Siberian Education

MY BIRTHDAY

We boys of Low River, as I mentioned before, really lived in accordance with the Siberian criminal laws; we had a strict Orthodox religious upbringing, with a strong pagan influence, and the rest of the town called us ‘Siberian Education’ because of the way we behaved. We didn’t use swear-words, we never took the name of God or the mother in vain, we never talked disrespectfully about any elderly person, pregnant woman, small child or orphan, or anyone disabled. We were well integrated, and to tell the truth we didn’t need swear-words to make us feel grown-up, as the kids of our age in other districts did, because we were treated as if we were genuinely part of the criminal community; we were a real gang, made up of juveniles, with responsibilities and the same hierarchy as the adult criminal community.

Our job was to act as look-outs. We would walk round our area, spend a lot of time on the borders with other districts and inform the adults about any unusual movement. If any suspicious character passed through the district – a policeman, an informer, or a criminal from another district – we’d make sure our adult Authorities knew about it within a few minutes.

When the police arrived, we usually blocked their path: we’d sit or lie down in front of their cars, forcing them to stop. They’d get out and move us with a kick up the backside or by pulling us by the ears, and we would fight back. We usually singled out the youngest one and jumped on him as a group – someone would hit him, someone else would grab his arm and bite it, someone else would cling on to his back and snatch off his hat, yet another would rip the buttons off his uniform or take his pistol out of his holster. We’d go on like this till the cop couldn’t stand any more, or till his colleagues started hitting us really hard.

The unluckiest of us got hit on the head with a truncheon, lost some blood and ran away.

Once a friend of mine tried to steal a policeman’s gun from his holster: the cop grabbed his hand in time, but he gripped it so hard that my friend squeezed the trigger and involuntarily shot him in the leg. As soon as we heard the shot we scattered in all directions, and as we fled those idiots started shooting at us. Luckily they didn’t hit any of us, but while we ran we heard the bullets whistling past us. One went into the pavement, chipping off a piece of cement which hit me in the face. The wound was a minor one and not very deep – they didn’t even give me a single stitch afterwards – but for some strange reason a lot of blood came out of that hole, and when we got to my friend Mel’s home his mother, Auntie Irina, picked me up in her arms and rushed off towards my parents’ house, screaming out to the whole district that the police had shot me in the head. I tried in vain to calm her down, but she was too taken up with the effort of running, and finally, a few metres from home, through the blood that covered my eyes, I saw my mother go as white as death, already looking prepared for my funeral. When Auntie Irina stopped in front of her, I writhed like a snake to get free and jumped out of her arms, landing on my feet.

My mother examined my wound and told me to go indoors and then gave Auntie Irina a sedative, to soothe her agitation.

They sat down together on the bench in the yard, drinking valerian tea and crying. I was nine years old at the time.

On another occasion the policemen got out of their cars to clear us out of the way quickly. They picked us up by the legs or the arms and dumped us at the side of the road; we jumped up and again went back into the middle, and the cops started all over again. To us it was a never-ending game.

One of my friends took advantage of a cop’s momentary abstraction and released the hand-brake of his car. We were at the top of a hill, on a road that led down to the river, so the car shot off like a rocket and the policemen, rooted to the spot but scowling with rage, watched it run all the way down the hill, hit the water and – glug – disappear like a submarine. At that point we too disappeared hurriedly.

As well as acting as look-outs we also carried messages.

Since people in the Siberian community don’t use the phone, which they regard as unsafe, and as a contemptible symbol of the modern world, they often use the so-called ‘road’ – communication by means of a mixture of messages passed on orally, written in letters or encoded in the shapes of certain objects.

A verbal message is called a ‘puff’. When an adult criminal wants to make a puff he calls a boy, perhaps one of his own children, and tells him the content of the message in the criminal language fenya, which derives from the old language of the forebears of the Siberian criminals, the Efey. Oral messages are always short and have a firm meaning. They are used for relatively straightforward, everyday matters.

Whenever my father called me to give me an oral message to take to someone, he would say: ‘Come here, I’ve got to give you a puff.’ Then he would tell me the content, for example: ‘Go to Uncle Venya and tell him the dust here is like a pole’, which was an urgent request to come and discuss an important matter. I had to set off at once on my bike, greet Uncle Venya properly, say a few conventional things which had nothing to do with the message, in accordance with Siberian tradition, such as inquiring about his health, and only then would I get to the point: ‘I bring you a puff from my father.’ Then I had to wait for him to give me permission to pass it on to him; he would give that permission, but without saying so directly. Humbly, so as not to convey the least hint of arrogance, he would reply: ‘God bless you, then, my son’, or ‘May the Spirit of Jesus Christ be with you’, indicating to me that he was ready to listen. I would deliver the message and wait for his answer. I couldn’t leave without an answer; even if Uncle Venya or whoever it was had nothing to say, he had to think of something. ‘Tell your father that I’ll sharpen my heels, go with God’, he would say to me, indicating that he accepted the invitation and would come as soon as possible. If he didn’t want to say anything, he would say: ‘As music is to the soul, so is a good puff to me. Go home with God, may he bestow health and long life on your whole family.’ Then I too would take my leave of him in the conventional way and return home as quickly as possible. The faster you were, the more highly you were appreciated as a messenger, and the better your pay. Sometimes I’d get as much as a twenty-rouble banknote (in those days a bicycle cost fifty roubles), on other occasions a cake or a bottle of fizzy drink.

We also had our own small part to play in the delivery of letters.

Letters could be of three types: the ksiva (which in the criminal language means document), the malyava (little one) and rospiska (signature).

The ksiva was a long, important letter in the criminal language. It was very rarely written, and then only by elderly Authorities, usually in order to take orders into a prison, to influence the policy of the administration of prisons, foment revolts or persuade someone to resolve a difficult situation in a particular way. A letter of this kind would be passed from hand to hand, and from jail to jail, and because of its importance was never entrusted to an ordinary messenger, only to people very close to the criminal Authorities. We boys never carried letters of that type.

The malyava, on the other hand, was the typical letter that we almost always carried, backwards and forwards. Usually it was sent from jail to communicate with the criminal world outside, avoiding the checks of the prison system. It was a small, concise letter, always written in the criminal language. On a particular day, every second Tuesday in the month, we would go and stand outside Tiraspol prison. That was the day when the prisoners ‘launched the flares’: that is, using the elastic from their underpants, they catapulted their letters over the prison wall, for us to pick up. Each letter had a coded address – a word or a number.

These letters were written by almost all prisoners and used the ‘road’ of the prison, that system of communication from cell to cell which I have already mentioned. During the night prisoners ‘sent the horses’ – various parcels, messages, letters and suchlike – along strings that ran from one window to another. All the letters were then collected by a team of inmates in the blocks nearest to the wall, where the windows didn’t have thick metal sheets over them but only the standard iron bars. From there, people called ‘missilists’ fired the letters one after another over the wall. They were paid to do this by the criminal community and had no other task in prison; they practised their skills every day by firing scraps of cloth over the wall.

To launch a malyava you first made a ‘missile’, a small tube of paper with a long, soft tail, usually made of paper handkerchiefs (which are very difficult to get hold of in prison). This tube was folded over on one side, forming a kind of hook which was fixed to one end of the elastic; then you gripped it between your fingers and pulled. Meanwhile another person lit the soft paper tail, and when it caught fire the little tube was fired off.

The burning tail enabled us to locate the letter when it fell on the ground. You had to run as fast as possible, to put out the fire and not let the little tube with the precious letter inside it get burnt. There were nearly always at least ten of us, and in half an hour we would manage to collect more than a hundred letters. Returning home, we would distribute them to the families and friends of the prisoners. We were paid for this work.

Each criminal community had its own special day on which to fire the letters, once a month. In some cases, if there was a very urgent letter, it was customary for criminals to help each other, even if they belonged to different communities. So sometimes the letters of members of other communities ended up with the letters of our own criminals, but we would still take them to the addressee. Or rather, the rule was that the person who delivered it must be the one who had picked it up off the ground, which served to prevent quarrels among us.

In cases like these we were not paid, but they usually gave us something. We would take the letters to the house of the Guardian of the area, and one of his helpers would take them and put them in a safe: later people would go to see him and say a word or a number in code, and he, if he found a letter marked with the same code, would hand it over to the addressee. This service was not paid for but was one of the Guardian’s responsibilities; if there was any trouble with the post, if a letter disappeared or none of us went to collect it under the prison, the Guardian could be severely punished, even killed.

The rospiska, or ‘signature’, was a type of letter that circulated both inside prison and outside it. It might be a kind of safe conduct provided by an Authority, who guaranteed a peaceful stay and a brotherly welcome for a criminal in places where he didn’t know anybody, for example in prisons far from his region or in towns where he went on business trips. As I have already mentioned, the signature was tattooed directly on the skin.

In other cases the rospiska was used to spread important information, for example about a forthcoming meeting of criminal Authorities, or to send openly and without any risk an order addressed to several people. Thanks to the coded language, even if the signature fell into the hands of the police it didn’t matter.

I delivered letters of this kind a couple of times: they were normal, and always open. The Authorities never seal their letters, not only because they’re in code, but particularly because the content must never throw any shadow over them; usually it has a demonstrative purpose, to exhibit the powers of the laws and spread a kind of criminal charisma.

Once I delivered a signature with an order originating from the prisons of Siberia and addressed to the prisons of Ukraine. It instructed Ukrainian criminals to respect certain rules in prison; for example homosexual acts were forbidden, as was the punishment of individual prisoners by physical humiliation or sexual abuse. At the end of this letter were the signatures of thirty-six Siberian Authorities. The signature which came into my hands was one of the many copies of the document, which was intended to be reproduced and disseminated among all the criminals in prison or at liberty throughout the USSR.

Another form of communication, called the ‘throw’, came about through the delivery of certain objects. In this case, an object which had a particular meaning in the criminal community was given to any messenger, even a child. The messenger’s task was to take it to the addressee, saying who had sent it; there was no need to wait for an answer.

A broken knife meant the death of some member of the gang, or someone close to you, and was a very bad sign. An apple cut in half was an invitation to divide up the loot. A piece of dry bread inside a cloth handkerchief was a precise warning: ‘Watch out, the police are nearby, there’s been an important development in that case in which you’re involved.’ A knife wrapped in a handkerchief was a call to action, for a hired killing. A piece of rope with a knot tied in the middle meant: ‘I’m not responsible for what you know.’ A bit of earth in a handkerchief meant: ‘I promise I’ll keep the secret.’

There were simpler meanings and more complex ones, ‘good’ ones – intended, for example, for protection – and ‘bad’ ones – insults or threats of death.

If it was suspected that a person had relations which compromised his criminal dignity – relations with the police, say, or with other criminal communities (without the permission of his own) – he would receive a little cross with a nail, or in extreme cases a dead rat, sometimes with a coin or a banknote in its mouth, an unequivocal promise of the harshest possible punishment. This was the ‘bad throw’, the worst one, and it meant certain death.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to invite a friend to party, to have fun, to drink and enjoy yourselves, you would send him an empty glass. That was a ‘good throw’.

I often carried messages of this kind, never any bad ones. They were mostly administrative communications, invitations or promises.

Another of our duties was to organize ourselves in a decent manner so as to carry forward the glorious name of our district: in simple words, we had to be able to sow chaos among the boys of the other districts.

This had to be done in the right way, because our tradition requires that violence must always have a reason, even though the final result is the same, since a broken head is still a broken head.

We worked with the elders – old criminals who had retired and who lived thanks to the support of the younger ones. Like eccentric pensioners, they took care of us youngsters and our criminal identity.

There were many of them in the district, and they all belonged to the caste of the Siberian Urkas: they obeyed the old law, which was despised by the other criminal communities because it obliged you to follow a humble and worthy life, full of sacrifices, where pride of place was given to ideals such as morality and religious feeling, respect for nature and for ordinary people, workers and all those who were used or exploited by the government and the class of the rich.

Our word for the rich was upiri, an old Siberian term for creatures of pagan mythology who live in marshes and dense woodland and feed on human blood: a kind of Siberian vampire.

Our tradition forbade us to commit crimes that involved negotiating with the victim, because it was considered unworthy to communicate with the rich or government officials, who could only be assaulted or killed, but never threatened or forced to accept terms. So crimes like extortion, or protection rackets, or the control of illegal activities through secret agreements with the police and the KGB, were utterly despised. We only did robberies and burglaries, and in our criminal activities we never made agreements with anyone, but organized everything ourselves.

The other communities didn’t think like this. The younger generations, in particular, behaved in the European and American way – they had no morality, respected only money and endeavoured to create a pyramidal criminal system, a kind of criminal monarchy, something quite different from our system, which might be compared to a network, where everyone was interconnected and no one had personal power and everyone played his part in the common interest.

Already when I was a boy, in many criminal communities the individual members had to earn the right to speak, otherwise they were treated as if they didn’t exist. In our community, by contrast, everyone had the right to speak, even women, children, the disabled and the old.

The difference between the education we had received and the education (or lack of it) received by members of the other communities created an immense gap between us. Consequently, even if we weren’t aware of it, we felt the need to assert our principles and our laws, and to force others to respect them, sometimes by violence.

In town we were always causing trouble; when we went into another district it would often end in a fight, with blood on the ground, beatings and knifings on both sides. We had a fearsome reputation; everyone was scared of us, and this very fear had often led to our being attacked, because there’s always someone who wants to go against his natural instincts, to try his luck and attempt to overcome his fear by attacking the thing that causes it.

A fight wasn’t always inevitable; sometimes by diplomacy we managed to persuade someone to change his mind, and there would only be a few punches thrown on both sides, after which we would start talking. It was nice when it ended like that. But more often it ended in bloodshed, and in a chain of ruined relations with an entire district, relations which after their death it was very hard to revive.

Our elders had taught us well.

First of all, you had to respect all living creatures – a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people.

Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn’t create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men.

Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn’t want to be done to us: and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason.

One of the elders with whom I often discussed these Siberian philosophies used to say that in his opinion our world was full of people who went down wrong roads, and who after taking one false step went further and further away from the straight path. He argued that in many cases there was no point in trying to persuade them to return to the right road, because they were too far away, and the only thing that remained to do was to end their existence, ‘remove them from the road’.

‘A man who is rich and powerful,’ the old man would say, ‘in walking along his wrong road will ruin many lives; he will cause trouble for many people who in some way depend on him. The only way of putting everything right is to kill him, and thereby to destroy the power that he has built upon money.’

I would object:

‘But what if the murder of this person were also a false step? Wouldn’t it be better to avoid having any contact with him, and leave it at that?’

The old man would look at me in amazement, and reply with such conviction that it made my head spin:

‘Who do you think you are, boy – Jesus Christ? Only He can work miracles; we must only serve Our Lord… And what better service could we do than to remove from the face of the world the children of Satan?’

He was too good, that old man.

Anyway, because of our elders we were certain that we were in the right. ‘Woe betide those who wish us ill,’ we thought, ‘because God is with us’: we had thousands of ways of justifying our violence and our behaviour.

On my thirteenth birthday, however, something happened which gave me a few doubts.

It all began like this: on the morning of that freezing cold February day, my friend Mel came round to my house and asked me to go with him to the other side of town, to the Railway district, where the Guardian of our area had ordered him to take a message to a criminal.

The Guardian had told him he could take only one person with him, no more, because it was ill-mannered to take messages in a group: it was considered to be a display of violence, almost a threat. And Mel, unfortunately, had chosen me.

I had no desire to go all that way in the cold, especially on my birthday: I had already arranged with the whole gang to have a party at my uncle’s house, which was empty because he was in jail. He had left his house to me, and I could do what I liked there, as long as I kept it clean, fed his cats and watered his flowers.

That morning I wanted to get things ready for the party, and when Mel asked me to accompany him I was really disappointed, but I couldn’t refuse. I knew he was too disorganized, and that if he went on his own he was bound to get into trouble. So I got dressed, then we had breakfast together and set off for the Railway district. The snow was too deep to cycle, so we walked. My friends and I never went by bus because you always had to wait too long for one to come; it was quicker on foot. As we walked we usually talked about all kinds of things – what was happening in the district or elsewhere in the town. But with Mel it was very hard to talk, because Mother Nature had made him incapable of constructing comprehensible sentences.

So our conversations took the form of a dialogue conducted entirely by me, with brief interjections of ‘Da’, ‘A-ha’, ‘M-m-m’, and other minimal expressions which Mel could emit without too much effort.

Every now and then he would stop dead, his whole body would freeze and his face would become like a wax mask: this meant that he hadn’t understood what I was talking about. I would have to stop walking too and explain: only then did Mel resume his usual expression and start moving and walking again.

Not that his normal face was a thing of beauty – it had a fresh scar running right across it, and a hole where his left eye should have been. This was the result of an accident he had caused himself. He had handled the explosive charge of an anti-aircraft shell clumsily, and it had blown up a few centimetres away from his face. The long series of surgical operations to reconstruct his face was not yet complete, and at this time Mel was still going around with that horrible gaping black hole on the left side of his face. It wasn’t until three years later that he got a false eye, made of glass.

Mel was always like that – there was no connection between his body and his mind. When he was thinking he had to stand still, otherwise he couldn’t reach a decent conclusion, and if he was performing any movement he wasn’t able to think. Because of this I used to call him ‘donkey’ – partly in jest and partly seriously. It was mean and despicable of me, I know, but if I resorted to such behaviour it was only because I had to put up with him from morning to evening, and explain everything to him, as if he were a little child. He never took offence, but would suddenly turn serious, as if he were thinking about the mysterious reason why I called him donkey. Once he took me aback, when, quite out of the blue, in a situation that had nothing to do with the fact that I always called him ‘donkey’, he said to me:

‘I know why you call me that! It’s because you think my ears are too long!’

Then he worked himself into a frenzy defending the size of his ears.

I said nothing in reply; I just looked at him.

He was hopeless, and he made things worse by smoking and drinking like an old alcoholic.

Anyway, that February morning Mel and I were walking along the snow-covered streets. When there’s not much humidity the snow is very dry and makes a funny noise: when you walk on it, it sounds as if you’re walking on crackers.

It was a sunny morning and the clear sky promised a fine day, but there was a light and constant wind which might upset expectations.

We decided to go through the Centre district and stop for a snack in a little place – a mixture between a bar and a restaurant – run by Aunt Katya, the mother of a good friend of ours who had died the previous summer, drowned in the river.

We often went to visit her, and so that she didn’t feel lonely we’d tell her how things were going in our lives. She was very attached to us, partly because we’d been with her son, Vitalich, on the day he’d died, and that had united us all.

Vitalich’s body hadn’t been found immediately. The search had been difficult because two days earlier a big dam had burst a hundred kilometres upstream.

That’s another story, but it’s one that deserves to be told.

It was summer, and very hot. The dam burst at night, and I remember waking up because I heard a terrible noise, like an approaching blizzard.

We came out of our houses and realized that the noise was coming from the river. We rushed to see and found gigantic waves of white water, like breakers on the ocean, coming downriver with increasing force, beating against the bank and sweeping away vessels and boats of all descriptions.

Some people had torches and shone them on the river. They picked out many objects swirling around in the water: cows, boats, tree trunks, iron drums, rags and pieces of cloth which looked like sheets. Here and there, in that chaos of water, there were pieces of furniture. Screams could be heard.

Our district, fortunately, was on the high bank, and the wall of water hadn’t been too devastating: everything was flooded there too, the houses and cellars were full of water, but there was no serious damage.

Next day the river was a complete mess, and we decided to take upon ourselves the task of cleaning it up, of removing everything we could, using our own strength. There were several motorboats still available which had been spared by the waves, because when the dam had burst they had been on the bank.

My own boats had escaped as well. I had two: one large and heavy, which I used for transporting big loads (we used to spend the whole summer plundering apple orchards and food stores in Moldovan territory…), and one small and narrow, which I used for fishing at night. It was swift and manoeuvrable; I used it to ‘guide the net’ – which means to keep moving against the current, trying to close off with the fishing net the central part of the river, where most of the fish came down.

The smaller boat had escaped completely because it was at my house, where I had to do a bit of work on it. The other had escaped because it was in a boathouse on the bank: some time ago I’d asked the keeper to restore it for me with a special varnish. The boathouse keeper’s name was Ignat; he was a good man, and a poor one. He’d been promising to paint that boat for me for a month, but had never found the time – he always had something more urgent to do or was getting drunk out of his mind.

We had eight boats in all, and we split up into two teams: two boats to a team, four boys to a boat.

The work was organized in such a way as to keep the river constantly ‘blocked’ by two boats, which fished out the rubbish. One team, equipped with long poles with big iron hooks on the ends, retrieved branches and tree trunks, bodies of animals and various large objects. All these things were then tied to the hull with ropes, and when there was no room for any more stuff the crew returned to the bank, where other boys were waiting, who jumped into the water and unloaded it all. On the bank they had created a huge bonfire. We threw the junk on the embers: within half an hour even the most sodden trunks dried out and, doused with some petrol, eventually caught fire.

By noon the fire had grown enormous; you couldn’t go near it or you’d have been scorched to death. With a large number of us working all together we threw onto the flames the body of a cow, as well as various carcases of sheep, dogs, chickens and geese.

Then, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, we fished out the first human body.

It was a middle-aged man, fully clothed, with his skull cracked open. Presumably he had fallen in the river and been swept away and had hit his head against a rock or a tree trunk.

Another team was equipped with little nets, and fished out the small objects that floated on the surface: jars of preserves, two-litre bottles, fresh fruit and vegetables of various kinds, apples with peaches, water-melons with potatoes, and then children’s toys, plastic buckets and spades, photographs, lots of paper, newspapers and documents, all mixed together in one huge ratatouille.

