Besa was a real tough guy. He was a year younger than me, but looked much older, because he already had a lot of white hairs. He wasn’t born in our area; he came from Siberia. His mother, Aunt Svetlana, was the leader of a small gang of robbers, with whom she carried out turne, literally ‘tours’, series of robberies carried out from town to town. They used to rob rich people – local politicians, but especially the so-called ‘hidden industrialists’, people involved in illegal production and trade, who had links with the managers of the big factories. The phenomenon of a woman leading a gang was quite common in Siberia: women with a criminal role are affectionately called ‘mama’, ‘mama cat’ or ‘mama thief’, and are always listened to; their opinion is considered to be a perfect solution, a kind of pure criminal wisdom.
Besa’s mother had been in prison several times, and he had been born in the special-regime women’s prison of Magadan, in Siberia. Born in jail, he had experienced freedom for the first time at the age of eight. His prison upbringing was very obvious, and had left an indelible mark: an immense anger, above all.
Besa had never known his father. His mother said she had spent one night, out of pity, with a man who had been condemned to death, after being moved by train to the prison of Kurgan. She was put in a special block, and as soon as she arrived in her cell she received a letter from the next cell: a young boy nicknamed ‘Besa’, which means ‘little devil’, asked her to spend the night with him. Out of compassion and a sort of criminal solidarity she agreed to the condemned man’s request, and after paying the guards she was taken to his cell. She became pregnant. A few months later she learned through the prisoners’ secret mail system that the biological father of the son she was carrying in her womb had been executed a week after their meeting. So she decided to give him his name. All she knew about the man was that he had been a killer of policemen, that he had been good-looking and that he’d had a lot of white hairs; and Besa must have inherited them, because, as his mother used to say, he was as close a likeness to his father as Adam was to God the creator.
Ever since I’d known him Besa had had an obsession. In the prison where he had grown up he had heard from another child the story of the Kremlin star, the one on top of the main tower, where the gigantic clock is. According to the story, the star weighed five hundred kilos and was made of solid gold, but had been covered with red paint out of prudence. Many similar stories circulate among the children of criminals, especially in the juvenile prisons: they always concern a fabulous treasure hidden in some well-known place in full view of everyone and yet very hard to steal; but if you succeed in stealing it, it will set you up for life. One such story concerns the diamonds that Tsarina Catherine II is said to have hidden in the Bridge of Hope in Moscow, together with the body of her housekeeper, whom she is supposed to have killed with her own hands for trying to steal them. Another concerns the golden armour of the knight Elya of Murom, which is reputed to be buried under the monument of Tsar Alexander III in a monastery near Moscow.
All these stories were told in order to pass the time and create a mystery, but the mystery was always connected with criminal activity, so no one could say when you got to the end of the story that it had been a waste of time. After two hours of intrigue among the bourgeoisie, of descriptions of life in the Tsar’s palace, of wars, heroes, knights, ghosts, mysterious thieves, and murders committed with sophisticated techniques, there was always a treasure to be stolen: a treasure that was just waiting for someone to go and get it.
After such a story, nine times out of ten the listeners would ask:
‘Well, since you know the secret, why don’t you make use of it? Why don’t you get your hands on that treasure?’
The most effective answer was usually:
‘I’m an honest criminal; all I ask is that you give me a little cigarette money for telling you this story.’
Everyone would give a contribution and then they would start planning how to recover the treasure by destroying the national monuments. Besa was no exception: he, too, had worked out a plan for getting the star down from the Kremlin tower. Periodically he would go back to the plan to improve on it a little: for example, at first he didn’t know you couldn’t just walk into the Kremlin, and when he did find this out (thanks to me), he decided to fake some guards’ identity papers, kidnap five of them on their way to work and then enter the Kremlin disguised as guards. Initially he thought of lifting the star down with a crane, which he intended to steal from a building site. Then he decided on a more risky course: he would saw it off manually, after first securing it with ropes, then drop it down to the ground (after all, we didn’t care about its condition – we were going to break it up into pieces afterwards anyway, to extract the gold), and finally pick it up and put it into a car to carry it out of the Kremlin. To prevent the star making too much noise when it hit the ground it would be necessary, according to Besa’s plan, to cover it with rags.
Besa never stopped planning this crime of the century, and we had the honour of being included in his plan as assistants. He talked about it seriously, and given the vagaries of his fiery personality none of us dared to contradict him.
Meanwhile we continued our humble criminal activities without carrying out any crimes of the century. For the moment we were happy to participate in some black marketeering and try to keep Besa in the creative phase of his plan, so that he never reached the decisive phase, let alone the executive one. But lately he had grown rather restive – I think because he was beginning to realize that we weren’t particularly interested in stealing the Kremlin star.
Outside the Blinnaya, our stomachs full, we decided to split up. Gagarin would drive around the bars with Grave, Cat and Gigit, talking to the criminals of the district, while Mel, Speechless, Besa and I would go and see an old friend of my father’s, Uncle Fedya, who owned a megadisco on the other side of town and knew everything about everybody, and could even recount events that hadn’t yet happened, using his criminal sensibility and his knowledge of human nature.
