The shaman said the girl was suffering because an evil spirit always kept her in the chill of death, removing the warmth of life from her. To stop the spirit it was necessary to burn the place that still tied him to this world. So returning to Transnistria, Svyatoslav, with the help of other Siberians, set fire to Rabbi Moisha’s house, and later to the synagogue too.
Zilya recovered, and the two of them continued to live in our district for a long time. They had six sons: two of them murdered policemen and died young in prison; one went to live in Odessa, and in time set up a flourishing trade in clothes with fake brand-names (he was the most successful of all the brothers); and the other three lived in our district and carried out robberies; the youngest of them, Zhora, belonged to the gang led by my father.
In their old age Svyatoslav and Zilya went to end their lives in the Tayga, as they had always wanted to do.
After the synagogue was burned down by the Siberians many Jews left the area. The last of them were deported by the Nazis during the Second World War, and all that remains of that community now is the old cemetery.
Abandoned for years, it became a desolate place, where rubbish was dumped and kids went to fight. The graves were looted by some members of the Moldovan community, who committed this outrage against the dead simply to get stone ornaments that they could use as decorations for the gates outside their houses: this custom was the origin of a very offensive proverb: ‘A Moldovan’s soul is as beautiful as his garden gate.’
In the 1970s the Ukrainians started building houses in the old Jewish quarter. A lot of promiscuous girls lived there, and we often had parties with them. All you had to do to pull a Balka girl was buy her a drink, because not having a strict upbringing like the girls of Low River they saw sex as just fun; but as often happens in these cases, their over-lax behaviour became a kind of malaise, and many of them remained trapped in their own sexual freedom. They usually started having sex at the age of fourteen, or even earlier. By the time they were eighteen each one of them was already known to the whole town; it was convenient for the men to have women who were always ready to sleep with them without asking for anything in exchange. It was a game, which lasted until the man got fed up with one and moved on to another.
When they grew to adulthood, many Balka girls became aware of their situation and felt a great emptiness; they too wanted to have a family, find a husband and be like other women, but that was no longer possible: the community had permanently branded them, and no worthy man would ever be able to marry them.
Those poor souls, realizing they could no longer enjoy the positive emotions that are given by a simple life, committed suicide in appalling numbers. This phenomenon of girls killing themselves was rather shocking for our town, and many men, when they realized the origin of their despair, refused to have sex with them, so as not to participate in the destruction of their lives.
I knew an old criminal from Centre called Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Kangaroo’, because in his youth he had been wounded in the legs in a gunfight and ever since then had had a strange, hopping kind of walk. He was the owner of a number of nightclubs in various towns in Russia, and had always had a weakness for the girls of Balka. After the first cases of suicide Kangaroo was the first to guess the true extent of the problem, and vowed in front of a lot of people that he would no longer seek their company, and suggested the matter be discussed openly with the girls’ families. But the Ukrainians had a strange sense of dignity: they let their daughters put themselves in compromising situations, but then pretended they didn’t know anything about it and were furious if anyone spoke the truth. Consequently many of them were hostile to Kangaroo’s initiative, saying it was a plot to bring dishonour into their district. Later there were very unpleasant developments: some fathers actually killed their daughters with their own hands just to show others they didn’t accept any kind of interference.
The situation deteriorated partly because of the incredible consumption of alcohol by the people of that district. The Ukrainians drank a lot, a habit they shared with the rest of the Soviet population, certainly, but they did so in a particularly unrestrained manner, without the filter of tradition and without a trace of morality. In Siberia alcohol is drunk in obedience to certain reasonable rules, so as not to cause irreparable damage to one’s health: accordingly, Siberian vodka is made exclusively of wheat, and is purified with milk, which removes the residue of the manufacturing process, so that the final product has a perfect purity. Moreover, vodka must only be drunk with food (in Siberia people eat a lot, and dishes are very rich, because you burn off a large amount of fat in resisting the cold and preserving vitamins in winter): if you eat the right dishes, it is possible to drink as much as a litre of vodka per person without any problem. In Ukraine, however, they drink vodka of various kinds: they extract the alcohol from potatoes or pumpkins, and the sugary substances make you drunk at once. The Siberians never get too drunk, don’t pass out and don’t vomit, but the Ukrainians drink themselves unconscious, and it can take them as long as two days to work off the hangover.
So life in Balka, formerly the Jewish and later the Ukrainian quarter, was like one long party, but a party with a sad atmosphere, with a nostalgia for something simple and human which those people could no longer have.
My grandfather always used to say that this happens when men are forgotten by God: they remain alive, but are no longer really alive. My own opinion was that it was an extreme form of social degradation affecting the whole community, perhaps because the young people who had come to live in our town had broken violently away from their parents and had been left to themselves, and without any form of control they had burned themselves up, indulging in all kinds of vice. And, in turn, without the support of their old folk they brought up their own children badly.