Then there were dozens and dozens of bottles of soft drinks, both fizzy and still, because a few kilometres upstream there was a bottling factory. The water had gone through there too, sweeping away the entire contents of the warehouse.

We decided to retrieve all the bottles, put them to one side and distribute them later among the people who had helped to clean up the river. But by the end of the first hour of work we had already fished out so many that we didn’t know where to put them. So two of our friends carted them away from the bank in big wheelbarrows, to free up the space for others, and dumped the bottles in the front yards of the people who lived nearby. They filled the entire first street of the district – about fifty houses – with bottles, and when they came up again with their barrows full, the people shouted:

‘No, there’s no more room here, boys, go on to the next house!’

We worked all day without stopping for a moment, and didn’t let up till the evening, when it was so dark we couldn’t see a thing.

We had thoroughly cluttered up the bank, it was almost impossible to walk along it: wherever you put your foot, you trod on something.

We stayed and slept by the fire.

Before we went to sleep we had a meal; some people had brought things from home, and there was plenty to drink – I think I drank more fizzy drinks that evening than I have in the rest of my life.

Afterwards we all lay on the ground, lit up by the firelight. We all kept burping because of all the pop we’d drunk.

Ten metres away from us lay the body of the man we’d fished out in the afternoon. We put a cross and a candle in his hands so that he wouldn’t be angry. Someone also brought him a glass of mineral water and a piece of bread, in accordance with the Siberian tradition of always offering something to the dead.

We decided that next day we’d better ask the people of the other districts to help us, since the river was still full of junk, as well as other corpses. With the warmth the bodies would start to decompose, and then it would be unbearable. We thought we’d be able to clear the river quickly with the help of other kids.

Next day, at around ten, the reinforcements arrived. Many boys from the Centre, and some from Caucasus and Railway: they had all come to help us, and we were pleased.

To avoid any risk of them falling in the water (many of them couldn’t swim – they hadn’t grown up on the riverside like us), we got them to work on the bank. They carried the stuff away in wheelbarrows or bags.

We sold a lot of bottles of pop to people who came in cars to pick it up and then sell it on to shops. We asked a low price, basing it not on the number of bottles we gave them but on the number of trips they managed to make in their cars: fifty roubles per trip, and they could take as much as they could carry. If they were quick they would earn three times as much. It was a good deal for everyone – we cleared the bank quickly, and even made a bit of money out of it, they got for next to nothing goods that they could sell on.

One of the boys who worked with us was Vitalich.

Although he lived in Centre, we were good friends with him.

He often came to bathe with us in the river; he was an excellent swimmer. He competed in rowing races, so he had an athletic physique and plenty of stamina, and when we swam together he never got tired; he could keep going upstream for hours.

Since he was so good, we got him to lead the team of boys who were untying the objects from the boat near the bank. You had to be a good swimmer to do this, because the boat couldn’t get very close to the bank. Once it was untied, the object was carried to the bank by five or six swimmers. This was a tricky operation because it was impossible to see underwater – the river was clogged with earth and leaves and other stuff, so you couldn’t even make out what the thing you were carrying was. One boy had been hurt the previous day – while he was moving a trunk, a branch had impaled his calf, he’d lost a lot of blood in the water, and before he’d even realized what had happened, he had passed out. Luckily the others had noticed immediately and had carried him to the bank straight away, so it had all ended well.

At noon some relatives of the people who had disappeared in the river arrived. Each of them walked round the body of the drowned man, till a woman recognized him:

‘It’s my husband,’ she said.

She was accompanied by the man’s brother and two other men, friends of the family. There was also a ten-year-old girl, a tiny little thing, with the black hair and eyes that so many Moldovans have.

The woman burst into tears, screaming and throwing herself on her husband’s body. She embraced him and kissed him. Her little daughter started crying too, but silently, as if she were embarrassed to do so in front of us.

The drowned man’s brother tried to calm the woman; he took her to the car, but she went on crying and screaming there.

The three men loaded the body onto the back seat of their car. They thanked us and offered us money, but we refused it. One of us filled the boot with bottles, and they looked at us with a question in their eyes.

‘That way you’ll save money on the drinks, at the funeral,’ we said to them.

At this they thanked us profusely. The woman started kissing our hands and to evade all those kisses we went back to work.

Other people, in the meantime, were looking for their own dead. One of them offered us his help and we accepted it: poor devils, they hoped they could help us recover the bodies of their dear ones. But it’s not easy to find a drowned person. Usually the bodies stay underwater for at least three days, and only later, when they begin to putrefy and fill with gas, do they rise to the surface. It had been pure chance that we had found the body of that poor Moldovan; he must have been carried up to the surface by a strong current, and if we hadn’t grabbed him straight away he would certainly have gone under again.

Vitalich, with five other boys, was pulling towards the bank a tree with a lot of branches sticking out of the water – you could tell that underneath it must be enormous.

They had decided to turn it round back to front, with the foliage towards the bank, so as to create more handholds for those who had to grasp it from the land.

While they were turning it, Vitalich got his foot tangled up in the branches. He managed to shout, to let the others know that he’d got caught, but suddenly the tree worked like a propeller: it rolled over with all its weight, pulling Vitalich under.

We couldn’t believe it.

Everyone jumped into the water to get him out, but he was no longer there, either close to the tree or anywhere else, for several metres around.

We immediately blocked off the surrounding area with the net, to stop the current carrying him away. Then we started to search the river bed.

We dived into the dirty water, where you couldn’t see a thing, at the risk of crashing into something. One of us did indeed get hit by a trunk, but luckily not too hard.

Of Vitalich, however, there was no trace.

I remember continually diving into the water: I went right down to the bottom, some five or six metres, and groped with my hands in the void.

Suddenly I found something, a leg! I gripped it tightly, resting it against my body, and bending down I put my feet on the river bed; I gave myself a hard shove, as if I were suddenly releasing a spring, and a second later found myself back on the surface.

Only then did I realize that it was Mel’s leg I had grabbed. His head was sticking out of the water and he was looking at me in bemusement.

I lost my temper and punched him in the head, and he responded in kind.

We didn’t manage to find Vitalich’s body in the first hour of searching.

We were all tired and irritable, many had started quarrelling among themselves, insults flew, and everyone wanted to shake off the blame by putting it on others. At times like these, when everyone is totally disloyal, you begin to see what people are really like, and you feel disgust for what you are and where you are.

I had lost all feeling in my arms and legs and couldn’t swim any more, so I returned to the bank and lay down.

I don’t remember how, but I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was evening. Someone was asking me if I was okay. It was my friend Gigit; he had a bottle of wine in his hand.

The others were sitting round the fire getting drunk.

I felt full of strength again and asked Gigit if Vitalich’s body had been found. He shook his head.

Then I went over to the others and asked them why they were drinking, when our friend’s body was still in the river.

They looked at me indifferently; some were pissed out of their minds, most were tired and depressed.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I’m going to cast the nets at the Scythe.’

The Scythe was a place about twenty kilometres downstream. They called it that because at that point the river described a wide curve resembling a scythe. On that bend the water stopped and flooded the bank, so that the current seemed almost stationary.

Everything carried away by the current fetched up there sooner or later. By blocking the passage along the river bed, we could recover Vitalich’s body.

The only problem was that with the flood the river had filled up with all that junk, so the net would have to be changed continually, otherwise it would get too full and there would be a risk of breaking it when you pulled it up.

Mel, Gigit, Besa and Speechless came with me. We went in my two boats, taking my net and Mel’s.

Nets that are used for fishing out drowned people are thrown away afterwards, or kept only to be used on another sad occasion.

I had a dozen different nets for different uses; the best were the river-bed ones, which could support heavy weights and stay in the water for a long time. They had three superimposed layers, for more effective catching, and were very thick.

I took the best river-bed net that I had and we set off.

We cast the net all night, and kept clearing it of rubbish: there were all sorts of things at the bottom of the river, including many carcases of various kinds of animal. But the worst problem was the branches, because when they got stuck in the net it was hard to get them out, and they broke the mesh.

Our hands remained wet until morning; we hardly had time to dry them before they got wet again, because as soon as you finished clearing the net on one side it was already full on the other, so you would rush over there, and as soon as you emptied it you would have to go back to where you’d been before.

Eventually Gagarin arrived with the others to take over from us. We were exhausted – out on our feet. We threw ourselves down on the grass, and fell asleep instantly.

At about four o’clock in the afternoon Gagarin and the others found Vitalich’s body.

It was covered in scratches and cuts; the right foot was broken, and a bit of bone was sticking out. Vitalich was blue, like all drowned people.

We called the people of our district. They took him home to his mother. We went with them, to tell her how it had happened. She was distraught; she wept continuously and embraced us all together, squeezing us so hard that it hurt. I think she understood of her own accord, or perhaps one of the boys of the Centre had told her, how hard we had worked to find her son’s body. She kept thanking us, and I was touched to hear her say: ‘Thank you, thank you for bringing him home.’

I couldn’t look her in the face, I was so ashamed at having slept when I should have been searching for her son’s body.

We were all shocked, shattered. We couldn’t believe that fate had taken a person like Vitalich away from us.

And so, whenever we were anywhere near the Centre, we would always drop in on Aunt Katya, Vitalich’s mother.

She wasn’t married: her first partner, Vitalich’s father, had been on the point of marrying her when he’d been called up into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, where he had been reported missing when she was still pregnant.

Aunt Katya ran that little place I mentioned earlier, a kind of restaurant, and lived with a new partner, a good man, a criminal, who dealt in various kinds of illegal trade.

Whenever we went to see her we always took her some flowers as a present because we knew she was very fond of them.

One day she had told us that what she would like more than anything else in the world was to have a lemon tree. We had decided to get her one; the only problem was that we didn’t know where to get one from, in fact none of us had ever seen a lemon tree.

So someone had advised us to try in a botanic garden, because it would have plants that grew in warm countries. After a bit of time and exploration we identified the nearest botanic garden: it was in Belgorod, in Ukraine, on the Black Sea, three hours’ journey from our home.

We set off in a highly organized group. There were about fifteen of us: everybody wanted to take part in the lemon expedition, because everybody liked Aunt Katya and tried to help her and please her in every way possible.

When we got to Belgorod we bought just one ticket for the botanic garden: one of us entered, went to the toilet and passed the ticket out of the window to another member of the group, and so on, till we were all inside.

We tagged on behind a visiting school party and approached our objective. It was a fairly small tree, a little higher than a bush, with green leaves and three yellow lemons dangling in the wind.

Mel immediately said the lemons were fake and had been stuck on with glue for appearance’s sake, and that the tree was just an ordinary bush. We had to stop and quickly examine the tree, to see if those damned lemons were real or not. I smelled all three of them myself: they had a characteristic scent of lemon.

Mel got a cuff round the ear from Gagarin and was forbidden to speak until the end of the operation.

We grabbed the pot and went up to the second floor of a building on the edge of the garden. We opened a window and carefully tossed the little tree on to the roof of a lockup garage. We jumped down from there ourselves and ran to the station, clutching that heavy pot with the tree inside it. In the train we realized that despite all the knocks and shakes the lemons hadn’t come off: we were so pleased not to have lost them…

When we brought Aunt Katya our present she wept with joy, or perhaps she was weeping because she’d seen the stamp of the botanic garden on the pot which we had carelessly failed to remove. At any rate, she was so delighted that when she picked her first ripe lemon she invited us all round for a cup of lemon tea.

So on that day too – my thirteenth birthday – as Mel and I were walking across town on our way to the Railway district, we thought of taking her a plant, and called in at old Bosya’s shop.

We always bought our plants and flowers for Aunt Katya in his shop; since we had no idea what they were called, we always asked him to write down their names on a piece of paper, so that we wouldn’t buy the same thing twice.

Every five plants, Bosya allowed us a small discount, or gave us some packets of old seeds, which were no longer any use because they were all dry. We took the seeds anyway and made a detour via the police station. If we found the police cars parked outside the gate we’d pour the seeds into their petrol tanks: the seeds were light and didn’t sink to the bottom straight away, and they were so small that they could pass through the filter of the petrol pump, so when they reached the carburettor the engine would stall. So we made good use of what in other circumstances would have been thrown away.

Grandfather Bosya was a good Jew, respected by all the criminals, although apart from having a flower shop (which didn’t sell much), nobody knew exactly what he did, so secret did he keep his affairs. It was rumoured that he had links with the Jewish community of Amsterdam and smuggled diamonds. However, we never had any actual proof of this, and we always used to tease him when we went to his shop, trying to find out what he really did. It had become a tradition: we tried to get him to talk and every time he succeeded in avoiding the issue.

We would say:

‘Well, Mr Bosya, what’s the weather like in Amsterdam?’

And he would reply in an off-hand manner:

‘How would I know that, a poor Jew like me who doesn’t even possess a radio? Though even if I did have one I wouldn’t listen to it: I’m so old now that I can’t hear a thing – I’m going deaf… Oh, how I wish I could go back to the days when I was young like you, and just play around and have a good time… By the way, what have you boys been up to lately?’

And it always ended with us, like a bunch of idiots, telling him about our own doings instead of hearing about his, and leaving his shop with a vague sensation of having been tricked.

He had a real talent as a conman, and we fell for it every time.

The flowers in old Bosya’s shop weren’t all that special; I reckon some of them had been there for years. The shop was a long, narrow cubby-hole, with wooden shelves crammed with old plants that no one ever bought. When you entered you felt as if you’d landed in the middle of a jungle; a lot of the plants had grown so much their leaves intertwined with those of the ones next to them, and all the plants together formed a kind of huge bush.

Bosya was a twisted, thin old man; he wore glasses as thick as the armour of a tank and through the lenses his eyes seemed monstrously large. He always wore a black jacket, a white shirt with a black bow-tie, black trousers with impeccably ironed creases and shiny black shoes.

Despite his age (he was so old even my grandfather called him ‘uncle’), his hair was quite black, and he kept it very neat, cut in the style of the 1930s, under a thin layer of brilliantine.

He always used to say that the true weapon of every gentleman is his elegance: with that you could do anything – rob, kill, burgle and lie – without ever being suspected.

When the little bell on the door of the shop rang, Bosya would get up from his chair behind the counter, creaking like an old car changing gear, and advance towards the customer with his hands wide apart, like Jesus does in those sacred paintings, to indicate acceptance and compassion. He looked funny when he walked, because he had a comical face – smiling, but with sad eyes, like those of a dog with no master. And with every step he uttered a sound, one of those groans that old men full of aches and pains utter when they move.

All in all he filled me with sadness: a mixture of melancholy, nostalgia and pity.

When we entered his shop old Bosya would emerge from his jungle and, not seeing who had come in, set off as usual with a saintly aspect, but as soon as his eyes fell on our disreputable faces, his expression would instantly change. First the smile would disappear, to be replaced by a weary grimace, as if he were having difficulty in breathing, then his whole body would become twisted, his legs a little bent, and he would start waving his hands as if to refuse something that we’d offered him. He would turn his back on us and return to the counter, saying in a quavering voice and with a slight hint of irony, in a Russian accent contaminated by the Jewish dialect of Odessa:

‘Shob ya tak zhil, opyat prishli morochit yayza…’

Which meant, ‘What a life I have to live!’ – a Jewish expression, which they stick in everywhere – ‘You’ve come to pester me again…’

That was his way of welcoming us because, in reality, he was very fond of all of us.

He too enjoyed not letting us trick him. We always tried, but Bosya, with his wisdom and his Jewish cunning, which in his case had something humble and worldly-wise about it, would get us to fall into his trap, and sometimes we would only realize it later, after we’d left the shop. He was a genius at mind games, a real genius.

Since he always complained that he was blind and deaf, we used to provoke him by asking him what the time was, hoping he’d look at the watch he wore on his wrist. But without batting an eyelid he would reply:

‘How can I know what time it is if I’m a happy person? Happy people don’t count time, because in their lives every moment passes with pleasure.’

Then we would ask him why he wore a watch, if he never looked at it, and if he didn’t care about the passing of time.

He would put on an astonished expression and look at his watch as if he were seeing it for the first time, and then reply in a humble tone:

‘…Oh, this isn’t a watch… It’s older than I am; I don’t even know if it works…’

He would put it to his ear, hold it there for a moment and then add:

‘…Well, I can hear something, but I don’t know if it’s the ticking of the hands or that of my old heart running down…’

Bosya’s wife was a nice old Jewish lady called Elina. She was a very intelligent woman who had worked as a schoolmistress for many years and had taught my father and his brothers. They all spoke of her affectionately, and even many years later they still respected her authority. The first time my father killed a policeman – in fact he killed two – she boxed his ears, and he knelt down at her feet to ask her forgiveness.

Bosya had a daughter, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Her name was Faya, and she too was a schoolmistress. She taught foreign languages, English and French. But she had grown up with the idea that she was ill, because Bosya and Elina had forbidden her to do all the things that normal children did. She was unmarried and still lived with her parents; she was a calm and very cheerful person. She had a gorgeous figure: hips and curves that seemed to have been drawn with a pencil, so perfect were they, a fabulous mouth, small and with the lips slightly parted and well defined, big black eyes, and wavy hair, which hung down to her bottom. But the most spectacular thing was the way she moved. She seemed like a cat; she made every gesture with a grace all of her own.

I was obsessed by her, and whenever I saw her in the shop I tried to find some pretext for standing near her. I would go and talk to her about the plants or anything else, just to feel her close to my skin.

She would smile at me; she was happy to talk to me and she understood that I liked her. Only later, at sixteen, did I pluck up the courage to get really close to her, by talking about literature. We started seeing each other, and exchanging books, and before long we developed a relationship which polite people usually call ‘intimate’, but which in my district was described with a different phrase altogether: ‘dirtying the sheets together’.

But that’s another story, which deserves to be told separately, and not here.

The story that should be told here is that of old Bosya’s life.

In his youth old Bosya was a bander – the term used at the beginning of the century for a member of Jewish organized crime. The word is derived from banda, which in Russian means ‘gang’.

In the 1920s and 1930s, in Odessa, the Jewish gangs were among the strongest and the best organized: they ran all the smuggling operations and the affairs of the harbour. Their members were united by strong religious feelings and by a code of honour, a kind of internal set of regulations called the koska, a term which in the old Jewish dialect of Odessa means ‘word’, ‘law’ or ‘rule’. In short, contravening the koska was a good way of committing suicide.

In the mid-1930s the Soviet government began systematically combating crime all over the territory, and they dispatched to Odessa – which was deemed to be one of the towns worst affected by rackets and organized crime – special squads which devised a battle tactic called podstava, which means ‘done on purpose’. Through infiltrators they provoked internal conflicts within the gangs themselves.

Donnie Brasco, the famous movie gangster played by Johnny Depp, certainly couldn’t have imagined that his Soviet precursors had exploited the work of undercover agents not in order to obtain information but to create by artificial means situations where criminals went to war against each other and killed each other on an industrial scale. No, Donnie Brasco would never have dreamed of it.

In this way many of the gangs and criminal communities in Odessa were eliminated. Only the Jewish community managed to survive, because there were no Jews in the police force and no one else knew the Jewish culture, language and traditions well enough to be able to pass for one of them.

Later, when the power of the police grew in Odessa and began to threaten the Jews as well, they pooled their forces to form two big gangs, each with thousands of members.

One, the more famous, was led by the legendary criminal Benya Krik, alias ‘the King’, and specialized mainly in robberies and burglaries. The other was headed by an old criminal called Buba Bazich, alias ‘the Squint’, and dealt only in illegal financial dealing.

These two organizations worked very well together, and the police could do nothing against them. Before long they had taken over Odessa, and the Jewish community became one of the most powerful throughout the southern USSR, and especially in Ukraine.

In October 1941, when the German and Romanian occupation forces entered Odessa, most of the Jews were deported to the concentration camps and exterminated.

The criminals joined the partisan units, hiding in the underground tunnels which ran all the way across the city and right down to the sea. They hit the enemy at night, with sabotage actions: they blew up their railway lines, derailed trains carrying arms and provisions, torched and sank ships, and kidnapped and killed senior German officers, often capturing them while they were intimately engaged with the prostitutes of Odessa, who for the occasion had turned into skilful spies.

Bosya was there, in those underground tunnels.

Sometimes, when we dropped in at his shop, Bosya would tell us about the Odessa resistance; he said that for several years they had all lived in the tunnels under the city, without ever seeing the light of day. The Germans, he said, were constantly blowing up the tunnels to prevent the partisans from carrying out their sabotage attacks, but each time they shook off the dust and dug new passages.

Bosya had met his wife in those tunnels. Elina had been with her Jewish family, who had been freed by the partisans: they had fallen in love and got married there, underground. He used to say – perhaps joking, perhaps not – that when they had finally come out of the tunnels they had forgotten what the sunlight was like, and his young wife, after taking a good look at his face, had said to him:

‘I’d never noticed you had such a long nose!’

They wanted a child, but for years after the war didn’t succeed in having one, and were sad about this. They tried all the treatments, but in vain. So one day they decided to go and see an old gipsy woman who lived with her blind niece. People said this gipsy woman could cure diseases with magic and with folk remedies – that she was a kind of witch, but very knowledgeable. The gipsy told Bosya that neither he nor his wife had any disease, that they were only suffering from unpleasant memories. She advised them to leave Odessa and settle somewhere else, in a place where there was nothing that linked them with the past.