Uncle Fedya was what in the criminal community is called a ‘Saint’. This is a term of the highest respect. A Saint is a person who lives according to very strict rules of self-control and tries in every sphere of his life to be a perfect example of the criminal ideal. The Saint lives in isolation from everyone, like a kind of hermit, and like the old Authorities he possesses nothing of his own; even the clothes he wears are not his, but gifts from other criminals. But unlike the Authorities he has no real power over other criminals, simply living his life as an example to them.
The Saint sends all his earnings into prison. Often the administrator of the obshchak – the criminals’ common fund – finds it difficult to satisfy everyone, especially in large prisons, where there are more than thirty thousand people and the structure is divided into hundreds of blocks. And often the assistants cannot agree among themselves how to divide up the funds. At that point it is always the Saint who supports them, because with his earnings he can get round any kind of internal conflict.
The Saint has no right to judge other criminals, and must remain neutral in all conflicts, but he may help to resolve them by communicating with all parties without getting personally involved. However, unlike the old Authorities he is allowed to touch money and commit crimes himself.
No one can become a Saint through his own wishes: it is a role that, like all roles in the criminal community, is given to you on the basis of your abilities and your particular talents.
The position of Saint is the rarest of all in the criminal community: in practice it is these men who administer the circulation of funds. It is they who collect the money from all the communities and send it to the prisons, either as cash or in the form of material aid. Consequently, Saints are closely protected.
In the whole of Bender there had only ever been three Saints. The first, Grandfather Dimyan, known as ‘Fur Hat’, died of old age in the late 1980s, and was a Siberian of our district. The second, Uncle Kostya, kno
wn as ‘Wood’, also from our district, was killed in a gun battle with the police in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. The third was Uncle Fedya, the last Saint of Bender.
He was a cheerful and very optimistic person; he seemed more like a monk than a criminal. In his youth he had killed three policemen and been condemned to death, but later the sentence had been reduced to life imprisonment. After he had spent thirty years inside a special-regime prison they had released him, judging him to be an ‘individual suitable for reintroduction into society’. He was over fifty by then. Soon he became a Saint. He organized various black market operations with a group of loyal Siberian criminals, and ran a bar. They lived together in the same house, without families: they were completely at the service of the criminal world; they helped people in prison and those who had just been released, and they supported the families of deceased criminals and elderly ones.
If anything happened in town you could be sure Uncle Fedya’s men would know about it. They were also in contact with prisoners held in even the most distant jails, as far away as Siberia, and could get any information they needed extremely quickly.
In view of their position in our society I thought it was very important to tell them what had happened. Even if it didn’t produce any positive leads for our inquiries, it would be a sign of respect on our part, and might win us some secondary assistance in gathering information.
We reached the Saint’s house. It was a kind of tenement block, with a yard and a fine garden full of small tables and benches. In accordance with the old tradition, the front door had been taken off its hinges and thrown on the ground, as a sign that the house was open to all, and indeed there were always guests; people came from all over the USSR to visit the Saint and his friends.
I too had often been a guest in that house, because my father was a good friend of Uncle Fedya’s. They had done business together and shared a passion for pigeons. My father used to give him pigeons because he couldn’t buy anything for himself: the Saint would keep them but say they were my father’s, and if in conversation I should let slip a compliment to one of ‘his’ pigeons, Uncle Fedya would always correct me, saying that those pigeons weren’t his, and that he only kept them because there was no room at our house.
As usual, Uncle Fedya was on the roof, where he kept ‘my father’s pigeons’ in a special shed. He saw me and beckoned to me to come up; I pointed to my companions and he repeated the gesture, inviting us all up. We went indoors and walked up three flights of stairs, greeting everyone we met, until we came to the door that led up to the roof. Before opening it we took off the weapons we were carrying, leaving them on a shelf on which there was a bucket of food for the pigeons. According to the rules, no one may appear before a Saint armed. You can’t even carry a knife, and that should be stressed, because usually the knife is regarded as a cult object, like the cross, which you must always have on you. Even the knife must be laid aside when you meet a Saint, to emphasize each criminal’s position with respect to his power, which is greater than that of force and of money.
While we were leaving our guns and knives, Mel saw me putting Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant on the shelf. He looked amazed and asked me where I’d got it.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story.’
I opened the little door and at last we went up the narrow stairway that led to the roof. Uncle Fedya was standing there among the pigeons, which were pecking at grains of wheat; he had a pair of pigeons in his hand. I noticed that they were of the Baku breed, so they would be good at flying and especially at ‘hitting’ – that’s what we call the way the males of some breeds have of displaying their agility to attract the attention of the females.
We greeted Uncle Fedya, and my friends introduced themselves. As tradition requires, first I had to talk for a while about matters which had nothing to do with our visit: this is not just a formal rule; it is done to enable you to assess the other person’s state of mind and to judge whether that is the right moment for discussing the matter that is your main concern. So I asked him about his health and made some small talk about pigeons, until he asked me what brought me there.
‘I came for “a bit of a chat”,’ I replied.