The Ukrainians’ sons were notorious as mothers’ boys, and as people incapable of doing anything useful either for themselves or for others. In Bender nobody trusted them because they were always telling lies to make themselves seem important, but they did it so clumsily that no one could possibly have believed them: we just treated them as poor idiots. Some of them even tried to make money by inventing non-existent laws: for example, that a brother could force his sister to prostitute herself. The exploitation of prostitution had always been considered an offence unworthy of a criminal: men convicted of that kind of crime were liable to be killed in jail; it could happen outside as well, to tell the truth, but it was rare for them to get out of prison alive. The Ukrainians simply didn’t understand this; they would wander around the districts of the town, trying in vain to get into the bars and nightclubs. All doors were always closed to them, since the money they wanted to spend had been earned in an unworthy manner. They went on without stopping to wonder why, creating an increasingly deep rift between their community and the rest of the town.
There was only one road through the district of Balka, and by the side of it there was a kiosk run by an old Ukrainian criminal by the name of Stepan, who sold cigarettes, drinks, and now and then drugs, usually the kind you smoke. He would also sell you weapons and ammunitions from the Ukrainian military bases, which he obtained with the help of his elder brother, a career soldier.
Stepan was partially paralysed, because he had once drunk some alcohol intended for scientific use. When he told the story of that terrible day he always made a joke of it: as soon as he realized that the left side of his body was on the point of losing all feeling, he said, in the nick of time he’d flipped his ‘honourable member’ over to the right-hand side and thereby saved it.
I often stopped to chat with him, because I loved to see his spirit and his good humour even in his pretty desperate situation. He would sit all day in his wheelchair under a big umbrella, talking to the people who passed by. He had a daughter, perhaps the only respectable girl in the whole district, who looked after him and was studying to be an architect. His wife had left him shortly before he was paralysed; she had run off with her lover
, a young male nurse. I respected Stepan for the simple fact that he had succeeded in bringing up his daughter while remaining exactly what he was, a simple, uneducated person, but to judge from the results also a good one, capable of transmitting his natural affability to others.
His kiosk was always open. By day he ran it himself, sometimes with his daughter’s help, and at night it was run by his trusty assistant, a boy by the name of Kiril, whom everybody called ‘Nixon’ because he was obsessed with American presidents. A lot of people said he was retarded, but I think he just liked to take things slowly. Stepan used to pay him in food and cigarettes. Nixon smoked, and did so in a very theatrical manner: he seemed like an actor. He also had a dog, a small, ugly and very nasty mongrel, who with the most humble and amiable of expressions on its face would bite your ankles when you were least expecting it. Nixon used to call him ‘my secretary’, or sometimes dorogoy gospodin, ‘my dear sir’. The dog had no other name.
If you got into conversation with Nixon he would start criticizing the communists, saying they wanted to destroy his country and calling them ‘dirty terrorists’. He said he didn’t trust anyone except his ‘secretary’, who would then demonstrate his devotion by knocking his disgustingly mangy little tail against his master’s leg.
‘The Arabs have pissed me off,’ he said, ‘and Fidel Castro should be killed, but that’s impossible. And do you know why? Because he’s hiding in Siberia, where he’s protected by the communists. They’ve replaced him in Cuba with a double who doesn’t even look like him: his beard is obviously false, and he smokes cigars without inhaling.’
That was the way Nixon was. ‘And do you know what the American flag represents?’ he would ask. ‘I’ll tell you: a dead communist. The stars are his brain, which was blown to smithereens when he was shot in the head, and the red and white stripes are his blood-spattered skin.’
He hated blacks – he said their presence had stopped the progress of democracy – and he got Martin Luther King mixed up with Michael Jackson, saying ‘he was a good nigger, he liked dancing and singing’, but that some other niggers had killed him just because one day he had decided to become a white.
When we approached the kiosk we found Nixon sitting on his presidential chair as usual, playing Tetris. I was the first to get out of the car, and when he saw me he ran over to to greet me, as he always did with people he liked. I gave him a hug and asked him to wake Stepan because it was urgent. He immediately rushed off to his house, which was only a few dozen metres away.
Nixon couldn’t stand having my friend Mel around: for some unknown reason he was convinced he was a spy; once he had even given him a couple of blows with an iron bar because he was so scared of him. Because of this I had told Mel to stay in the car and not show himself, so as not to stir up a quarrel in the middle of the night. However, when Nixon had gone to call Stepan, Mel had got out of the car to relieve himself in the nearby bushes. And while Mel peed, making a noise like a waterfall, Nixon arrived, pushing a wheelchair with a still half-asleep Stepan on it.
Since I knew Stepan better than the others did, I stayed to talk to him, with Speechless; the others either waited in the cars or drank beer by the kiosk.
Stepan must have guessed that something important was at stake, because he didn’t joke as he usually did. I apologized for waking him at that time of night and told him our sad story. As I talked I saw the living side of his face become a kind of mask, like the ones the Japanese use to represent their demons.
He was angry. When I mentioned the reward he made a contemptuous gesture with his hand and said he had something to give us. He called Nixon and gave him an order: the boy disappeared and returned after a few minutes with a cardboard box in his hands. Stepan gave it to me, saying he was a humble and poor person and couldn’t give us anything more, but in its own small way this was the most beautiful and useful thing he had.