For a long time they didn’t take this advice from the gipsy seriously, and besides, it was very difficult for them to break away from the community. Only in the late 1970s did they decide to leave Odessa and move to Bender, our town, where Bosya set up his little business and devoted himself to those mysterious activities about which nobody knew anything precise, but which soon made him rich.

And then, when Bosya and his wife were at an age when people usually become grandparents, Faya was born.

The three of them made a lovely family, and as Grandfather Kuzya often said, they were ‘people who know how to live happily’.

So – to return to our story – on that cold February morning Mel and I called in at Bosya’s shop to buy a plant, and he, as always, welcomed us with kind words:

‘Dear me, haven’t you got anything better to do in such cold weather?’

It was better for me to do the talking, because a dialogue between Mel and old Bosya would have been rather complicated.

‘We’ve come about Aunt Katya. On business.’

Bosya peered at me over his spectacles and said:

‘Thank goodness somebody still manages to do a bit of business! I’ve been knocking my head against these walls all my life and have never managed to do any at all!’

I gave in at once, without even attempting any repartee; trying to get the better of him was like trying to outrun a cheetah.

As always, pushing a plate towards us, with a somewhat nonchalant gesture, he offered us his revolting, ancient sweets. He knew perfectly well that they were awful; it was a ritual piece of mockery. We took them every time: we would fill our pockets and he would watch us, smiling, and repeating the words:

‘Eat them, boys, eat them! But mind you don’t break your teeth…’

When his wife caught him playing that cruel trick, she would get angry with him and insist that we empty our pockets and throw the sweets in the rubbish bin. Then Elina would take us to her house and offer us tea with biscuits filled with butter cream, the best biscuits in the world.

A few months earlier I had let Bosya in on the secret of his sweets, and he had been astonished, because he had thought that through all those years we had eaten them. ‘We used them as stones,’ I told him, ‘to fire with our catapults.’ At the windows of the police station, to be precise: they were deadly, especially the raspberry-flavoured ones. One evening I had fired one at Mel’s knee as a joke: it had swollen up, and for six months he’d had to keep having the water drained from his knee with a syringe.

Mel and I took our sweets in silence and chose a small plant to give to Aunt Katya.

But I can’t mention catapults like that without explaining exactly what our catapults were like.

Each of us made his own catapult, from start to finish, so they were all different and reflected in some way the individuality of their owners. The frame of the catapult had to be made exclusively of wood. A particular luxury was a thin frame, made of a pliant but strong wood. Everyone had his own little tricks which he kept to himself, but if someone liked another boy’s catapult he could buy it or be given it as a token of friendship.

The catapult always had to be kept in your pocket, like your knife; not until the age of thirteen or fourteen was it replaced by a gun. But I carried my catapult around with me even later, till I was eighteen.

When my grandfather had been in Siberia he had made pipes for tobacco, using the roots of local trees, or various kinds of bush. With his help we had found a type of wood that was perfect for catapults and this was my great strategic secret; my friends tried repeatedly to make me talk but I always held out, like a brave Soviet partisan in a Fascist prison.

To make the elastic we generally used old bicycle inner tubes, but often they didn’t produce enough power in the shot. Much better were the tourniquet bandages that we found in military first-aid packs: the ones that are used for compressing the arteries, to stop blood loss. If these bandages were properly attached, we could shoot a round stone or steel bolt – or one of Grandfather Bosya’s sweets – over a hundred metres through a window, and it might even break something inside the room.

But the most deadly elastic of all was an invention of mine: the one made from Soviet army issue gas masks.

Fixing the elastic on, too, was something that each of us did in our own way; I preferred a secure but complicated form of attachment, and I never got hit in the eye or on the nose by the elastic, which is very painful. I used a thin thread, wound round the elastic a number of times and tied with a simple fisherman’s knot. To make it extra secure I then smeared it with a little chewed-up bread, which created a kind of substance which was like glue but didn’t dry the thread.

In the middle of the elastic you fixed the piece of leather where you would put the object you wanted to fire. I used leather which was not very thick but was tough, because if it was too thick it would crack and eventually break.

There were a lot of little tricks for improving the ballistic capability of your catapult, once you had a good basic structure. For example, whenever possible, I always used to damp the frame of the catapult before firing it; that way it was softened and I could be confident of using it to maximum effect without breaking it. Then I would grease all the knots of the catapult: this guaranteed more precision, because it eliminated those little movements of dry materials which might influence the trajectory.

I invented the method of setting fire to the cars in the yard of the police station using a catapult. The yard was surrounded by a very high wall, and in order to fire something into it you had to venture too close and they would, inevitably, catch you as soon as they saw you arrive. Molotov cocktails were too heavy to throw, and whenever we tried they didn’t even reach halfway up the wall before smashing. We would always end up exchanging disconsolate looks, thinking that all the effort we’d made to prepare those bottles was burnt up in an instant against that grey wall. We had begun to lose heart, until one day I came across some liquor belonging to my uncle in the cupboard. What I found was a lot of small bottles containing various kinds of spirit – those little bottles for alcoholic dwarves. I emptied some of them; after all my uncle was in jail, and in any case he wouldn’t have scolded me, because I was making good use of them. I made a mini-molotov, then I constructed a special catapult, slightly stronger than usual, and after carrying out some preliminary tests, which it passed with flying colours, I prepared a box full of mini-molotovs (which we called ‘mignons’) and ten catapults for firing them.

We broke into an old abandoned printing works near the police station and from there we had a perfect view of our targets. We positioned ourselves carefully, and like a battery of howitzers we fired the first shot. Ten of us did the shooting; one boy would pull back the catapult with the little bottle in it and another boy standing behind him would light his bottle and that of the next shooter, using two cigarette lighters which he held at the ready. All our actions were perfectly synchronized. Our little bottles flew spectacularly, whistling like bullets as they disappeared over the wall of the police station. When I heard the small explosions followed by the cries of the cops and the first signs of black smoke, which rose in the air like fantastic dragons, I felt like bursting into tears, I was so happy.

Our position was ideal: before our victims realized what had happened, we had already fired off our whole arsenal and ridden calmly homeward on our bikes.

It was the talk of the town: ‘There’s been an attack on the police station,’ said one. ‘Who was it?’ asked another. ‘A gang of strangers, apparently,’ replied a third – and we felt very important; every time I heard someone talking about that episode I wanted to shout in his face, ‘It was us, us!’

I was proud, no doubt about it. I thought I was a genius and for some time after I behaved towards my friends like a general towards his army.

After that, we set fire to the police station car park a few more times, but then the police covered it with wire netting, so our molotovs couldn’t get through. Many bounced on the netting and then hit the ground, plof!, on the outer side of the wall, but without exploding. It wasn’t very interesting any more.

For a while we tried to think up something new, but then suddenly we grew up and someone suggested simply shooting the policemen with guns. That was interesting, too, but it wasn’t like burning them with mini-molotovs. There was something medieval about those ‘mignons’ which made us feel like knights fighting valiantly against dragons.

And so, as we walked towards Aunt Katya’s restaurant with our beautiful plant, we crossed the Bridge of the Dead. At that time this was a stretch of asphalted road with some old stones sticking out of it, but once it had been a real bridge. When the bridge was destroyed, it had first been covered with earth and then asphalted over, but for some inexplicable reason the stones kept breaking back up to the surface, making holes in the asphalt. It was weird to see those large old black, shapeless patches sticking out of the cracked asphalt. An old man of our area had told me the mystery could easily be explained as an ‘engineering error’. But when I was a child I preferred another story which explained that strange movement of the stones of the Bridge of the Dead as a supernatural phenomenon.

The story ran that during the nineteenth century the workers in our town, tired of being exploited by a rich and noble lord who had a reputation comparable to that of Count Dracula, had revolted. The pretext for their revolt had been the fact that the master had raped a young peasant girl. The girl had not, like many others before her, suffered in silence, but had told everyone the truth, even at the risk of being despised and of losing her dignity. The peasants and the workers, however, had not despised her but had supported her and risen up immediately. They had killed the guards and entered the master’s palace, then dragged him out of bed and taken him into the street, where they had kicked and beaten him to death. Afterwards, they had tied his body to the palace gate and prevented his family from removing it. ‘It must rot up there,’ they had said.

The next day, the revolt had been put down. But the people said that if the master’s body were taken down from the gate and buried under a cross, a curse would fall on all his family. Naturally nobody had heeded those words, and the master had been buried with full honours, like a hero who had fallen in battle.

After a few months his wife had fallen ill and died. His eldest son, now a young man, had also died not long afterwards, having fallen off his horse. Finally, some time later, his daughter had died while giving birth to her first child, a baby boy, who did not survive either.

The palace had been abandoned and soon fell into ruins: nobody wanted to live there any more. The land of that nobleman was occupied by the peasants. Over the family tombs they built a bridge, which was accordingly known as ‘The Bridge of the Dead’.

The legend says that every night the ghosts of the family gather to take the body of that cruel man out of the ground, so that they can hang it up on the gate again, because they want to lay the curse and be able to rest in peace. But they never succeed in getting him out, because the bridge was built over his grave, and all the ghosts manage to do in one night is to pull up a few stones, which the next day the people, when they pass over the bridge, put back in place.

When we were small we sometimes went hunting for those ghosts at night. To keep up our courage we carried our knives, as well as various ‘magic’ Siberian objects, such as the dried foot of a goose, or a tuft of grass taken from the river bank during a night of the full moon.

As we hid in a little ditch and waited for the ghosts we filled the time with horror stories to frighten ourselves so much that we stayed alert. But we soon all fell asleep, one after another.

The first would say:

‘Wake me up if you see something, boys,’ then we’d all fall asleep, lying at the bottom of the ditch like corpses.

In the morning the one who had held out longest would tell the others some tall tale about what he had seen.

The others, of course, would be angry.

‘Why didn’t you wake us up, you idiot?’

‘I couldn’t move, or even open my mouth,’ he would claim. ‘It was like being paralysed.’

Mel had once told us that the ghosts had carried him up into the air and flown him around the town. The idea of Mel flitting around in the company of aristocratic ghosts from the previous century made a deep impression on me.

Whenever we passed that way I would remind Mel of the story of his flight. He would gape at me.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ And I’d burst out laughing, flapping my arms to imitate the movement of the wings, whereupon Mel wouldn’t be able to restrain himself any longer and he too would start laughing.

Crossing the Bridge of the Dead, both flapping our arms, we finally reached the street where Aunt Katya’s restaurant was.

We found her among the tables, serving her regular customers – old criminals who lived on their own and went to eat in her restaurant every day. They had spent so long in prison that they had got used to the collective criminal life, and consequently they tried to be together all the time, though you would hardly have thought it, because they looked as if they couldn’t stand each others’ company. The expressions on their faces seemed to indicate great unhappiness, but in fact those were simply their normal expressions. I think they missed prison, in a way, and even missed the hardship in which they had grown accustomed to living. They continued to live the life of prisoners, despite having been free for years. Many of them couldn’t get used to the rules of the civil world, to freedom. Almost all of them preferred to live in one-room flats where they’d had the walls of the bathroom and the kitchenette knocked down to create a single space that reminded them of their cell. I knew some old men who even put barbed wire and bars across their windows, because otherwise they felt uneasy and couldn’t get to sleep. Others slept on wooden bunks like those of the prisons and always left the tap running, as it had in their cells. Their whole life became a perfect imitation of the one they had lived when they were incarcerated.

Aunt Katya allowed all those criminals to re-create a kind of make-believe prison in her restaurant, because they were her regular customers, but also because she loved every one of them and, as she herself used to say:

‘I wouldn’t presume to re-educate elderly people.’

So entering Aunt Katya’s restaurant was like entering a prison cell. All the men sat with their heads bowed, as if something were preventing them from looking up. This is an unmistakable mark of the ex-convict: he’ll always keep his head down, because in prison you spend most of the time lying on bunks and you have to be careful not to bang your head on the bunk above. Even people who have only spent a few years in jail don’t find it easy to break this habit when they come out.

The old men usually played cards at Aunt Katya’s, but not with normal playing cards: they used kolotushki, hand-painted cards made in prison.

They all dressed the same, in grey, and all wore the fufayka, the standard heavy jacket, which is thick and warm.

As in their cells, they smoked by passing a cigarette from one to another, even though they could afford to smoke one each. Out of that smoke, which filled the whole restaurant, their ravaged faces loomed, wearing an expression that was an eternal question, as if they’d been struck by some strange fact which they couldn’t make head nor tail of: wide eyes that looked at you and in the space of three seconds gave you a complete X-ray, and knew who you were even better than you did yourself.

Among themselves they talked only in slang and in fenya, the old Siberian criminal language, but they spoke quietly and little; they communicated more in gestures, mostly secret ones.

They called Aunt Katya ‘mama’, to emphasize the importance of her role and of her authority.

They followed many of the prison rules of behaviour; for example, they never went to the toilet while someone was eating or drinking, even though the toilet wasn’t in the same room but on the other side of the yard. Nor did they ever discuss politics, religion, or differences between nationalities.

There was strict hierarchy among them: the highest Authorities sat near the windows and enjoyed the best places; the others sat nearer to the doors. The ‘garbage’ – people considered to be beneath contempt – and those who had been ‘lowered’, or demoted to the lowest ranks of society, were not admitted: outside prison there is not the same compulsion to share the same space as there is inside. There were only two or three ‘sixths’[8] – a kind of slave, people who performed tasks deemed unworthy of a criminal: they were allowed to touch money with their hands, so they paid for everyone’s meals, taking the money from a common kitty. Whenever anyone ran out of cigarettes, the ‘sixth’ had to hurry off to get him some more: a service for which he was paid but also treated with slight contempt – not offensive, but indicative, to remind him of his place on the hierarchical scale. It was strange to see these old men being treated like little boys; they were always on the alert, constantly looking to see whether anyone in the room needed them. When they brought the cigarettes they would bow, with a humble expression on their faces, wait for the highest Authority to open the packet and offer them a few for the service, and then, thanking him, return to their place, walking backwards, like crayfish, so as not to turn their back on the person with whom they had been dealing.

So when you entered Aunt Katya’s restaurant you had to follow prison rules, and behave as you would when you entered a real cell. It may seem ridiculous, but for those people, for those elderly ex-convicts, it was a sign of respect, a way of showing them that you had come with good intentions and were astute.

When you enter a cell you have to know how to greet people in an appropriate manner. You can’t just say ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’: if you do, the criminals will immediately understand that you know nothing of their culture, and if you’re lucky they’ll dismiss you as ‘someone who’s just passing through’, who is irrelevant to them; they won’t communicate with you, they’ll act as if you don’t exist. You must greet them like this: open the door, take just one step and then stop – woe betide you if you take another step. Then say ‘Peace to your (or our) house’ or ‘Peace and health to honest vagabonds’ (this is a safe variant, worthy of a true criminal), or ‘Good health to the honest company’, ‘It’s the hour of your joys’: in short, there are many forms of greeting used in the criminal world. After saying the appropriate phrase, it’s essential not to move, but to wait for the reply. Usually the criminals don’t reply immediately; they let a few moments pass, to assess your reaction. If you’re clever you’ll keep calm, gaze at a point in front of you and never look anyone in the face. The highest Authority, or one of his men, will eventually answer you, again with a set phrase: ‘Welcome with honesty’ or ‘May the Lord guide you’, or ‘Enter with your soul’.

According to the rules, before doing anything else you must personally greet the highest Authority. In my case, on this occasion I knew him. He was sitting near one of the windows on the other side of Aunt Katya’s restaurant. He always sat there, with his companions.

All the people present belonged to the caste of the Men, who in the criminal hierarchy are also called Grey Seed. They are hardened criminals, alcoholics, simple people, thieves and murderers, who for personal reasons had never wanted to join the caste of Black Seed, whose members formed a kind of ‘aristocracy’ among the criminals.

In the criminal world Black Seed was a young but powerful caste, which had succeeded in exploiting the philosophy of personal sacrifice. Its members appeared to be pure and perfect men, who devoted their lives to the welfare of people in prison. They worshipped prison: they referred to it affectionately as ‘home’, ‘church’ or ‘mother’, and were happy to spend time there, even their whole lives. Whereas all the other castes, including that of the Siberian Urkas, despised prison and put up with detention as you might a misfortune.

Thanks to the enormous number of scum and lowlifes that had joined its ranks, Black Seed had become the largest caste in the Russian criminal world: but for every wise and good person that you could find among them, you would meet another twenty uncouth and sadistic ones, who showed off and threw their weight around in every possible situation.

Then there was another very unusual caste: Red Seed, whose members collaborated with the police and believed in the nonsense purveyed by the prison administrations, such as ‘redemption of the personality’. They were called ‘cuckolds’, ‘reds’, ‘comrades’, sucha, padla – all very pejorative words in the criminal community.

All the people in the middle were called Grey Seed, or neutrals. They were opposed to the police and observed the rules of criminal life, but they didn’t have the responsibilities, let alone the philosophy, of Black Seed, and they certainly didn’t want to spend their whole lives in prison.

The members of Black Seed were required to disown their relatives; they weren’t allowed to have either a home or a family. Like all the other criminals they idolized the figure of the mother, but many of them didn’t respect their own mothers; on the contrary, they treated them very badly. Many is the poor woman I’ve known with sons who, while they were in prison, declared to each other in a theatrical manner that the only thing they really missed was their mother and then, when they got out, turned up at home only to exploit her, and sometimes even rob her, because that is what their rule says: ‘Every Blatnoy – member of Black Seed – must take everything away from his home; only in this way can he prove that he is honest through and through…’

It was madness – mothers and fathers were robbed, threatened and sometimes even killed. A short and violent life, as the Black Seed described it: ‘Wine, cards, women, and then let the world come tumbling down…’, with no moral or social commitment. Their whole life becomes one long show, in which they must always demonstrate only the negative and primitive sides of their nature.

The balance between Grey Seed and Black Seed rests on a continual series of truces: the Men are more numerous, but the Blatnye are better organized in prison.

The caste of the Men has no hierarchy like that of Black Seed – respect is accorded to age and profession. The highest in rank are those who take the greatest risks – robbers and murderers of policemen. After them come the thieves, conmen, cheats and all the rest.

The Men take every decision together and follow rules of life similar to those of the Siberians, but they remain more neutral in every situation. Their motto is: ‘Our home is outside the village.’ Their criminal units are not called gangs, but ‘families’, and even in prison they form families where everyone is equal and shares everything; when necessary the families get together and become a power which knows no limits. Almost all prison riots are organized by them.

The highest Authority in that restaurant – whom I had to greet personally before doing anything else – was called Uncle Kostich, nicknamed ‘Shaber’. He was an old and experienced criminal, well-known all over the country; in our community and in my family he was highly thought of and treated with great affection. He was a calm, peaceful man with a very agreeable way of speaking. He expressed himself with patience and humility and was always clear and direct – if he had to tell you something he didn’t beat about the bush. He lived with his mother, a woman so old she seemed like a tortoise; she moved slowly but she was otherwise in very good physical shape. They owned a house and a bit of land. Uncle Kostich kept a lot of pigeons, and I went to see him now and then to swap some of mine with his. He was honest, and would always give me a few pigeons more. He would offer me chifir and then tell me a lot of interesting stories about his life. He had a daughter somewhere in Russia, but hadn’t seen her for a long time, and I think he was very sad about that.

In his youth, he told me, he hadn’t been a criminal; he used to work in a big sawmill, cutting tree trunks. But then one day he’d seen a boy get cut in two, when a trunk had knocked into him and he had fallen on the blade of a large saw. The foreman hadn’t allowed anyone to stop working even for a second; they had been forced to go on cutting the wood, getting spattered with their workmate’s blood. From that moment he’d begun to hate communism, collective work and everything the Soviet system represented.

He had been given his first prison sentence under an article of the penal code known in the USSR as the ‘Idler’. According to this article, anyone who was unemployed could be condemned as a criminal. So Kostich had been sent for three years to an ordinary regime prison in the town of Tver. During that period a war between castes was going on, and Black Seed was about to gain control of the prisons; at first not many were happy with this change, and the blood flowed like a river in spring. Kostich had tried to stay aloof from everyone, not to take sides, but gradually, as time passed, he had realized that it was impossible to live on your own in prison. He liked the Men better than the Blatnye because, he said, ‘they’re straightforward and don’t try to get anything by violence and bullying; they prefer to use words and common sense’. In prison he had joined a family which tried to live in a neutral manner, not siding with anyone in that war, but one day one of their elderly criminals had been killed by a young, ruthless Blatnoy, who wanted to weaken Grey Seed so that he could exploit its members, bending them to his own interests.

So the Men first organized a kind of peaceful resistance, and then, when they realized that this approach wasn’t producing the desired results, they decided to go to war. And they fought the war with knives. Many of them, there in prison, worked in the kitchens or as barbers (whereas the Blatnye didn’t work; it was against their rules), so they easily armed themselves with knives and scissors and wrought havoc among the Black Seed.

Kostich was very good at using a knife: he’d grown up in the country, and as a boy he’d learned to kill pigs thanks the teaching of an old First World War veteran who worked as a butcher and slaughtered pigs by running them through with a bayonet. So, after his first murders, Kostich earned his nickname ‘Shaber’ – the name of a knife. When he got out of prison, he already knew what he was going to do: he began a long career as a robber from ships on the rivers Volga, Don and Danube.

With Uncle Kostich I could speak freely, without worrying too much about rules of behaviour. Of course I was respectful, as I was towards any Authority, but I also took some liberties: I would tell him about my adventures and ask him a lot of questions, something that is not usually done in the criminal community.