In conversation, especially with important figures in the criminal world, it is usual to talk ironically about the problems you need their help in solving. In the same way the Authorities themselves never begin discussions about their life or about some personal question as if they were matters of the greatest importance: they speak of themselves with lightness and humility. For example, if you ask a criminal how his affairs are going, he will answer ironically that his affairs are all under investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s office, and that he is only occupying himself with bagatelles, trifles, matters of no importance.
That is why I was obliged to present our problem rather nonchalantly, saying that I’d come for a ‘bit of a chat’, something of no great consequence.
He smiled and said he already knew what had happened. He asked me to tell him how our inquiries were going. Briefly, and without going into too much detail, I explained the situation to him; he listened calmly and patiently, but now and then he sighed heavily.
When I had finished he stood motionless for a while, thinking it over; then suddenly he said it would be better if we went downstairs and sat at the table and drank some chifir, because ‘it’s hard to find the truth standing up’.
We went downstairs with him. There were already two old criminals sitting at the table, whom Uncle Fedya at once introduced to us. They were guests of his who had come from a little Siberian village on the River Amur.
The tea ceremony began.
Uncle Fedya prepared the chifir himself. All his teeth were dark, almost black: an unmistakable sign of the habitual chifir drinker. After heating the water on the wood stove, he took the chifirbak off the fire, put it on the table and poured a whole packet of Irkutsk tea into it.
As we waited for the chifir to brew, Uncle Fedya recounted our story to his guests, who listened to him sadly. One of the two, a big, strong man with a tattooed face, crossed himself every time Ksyusha’s name was mentioned.
Uncle Fedya poured the chifir into the mug, took three long swigs and passed it on to me. It was strong and boiling hot and ‘caught’ well: that’s what we say when the chifir has an immediate effect, giving a slight sensation of light-headedness. We passed the chifir round three times; Mel took the last swig, then washed the mug, as tradition prescribes.
Finally Uncle Fedya put on the table a dish of sweets, perfect for tempering the strong taste of chifir that remained in the mouth. My favourites were those that had the flavour of klyuchva, a very sour berry that grows on small bushes in northern Russia, exclusively in marshy areas. As we ate the sweets we started talking again.
Uncle Fedya said that the people who ran his clubs already knew the whole story, and that if any interesting news had been reported at ‘The Cage’ – the largest and most spectacular disco in town, where large numbers of people went – they would certainly have passed it on to him at once.
Then he laid on the table his financial contribution to the cause. One of the guests immediately imitated him, producing a pack of dollars – no less than ten thousand; and finally, without a word, the Siberian giant with the tattooed face, who was known as ‘Cripple’, added another five thousand.
Uncle Fedya also gave us a couple of tips: he advised us to go back to the district of Bam.
‘It’s hard to have an honest conversation with those people; terror tactics are better,’ he said, winking at me. ‘If you fire a few shots and someone gets killed, it won’t matter; they’d kill each other anyway, sooner or later. If you scare them they’ll actually start doing something, and who knows, in the midst of all the trash that lives there perhaps they’ll find your man.’
He also advised us to put more pressure on the people of Centre; after all, it was partly their fault if the girl had been raped in their territory.
In his opinion – and people like the Saint were rarely mistaken – all the leaders of Centre might as well ‘write letters home’ – that is, prepare for a violent clash with the unknown.
Uncle Fedya didn’t approve of Gagarin’s generous decision to give the Centre boys half a day to gather information without the Guardian’s knowledge.
‘For the love of Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘what do we care if the Guardian is angry with them? He’d be perfectly right to be angry, because they’re a bunch of incompetent fools. These people of Centre only think about womanizing and playing cards; they look like gipsies with all the gold they wear, and then, when something happens in their area, they’re left with the shit between their legs, stinking in front of the whole town… No, you go straight to the Guardian now, and tell him that if he doesn’t bring you by this evening the idiots who’ve been causing trouble in his area while he and his men were sleeping, you’ll tell all the Authorities about the matter… They’ll bring them to you on a blue-edged salver, you’ll see…’
While he was saying all this, I was already imagining the scene. We wouldn’t even be allowed to see the Guardian of Centre, let alone rebuke him and threaten him. However, as my late lamented uncle used to say: ‘A person who takes no risks drinks no champagne.’
Thanking Uncle Fedya for his hospitality, his excellent advice and the money for increasing the reward, we went to join the rest of our group so that we could plan our rendezvous with the Centre guys.
We had arranged to meet the others at a bar owned by old Plum, a criminal who hadn’t participated in any criminal activities for a long time and just ran his bar, or rather, sat at a table drinking or eating, while two young girls, his granddaughters, did all the work.
Plum was well known in the town for the life of hardship and suffering that he had led. He wasn’t born into a criminal family: his parents were educated people, intellectuals – his father was a scientist, and his mother taught literature at the University of Moscow. In the late 1930s, when Stalin’s regime unleashed a wave of terror, his parents were arrested and declared enemies of the people. His father was accused of having links with American and British spies, his mother of anti-Soviet propaganda. The whole family, including the two children – Plum, who was twelve at that time, and his sister Lesya, who was only three – were deported to the gulag of Vorkuta.
Siberian Education Page 31
