give to the community of the Siberians, who had welcomed him without any problems. Svyatoslav had no family; his parents were dead. To cut a long story short, Svyatoslav fell in love with Zilya, and she fell in love with him.
As etiquette required, he went to Rabbi Moisha’s house and asked him for his daughter’s hand, but the rabbi dismissed him scornfully, thinking he was a pauper because his appearance was modest and, in accordance with Siberian law, he didn’t flaunt his wealth.
After suffering this humiliation, Svyatoslav appealed to the Guardian of Low River, who at that time was a criminal by the name of Sidor, nicknamed ‘Lynx’s Paw’, an old Siberian Urka. After listening to his account of the matter, Lynx’s Paw thought the Jew might have reacted like that because he had doubts about Svyatoslav’s financial position, so he advised him not to despair, but to go back to the rabbi with some jewels to offer as a gift to his daughter.
Siberian custom requires that the bridegroom himself make a proposal of marriage, but that he be accompanied by a member of his family, or in extreme cases by an old friend. So, in order to respect the law, Lynx’s Paw suggested that he himself should accompany Svyatoslav on his second attempt. They arrived at the rabbi’s house with many precious jewels, and again presented his suit, but again the rabbi dismissed them scornfully, even daring to insult them. Putting the jewels in his hand, he pretended that his palm had been burnt and dropped them on the floor, and when his guests asked him what had burnt him, he replied:
‘The human blood they are covered with.’
The two Siberians went away, already knowing what they had to do. Lynx’s Paw gave Svyatoslav permission to take the rabbi’s daughter to live in the Siberian quarter, if she agreed.
The beautiful Zilya ran away from home that very same night. Under Siberian law she could not take any possession from her father’s house except herself, so Svyatoslav had even brought her clothes for her elopement.
Next day the rabbi sent some Jewish criminals to negotiate with the Siberians. Lynx’s Paw explained to these men that according to our law any person who reaches the age of eighteen is free to do what they want, and it is a great sin to oppose this, especially when it is a question of forming a new family and of love, which are two God-willed things. The Jews showed their arrogance and threatened Lynx’s Paw with death. At that point he lost his temper and killed three of them instantly with a wooden chair; the fourth one he struck on the arm, breaking it, and sent him to Rabbi Moisha with these words:
‘He who names death doesn’t know that it is closest to him.’
At this all hell was let loose. Moisha, finding himself up against Siberians, about whom he knew nothing except that they were murderers and robbers who always stuck together, couldn’t challenge them on their own territory, so he asked the J
ews of Odessa to help him.
The leaders of the Jewish community of Odessa, who were very rich and powerful, organized a meeting to discover where the truth lay, and how justice could be done. Everyone attended, including Svyatoslav, Zilya and Moisha.
After listening to both sides, the Jews tried to blame Svyatoslav, accusing him of kidnapping Moisha’s daughter, but the Siberians replied that according to Siberian law she had not been kidnapped, because she had left of her own free will, and this was proved by the fact that she had left in her father’s house everything that linked her with that place.
Moisha retorted that there was one thing she had taken away: a coloured ribbon with which she bound up her hair. It was true – Zilya had forgotten to take it off, and Moisha’s wife had noticed it.
Such a tiny detail was enough to turn the situation against the Siberians. According to our rules, now the girl would have to be returned to her father. But there was one objection.
Zilya, the Siberians said, had already married Svyatoslav, and in order to do so she had converted to the Orthodox faith and had been baptized with the Siberian Cross: therefore, according to our laws, the powers of the parents could no longer extend over her, since they were of a faith different from hers. However, if Moisha, too, converted to the Orthodox faith, his word would carry a different weight…
In a fury, Moisha tried to stab Svyatoslav with a knife, and wounded him.
And thereby he made a serious mistake: he violated the peace in a criminal meeting, a crime that must be punished by immediate hanging.
To take his own life, Moisha decided to use that ribbon of cloth that his daughter wore in her hair. He died cursing Zilya and her husband, wishing every evil on their children, on their children’s children and on all those who loved them.
Soon afterwards Zilya fell ill. Her condition deteriorated, and no medicine could cure her. So Svyatoslav took her to Siberia, to see an old shaman of the tribe of the Nency, a people of Siberian aborigines who had always had very close ties with the Siberian criminals, the Urkas.
Siberian Education Page 29