Often he asked me to recite to him the poems of Yesenin, Lermontov and Pushkin, which I knew by heart, and when I’d finished he would say to his companions:

‘Did you hear that? This boy’s going to be an intelligent man one day, a scholar! God bless you, my son! Come on now, let’s hear the one about the eagle behind the bars again…’

It was his favourite piece, the poem by Pushkin which describes a prisoner’s state of mind, comparing it to that of a young eagle that has been raised in captivity and forced to live in a small cage. I used to recite it to him in a powerful tone and he would look me straight in the eye expectantly, his lips moving slowly, repeating the words after me. When I ended with the lines ‘Come, let’s fly away! We’re free birds! It’s time, brother, it’s time! There, where behind the clouds the mountain gleams white, there, where the blue of the sea is deepest, there, where I fly alone in the wind…’, he would clap his hands to his head and say in a very theatrical manner:

‘That’s just what it’s like, it’s true, that’s just what it’s like! But even if I could have my time over again, I’d do exactly the same!’

At these moments I found it moving to see how simple he was, and how beautiful and pure his simplicity was.

One day Kostich had beaten to death a couple of young junkies who lived in Centre, and who were guilty of having starved to death their four-month old baby, leaving him to die in a corner of their apartment, among the dirty rags and the clothes that needed washing.

That couple were famous in town for their arrogance. The girl was quite good-looking; she dressed very provocatively and behaved accordingly. Her husband, the son of the manager of a car factory in a big city in central Russia, was a university drop-out, a drug addict and a pusher; he was disliked by a lot of people because he spread his poison among the young.

The neighbours, who had been aware for some time that the baby was too thin and was always crying, saw them leave home one morning without the child and go to a bar, where they stayed all day. Suspecting the worst, they had knocked down the door and found that lifeless little body. At that point all hell broke loose.

The two parents were seized by the crowd, which would certainly have killed them had it not been for the intervention of the Guardian of Centre, who took them and drove them to his home, saying that they must be judged according to the criminal laws. In reality the Guardian only wanted to exploit the occasion to blackmail the manager of the factory and force him to pay up to save his son from certain death. Everyone, though they suspected something, preferred to keep quiet. Everyone except Kostich.

Kostich made a spectacular gesture: he turned up alone at the Guardian’s house, bare-chested, with a stick in his hands. The Guardian’s henchmen tried to stop him, threatening him with force, but he said just one thing:

‘Are you going to strike her?’ pointing at the Madonna with Child tattooed on his chest. They backed off and let him go in, and he beat those two unnatural parents to death, then threw them out of the window into the street, where the people trampled them underfoot till they were reduced to a pulp.

The Guardian was furious, but only half an hour later the highest Authorities in the town, including Grandfather Kuzya, proclaimed that Kostich was right and recommended to the Guardian a simple and drastic solution: to commit suicide.

A week later the manager of the factory arrived in town, with the intention of avenging his son. It was clear that he didn’t know much about our town, because he turned up with a gang of armed buffoons, made up of off-duty cops and soldiers. He had engaged them to carry out a punitive raid against the criminal who had killed his son. Well, they all disappeared in an alleyway, together with their three off-roaders. Nobody saw or heard anything; they entered the town and never left.

The authorities searched for them for a while: there were appeals in the newspapers, and on television they even showed the manager’s wife begging anyone who knew anything about her husband to speak out. Nothing came of it. As they say in our community: ‘drowned without even leaving any ripples in the water’.

Whenever I asked Grandfather Kuzya – not straight out, of course, but in a roundabout way – whether he thought the manager had died for a just cause, he would answer me with a saying which he must have been very fond of, since he repeated it on every possible occasion:

‘He who comes to us with the sword shall die by the sword.’

As he said this he would smile at me in his usual way, but with the brooding look of a man who holds many stories within him which he will never be able to divulge.

To return to our story, we made our way towards Uncle Kostich’s table. I walked quickly and Mel shuffled along behind me. Uncle Kostich immediately invited us to join him. It was a generous gesture and we accepted at once.

Just then Aunt Katya arrived, and showered us with kisses.

‘How are you, my sons?’ she asked, in her usual angelic voice.

‘Thank you, Aunt, everything’s fine… We were passing this way, so we decided to drop in to see how you were, and if you needed anything…’

‘I’m still here with my company, thank heavens…’ and she threw an affectionate glance at Uncle Kostich.

He took her hand and kissed its palm, as was customary in the old days as a sign of affection towards a woman – often your mother or sister. Then he said:

‘May Jesus Christ be with you, mother; we breathe thanks to the labours you make. Forgive us for everything, Katyusha; we’re old sinners, forgive us for everything.’

It was a real spectacle to witness these simple yet flamboyant gestures of respect and human friendship exchanged between people of such different backgrounds, united by loneliness in the midst of chaos.

Aunt Katya had sat down with us. The old man continued to hold her hand and, looking into the distance, over our heads, said:

‘My daughter must be the same age as you, do you know that, Katya? I hope she’s well, that she’s found her road, and that it’s a good and just road, different from mine…’

‘And from mine too…’ replied Aunt Katya, with a slight tremor in her voice.

‘God forgive me, poor fool that I am. What have I said, Katyusha, may God help you…’

She didn’t reply; she was on the point of tears.

We could only be silent and listen. The air was full of true and profound feelings.

What I liked about that circle, however violent and brutal it might be, was that there was no place for lies and pretence, cant and dissembling: it was absolutely true and involuntarily profound. The truth, I mean, had a natural, spontaneous appearance, not one that was cultivated or deliberate. The people were truly human.

After a short pause I said:

‘Aunt Katya, we’ve brought you something…’

Mel put on the table the little bag with the plant wrapped up in old Bosya’s rags to protect it from the cold.

She unwrapped the rags and on her face there appeared a smile.

‘Well, what do you think? Do you like it?’

‘Thank you, boys, it’s lovely. I’ll take it into the greenhouse straight away, otherwise with this cold…’ and she went away with the plant in her hands.

We were delighted, as if we’d performed a heroic act.

‘Well done, boys,’ Uncle Kostich said to us. ‘Never forget this holy woman. God only knows what it feels like to lose your children…’

When Aunt Katya came back she hugged us and you could see from her eyes that while she was in the greenhouse she’d been crying.

‘Well, what shall I feed you on today?’

The question was almost superfluous. Everything she cooked was delicious. Without thinking twice we ordered an excellent red soup with sour cream and bread made from durum wheat. It was good bread, as black as the night.

She brought us a full saucepan and put it in the middle of the table; the soup was so hot that the steam rose solid as a pillar. We helped ourselves with a big ladle, then added to our dishes a spoonful of sour cream, which was hard and yellowish from all the fat it contained. We took a piece of black bread, spread garlic butter on it, and away we went: a spoonful of soup and a bite of bread.

On these occasions Mel was capable of emptying a whole saucepan on his own. He ate quickly, whereas I chewed slowly. I always gave myself up entirely to the pleasure of it, and often, when I twirled the ladle around in the saucepan to get a second helping, I would hear it knock sadly against the empty sides. At these moments I was strongly tempted to break the ladle over the head of my insatiable companion.

After eating that soup, I always felt as if I’d been given a new lease of life; a stream of positive emotions flowed through my body, and I felt like lying down on a warm, comfortable bed and sleeping for ten hours.

But within five minutes the second course arrived: potatoes roasted with the meat in the oven, which were were floating in the melted fat and had a smell that went straight to your heart. And as usual, to accompany this course, there were three traditional dishes. Cabbages cut into long, thin strips and marinated in salt – quite delicious. My grandfather used to say they were a natural medicine against any disease, and that it was thanks to them that the Russians had won all the wars. I didn’t know how cabbages could cure diseases and with what military strategies they had won the wars, but they were tasty and, as we say, ‘they went down whistling’. The second dish was cucumbers, also marinated in salt – delicious, and as crunchy as if they’d just been picked off the plant, perfumed with many spices and herbs, fabulous. The third was grated white turnips with sunflower oil and fresh garlic. All these dishes were products of a peasant cuisine that was very poor in raw materials, but capable of exploiting them all in numerous different recipes. Then there were always on the table little dishes of fresh garlic, sliced onion, small green tomatoes, butter, sour cream, and plenty of black bread. For me, if heaven exists, it must include a table laden with delicacies, like that of Aunt Katya’s restaurant.

We didn’t dare to drink alcohol in front of her, because we knew it would offend her. So we drank kompot, a kind of fruit salad, a cocktail of apples, peaches, plums, apricots, cranberries and bilberries boiled for a long time in a big saucepan. It was made in summer, and for the rest of the year preserved in three-litre bottles with a hermetically sealed neck ten centimetres wide. It was kept cool in the cellars, then warmed up before it was drunk.

But every time Aunt Katya went away, Uncle Kostich added a bit of vodka to our glasses, with a wink:

‘You’re right not to let her see you…’ We obediently knocked back the mixture of vodka and kompot, and he laughed at the faces we made afterwards.

Lunch lasted an hour, maybe a little longer. At the end there was boiling hot tea, strong and black, with lemon and sugar. And apple cake, a marvel. Mel leaped at that cake like a German invader jumping on the chickens in the henhouse of a Russian peasant. But he promptly got a friendly slap from me and his hands withdrew and retreated under the table.

The task of slicing up the cake was mine – it was my birthday. I gave the first piece, out of respect, to Uncle Kostich, the second to his friend, an old criminal called ‘Beba’, who was a kind of silent, invisible shadow of his. Then, taking my time, very slowly, I served Mel, who was on the point of bursting: he was staring at his slice with intense concentration, like a dog who stares at the morsel of food in his master’s hands, following its every movement. It made me laugh, so without the slightest remorse I played on his patience, performing each gesture in slow motion. Eventually Mel lost control and his legs started trembling under the table in a nervous tic, so I said to him, very calmly:

‘Watch out, or you’ll knock it onto the floor.’

Everyone burst out laughing, Mel even louder than the others.

After the dessert it is customary to sit still for a quarter of an hour, ‘to accumulate a bit of fat’, as my grandfather used to say. And people talk about all kinds of things. Mel, however, couldn’t talk about anything, because to judge from the way he sat back from the table and slumped down in his chair, he had overdosed. That was why my uncle, ever since Mel had been small, had always called him ‘pig’, because like pigs Mel went into a kind of drunken state after eating.

So the only participants in the conversation were Uncle Kostich and I, with Beba occasionally putting in a word.

‘Well, is everything all right at home? How’s your grandfather, may God help him?’

‘Thank you, he still says his prayers; it’s a good thing the Lord always listens to us.’

‘And what happened about that poor lad Hook?’

Kostich was referring to something that had happened a few weeks earlier: one of our friends, who had just come of age, had got into a fight with three Georgians and seriously wounded one of them with his knife. There was always a bit of trouble with Caucasus; it wasn’t a real inter-district war, we only had it in for a group of reactionary Georgians. Hook wasn’t wrong to get into the fight, but he had made a mistake afterwards: he had refused to appear at a trial that had been organized by the Authorities of the town at the instigation of a relative of the wounded Georgian. Hook was angry and out of control, and so, very thoughtlessly, he had offended the local system of criminal justice. If he had gone before the Authorities and put his case, it would certainly have been resolved in his favour, but as it was the relative had convinced everyone that the Georgian had been attacked for no reason by a cruel, merciless Siberian.

Kostich was one of the Authorities involved in the trial, and was trying to understand why Hook had behaved like that.

‘What’s this boy like? You know him well, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Uncle, he’s a good friend of mine, we’ve been through all kinds of scrapes together. He’s always behaved very well to me and the others – like a brother.’ I was trying to save his face at least before one of the Authorities, hoping that Uncle Kostich would then influence the others. But I couldn’t go too far and give my word; besides, my word as a minor didn’t count for much.

‘Do you know why he behaved dishonestly towards good people?’

Kostich had asked me a question which we call ‘the one that tickles’ – that is, a direct question that you can’t not answer, even if you have nothing to do with it. I decided to express my opinion, irrespective of what had happened:

‘Hook’s an honest person; three years ago he got stabbed three times in the fight against the people of Parkan, because he covered Mel and Gagarin with his body. Mel was still a child – he could have been killed. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to him because he’s a bit of a loner, but he’s good-hearted and has never shown disrespect to anyone. I don’t know what happened with the Georgians: Hook was on his own, there was nobody with him. Maybe that’s partly why he felt betrayed. Three strangers – and guys from Caucasus, at that – attack you almost in front of your own house, in the heart of your own district… and none of your friends is there to help you stand up to them.’

I had told that story deliberately, about Hook’s sacrifice in defence of Mel, because I knew that these things count far more than many others. I hoped Kostich thought so too; after all, he was still a simple man and a terrible troublemaker.

‘Do you think he behaved rightly? Wouldn’t it have been better to settle the matter in words?’

This question was a trap laid specially for me.

‘I think it just happened like that. You know better than I do, Uncle, that every time is different. Until it happens to you, you can’t know how you’ll react.’

‘If he was right, why didn’t he want to appear before the others, to give his side of the story? He must think he’s in the wrong, he can’t be sure he behaved honestly…’

‘I think he was just scared of being attacked a second time. The first time outside his house, with knives, the second through the justice of the Authorities. He lost faith in Authority, he felt betrayed: they granted the Georgians’ request even though they knew he’d been knifed like that, three against one, and in his own district.’

At last I’d succeeded in saying what I thought.

Kostich looked at me for a moment expressionlessly, then smiled at me:

‘Thank goodness there are still some young delinquents in our old town… Remember this always, Kolima: it’s wrong to want to become an Authority, you’ll become one if you deserve it, if you were born for it.’

The question of Hook was settled three days later. The Authorities decided that the Georgians, by their request, had offended the honour of justice, and they proclaimed them ‘stinking goats’, an expression of extreme contempt in the criminal community. Those three quickly disappeared from Transnistria, but before leaving they threw a hand grenade into Hook’s house, while he was having supper with his old mother. Luckily the grenade came from a batch that was intended for use in military exercises: it had a red circle drawn on it with ink and there was no explosive charge, so it was about as dangerous as a brick. The Georgians didn’t know that; they’d bought it thinking it worked.

Although nobody had been killed, the people of our district had taken it as a grave insult to the community. And one evening Grandfather Kuzya said to me:

‘Watch the news; you might see something interesting.’

Among the latest headlines was a report from Moscow: seven men with criminal records, and of Georgian nationality, had been found murdered in the home of one of them – brutally shot while they were having their evening meal. The pictures showed an overturned table, furniture riddled with holes, bodies gashed with wounds. On the lampshade, a hand-painted Siberian hunting belt, and hanging from the belt the fake hand grenade. The journalist commented:

‘… a brutal massacre, no doubt a revenge attack by Siberian criminals.’

I remember that that evening, before going to bed, I took my hunting belt out of the cupboard, looked at it for a long time and thought, ‘How wonderful it is to be Siberian.’

After the conversation with Uncle Kostich I woke Mel up with a couple of slaps on the cheek. We thanked Aunt Katya and went on our way. She, as always, came out onto the steps outside the restaurant and waved to us till we disappeared round the corner.

Mel started pestering me; he was desperate to know what I’d talked about with Uncle Kostich. The idea of having to summarize the whole content of our conversation was almost unbearable, but when I looked at his innocent expression I couldn’t say no.

So I started to tell him the story, and when I got to the part where Uncle Kostich had asked me about Hook, he stopped and stood as stiff as a lamppost:

‘And you said nothing, didn’t you?’

He was angry, and this was a bad sign, because when Mel got angry we often ended up fighting, and since he was four times bigger than me I always came off worst. I only beat him once in my whole life, and we were only six years old at the time: I hit him with a stick, giving him a nasty gash on the head, taking advantage of the fact that he’d got his arms and legs trapped in a fishing net.

Now Mel was standing there, stock still on the road with a scowling face and fists clenched. I looked at him for a long time, but just couldn’t guess what might be going through his mind.

‘What do you mean, nothing? I said what I thought…’ Before I could finish the sentence he’d thrown me down on the snow and was pummelling me, shouting that I was a traitor.

While he was hitting me, I slipped my right hand into the inside pocket of my jacket, where I kept a knuckle-duster. I put my fingers right through the holes, then suddenly pulled out my hand and punched him hard on the head. I was a bit sorry to hit him right in the area where he already had so many aches and pains, but it was the only way of stopping him. Sure enough he released his grip and sat down beside me, on the snow.

I lay there panting, unable to get up, watching him closely. He was touching his head where I’d hit him and with a disgusted grimace he kept kicking me lightly with his foot, more out of scorn than with the intention of hurting me.

When I got my breath back I propped myself up on my elbows:

‘What the hell got into you? Were you trying to kill me? What did I say?’

‘You talked about Hook, and now there’ll be trouble. He saved my life, he’s our brother. Why did you squeal to Uncle Kostich?’

At those words I felt a sharp pain in my stomach, I couldn’t believe it. I got up, brushed the snow off my jacket and trousers and, before walking on, turned my back on him. I wanted him to understand the lesson properly.

‘I praised Hook, you idiot – I defended him,’ I said. ‘And God willing, Uncle Kostich will help us to get him out of trouble.’

With that I set off, already knowing what would happen. For well over an hour we would walk like a theatre company: me in front, looking like Jesus just descended from the cross, with head held high and a gaze full of promises which loses itself cinematically in the horizon, and Mel behind, with shoulders drooping, all humble, with the expression of someone who’s just committed a shameful crime, forced to lurch like the hunchback of Notre-Dame and repeat the same words over and over again in a whimpering, piteous voice, like a monotonous prayer:

‘Come on, Kolima, don’t be angry. We had a misunderstanding. These things happen, don’t they?’

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘bloody hell!’

And so we left the Centre and the last row of old threestorey houses. We now had to walk across to the other side of the park, where there stood a hideous and depressing building, a palace which had been erected two centuries earlier as a lodge for the tsarina of Russia on her journeys into the borderlands. I know nothing about architecture, but even I could see that the palace was an ill-assorted jumble of styles: a bit of Middle Ages and a bit of Italian Renaissance, clumsily imitated by Russians. It was coarse, its ornamentation was completely out of character, and it was covered with mould. This ghastly place, which I thought more suitable for Satanic feasts and human sacrifices, was in fact used as a hospital for people suffering from tuberculosis.

In Bender the hospital was known as morilka, which in the old Indic language means something that suffocates you. The doctors who worked there were chiefly military medics employed by the penitentiary system – prison doctors, in other words. They came from all over the USSR. They would move to Bender for a few years with their families and then go away; their place would immediately be taken by others, who in turn, before leaving would suggest new changes – trivial and pointless revolutions. Those poor patients had grown accustomed to being constantly moved from one floor or wing to another. They were forced to see their lives drawing to an end in the midst of absolute chaos.

The hospital was of the ‘closed’ type – that is, it was guarded, like a normal prison, because many of the patients were ex-convicts. It was surrounded by barbed wire and had bars on the windows.

Smoking was forbidden in the building, but the nurses secretly brought in cigarettes and sold them to inveterate smokers at three times the normal cost.

Among the patients there were many who were only feigning illness: Authorities of the criminal world who by exploiting their connections had managed to have false medical certificates made out for them which declared them to be ‘terminal’. So they stayed in a comfortable hospital instead of a cold, damp, stinking prison. Whenever they wanted they had prostitutes brought in from outside; they organized parties with their friends and even meetings of Authorities at a national level. Anything was permitted and covered up, provided you paid for it.

The person who guaranteed the Authorities a happy stay in hospital was a woman, a fat nurse of Russian nationality and of a perennially cheerful disposition: Aunt Marusya. She seemed healthier than Our Lord: she had red cheeks and spoke in a loud and extremely powerful voice. She was very popular with the criminals, because there was nothing she wouldn’t do for them.

The hospital was divided into three non-communicating blocks. The first and most pleasant was exposed to the sun: it had big windows and a warm swimming-pool; it was the block for the terminally ill, where every patient had his own clean, warm little room and received constant attention from the staff. This was where the Authorities stayed: they pretended to be moribund but were really as healthy and strong as could be; they spent their days playing cards, watching American films on video, screwing the young nurses and receiving visits from their friends, who supplied them with all they needed for an agreeable life full of delights.

Grandfather Kuzya was critical of those people; he called them urody, which means ‘freaks’: he used to say they were a disgrace to the modern criminal world, and we had the culture that came from America and Europe to thank for the fact that people like them existed.

The second block was intended for the chronically ill. They slept six to a room; no television, no fridge, only the canteen and a bed. Lights out at nine o’clock in the evening, wake-up call at eight in the morning. They couldn’t leave their room without the permission of the authorized staff – not even to go to the toilet. In case of need, outside the prescribed hours they could use an old mobile latrine which was emptied every evening. The food was reasonable and was delivered three times a day. This was the block where the genuinely sick were kept – criminals and non-criminals, and also many homeless people and vagabonds. The medical treatment was the same for everybody: pills and the occasional injection, inhalations of steam twice a week. The wards were cleaned by the nurses with a powerful disinfectant, creolin, the same one as was used for cleaning stables: it had such a strong smell that if you breathed it in for more than half an hour you got a terrible headache. In this block even the food smelled of creolin.

The third block was for patients suffering from tuberculosis in the acute phase, those who were infectious. The block was entirely in the shade, facing the trees of the park, with small windows which were always misted over; it was so damp that the water dripped from the ceiling. There were three floors, with fifty rooms to a floor and about thirty people to a room. For sleeping there were wooden bunks like those of the prisons, small mattresses, sheets that were changed once a month and rough blankets made of synthetic wool. Not everyone had a pillow. In these over-crowded rooms people were constantly dying. It was disgusting in there. Many couldn’t even get to the toilet on their own, and since nobody helped them they did everything over themselves. What’s more, many of them spat blood when they coughed; they spat it continually, straight on the floor. They had no television, radio or any other form of entertainment. They received no treatment, because it was deemed to be pointless. And they were given little or nothing to eat, on the grounds that since they were going to die, food would have been wasted on them.