He opened the box: inside was a Stechkin with silencer and stabilizer, and six magazines full of ammunition. A splendid and pretty expensive weapon: the only pistol made in the USSR that could fire a continuous burst, with twenty shots in the magazine.
I thanked him and said that if it was all right with him I would gladly pay for it, but Stepan refused, saying it was okay, all he asked was that I tell our elders about his gesture. He promised me he would keep his ears open, and that if he heard anything interesting he would let me know at once. Before leaving I tried at least to pay for what the boys had consumed at his kiosk – a few beers, cigarettes and some food – but again he wouldn’t hear of it. So I slipped a little money into the pocket of Nixon, who waved to us delightedly, like a little child, as we got into the cars.
Two hundred metres further on Mel was waiting for us: to avoid a clash with Nixon he had gone through the bushes, and he was angry, because in the darkness he’d got scratched all over his face.
Nobody wanted to take Stepan’s gun, because – it emerged – they all had at least two on them already. So I took it myself.
We were approaching Centre, and the dark of the night was becoming ever more transparent: day was breaking, the second day of our search.
In the car I slept for a while, without dreaming about anything in particular, as if I’d fallen into a void. When I woke up we were already in Centre and the cars had stopped in the yard of a house. Except for me and Mel, who was still asleep, the boys were all outside, talking to two guys by a door.
I got out of the car and went over to the others. I asked Grave what was happening and he replied that the two people Gagarin was talking to were assistants of the Guardian of Centre.
‘What have they been saying?’
‘That they don’t know anything about what happened by the phone boxes. And they haven’t heard anything about strangers pestering a girl in their district.’
Shortly afterwards the two guys went away.
‘Well?’ I asked Gagarin.
‘It’s a challenge for them now: admitting they know nothing about it is like admitting they’re out of the loop. It might land them in serious trouble, if that really is the case. Anyway, they’ve asked us to give them time to check all the facts. And not to tell the Guardian, for the time being. They’ve assured us of their complete cooperation. We’ve arranged to meet again at noon under the old bridge.’
So we got back into the car and decided to go and have breakfast in a place called Blinnaya, which means ‘The Pancake Parlour’, in the district called The Bank.
The Bank was situated in the most attractive part of the town, where there was a big park on the river with beaches and places where you could relax and pass the time pleasurably. The most expensive restaurants, bars and night clubs were all there. There was also a clandestine gambling den, where admission was strictly by invitation.
The district was run by various Bender criminals, and was a kind of tourist attraction: a lot of people came from Odessa – rich Jews and merchants of various kinds – because it was highly fashionable to breathe a bit of the scent of exotic criminality. But the real criminals of the town were forbidden to settle their personal scores in the Bank; if some people created a few problems or got a bit rowdy it was only an act put on specially for the guests, to make them believe they’d come to a disreputable area: a way of making them feel a bit threatened, to raise their adrenaline. In reality no one ever committed any serious crimes in that district.
The Blinnaya made the best pancakes in the whole town. In Russia pancakes are called bliny, and everyone has their own way of cooking them: the best ones are those made by the Cossacks of the Don, who add yeast to the mixture, which they then quickly scorch on red-hot pans smeared with butter, so that the bliny turn out thick and very greasy, crisp and with an unforgettable flavour.
There at the Blinnaya people ate them in the Siberian manner, with sour cream mixed with honey, drinking black tea with lemon.
We were pretty tired. There were quite a few people in the restaurant. We ordered fifty bliny, just to start with (on a
verage a Russian will eat at least fifteen bliny at a time, and guys like Mel and Gagarin as many as three times that number). In three minutes the plate was empty. We ordered several more helpings. We took the tea straight from the samovar that stood on the table; every now and then the waiter came to add more water to it. That’s normal in my country: in many restaurants you can drink as much tea as you like; every person, however much food he orders, can drink all the tea he can get inside him, and it’s free.
As we ate and drank we discussed the situation. The morale of the group was fairly high, as was our anger and our desire for justice.
‘I can’t wait to break the back of the bastard who raped her,’ said Speechless.
I thought our situation must be really exceptional, seeing as that was the second time Speechless had spoken in two days.
Then I thought we were really a strange group. I thought about the lives each of us had led. Gigit and Besa, in particular.
Gigit was the son of a Siberian criminal; his mother was an Armenian woman who had died when he was six, murdered by one of her brothers because by marrying a Siberian criminal she had insulted the name of the family.
He was a bright boy, with a strong sense of justice: in fights he was always one of the first to enter the fray, so he had a lot of scars. A couple of times he had been wounded quite seriously, and on one of those occasions I had given him my blood, which is compatible with all groups. Since then he had been convinced that we had become blood brothers; he tried to watch my back in every situation, and would always be there when I needed him. We were friends; we understood each other almost without speaking. He was a quiet person; he liked reading, and I could talk to him about literature. Quiet up to a point, though: he had beaten a Centre boy to death with a hammer for trying to humiliate him in the eyes of a girl he wanted to impress – a girl Gigit had gone out with for a while and remained good friends with afterwards.
Siberian Education Page 30