The nurses’ market, of course, didn’t reach the patients of the third block, so they had invented an ingenious system for getting hold of cigarettes. They used young boys, people like us, in the street. The patients would throw out of the windows a heavy bolt with a double fishing line tied to it. When the bolt landed over the wall, the boys would hook a little bag containing the cigarettes onto the thread, and the patients would fix on another bag containing the money. By pulling the thread you propelled the two little bags, which thus began their journeys in opposite directions – the money towards the boys and the cigarettes towards the patients.

The boys sold the cigarettes more or less at market price, but they made a profit anyway because the cigarettes were stolen and hadn’t cost them anything.

The patients were always hungry for cigarettes, always. The hospital administration, in an attempt to stop this kind of trade, had spread a story to scare the street boys, giving them to believe that they might fall ill and die if they touched the patients’ money. But the boys, as always, had found a solution: they quickly ran the flame of a cigarette lighter around the banknotes to ‘kill’ the mortal bacterium. And besides, the idea of doing something forbidden and dangerous attracted them even more.

The hospital guards were under orders to intervene. Many turned a blind eye, but some bastards took pleasure in thwarting the exchange at the very last minute: they waited for the moment when the patient stretched out his hand to take the packet and – snip! – they cut the string. The cigarettes fell to the ground, accompanied by the despairing cries of the patient. The guards had a good laugh: they were scum that deserved to be slaughtered like pigs, in my opinion.

By now Mel and I had crossed the park. Mel continued to apologize to me, and I continued to ignore him and walk on as if I were alone.

Suddenly, as we were skirting the wall of the block, a bolt fell between my feet. I stopped and picked it up: it had the fishing line tied round it. I looked up: leaning out of a window on the third floor was a middle-aged man with a long beard and unkempt hair. He was staring at me with wide-open eyes, making the gesture of smoking, as if he held a cigarette between his fingers.

I made a sign to him that I would see to it at once. I turned towards Mel, who hadn’t even realized why I’d stopped, and asked him to give me all the cigarettes he had.

Mel eyed me suspiciously, but I said to him disgustedly:

‘Oh come on! These people haven’t got anything to smoke. You’ll be able to buy yourself another packet in a minute.’

‘But I haven’t got any money on me!’

I felt a terrible anger rising within me, but anger didn’t get you anywhere with Mel, so I calmed myself down and told him:

‘If you give me your cigarettes, I’ll forgive you and I won’t tell the others.’

Without a word, Mel took two packets of Temp – the Soviet Marlboro – out of his pocket.

I pointed to the area of his jacket where he kept his cigarette lighter.

‘But you gave it to me, don’t you remember?’ he said, trying to save at least that much, but even as he spoke, he was already putting his hand into his inside pocket to get it.

‘I stole it from a kiosk at Tiraspol. I’ll steal you another one – a better one, with a naked woman on it…’

‘Oh, all right, all right…’ The ploy of the naked woman had worked, and Mel thought he had made a great bargain. ‘But remember, Kolima, it’s got to have a naked woman on it, you’ve promised!’

‘I always keep my promises,’ I told him, taking the lighter from his large but gullible hand.

One of the packets had already been opened and a couple of cigarettes were missing. I slipped the lighter into it and then wound the string all round the bundle, tying it up with a bow like a gift. Finally I added the only thing I had on me, my clean cotton handkerchief, slipping it in between the two packets. Then I started pulling the string. When my bundle reached the window, the man’s hand stretched out through the bars and the shouts of joy carried right down to us.

I was left with the patients’ little bag in my hands. I opened it: inside was a banknote, torn, dirty and wet. One rouble. Next to it, a scrap of paper with a message: ‘Sorry, we can’t afford any more.’

I didn’t even touch the rouble; I closed the little bag again and moved the two strings, to alert the patients. The man at the window pulled the string towards him, took back his rouble and shouted to me:

‘Thanks for everything!’

‘God bless you, guys!’ I replied, shouting as loud as I could.

At once a guard materialized to the right, waving his Kalashnikov and shouting:

‘Get away from the wall! Get away or I’ll fire!’

‘Shut your mouth, you fucking cop!’ Mel and I replied simultaneously, though each in slightly different words.

Completely unruffled, we walked on. Then we turned around. The cop was standing there silently, glaring at us with such malice he seemed on the point of exploding. From the window the patient was still watching us: he was smiling and smoking a cigarette.

‘You could have taken that rouble, though,’ said Mel after a while.

I couldn’t kill him because I was fond of him, so I did what Grandfather Kuzya always told me to do with people who can’t understand the important things: I wished him good luck. He was a real imbecile, my friend Mel, and he still is: he hasn’t improved over the years, in fact he might even have got a bit worse.

By this time we weren’t far from the Railway district, where Mel had to deliver the message to a criminal. Leaving the hospital behind us, we passed the food warehouse complex – a place we knew well, because we often went to steal there at night. It was an old, turn-ofthe-century site comprising several brick buildings with high walls and no windows. The railway ran alongside it, so the trains stopped right there and the wagons were quickly unloaded or loaded.

In order to steal from them you didn’t need the agility of a burglar, but simply a bit of diplomacy. We never forced any locks; we had one of our own men inside, an infiltrator, a kind of mole who kept us informed and told us when it was the right moment. After the goods had been loaded, the trains usually stayed where they were for a few hours; the drivers rested and then left later, at dawn. So we would open the wagons at night while they slept and carry off the stuff: it was easier to work on the trains than to break down the doors of the warehouses. We would load everything into a car and drive off.

The trains were bound for the countries of the Soviet bloc – many for Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. They carried sugar, preserves and all kinds of canned food. Sometimes they were already half-full, with clothes, warm coats, workers’ overalls, gloves and military uniforms. In some wagons you might also find domestic appliances, drills, electric wiring, hardware, electric fires and fans. When we got a chance like that we would make as many as three or four trips, to carry off as much as possible. We never managed to get everything into the car: but fortunately our man let us leave the goods temporarily in certain hiding places inside the warehouse.

Our mole was in fact the elderly caretaker of the warehouses, a Japanese who, after years of living with the Russians, now went by the name of Borishka.

He was very old, and had come to our town with the Siberians in the second wave of deportation in the late 1940s, after the Russian victory in the Second World War.

He had been made a prisoner-of-war in the Russo-Japanese conflict, at the battle of Khalkhin Gol. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, and only survived by pure chance, because the Russian tanks drove straight over the dead bodies lying on the ground. After the tanks, the cavalry passed by: they found him there, looking bewildered, wandering around like a ghost in the midst of the dead. Out of pity they took him with them, otherwise he would have been killed by the infantry, who were searching for any Japanese left alive to avenge their comrades who had been killed the previous night, when the Japanese forces had attacked the first Russian divisions.

The Cossacks didn’t hand him over to the armed forces; for some time they kept him on as a stable hand. He had to clean and care for the horses of the Cossacks of Altay, in southern Siberia. They treated him well and a friendship formed between him and the Cossacks.

Borishka came from Iga, a land of ninjas and assassins. Since boyhood he had been trained to fight both with weapons and bare hands. The Cossacks, too, loved fighting with cold steel and wrestling, so Borishka taught them the techniques of his own country and learned theirs.

Borishka hated the Japanese, and especially the samurai and the emperor; he said they exploited the people, who were forced to submit to many injustices. He said he had enlisted only in desperation, because of an unhappy love affair. The girl he had fallen in love with had been given in marriage to another man, who was rich and powerful.

The Cossacks’ ataman, or leader (a big, strong man, a typical southern Siberian), was particularly fond of him. One day, Borishka said, they had called him out of the stables. He had gone out onto the parade ground, where the Cossacks were waiting for him, standing in a circle.

‘Now the Japanese are all dead,’ the ataman said, ‘Japan has lost its war and you can go home. But first I want you to do one thing…’ The ataman motioned to a young Cossack, who brought two swords: one was Borishka’s – he had been wearing it on his belt when the Cossacks had saved him – and the other, the shashka, was the typical sword of the Siberian Cossacks, much heavier than that used by the Cossacks in other parts of Russia, because the Siberians also used it for chopping wood. A sword of that kind can weigh as much as seven kilos, and the men capable of carrying it could, in battle, split a man in two from head to hip.

The ataman took the two swords and said to him, in front of everyone:

‘We have treated you well and you have nothing to complain of, but now I want to find out whether trying to occupy the USSR has served as a lesson to you. Here are the two swords. If you have understood that making war on us was unjust, break your Japanese sword with our Cossack one, and we will let you stay with us and you will be a Cossack yourself. But if you think your war was a just one, break our sword with yours, and we will let you go free wherever you want, and may God assist you; we will do you no harm.’

Borishka didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to become a Cossack, but nor did he think that the war against the Russians had been a good and just thing. And above all, he hated the Japanese.

So he picked up his sword, kissed it, as the Cossacks kiss their swords, and hung it on his belt, in its place.

The ataman was watching him with interest, trying to understand what he was up to. Many Cossacks were sure Borishka would break their sword.

But instead he picked up the shashka, kissed it too and gave it back to the ataman.

Everyone was left speechless, and the ataman burst out laughing:

‘Well, Borishka… You’re a clever man, Japanese!’

‘I’m not Japanese, I’m from Iga, and my sword is from Iga too,’ he replied.

‘Well, you’re really a good fellow, Borishka; you must never forget who you are and never betray your tradition… You must be proud; only in that way will you preserve your dignity!’

So Borishka stayed with the Cossacks for a long time yet, but from that day on he was allowed to carry his sword with him.

When the Cossacks returned to Siberia, and to Altay, Borishka went with them. The ataman took him into his own house, and there Borishka met his future wife, the ataman’s eldest daughter, Svetlana. They got married. Out of respect for her, Borishka was baptized in the Orthodox faith with the name of Boris, so that the ceremony could be held in church. They built their house and lived there, in a little village on the River Amur.

Then one day the ataman was suddenly arrested by Stalin’s secret services, and some time later shot as a traitor. Borishka was very distressed; he thought it was all his fault, whereas in fact it was nothing to do with him: during that period many Cossacks were singled out by the Soviet government because they didn’t share its communist ideas and still had a certain liking for anarchy and autonomy.

After his death the ataman was declared an ‘enemy of the people’, and the members of his family were deported to Transnistria, along with many other Siberians.

Borishka still remembered that long journey. The trains, he said, used to stop for a long time on the rails, and you couldn’t get out because they were guarded by armed soldiers. Sometimes two trains travelling in opposite directions would stop alongside each other; on the one there would be people from the European part of the USSR who were being sent to Siberia, and on the other the opposite. He would hear someone shout from one train:

‘Oh God, they’re taking us to Siberia! It’s too cold there, we’ll all die!’

And someone reply from the other:

‘Oh Christ, they’re sending us to Europe! There are no woods there, only empty hills, we’ll die of hunger!’

During that journey Borishka met some Siberian Urkas. He joined up with them because they were the only ones who didn’t seem to be in despair. In a sense they had a secure future; there was already a fairly well-developed community waiting for them in Transnistria.

Borishka told his story to one of them, an elderly man respected by all the others, and was reassured:

‘Don’t be afraid, stay with us: our brothers are in Transnistria. If you’re a just man, you’ll soon have a home and you’ll be able to bring up your children with our children, may the Lord bless us all…’

The Urkas and the Cossacks had always been on the same wavelength and got on well: both groups respected the old traditions, loved the nation and their homeland and believed in independence of any form of power. Both were persecuted by various Russian governments in different ages, for their desire for freedom. It was just that the Urkas were more extreme, and had a particular hierarchical structure. The Cossacks, on the other hand, regarded themselves as a free army, and so had a paramilitary structure; in peacetime their main occupation was raising livestock.

When they arrived in Transnistria, Borishka and his wife were taken in by a family of Urkas, just as the old man had promised them.

Borishka at once felt at home. To him the Urkas had a lot in common with the people of the land where he came from, Iga. They were united and extremely anarchic and had a strong criminal tradition.

He soon joined in the business activities of the Siberian criminals, who respected him because he understood everything about their law; he was a man of his word and a just one.

And little by little he became one of us. He lived in our area with his family. His wife, whom we all called Grandmother Svetlana, had borne him two sons, who followed the road of the Urkas.

In his old age Borishka exploited a connection with the manager of the food warehouses, who took him on as a caretaker. They came to an agreement: the manager wouldn’t make any fuss when goods disappeared, and Borishka would share his slice of the profits with him. He organized every raid to perfection; he was very precise and serious in business matters. In particular, he was very good at controlling his emotions; I never saw him get flustered.

Once, in autumn, when in every home the people make preserves for the winter and light a big fire on which they put a big pot full of water, I saw Borishka save a child’s life. As usual at our house, the women gathered to cut the greens and prepare the pulses, and the men tended the fire and prepared the glass jars. We children were nearby, playing among the adults. Old Borishka was there too, with his son and grandchildren.

Suddenly the bar under the big saucepan snapped in two, and the pot overturned and poured out a flood of boiling water in a second. A few metres away sat a little boy, the son of a neighbour of ours, Uncle Sanya. I had gone out into the garden to look for more jars. When I heard the sound of the pot overturning, I rushed into the house and saw old Borishka pick up a big steel alloy bowl, throw it on the ground and jump into it, skimming along as if on a surfboard. And there in the steam, which was as thick and white as the morning fog on the river, I saw slowly emerge the figure of a man standing inside a bowl with a child in his arms, surrounded by boiling water. The child’s mother fainted; his father, Uncle Sanya, started screaming; the only two people who were calm were those two, Borishka and the little boy.

He had acted instinctively, without thinking about it, and afterwards had resumed his usual serene expression, as if he did such things four times a day.

He was a very interesting person; I liked talking to him, and hearing him tell the stories of his life. He often went fishing with a rod he had made himself, and while he was fishing he would stand with his feet in the water and sing Japanese songs. When I was small he taught me a very nice one: it was about a mountain and a young man who crossed it to find his betrothed.

We had made a deal with Borishka: when we went to the stores we had to pretend not to know him. If we saw him near the gate, we mustn’t even greet him. He would often be there keeping guard with an old sheepdog that had something wrong with its hind legs and found it difficult to move; both of them would usually sit on a bench, and while the dog slept, Borishka would read the paper. Borishka read only one paper: Pravda, which means ‘The Truth’ – the newspaper of communist propaganda, which was read by everyone who wanted to believe in the freest and most beautiful country in the world. In Pravda any item of news whatsoever was transformed into a source of pure propaganda: even when you read about disasters and wars, in the end you were left with a sense of happiness and you felt lucky to live in the USSR. I don’t know why Borishka was so fond of that paper; once I asked him, and he replied:

‘When you’re forced to listen to cattle singing, you must at least exercise your freedom to choose the one that sings best.’

When I passed the gate I always looked away, so as not to see whether Borishka was there or not. But my friend Mel could never remember this simple but important rule. He always stared at the gate, and if he saw Borishka he would greet him, waving his hand in the air and smiling with that disfigured face of his. Then I would glare at him and he would immediately remember the deal we had made with Borishka and start hitting himself, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. As Grandfather Kuzya used to say, a guy like him was enough to drive a madman mad.

Borishka was always furious when Mel greeted him. On his way home from work he would come looking for me or Gagarin and say, in a voice trembling with anger, yet quiet and lilting:

‘So you’re wealthy men – you’ve finally become rich!’

‘What do you mean? We’re not rich…’

‘You must be, since you can afford to refuse to work with me, and earn money…’

At those words my hair would stand on end. To refuse to work with Borishka was to say goodbye to half our earnings.

‘We didn’t do anything, Uncle Borishka.’

‘Didn’t do anything? Teach that imbecile of a friend of yours how to behave. And if he can’t get it into his head, don’t bring him past the warehouses any more, take the long way round…’

We would talk to Mel, explain everything to him all over again, but it was no use. The next time, as soon as we got near to the stores, he would be looking for the old man, to greet him. It was like a penance to us, having him with us.

One day, as we were walking past Borishka’s house, in our district, we stopped to have a chat with him. While we were talking, we realized that Mel was some distance away, on the other side of the road, with his back turned to us. Borishka looked at us all, then pointed to him, and his face suddenly became very serious.

‘For your own good, get rid of your friend,’ he said.

‘Don’t take him with you any more: he’ll only cause trouble. In fact, I’m willing to pay him, if only he’ll stay at home and not roam the streets.’

Pretending not to understand, I said:

‘But Uncle Borishka… It’s true that Mel’s a bit thick, but he means well.’

Borishka looked at me as if I’d spoken to him in a language he didn’t understand.

‘A bit thick, you say? Look at him: he’s a disaster, that one! Even he doesn’t know what’s going on inside his head! Listen, I like you boys, that’s why I’m being frank with you. You’re still young; your friend makes you laugh now, but before long he’s going to cause so much trouble that you’ll be crying.’

What wise words they were! A pity I understood that too late, after many years had passed.

When we left, I asked Mel why he’d kept away from us. He looked at me with the expression of a torture victim, full of suffering, and said, almost in tears:

‘First you tell me not to speak to him, then I speak to him and you scold me, then I don’t speak to him and you scold me anyway! I give up; for all I care this Borishka might not even exist!’

I laughed, but Borishka was right – it was no laughing matter. And that was something we should have known by then.

When we were about ten years old, we went to the cinema to see a film called The Shield and the Sword. The main character, a Soviet secret agent, appeared in various action scenes, shooting his capitalist enemies with his silenced gun and doing a lot of acrobatics. The guy risked his life as if he were doing something perfectly normal and routine, to combat injustice in the NATO countries. It was a kind of Russian response to the many American and British films about the cold war, where the Soviets were usually portrayed as stupid, incompetent monkeys who played about with the atomic bomb and wanted to destroy the world. We, despite the rule imposed by our elders, had gone to see it in the only cinema in town (they hadn’t yet built the second cinema, which was to have a very short life, because it was destroyed in the 1992 war: the Romanian soldiers took up their positions there, and our fathers, in order to kill them, one night blew the whole complex up, including the restaurant and the ice-cream parlour). Well, at one point in the film the main character jumped off the roof of a very tall building, using a big umbrella as a parachute, and landed comfortably without getting hurt. You could say he did a Mary Poppins.

The next day, without saying anything to anyone, Mel, equipped with a big beach umbrella, jumped off the roof of the central library, a three-storey building, below which there was a pleasant green area full of chestnuts and birches. Crashing down onto a tree, a birch, he managed to break a hand and a leg, knock himself out and impale his stomach on the pole of the umbrella. The result was a sea of blood, his mother in despair, and him having to shuttle from one hospital to another for almost six months.

Taking the piss out of him seemed a good way of getting him to understand where his naivety might lead him. Another time, when we were already fourteen or fifteen, Mel was at my house, and we were making some tea to drink in the sauna. All at once he started blathering about tropical countries, saying that it wouldn’t be bad to live there; he thought it might suit us, because the weather was never cold.

‘There’s too much humidity,’ I told him. ‘It never stops raining. It’s a lousy place. What would we do there?’

‘If it rained we could shelter in a hut. And think about it – on an island you don’t need a car, you can go around on a bike and there’s always a boat available. And the Indians…’

They were all Indians to him. American Indians. He thought the indigenous people of every country always went around on horseback with coloured feathers on their heads and painted faces.

‘…the Indians,’ he went on, ‘are clever people. It would be great to become like them.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I provoked him. ‘They wear their hair long, like homosexuals.’

‘What are you talking about? They’re not homosexuals. It’s just that they don’t have any scissors to cut their hair with. Look,’ he said to me, taking out of his pocket a little plastic figure with faded colours that he always carried about with him – an Indian warrior in a fighting pose, with a knife in his hand. ‘You see? If he’s got a knife he can’t be a homosexual, or they’d never had given him permission to insult a weapon!’

It was funny to see how he applied our Siberian rules to the Indians. He was right, in our culture a ‘cockerel’ – that is, a homosexual – is an outcast: if he isn’t killed he is prevented from having contact with others and forbidden to touch cult objects such as the cross, the knife and the icons.

I had no wish to dismantle his fantasies about the fabulous heterosexual life of Indians. I just wanted a bit of fun. So I tried another angle of attack, teasing him about a subject that he regarded as sacred: food.

‘They don’t make red soup,’ I said in one breath.

Mel became very attentive. He craned his neck:

‘What do you mean, they don’t make soup… What do they eat, then?’

‘Well, actually they don’t have much food; it’s hot there, they don’t need fat to help them resist the cold, they just eat the fruit that grows on the trees, and a few fish…’

‘Fried fish isn’t bad,’ he attempted to defend tropical cuisine.

‘Forget fried fish: they don’t cook anything there, they eat everything raw…’

‘What kind of fruit do they have?’

‘Coconuts.’

‘What are they like?’

‘They’re good.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My uncle’s got a friend in Odessa who’s a sailor. Last week he brought me a coconut with milk inside it.’

‘Milk?’

‘Milk, yes – only it doesn’t come from a cow but from a tree. It’s inside the fruit.’

‘Really? Show me!’ In five seconds he had taken my bait. All I had to do was reel him in.

‘I’m afraid we’ve already eaten the fruit, but if you want to try it I’ve still got a bit of the milk.’

‘Yes, let me try it!’ He was jumping up and down on his chair, so eager was he for this milk.

‘All right, then, I’ll give you some. I put it in the cellar to keep it cool. Wait a couple of seconds and I’ll bring it to you!’

Laughing like a bastard, I went out of the house and over to the toolshed where my grandfather kept all things useful and useless for the house and garden. I picked up an iron cup and put a bit of white filler and some plaster into it. To give the liquid the right density I added a bit of water and some glue for sticking on wall-tiles. I stirred the mixture with the wooden stick that my grandfather used for clearing the pigeons’ nests of their droppings. Then I lovingly carried the magic potion to Mel.

‘Here you are, but don’t drink it all, leave some for the others.’

I should have saved my breath: as soon as he took the cup in his hands, Mel drained it in four gulps. Then he grimaced, and a timid shadow of doubt appeared in his good eye.

‘Maybe it’s gone off a bit in the cellar, I don’t know; it was delicious when we first tried it,’ I said, trying to save the situation.

‘Yes, it must have gone off…’

From that day on I started calling him ‘Chunga-Changa’, and he never understood why.

Chunga-Changa was a cartoon film which was much loved by children in the Soviet Union. It was rather badly drawn, in the style of a communist propaganda poster: all bright colours, figures filled in without any gradations of tone and very stylized, proportions deliberately not respected so as to create an effect like that of a puppet show.

The cartoon promoted friendship among the children of the world through the story of a little Soviet boy who went to visit a little coloured boy on an island called Chunga-Changa. The Soviet boy had a very determined look in his eye (as did all communists and their relatives), a steamship and a very small dog , and he dressed like a sailor. The coloured boy was as black as a moonless night and wore only a kind of skirt made of leaves, and his friends were a monkey and a parrot; other creatures also appeared – a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a zebra, a giraffe and a lion, who all danced together paw in paw, round and round.

The cartoon lasted a quarter of an hour in all, and more than ten minutes of that were taken up by three songs, with a few very short dialogues in between. The song that became famous, and was loved by all the children of the USSR, was the last one. In it, to a cheerful, moving little tune, a female voice sang of the happy, carefree life on the island of Chunga-Changa:

After the food warehouses the first houses of the Railway district finally began. This district belonged to Black Seed, and had different rules from our own. We would have to behave ourselves, or we might not come out alive.

The boys of that area were very cruel; they tried to earn the respect of others with the most extreme violence. Power among juveniles had a symbolic value: some kids could order others about, but none of them was respected by adult criminals. So, naturally, boys couldn’t wait to grow up, and to achieve this more quickly many became absolute bastards, sadistic and unjust. In their hands the criminal rules were distorted to the point of absurdity; they lost all meaning, and became little more than excuses for violence. For example, they didn’t wear anything red – they called it the communists’ colour: if anyone wore any red garment the Black Seed kids were quite capable of torturing them. Of course, knowing this rule, none of the people who were born there ever wore anything red, but if you had it in for someone, all you had to do was hide a red handkerchief in his pocket and shout out loud that he was a communist. The hapless individual would immediately be searched, and if the handkerchief was found, no one would listen to anything he had to say in his defence: in everyone’s eyes he was already an outcast.

This sense of a constant struggle for power, or, as Grandfather Kuzya called it, ‘contest of the bastards’, was essential to the ethos of the district. In order to be a perfect Authority among the youngsters of Railway you had to be always ready to betray your own people, not have ties of friendship with anyone and be careful you weren’t betrayed in your turn, know how to lick the arses of the adult criminals and not have any education received from any form of human contact that was deemed to be good.

Those boys had grown up thinking they had nothing but enemies around them, so the only language they knew was that of provocation.

If it came to a fight, however, they behaved in various ways. Some groups fought with dignity, and many of these we were friends with. But others always tried to ‘strike from round the corner’, as we say – in other words attack from behind – and didn’t respect any agreement; they were perfectly capable of shooting you even if you’d previously made a pact with them not to use firearms.

They were organized in groups which, unlike us, they didn’t call ‘gangs’, a word they considered a bit offensive, but kontory, which means ‘bureaus’. Each kontora had its leader, or, as they called him, bugor, which means ‘mound’.

I had a long-standing quarrel with a bugor of that district: he was a year older than me and called himself ‘the Vulture’. He was a lying buffoon, who had arrived in our town four years earlier, claiming to be the son of a famous criminal who went by the nickname ‘White’. My uncle knew White very well; they had been in jail together and he had told me his story.

He was a criminal of the Black Seed caste, but one of the old guard. He respected everyone, and was never arrogant, but always humble, my uncle said. In the 1980s, when a group of young Black Seed men ousted the older Authorities (with the sole aim of making money and setting up as businessmen in civil society), many old men tried with all their strength to prevent it. So the young men started killing their old folk: during that period this was happening all over the place.

White fell victim to an ambush. He was getting out of a car with his men, when some men in another passing car opened fire on him. When they fired with their Kalashnikovs, a lot of people were walking along the street, and some were wounded. White managed to take refuge behind his car, which was armoured, but he saw a woman in the line of fire and threw himself at her to cover her with his body. He was badly wounded, and died in hospital a few days later. Before he died, he asked his men to seek out that woman, ask her forgiveness for what had happened and give her some money. This gesture of his made such a great impression in the criminal society that his killers repented and apologized to the old men, but then they went on killing each other and, as my uncle said, ‘at that point Christ only knew what was in that salad’.

Anyway, in our community White was very highly thought of. So when I heard that his son had arrived in town and that he’d had to leave his village because a lot of people had wanted to take revenge on him after his father’s death, I was dying to meet him. I told my uncle about this at once, but he replied that White hadn’t had any sons, or indeed any family at all, because he had lived according to the old rules, which prevented the members of Black Seed from marrying and bringing up children. ‘He was as lonely as a post in the middle of the steppe,’ he assured me.

Some time later I met the Vulture, and without wasting many words I went straight to the point and unmasked him. We had a fight, and I came off best, but from that day on the Vulture hated me, and tried to get revenge in any way possible.

One winter evening, in 1991, I was returning home dead drunk from a party. I was with Mel, who was even drunker than I was. Around midnight, on the border between our district and the Centre, the Vulture appeared with three of his friends: they overtook us on their bikes and stopped in front of us, blocking our way, and the Vulture pulled a 16-bore double-barrelled shotgun out of his jacket and fired two shots at me. He hit me in the chest; the cartridges were filled with chopped-up nails. Luckily for me, however, those cartridges had been carelessly filled: in one there was too much gunpowder and only a few nails, and the stopper had been pushed too far down; so it exploded inside, and the backfire scorched that poor fool’s hand and part of his face. With the other the opposite mistake had been made: it had too many nails and too little powder, and evidently the stopper hadn’t been closed properly, so the nails came out at a lower velocity and only tore my jacket a little; actually, one got through to my skin, but it didn’t hurt me, and I only noticed it a couple of days later when I saw a slightly red blister. Mel threw himself at them barehanded and managed to knock one of them down and break his bike, so they made off.

After that episode, with the help of the whole gang I caught the Vulture and gave him three stab wounds on the thigh, as was the custom in our community as a sign of contempt. He didn’t give up, but kept saying to everyone that he wanted revenge. But back then he was still a nobody, just one of the many teenage delinquents in Railway. Later though, the Vulture had succeeded in building a successful career, and now he was the leader of a bunch of thugs with whom he did things for which we in our community would have had our balls cut off at the very least.

That February day, as we entered the Railway district, I was only thinking of getting the job done quickly and not running into this fool of an enemy of mine. So as not to bother Mel with that story and not make him anxious – because it was a very serious matter to see him looking worried – I tried talking to him about the birthday party I would be having that evening, and the dishes my mother had prepared for us. He listened attentively, and from his expression it was clear that he was already there at the table, eating it all himself.

In Railway, as in our district, the boys acted as lookouts: they observed the movements of anyone who came in or left and then informed the adults. So we were immediately spotted by a little group of boys aged six or seven. We were crossing the first yard of the district and they were sitting there in a corner, a strategic point from where they had a good view of each of the two roads that ran from the park to the district. One of the boys, the smallest, received an order from another bigger boy, whereupon he got up and started running like a bullet towards us. In our district we didn’t do that: if you had to approach someone, you went in a group; you never sent just one boy, let alone the smallest. And usually you didn’t go towards anyone at all; you organized things so that the outsiders came to you, so from the outset you put yourself in a position of superiority.

The little boy looked like a little junkie. He was thin and had two blue rings round his eyes, a clear sign that he sniffed glue – a lot of kids in Railway used to get high like that. We took the piss out of them, calling them ‘boyfriends of the bag’, because they always carried a plastic bag around with them. They would put a bit of glue into it and then stick their head in the bag. A lot of them died like that, asphyxiated, because they didn’t even have the strength to take the bag off their heads; an incredible number of them were found in various little hiding places around town, in the cellars or in the central heating boiler rooms, which they turned into shelters.

Anyway, this little boy stood in front of us, wiped his snivelling nose on the sleeve of his jacket and with a voice ravaged by the residue of glue said:

‘Hey, stop! Where are you going?’

To let him know who we were, I gave him a crash course in good breeding:

‘Where have you put your manners? Have you left them in your pocket, along with your dear little bag? Has nobody ever taught you that there are places where if you don’t say hello to people you can end up as a baklan?[9] Go back to your friends and tell them to come all together and to introduce themselves properly, if they want to talk. Otherwise we’ll go on acting like we haven’t seen them!’

Before I had even finished his heels could already be seen kicking up the snow.

Soon the whole delegation arrived with its leader at its head, a small boy aged about ten who to give himself the air of a criminal was turning over in his hands a chotki, a piece of equipment made of bread used by pickpockets for exercising their fingers, to make them more supple and sensitive.

He looked at us for a while and then said:

‘My name’s “Beard”. Good morning. Where are you going?’

There was a lifeless note in his voice. He too must have been ruined by glue.

‘I’m Nikolay “Kolima”,’ I replied. ‘This is Andrey “Mel”. We’re from Low River. We’ve got a letter to take to one of your elders.’

Beard seemed to wake up.

‘Do you know the man you have to deliver it to?’ he asked in an unexpectedly polite tone. ‘Do you know the way, or do you need someone to show you?’

Strange, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone from Railway offering to show you the way; they’re famous for their rudeness. Maybe, I said to myself, they’ve been told not to let anyone who enters the district go around on their own. But it would be crazy trying to follow everyone – they’d be going backwards and forwards day and night.

We didn’t know the addressee or the way to his house.

‘The letter’s for a guy called Fyodor “the Finger”; if you tell us the way we’ll find him on our own, thank you.’ I was trying to get out of his offer to show us the way. I don’t know why, but I felt there was something wrong with that offer.

‘I’ll explain it to you, then,’ said Beard, and he started saying that we had to go that way, turn off there, then again there, and then again there. In short, I realized after a few seconds, since I knew the district well, that he was trying to make us take a needlessly long route. But I couldn’t make out why, so I heard him out to the end, feigning ignorance. Then I said deliberately, as if agreeing with him:

‘Yes, it does seem very complicated. We’ll never find the way on our own.’

He lit up like a coin fresh from the mint.

‘I told you, without the help of a guide…’

‘Okay then, we accept,’ I concluded, with a smile. ‘Let’s go. Lead the way!’

I asked him to take us himself so that I could assess the gravity of the situation. No leader of a group guarding a district will ever leave his station; he will always send one of his underlings. My proposal was a kind of test – if he refused to accompany us, fine, I could relax, but if he agreed, it meant he had orders to take us somewhere, and that we were in for serious trouble.

‘Great, let’s go!’ he replied, almost singing. ‘I’ll just have a word with my kontora, then I’ll be with you.’

While Beard was talking in a corner with his group, I told Mel about my worries.

‘I’ll beat them up,’ he said bluntly.

I told him that didn’t seem to me a very good idea.

If we beat them up, we’d have to leave the district at once, without delivering the letter. And how would that make us look in front of our Guardian?

‘Stupid, Mel, that’s how we’d look, bloody stupid. What would we tell him? “We didn’t deliver the letter because we suspected something strange was going on, so we beat up some nine-year-old kids who were so high on glue they could hardly stand upright?”’

I proposed a different, more risky plan: that we get Beard to show us the way and then, in the first convenient place, ‘split’ him, a verb which in our slang means ‘to beat the truth out of someone’.

We had to find out what we were up against, I explained to Mel, and make him give us this Finger’s right address. If we found out there was a serious risk, we could go back and tell our Guardian all about it; but if the risk was low we would deliver the letter, and when we got home we’d tell everyone about it anyway – and so become the heroes of the district.

He liked the last part of my speech very much. The idea of returning to Low River with a glorious tale to tell definitely appealed to him. He clapped his hands in support of my brilliant strategy. I smiled and reassured him that everything would be fine, but deep down I had some doubts about the matter.

Meanwhile Beard’s boys were huddled in a circle around him; one or two of them burst out laughing and glanced at us. As far as they were concerned we’d already fallen into their trap, and it had all been so easy…

I told Mel to act normal, and when Beard came back over to us Mel flashed him a smile so wide and false that my heart sank.

We set off. Beard walked between the two of us, and we chatted about this and that. We passed a dozen or so deserted front gardens: now the weather had turned cold people were staying indoors.

We walked along the side of a closed and dilapidated old school, where in summer the Railway kids used to get together and mess around. There, two years earlier, a teenage girl had been brutally murdered – a poor down-and-out kid with no family who had been driven to prostitution to survive. It had been her friends, other teenagers like her, who had forced her to work the streets for them, and who had then taken what little money she earned. They had killed her because she had wanted to get out of the scene and go to live in another district, where she’d found a job as a dressmaker’s assistant.

It was a shocking story, because they had raped and tortured her for the best part of three days, keeping her tied to an old bed frame which had lost its netting: she had been left hanging there, and her wrists and ankles hadn’t been able to take the strain and had broken. She was found with cuts all over her body and cigarette burns on her face; they’d forced a large hydraulic torque wrench into her anus and pushed into her vagina the spout of an electric kettle, with which they’d burned her little by little, to heighten her sufferings.

At first the people of Railway had tried to hide this horrific murder, but soon the whole town had found out and the criminal Authorities had intervened. They had ordered the Guardian of Railway to find the people responsible within a few days, beat them to death with clubs and hang their bodies up at the scene of the crime for a week, and then bury their corpses in a grave with no cross or any identifying mark.

And so it had been. We too had gone to look at the bodies of those murdering bastards strung up by their legs on the veranda of the empty school; they were swollen up like balloons and black all over from the beating. I averted my gaze, which then fell on the walls: they were very thick; I realized that while the girl was being tortured nobody had heard her screams. It must be difficult and terrifying to die in that way, knowing that only a few steps away from the hell in which you find yourself people are relaxing in their homes, doing the things they always do and not imagining even a fraction of the pain you’re suffering. The tears came to my eyes at the thought of this detail: ‘all the noise that can be made in here stays in here’; and this was nothing compared with what that poor soul must have gone through.

When we reached the front of the school I nudged Mel with my elbow to indicate that it was up to him to make the first move.

‘I can’t wait any longer, boys,’ he said at once, ‘I must have a pee. Let’s go to some place for a moment where I can “wait for the train” in peace.’

Beard looked first at Mel and then at me with a rather worried look on his face; perhaps he wanted to make some objection, but he didn’t, for fear of raising our suspicions, and merely said:

‘Okay, come on, I’ll show you a place. Here, inside the school.’

As soon as we got inside, Mel gave him a shove in the back and Beard fell face down on the frozen floor. He turned towards us with a terrified expression on his face:

‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ he asked in a trembling voice.

‘You’re the crazy one, if you think you can screw us like a couple of whores…’ I said, while Mel opened his flick-knife; he turned it over in his hand almost sadly and longingly, so that the blade threw a thousand reflections on the grimy walls covered with vulgar graffiti.

I walked slowly towards Beard, and he backed away on the floor at the same speed as me, until he came up against the wall. I kept talking to him, pretending I knew everything, to make him feel useless and afraid:

‘We came here specially to make an end of this whole business… You’ll see, it’s not nice to try and cheat the people of Low River.’

‘Don’t hurt me! It’s nothing to do with me!’ Beard started squealing sooner than expected. ‘I don’t know anything about your business, I’m just carrying out the Vulture’s orders…’

‘What orders?’ I asked him, pressing the tip of my boot against his side.

‘If anyone from Low River arrives, we have to take them straight to him!’ He was almost hysterical; he spoke in a hoarse little voice.

Mel moved in close and began to tease him with his knife, pushing the blade little by little through his clothes. With each move he made, the boy cried out louder, with his eyes closed, begging us not to kill him.

I waited a while, to let him simmer properly, and when I realized he’d reached the point where he couldn’t refuse me anything, I made my proposal:

‘Tell me where we can find Finger, we’ll deliver the letter to him and you’ll live. But don’t try to trick us – we know this lousy dump of yours, and if you send us to the wrong place we’ll realize it. And if we don’t find Finger we’ll kill you, but not with a knife: we’ll beat you to death, breaking every bone in your body first…’

In a few seconds he sketched in the air the correct route to Finger’s house.

We decided to lock Beard in the school so he didn’t try to double-cross us. In the basement we found a door that could be barred from outside by jamming a wooden plank against the iron handle. The room was cold and dark, a real shithole. Perfect for Beard, who was humbly waiting to know his fate.

‘We’re going to lock you in here, and nobody will find you till summer. If you’ve lied and we have any problems, if they give us any bother or hurt us, you’ll stay here to rot – you’ll die alone. If everything goes well, we’ll tell someone where you are and they’ll come to let you out. Okay? You’ll be able to live and remember this personal lesson we’ve given you free of charge.’

Mel pushed him into the darkness, then shut and barred the door. Tearful screams came from inside:

‘Don’t leave me here, please! Don’t leave me here!’

‘Shut your mouth and be a man. And pray to the Lord we don’t run into trouble, or you’re dead!’

Finger’s house was some distance away, a quarter of an hour’s walk. We had to try not to attract attention, but the further we moved into the district the less chance we had of emerging unscathed from this expedition.

In the meantime I formed a thousand ideas of the kind of surprise that fool Vulture could have planned for us, and strangely I was growing more and more curious. I was dying to know what they meant to do to us in Railway. I wasn’t scared, but excited, as if I were playing a game of chance. Mel was walking along quite calmly and showing no sign of inner conflict. He wore his usual blank expression; now and then he would look at me and snigger.

‘What the hell are you laughing about? We’re in the shit,’ I said, trying to scare him a bit. Not out of malice, just to stir things up.

But it was no use, he was imperturbable, and his smile broadened. ‘We’ll slaughter them all, Kolima,’ he gloated. ‘We’ll carry out a massacre, a bloodbath!’

To be honest, a massacre was precisely what I wanted to avoid.

‘As long as it’s not our blood…’ I replied; but he didn’t even hear me, he was walking along like a man who had decided to exterminate half the population of the world.

Then we came to the apartment block where Finger lived, and went up to the second floor, stopping outside his door. Mel raised his hand to ring the bell, but I stopped him. First I looked through the keyhole, which was pretty big. I could see a dirty hallway, with a light which hung down very low, as if someone had pulled it down deliberately. At the end of the hall, in front of a television, a thin man with short hair was cutting his toenails with a razor blade, as people do in prison.

I took my eye away from the keyhole and said to Mel:

‘Check that the letter’s okay, then ring the bell. When Finger opens the door, greet him and introduce yourself, then introduce me. Don’t mention the letter straight away…’

Before I could finish, Mel interrupted me:

‘Are you going to teach me how to go to the toilet? It’s not the first letter I’ve delivered, I know how to behave!’

He pressed the bell. The sound was strange, it kept breaking off, as if the wires didn’t make perfect contact. We heard the creaking of the wooden floor at every step Finger took. The door opened without any sound of a key: it hadn’t been locked. In front of us appeared a man of about forty, completely covered with tattoos, and with iron teeth which shone in his mouth like jewels. He wore a vest and some light trousers; his feet were bare on the icy cold floor.

Inside the flat it was so cold we could see his breath condense into white vapour. He looked at us calmly; he seemed a normal kind of guy. He waited.

Mel stared at him speechless, and the man raised his hand and scratched his neck, as if to indicate that our silence was making him feel ill at ease.

I gave Mel a gentle kick and he started off straight away, spraying out words as a machine gun does bullets. He did everything according to the rules, and after the introductions he said he was carrying a letter.

Finger immediately changed his expression, smiled and invited us in. He led us to a table on which stood a saucepan full of freshly made chifir.

‘Go ahead, boys, help yourselves. I’m sorry, but I haven’t got anything else, only this. I’ve only just got out – the day before yesterday… What a terrible thing, this freedom! So much space! I’m still feeling dizzy…’

I liked his sense of humour; I realized I could relax.

We sat down, saying he shouldn’t worry about us. While we were passing the cup of chifir round between the three of us, Finger opened the letter from our Guardian. After a few moments he said:

‘I have to go back to your district with you; it says here that they want me to speak…’

Mel and I looked at each other. We would have to tell him about our adventure; it would be treacherous to take a person with you without telling him you were in trouble.

I decided to do the talking; letting Mel talk would only complicate things. I filled my lungs with air and blurted it all out: my war with the Vulture, the trap set by Beard and his gang of young junkies, the school…

Finger listened attentively, following every little detail as prisoners do. Stories are the criminals’ only entertainment in jail: they take turns at telling each other the story of their life, one piece at a time, in episodes, and when they’ve finished they go on to somebody else’s life.

At the end I told him that if he didn’t want to run a risk by coming with us, he could put off his visit to the next day.

He opposed this:

‘Don’t worry, if anything happens I’ll be with you.’

I wasn’t happy, because I knew that in Railway the young didn’t respect the old. Often they would lie in ambush for them outside their houses, when the old men came home drunk, and beat them up to get something they were carrying, and afterwards show it off to the others as a trophy. Moreover, Finger wasn’t an Authority; from what could be read in his tattoos he was a guy who had for some reason joined up with the Siberians in jail: he had a Siberian signature on his neck, which meant that the community protected him, perhaps because he had done something important for us.

While I was thinking about all this, Finger had got dressed, in a jacket covered with sewn-up tears, battered shoes, and a green scarf that almost touched the ground.

Along the way we got talking. Finger told us he had been in prison since the age of sixteen. He had been sent there because of a stupid incident: he had been drunk, and without realizing it had clubbed a cop a little too hard, killing him stone dead. In juvenile prison he had joined up with the Siberian family, because, he said, they were the only ones who stuck together and didn’t beat people up; they did everything together and didn’t take orders from anyone else. He had arrived in the adult prison as a member of the Siberian family, and the others had welcomed him. He had served twenty years in prison, and when he was about to be released an old man had suggested he go and live in the apartment we had seen.

Now he wanted to move closer to the people of our district: they, he said, were his family. So he had asked the old Siberian Authorities in prison to contact the Guardian of Low River.

He felt part of our community, and this pleased me.

While we were walking, I had an idea. Since we needed reinforcements, I had decided to drop in at the house of a friend who lived nearby. He was a boy called ‘Geka’, which is a diminutive of Evgeny. He and I had known each other since childhood; he was the son of an excellent paediatrician called Aunt Lora.

Geka was a well-read, intelligent, polite boy; he didn’t belong to any gang and preferred a quiet life. He had many interests and I liked him for this; I had been at his house several times and had been fascinated by his collection of model warplanes, which he assembled and painted himself. His mother allowed me to borrow some books from her library; that’s how I got to know Dickens and Conan Doyle, and above all the only literary upholder of justice I had ever found congenial: Sherlock Holmes.

Geka would spend the whole summer with us on the river; we taught him to swim, to wrestle and to use a knife in a fight. But he wore glasses, so my grandfather felt desperately sorry for him: to Siberians wearing glasses is like voluntarily sitting in a wheelchair – it’s a sign of weakness, a personal defeat. Even if you don’t have good eyesight you must never wear glasses, in order to preserve your dignity and your healthy appearance. So whenever Geka came to our house, Grandfather Boris would take him into the red corner, kneel down with him in front of the icon of the Siberian Madonna and that of the Siberian Saviour, and then, crossing himself over and over again, say his prayer, which Geka was obliged to repeat word for word:

‘O Mother of God, Holy Virgin, patron of all Siberia and protectress of all us sinners! Witness the miracle of Our Lord! O Lord, Our Saviour and Companion in life and death, You who bless our weapons and our miserable efforts to bring Your law into the world of sin, You who make us strong before the fire of hell, do not abandon us in our moments of weakness! Not from a lack of faith, but in love and respect for Your creatures, I beseech You, perform a miracle! Help Your miserable slave Evgeny to find Your road and live in peace and health, so that he can sing Your glory! In the names of the Mothers, Fathers and Sons and of those members of our families who have been resurrected in Your arms, hear our prayer and bring Your light and Your warmth into our hearts! Amen!’

When he had finished the prayer, Grandfather Boris would get up off his knees and turn towards Geka. Then, making solemn, spectacular gestures, like those of an actor on the stage, he would touch Geka’s glasses with his fingers and, saying the following sentence, slowly remove them:

‘Just as many times You have put Your strength into my hands to grip my knife against the cops, and have directed my pistol to hit them with bullets blessed by You, give me Your power to defeat the sickness of Your humble slave Evgeny!’

As soon as he had taken off the glasses, he would ask Geka:

‘Tell me, my angel, can you see well now?’

Out of respect for him, Geka couldn’t bring himself to say no.

Grandfather Boris would turn towards the icons and thank the Lord with the traditional formulas:

‘May Your will be done, Our Lord! As long as we are alive and protected by You, the blood of the cops, the contemptible devils and the servants of evil will flow in abundance! We are grateful to You for Your love.’

Then he would call the whole family and announce that a miracle had just occurred. Finally he would return Geka’s glasses to him in front of everyone, saying:

‘And now, my angel, now that you can see, break these useless glasses!’

Geka would put them in his pocket, mumbling:

‘Don’t be angry, Grandfather Boris: I’ll break them later.’

My grandfather would stroke his head and tell him in a gentle, joyful voice:

‘Break them whenever you like, my son; the important thing is that you never wear them again.’

The next time, so that he wouldn’t be angry, Geka would turn up at our house without his glasses; he would take them off outside the door before coming in. Grandfather Boris, when he saw him, would be overcome with joy.

Well, to return to our story: Geka lived with his mother and an uncle who had had an incredible life; he was the embodiment of divine anger, of the living doom to which this likeable, kindly family was predestined. His name was Ivan, and he had been nicknamed ‘the Terrible’. The allusion to the great tyrant was ironical, because Ivan was as good-natured as they come. He was about thirty-five years of age, short and thin, with black hair and eyes, and abnormally long fingers. He had been a professional musician before he had fallen into disgrace; at the age of eighteen he was playing the violin in an important orchestra, in St Petersburg, and his musical career seemed to be rocketing upwards like a Soviet intercontinental missile. But one day Ivan had ended up in bed with a friendly tart who played in the orchestra, a cellist, the wife of an important member of the communist party. He had become infatuated with her, made their relationship public and even asked her to leave her husband. Poor naive musician, he didn’t know that party members couldn’t get divorced, because they and their families had to be an example of a perfect ‘cell’ of Soviet society. And what kind of cell are you, if you get divorced whenever you feel like it? Russian cells must be as hard as steel, made of the same stuff as their tanks and their famous Kalashnikov assault rifles. Have you ever seen a faulty Soviet tank? Or a Kalashnikov that jammed? Families must be as perfect as firearms.

So our friend Ivan, as soon as he tried to follow the motions of his heart, was crushed by his lover’s husband, who hired some agents of the Soviet secret services, who pumped him so full of serums they reduced him to a zombie.

Officially he had disappeared, nobody knew where; everyone was convinced that he’d escaped from the USSR via Finland. A few months later he was found in a psychiatric hospital, where he had been interned after being picked up on the street in a serious state of mental confusion. He couldn’t even remember his own name. The only thing he had with him was his violin; thanks to that the doctors traced him to the orchestra, and later were able to hand him back to his sister.

By this time Ivan’s health was permanently impaired, and his face was that of a person tormented by one long, enormous doubt. He could communicate perfectly well, but he needed time to reflect on questions and think about his answers.

He still played the violin; it was his only link with the real world, a kind of anchor which had kept him attached to life. He would perform twice a week in a restaurant in the Centre and then get drunk out of his mind. When he was drunk, he used to say, he managed to have moments of mental lucidity, which unfortunately soon passed.

The faithful companion of his life, who had always shared in all his drinking bouts, was another poor wretch called Fima, who had caught meningitis at the age of nine and since then been out of his wits. Fima was extremely violent, and saw enemies everywhere: when he entered a new place he would put his right hand inside his coat as if to take out an imaginary gun. He was bad-tempered and quarrelsome, but nobody reproached him for it, because he was ill. He went around dressed in a sailor’s overcoat and shouted out naval phrases, such as ‘There may be few of us, but we wear the hooped shirt!’ or ‘Full ahead! A hundred anchors in the arse! Sink that damned fascist tub!’ Fima divided the world into two categories: ‘our boys’ – the people he trusted and regarded as his friends – and the ‘fascists’ – all those he considered to be enemies and therefore deserving to be beaten up and insulted. It wasn’t clear how he determined who was one of ‘our boys’ and who a ‘fascist’; he seemed to sense it, on the basis of some hidden, deep-seated feeling.

Together Ivan and Fima got into a lot of trouble. If Fima was wild, Ivan would attack with a natural violence: he would pounce on people like a beast on its prey.

In short, because of these virtues I really hoped we would find them at home.

When we arrived, Geka, Ivan and Fima were playing battleships in the living room.

Geka was relaxed and was laughing, mocking his competitors in the game:

‘Glub-glub-glub,’ he repeated derisively, imitating the sound of a sinking ship.

Fima, with trembling hands, disconsolately clutched his piece of paper: his fleet was evidently in a desperate plight.

Ivan was sitting in a corner looking crestfallen, and his piece of paper thrown on the floor indicated that he had just lost the game. He was holding his violin and playing something slow and sad which resembled a distant scream.

I briefly explained our situation to Geka and asked him if he could help us to get across the district.

He immediately agreed to help us, and Fima and Ivan followed him like two lambs ready to turn into lions.

We went out into the street; I looked at our gang and could hardly believe it – two Siberian boys and an adult fresh out of jail, accompanied by a doctor’s son and two raving lunatics, trying to escape unharmed from a district where they were being hunted. And all of this on my birthday.

Geka and I walked in front and the others followed. While I was chatting to Geka, I heard Mel telling Finger one of his miraculous stories, the one about the big fish that had swum all the way up the river, against the current, to get to our district, because it had been attracted by the smell of Aunt Marta’s apple jam. Every time Mel told that story, the funniest part was when he demonstrated how big the fish had been. He would open his arms like Jesus crucified, and with an effort in his voice would shriek ‘A brute as big as that!’ As I waited for that phrase with one ear and listened to Geka with the other, I felt really great. I felt like I was out for a stroll with my friends, without any dangers.

When Mel came to the end of his story, Fima commented: ‘Holy fuck, the number of fish like that I’ve seen from my ship! The whales are a real pain in the arse! The sea’s full of the buggers!’

I turned round to see what expression he had as he was saying those words, and saw something fly past close to my face, so close it almost touched my cheek. It was a piece of brick. At the same moment Geka shouted:

‘Shit, an ambush!’ and a dozen boys armed with sticks and knives emerged from each of two opposite front yards, and ran towards us, shouting:

‘Let’s kill them, kill them all!’

I put my hand in my pocket and took out my pike. I pressed the button and with a clac the blade, pushed by the spring, shot out. I felt Mel’s back lean against mine and heard his voice say:

‘Now I’m going to do someone!’

‘Go for their thighs, you fool; their jackets are stuffed with newspapers, don’t you see they’re prepared? They’ve been waiting for us…’ Before I could finish the sentence I saw a big guy armed with a wooden stick in front of me. I heard his stick whistle past my ears once, then a second time; he was quick, the bastard. I tried to get closer so I could stab him with my blade, but I was never fast enough; his blows were getting ever quicker and more accurate, and I was in danger of being hit. Suddenly another guy attacked me from behind; he pushed me hard and I knocked into the giant with the stick. Instinctively I gave him three quick stabs in the thigh, so quick that I felt shooting pain in my arm, a kind of electric shock, from the released tension. The snow beneath us was spattered with blood, the giant elbowed me in the face but I kept stabbing him till he fell on the ground, clutching his leg in the blood-red snow, grimacing in agony.

From behind, the boy who had pushed me tried to stab me in the side, but I was thin and my jacket was big, and he didn’t manage to reach the flesh. The jacket ripped, however, and his hand went through the hole along with the knife. I turned and wounded him with my pike, first on the nose and then above the eye: his face was instantly covered with blood. He was trying to get his hand out of the hole in my jacket, but his knife had got stuck in the material, so he abandoned it there. He put his hands to his face and, screaming, fell on the snow, away from me.

I put two fingers into the hole in my jacket and carefully pulled out the blade: it was a hunting knife, wide and very sharp. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘if he’d got through I’d have been killed. When I get home I’m going to light a candle in front of the icon of the Madonna.’

Stepping over my enemy’s body and holding his knife in my left hand, I went towards Geka, who was down on the ground, trying to avoid the blows from a stick wielded by a sturdy boy. He was leaning on his right arm and trying to fend off the blows with his left. I surprised his attacker from behind and plunged the blade of my pike into his thigh.

The blade of my knife was very long and slipped easily into the flesh; it was the ideal thing for putting people out of action, because it had no problem in penetrating muscle right through to the bone.

Simultaneously, using the hunting knife, I cut the ligaments behind the knee of his other leg. With a cry of pain the stocky boy fell to the ground.

Geka got to his feet and picked up the stick, and together we rushed towards Mel, who had caught one of them and, yelling like a madman, was stabbing him with his knife in the area of the stomach, while three guys tried to stop him by raining down blow after blow from their sticks on his head and back. If I had taken so many hits I’d have been killed for sure; it was only thanks to his physique that Mel managed to stay on his feet.

I rushed with my knife at a guy who was about to deal a powerful blow at Mel’s head. I came up from behind, and cut one of his ligaments.

Geka hit another boy on the head, who immediately passed out, blood oozing from his ear. The third ran off towards one of the yards from which they had all emerged a few moments before.

Meanwhile Fima and Ivan, armed with sticks, were standing close to the pavement, clubbing two guys who had fallen on the ground. One was in a very bad way. Fima had definitely broken his nose and his face was covered with blood – he was instinctively holding up his quivering hands to shield his face from the blows, but Fima was hitting him anyway, with such violence that the stick bounced off those hands as if they were made of wood, like a puppet’s: it was clear that Fima had broken them. Angrily, furiously, Fima hit him, shouting:

‘Who is this guy who wants to kill a Soviet sailor? Eh? Well? Who is this damned fascist?’

In the meantime Ivan was trying to club the face of the other attacker, who was doing well to avoid the blows by twisting to one side and the other. At one point he almost hit him, but at the last moment the stick missed his face and slammed into the frozen asphalt covered with red snow – red with the blood which as soon as it fell on the ground became as hard as ice. The stick broke in two; Ivan lost his temper and threw away the piece that was left in his hand. Then he jumped two-footed on the boy’s head and started stamping on his face, letting out a strange war-whoop, like the Indians when they attack the cowboys in American westerns.

They were really crazy, those two.

In an instant the battle was over.

On the other side of the street was Finger, with a knife and a stick in his hands, and at his feet a boy with a cut which started from his mouth and ended in the middle of his forehead: it was too deep: a nasty wound. The boy lay there, conscious but not moving – terrified, I think, by the blood and the pain.

Mel was holding fast by the lapel the guy he had previously been stabbing in the stomach with his knife. He was gazing in astonishment at his blade, which had snapped in two. I went over to him and with a sharp tug ripped open the boy’s jacket, which was full of holes. Out onto the snow fell a couple of dozen thick newspapers, glued together: the missing part of Mel’s blade was sticking out from that pack of paper.

Surprised and incredulous, Mel looked at the scene as if it were a magic show.

I picked up the pack of paper from the ground and held it in my hand for a moment, feeling its weight. Then, putting all the strength I had into it, I slapped Mel across the face with that bundle of newspapers, making a loud noise, like when an axe splits a stump of wood.

His cheek immediately went red, he let go of the boy’s neck and put his hand to his face. In a plaintive voice he asked me:

‘What’s the matter with you? Why the hell are you angry with me?’

I hit him again and he took two paces backwards, putting one hand in front of him, to stop me.

I replied:

‘What did I tell you, you fool? Go for the thighs, not the chest! While you were messing around with that junkie and getting whacked by his three friends, I got the real blade. Shit, it was a damn close thing, I nearly got killed! And where were you? Why didn’t you cover my back?’

He immediately put on a mournful expression – lowered eyes, bowed head, mouth slightly open – and in the voice of a beggar asking for alms he started mumbling incomprehensible words, as he always did when he was in the wrong:

‘Uh-m-m-m… Kolima… o-o-only wa-a-anted…

mm-hm-hm… so-o-orry…

‘Fuck your excuses,’ I interrupted him. ‘I want to go home and celebrate my birthday, not my funeral. Now listen to me. This is no time for pissing about, we’re risking our necks in this fucking business. And don’t forget we’re not alone; there are other people with us, they’re giving us a hand; we can’t expose them too much. And thank God they are here, because with more friends like you I’d already be dead.’

Mel shrank even smaller and, as he always did on such occasions, began to cover my back, though it was a bit late now.

The street was like the scene of a massacre: all the snow was red with blood; our assailants were dragging themselves over to the sides of the pavement, looking decidedly the worse for wear.

I went over to the one Mel had been trying to stab: he was frightened, even though he didn’t have a scratch on him. I had to play tough. I grabbed him by the neck and tried to pull him up, but I couldn’t lift him – he was heavier than me – so I bent down and stuck my knife into his thigh, till a little blood started to ooze out. He screamed and started crying, begging me not to kill him. I gave him a hard slap, to shut him up:

‘Shut your mouth, you little pansy! Do you know who you’ve taken on, you dickhead? Don’t you know us guys from Low River are baptized with knives? Did you really think you could kill us? I’ve been fighting since I was seven; I’ve ripped open so many guys like you, it would take me a lifetime to count them.’

I was exaggerating the number of victims, of course, but I had to scare him, sow fear, because a terrified enemy is already half defeated.

‘I won’t kill you this time, seeing as today’s my birthday and it’s the first time we’ve come up against each other; but if you cross my path again I’ll have no mercy. When you see the Vulture, tell him Kolima sends his regards, and if I meet him before this evening I’ll slit him open like a pig…’

That poor idiot, with the blood welling out of his thigh and his face distorted with terror, looked at me as if I were taking possession of his soul.

We set off again: Fima with a big stick, Ivan with a broken truncheon that he’d picked up off the ground, Geka with an iron bar, Finger with a knife and a stick, I with two knives in my pocket, and lastly my second shadow, Mel, with a sheepish look on his face, holding a stick and a knife with only half a blade.

As we went away, the ‘survivors’ started to come out of the yard. We were twenty metres away when one of them shouted after us:

‘Siberian bastards! Go back to your fucking woods! We’ll kill you all!’

Mel turned round and quick as a flash hurled his broken knife at him. It flew in a strange trajectory and landed smack in the face of a boy standing next to the one who had shouted. More blood, and they all scattered again, leaving another wounded comrade on the snow.

‘Holy Christ, what a massacre…’ said Geka.

We walked fast. When we came out into wide open spaces we almost ran. We tried to avoid yards and narrow passageways.

We passed the last row of houses before the food warehouses and hid among the illegally built garages and lockups. I suggested we should explore the area carefully before crossing the road in a group: I sensed that there were surprises in store for us.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take off my jacket so I can run faster. I’ll cross the road further down, where it bends round and goes into the trees, then I’ll go on to the warehouses and see what the situation’s like. If there are a lot of them waiting for us, we’ll go another way. If there are only a few of them we’ll attack them from behind, and rub them in the shit… It’ll take me a quarter of an hour, no more; in the meantime, have a look in the garages, maybe there’s something handy we could use as a weapon, but be careful not to attract attention…’

Everyone agreed. Only Mel didn’t want to let me go on his own: he was worried.

‘Kolima, I’ll come with you: anything might happen…’

I couldn’t tell him he was a burden; I had to find a kinder way.

‘I need you here. If they discover where you guys are, it’ll be your job to defend the group. I can get away from any shit on my own, but do you think they can?’

At these words Mel became serious, and his face took on the same expression the Japanese kamikazes might have worn before boarding their aircraft.

I took off my jacket and was about to leave, but Mel stopped me, putting the iron bar in my hand, and in a trembling voice he said:

‘You might need it…’

I looked at him in wonder: what a fool that human being was, and how he loved me!

The fewer things I carried in my hands the better it was. But to avoid pointless explanations I took the bar and ran off. I threw it away as soon as I disappeared behind the garages. I was moving fast; the air was cold and breathing was easy.

I got to the bend, crossed the road and headed toward the stores. From a distance I saw a dozen boys sitting around an iron bin, where they had lit a fire to warm themselves. I counted the sticks and bars leaning against the wall. I waited a moment, to make sure there wasn’t anyone else there, then I turned back.

When I reached them, my friends had already opened five garages. Mel had turned out a cupboard full of gardening equipment and armed himself with a small hoe which had on one side an iron blade for hoeing and on the other a little fork, which I think was for picking things up: I don’t know the first thing about gardening – in our district gardens were only used for hiding weapons.

Mel had also filled his pockets with some spare cutters for a circular saw; they were round and had large sharp teeth.

‘What are you going to do with those things? Do you think you can slice people up?’

‘No, I’ll use them as missiles,’ he replied proudly, and I saw his eye gleam as it always did when he was about to do something really stupid.

‘Mel, this isn’t a game. Be careful you don’t hit any of us, or I’ll be forced to shove all those missiles up your arse.’

He looked offended, and sloped out of the garage hanging his head.

Fima was walking around with an enormous axe, which worried me a lot, so I persuaded him to abandon it in favour of a nice length of stainless steel piping.

‘Look how shiny it is,’ I said to him. ‘It looks like a sword, doesn’t it?’

He seized the pipe without comment, his eyes suddenly full of the desire to fight.

Ivan had got himself a long hatchet, the kind that’s used for lopping off branches. I took it out of his hands, replacing it with an iron bar. They were too violent, those two. They would have carried out a full-blown massacre; their armaments needed scaling down.

Finger had found a long, stout axe-handle, Geka a big skiving knife and a heavy wooden stick.

Perfect.

I searched one of the garages and found a crate of empty bottles. I’d had an idea: I wanted to do something horrible, but very useful in our situation. I looked in the other garages; in one I found some sand for preserving apples in winter. So I called Geka and we got a little tube and siphoned the petrol out of the cars’ tanks. We filled all the bottles with a mixture of petrol and sand, and made the stoppers out of some old rags we found lying around.

The molotovs were ready.

We had a quick meeting, at which I outlined my elementary plan:

‘We’ll cross the road directly from here and get to the wall of the warehouse, then we’ll creep towards them, getting as close as possible. They’re expecting us to appear from the other direction; we’ll take them by surprise, attacking them with the molotovs, and then close in and beat them up. That’s our only chance of getting out of the district on our own legs.’

They all agreed.

We ran across the road all together, very fast. When we reached the wall we slowed down. Geka and I were carrying the crate full of molotovs.

Suddenly we started to hear their voices: they were just around the corner. We stopped. I stuck my head out a little and took a peek at them: their position was a perfect target. They were all close to the wall, sitting round the fire in the bin.

One of them I knew, he was a thug about four years older than me, a born imbecile, called Crumb. He’d killed three cats that belonged to an old woman, a neighbour of his, and then gone on boasting to everyone about this heroic deed for a long time. He was a real sadist.

One day we’d all got together for a swim on a beach by the river, and one of the boys of our district, Stas, nicknamed ‘Beast’ – a really nasty type, a guy who was angry with the whole world – heard him boasting about his exploit with the cats. Beast didn’t waste any words: he went over to him, grabbed hold of his hands and crushed them so hard you could heard the sound of the breaking bones. Crumb went white in the face and passed out; his hands became swollen and purple, like two balloons. His family carried him away. Later I heard they’d fixed his hands in hospital, and that he’d resumed his life as a hooligan, telling everyone that he was going to take his revenge one day. But he never had time to, because Beast died soon afterwards, killed in a shoot-out with the cops. So Crumb swore vengeance on our whole district, and made a pact with the Vulture, vowing to destroy us. There was a rumour that they had held a black mass in the town cemetery, during which all of us Low River boys had been cursed.

I took two molotovs and gave another two to Geka and Finger. I didn’t give any to Mel, because when he was small he’d thrown one too high and it had come apart and spilt part of its contents over us. Since then he had always been given the job of holding the match or cigarette lighter at the ready.

I shook the bottles well, raising the sand from the bottom, set fire to the two rags, jumped out from behind the wall and threw two molotovs simultaneously at the group. A moment later I already had two more in my hands, lit them and threw them, in rapid succession.

The enemy were in a panic – boys with burnt faces threw themselves in the snow; there was fire everywhere; someone ran off so fast he vanished from our sight in a flash.

The three of us emptied the crate in less than a minute. Before Mel had even had time to put out his match, we had finished.

I pulled out my knives and rushed towards a guy who had just got up off the ground and was about to pick up a stick. He had no burns: the fire had only reached his jacket and he’d had time to roll in the snow. He was very angry, and kept whooping like a warrior. He tried to hit me a couple of times, always keeping me at a distance. Suddenly I dived towards his feet, avoiding a swipe from the stick, and plunged my knife into his leg. He kicked me in the face with the other leg and split my lip; I tasted blood in my mouth. But in the meantime I had managed to give him several stabs in the thigh and to cut the ligament behind his knee.

Behind me Mel had already felled three, one with half his face burnt, another with three holes in his head from which serious blood was oozing: the black stuff, the kind that comes out when they get you in the liver, only thicker. The third one had a broken arm. Mel was furious, and was walking around with a knife stuck in his leg.

Finger was standing by the wall. At his feet were three others, all wounded in the head; one had a broken bone sticking out of his leg, below the knee.

Geka, too, was leaning against the wall; he had taken a blow to the forehead, nothing serious, but he was clearly scared.

Meanwhile, those two maniacs Fima and Ivan were both laying into a giant, a colossus stretched out on the ground who, for some reason, wouldn’t let go of the wooden club he held in his fist. His face looked like a lump of minced meat, and he must have passed out some time ago, but he still didn’t release the club. I bent down over him and noticed that the club was fixed to his wrist by an elastic bandage. To leave him a souvenir from Siberia I cut the ligaments under his knee. He didn’t even utter a moan, he was completely unconscious.

I pulled the knife out of Mel’s leg, then retrieved the elastic bandage and divided it into two: one part I put over the wound as a plug and with the other I made a tight bandage. Mel had taken off his trousers to simplify the operation and now said that he didn’t want to put them back on. He said he wanted to get a bit of air, the nutcase.

Finger was looking at Fima and Ivan with a smile that didn’t fade. They waved their iron bars proudly, like heroes.

I helped Geka to his feet. He was fine, except that after the blow he felt a bit groggy and at the same time agitated. I took a sweet out of my pocket.

‘Take this, brother; chew it slowly. It’ll calm you down.’

This was bullshit, of course, but if you believe it a sweet works like a tranquillizer. ‘The psychological factor’, my uncle called it; he had induced one of his cellmates to give up smoking by telling him the cock-and-bull story that if he massaged his ears for half an hour a day he would lose the habit in a month.

Geka took the sweet and felt better. He had a long purple bruise which ran across his forehead and down to his left ear. I told him we had to get away fast, leave Railway as soon as possible.

Geka was scared to go home in case they knew where he lived.

‘Don’t worry, little brother,’ I reassured him. ‘When we get to our district I’ll tell the Guardian the whole story. Uncle Plank will sort things out.’

I tried to explain to him that with us he was safe, protected.

‘How can you be sure we’re in the right and not in the wrong?’ he asked me.

At the time his question seemed stupid to me. Only later, with time, did I come to see how profound it was. Because the real question was not whether we boys were right or wrong in that situation, or in other similar situations, but whether our values were right or wrong with respect to the world around us.

He was a philosopher, my friend Geka, but I wasn’t clever enough with words, so I answered him with the first ones that came into my head:

‘Because we’re genuine, we don’t hide anything.’

When he heard my reply he smiled in a strange way, as if he wanted to say something but preferred to keep it for another time.

Meanwhile Mel had searched our enemies’ pockets and come up with three knives, six packets of cigarettes, four cigarette lighters – one of which was made of gold, and which he immediately slipped in his pocket – more than fifty roubles and a plastic bag full of gold rings and chains, which those thugs had no doubt just stolen from someone.

We found more booty inside a cloth bag near the bin. A thermos full of badly made but still quite hot tea, about ten cheese sandwiches and the biggest surprise – a short double-barrelled shotgun, with no butt, and a lot of cartridges scattered here and there, even inside the sandwiches. I checked the cartridges: the original ones I kept, the home-made ones I threw away, because I didn’t trust cartridges made by strangers, especially guys from Railway.

Mel was surprised and kept asking over and over, like a cracked record:

‘Why didn’t they fire at us? Why didn’t they fire at us?

Why didn’t they fire at us?’

‘Because they haven’t got the balls…’ I replied, but only to stop him asking that question, because in fact I couldn’t understand it myself. Maybe the guy who had brought that shotgun with him had been taken by surprise and hadn’t had time to get it out… Maybe, maybe not. The only certain thing was that if he had used it our whole story would have taken a different course and I might not be here now to tell it.

Mel wanted to take the shotgun, but by right of seniority it was due to Finger: I gave it to him, and he hid it well under his jacket. Luckily Mel wasn’t offended, but agreed with the decision; he just started teaching Finger how to shoot with the thing.

We set off at a brisk pace towards the park. As I walked along, chewing a frozen sandwich, I thought to myself what a bad omen it was that I’d got into all this trouble on my birthday.

‘Okay, I’m in for a hard life,’ I said to myself. ‘I only hope it’s not too short.’

By the time we entered the park it was already dusk. In the winter the darkness falls quickly; the daylight retreats without much of a battle, and before half an hour has passed you can’t see a thing. There were no lamp-posts in the park; all we could see was the weak lights of the town twinkling between the trees.

We walked along the main path. As we drew level with the sanatorium I expounded to Geka my theory that the crisis wasn’t over yet. I felt in my heart that there was another ambush waiting for us, and since the park was the best place for laying it, isolated and dark as it was, I feared for all of us.

Geka was of the same opinion:

‘It can’t be a coincidence, can it, that Vulture hasn’t shown himself yet?’

He suggested we all walk close together, so we’d be ready to cover each other’s backs if they jumped out on us suddenly.

We bunched together in an instant, and all walked in step, like soldiers, expecting the enemy attack at any moment.

We went right across the park, but nothing happened. When we saw the lights of Centre we were so pleased we were almost jumping for joy. Mel even started hurling bizarre insults in the direction of Railway.

We entered Centre; walking along the lighted streets we were already quite relaxed and even able to crack jokes. Everything seemed so natural and simple… I felt such a lightness in my body that I said to myself: ‘If I wanted to, I could fly.’

Mel started making snowballs and throwing them at us; we all laughed as we walked homeward.

We took a short cut near the library, along a quiet little street that went past the old houses of the original town centre. I was dying to get back to celebrate my birthday with the others who were waiting for us.

‘They’ll be pissed out of their minds,’ joked Mel.

‘They’ll already have eaten everything, and when we get there we’ll have to do the washing up.’

‘If we do, boys, the next time I have a birthday I’m going to spend it on my own; you can all go…’ I didn’t finish the sentence: something or someone struck me a violent blow on the right side. I fell down on the frozen ground, banging my head. I was in pain, but I reacted at once, and when I got to my feet in one jump, I already had the knives in my hands.

The street was narrow and dark, but somewhere, a little way off, there was a lighted window, and thanks to that light it was possible to see something. There were shadows coming towards us.

‘Shit, what was that? Are you all right?’ Mel asked me.

‘I think so; somebody pushed me. It’s them, I’m sure of it…’

‘Holy Christ, I’ve already thrown away my stick,’ he looked at me despairingly.

‘Take one of my knives. What happened to those blades for the circular saw?’

Mel put his hand in his pocket and gave them to me.

‘Throw them at their faces, boy.’

I didn’t need telling twice. I hurled a blade at the nearest shadow, and a few seconds later there was a terrible scream.

I saw Fima jump forward with the iron bar, shouting:

‘You damned fascists, I’m going to tear you to pieces!’

He threw himself at a boy who by now was so close to us you could see his face; the boy tried to dodge the blow but the bar hit him full on the back of the head and he fell down without a moan.

Out of the darkness three of them charged at Fima; Ivan tried to hit them with his iron bar as best he could.

Geka was on the ground; he had a broken hand, he was getting beaten by a giant – another one – armed with a stick. In a second Finger threw himself at the giant with his shotgun lowered: he shot him at point-blank range, right in the chest. The giant collapsed in an unnatural way, as if pushed by an invisible force.

I set about helping Fima: I kept throwing blades, hitting two attackers full in the face. Another one I stabbed in the side; I felt the knife go deep into the flesh through a layer of cloth, then I realized they’d been so sure of taking us by surprise that they hadn’t even stuffed themselves with newspapers. I stabbed him twice more in the same place, in the region of the liver. I hoped to kill him. Immediately afterwards I felt a sensation of weakness in the hand that was holding the knife. It was as if I was losing control of the arm, a kind of paralysis.

‘That was all I needed…’ I thought.

I tried to pull myself together, to grip the knife more tightly, but my right hand wasn’t listening to me, wasn’t responding any more. So I grasped the knife with my left hand and at the same moment, from behind, Mel seized me by the neck and dragged me away. Meanwhile I heard a lot of footfalls in the dark: the sound of people running away.

I was winded, struggling to breathe. The blow on my left side hurt, but I didn’t think it was anything serious. I thought that at worst they’d broken a couple of my ribs, and indeed the pain increased when I breathed in.

The giant was on the ground, motionless, and groaning. There wasn’t a drop of blood. The bullets Finger had used to shoot him must have been those rubber ones with an iron ball inside them: specially made not to kill, but when fired from close range they can do serious damage.

We started walking again – or rather, without realizing it, we started running. We all ran; in front was Finger with Geka, who held his broken hand against his chest, supporting it with the other. Then Fima, shouting curses as he ran, and behind him Ivan, who was silent and focused. Although I was in pain I ran like mad too, I didn’t know why: maybe that sudden attack, just when we had been feeling as if we were out of harm’s way, had put a new fever into us.

Mel ran slowly behind me, he could have run faster, but he was worried because I couldn’t run as well as I usually did: the side where I’d been hit was hurting like hell.

At last we reached the border of our district. We slowed down to a halt in the middle of the road that led to the river. Three friends arrived, who were on guard at the time. We gave them a brief account of what had happened, and one of them went straight off to tell the Guardian.

We arrived at my home. My mother was in the kitchen with Aunt Irina, Mel’s mother, and when they saw us come in they froze on their chairs.

‘What happened to you?’ my mother stammered.

‘Nothing; we had bit of trouble, nothing much…’ I hurried into the bathroom to hide my torn jacket, and to wash my blood-stained hands. ‘Mama, call Uncle Vitaly,’ I said, going back into the kitchen. ‘We’ve got to get Geka to hospital, he’s broken his arm…’

‘Are you all crazy? What? He’s broken his arm? Have you been fighting with someone?’ My mother was trembling.

‘No, ma’am, I fell down, it was an accident… I should have been more careful.’ Poor Geka, in a voice that seemed to come from the other world, tried to save the situation.

‘If you fell down, why has Mel got a bruise on his face?’ My mother had her own special way of saying that we were a bunch of liars.

‘Aunt Lilya,’ said that genius Mel to my mother, ‘the fact is, we all fell down together.’

At that Aunt Irina gave his face a good slapping.

I went back into the bathroom and locked myself in. I turned on the light, and when I looked in the mirror my heart sank: the whole of my right leg was soaked in blood. I got undressed and turned towards the mirror. Yes, there it was: a very thin cut, only three centimetres wide, from which a piece of broken blade was sticking out.

I picked up the tweezers my mother used for her eyebrows, and at that moment she knocked.

‘Let me in, Nikolay.’

‘Just a second and I’ll be out, mama. I just want to wash my face!’

I gripped the broken piece of blade and gently pulled. As I watched the blade emerge and grow ever longer, I felt my head throb. I stopped halfway, turned on the tap and damped my brow. Then I pinched the blade again and pulled it right out. It was about ten centimetres long; I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was part of the blade of a saw for cutting metal, filed by hand till it was razor sharp on both edges, and with a thin, fragile tip. They’d chosen that weapon specially, so they could jab it in and then snap it off, so that it would stay in the wound and be more painful.

The wound was bleeding. I opened the wall cupboard and treated myself as best I could: I put a bit of cicatrizing ointment on the cut, and all around it a tight bandage, to stop the blood. I threw all my clothes and my shoes out of the bathroom window and put on some dirty clothes from the basket next to the washing machine. I washed and dried the knife and went back into the other room.

Mel and Aunt Irina had already left. Uncle Vitaly had arrived; he had his car keys in his hand, ready to take Geka to hospital.

Fima and Ivan were sitting at the kitchen table, and my mother was serving them soup with sour cream and meat stew with potatoes.

‘Well, bungler, what have you all been up to this time?’ asked Uncle Vitaly, who was in a cheerful mood, as always.

I was drained of strength; I didn’t feel much like joking.

‘I’ll tell you later, Uncle, it’s a nasty story.’

‘Did you have to go and get into trouble on your birthday, of all days? All your friends are already drunk, they’re waiting for you…’

‘No party for me, Uncle. I can hardly stand up, I just want to sleep.’

I spent two days in bed, only getting up to eat and go to the bathroom. On the second day Mel came to see me with the Guardian, Uncle Plank, who wanted to hear what had happened.

I told him the whole story, and he promised me he would sort it out in a matter of hours and prevent any reprisals being taken against Geka, Fima and Ivan in Railway. Finger, meanwhile, would be staying on in our district.

About a week later Plank called me round to his home to speak to a man from Railway. He was an adult criminal, an Authority of the Black Seed caste; his nickname was ‘Rope’, and he was one of the few criminals in Railway who was respected by our people.

I found them sitting round the table; Rope got up and came to meet me, looking me in the eye:

‘So you’re the famous “writer”?’

A writer, in criminal slang, is someone who’s skilled at using a knife. Writing is a knife wound.

I didn’t know what to say in reply or whether I was allowed to reply, so I looked at Plank. He nodded.

‘I write when I feel the urge to, when the Muse inspires me,’ I replied.

Rope smiled broadly:

‘You’re a smart young rascal.’

He had called me young rascal – that was a good sign. Maybe the matter was going to be resolved in my favour.

Rope sat down and invited me to join them.

‘I’ll ask you only once what you think about this business, then we won’t discuss it again.’ Rope talked with a great calm and confidence in his voice; you could tell he was an Authority, a man who was able to handle things. ‘If, as far as you’re concerned, the matter ends here and you don’t want to take revenge on anyone, I give you my word that all those who have bothered you and your friends will be severely punished by us, the people of Railway. If you want to take revenge on someone in particular, you can do so, but in that case you’ll have to do it all on your own.’

I didn’t think about it for a moment; the reply came to my lips at once:

‘I’ve got nothing personal against anyone in Railway. What’s done is done, and it’s right that it should be forgotten. I hope I didn’t kill any of your people, but in a fight, you know how it is – everyone’s intent on his own survival.’

I wanted him to understand that revenge wasn’t important for me, that well-being and peace in the community came first.

Rope looked at me earnestly, but with a kindly, amiable expression:

‘Good, then I promise you the person who organized this shameful action against you, while you were guests in our district, will be punished and expelled. Your friends can live their worthy life and walk with their heads held high in Railway…’ He paused, glancing at a door on the other side of the room. ‘I want to introduce you to my nephews; you’ve already met them, unfortunately, but now I want you to accept their apology…’ At these words, two boys with gloomy faces and bowed heads came in. One I recognized immediately – it was Beard, the little bastard whom we had beaten up and locked in the school – while the other’s face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I noticed he was limping, and that under his trousers, on his left leg, there was the swelling of a bandage: it was the guy I’d stabbed when I was giving him my message for Vulture, after the first fight.

The two boys approached and stopped in front of me, with all the enthusiasm of two condemned prisoners in front of a firing squad. They greeted me in unison. It was very sad and humiliating; I felt sorry for them.

Rope said to them sternly:

‘Well, then? Begin!’

Immediately, Beard, the little junkie, jabbered out what was clearly a prepared speech:

‘I ask you as a brother to forgive me, because I’ve made a mistake. If you want to punish me I’ll let you, but first forgive me!’

It wasn’t as moving as it might sound; it was clear that he was just going through the motions.

I too had to act my part:

‘Accept the humble greetings of a fond and compassionate brother. May the Lord forgive us all.’

It was pure Grandfather Kuzya, that speech. If he’d heard me he would have been proud of me. Poetic tone, Orthodox content, and spoken like a true Siberian.

After my words Plank sat with a contented smile on his face, and Rope looked astonished.

Now it was the other wretch’s turn:

‘Please, forgive me like a brother, for I have committed an injustice and…’

His voice was less resolute than Beard’s; it was clear that he couldn’t remember all his lines, and had shortened them. He threw a helpless glance at Rope, but Rope remained impassive, though his hands involuntarily clenched into fists.

Then I decided to kill them all with my kindness, and after taking a deep breath I reeled off the following sentence:

‘As our glorious Lord Jesus Christ embraces all us sinners in His gentle love, and affectionately impels us towards the way of eternal salvation, so with equal humility and joy I enfold you in brotherly grace.’

Saintly words: my feet were almost lifting off the ground and it seemed as if a hole were going to open up in the ceiling for me.

Plank didn’t stop smiling. Rope said:

‘Forgive us for everything, Kolima. Go home and don’t worry; I’ll sort everything out myself.’

A month later I heard that Vulture had been given a savage beating: they had ‘marked’ his face, giving him a cut that started from his mouth, ran right across his cheek and ended at his ear. Then they had forced him to leave Railway.

One day someone told me he’d moved to Odessa, where he’d joined a gang of boys who stole wallets on trams. People who had no respect for any law, neither that of men nor that of the criminals.

Some time later I heard he’d died, killed by his own cronies, who had thrown him out of a moving tram.

Geka soon recovered; no sign of the fracture remained on him – later he went to university to study medicine.

Fima, to his misfortune, was taken by his family to Israel. I heard that when they tried to get him to board the plane he started to protest, shouting that it was shameful for a sailor to travel by air. He punched a co-pilot and two customs officials. In the end they had to knock him out with a sedative.

Ivan continued to play the violin in the restaurant, and after a while found a way of consoling himself for the absence of his friend: he met a girl and went to live with her. In fact it was rumoured among the girls of the town that Ivan had been endowed by nature with another talent besides his musical one.

Finger lived in our district for a while, then robbed banks with a Siberian gang, and finally settled in Belgium, marrying a woman of that country.

After the trouble in Railway, for a couple of years I would occasionally bump into boys I didn’t know around town, who would greet me and say:

‘I was there that day.’

Some of them showed me the cuts behind their knees and the scars on their thighs, almost with a sense of vanity and pride, saying:

‘Recognize that? It’s your work!’

I remained on friendly terms with many of them. Luckily no one had been killed that day, though I had wounded one boy quite seriously, by stabbing him near the liver.

Grandfather Kuzya, after hearing from Plank how I’d behaved towards Rope’s nephews, congratulated me in his own way. A lopsided smile and a single sentence:

‘Well done, Kolima: a kind tongue cuts and strikes better than any knife.’

I didn’t get any birthday presents that year – my father was angry with me and kept repeating: ‘You can’t keep out of trouble, even on your birthday.’ My mother was offended because I’d kept from her what had happened to me that day, and in the midst of all this mess nobody gave me anything, except Uncle Vitaly, who brought me a genuine leather football, a beautiful one, but my dog tore it to shreds that very same night.

No presents, and above all a nasty wound which encouraged me to reflect on, and to understand better and put into perspective, the life I was leading.

After many thoughts and debates with myself I came to the conclusion that knives and fisticuffs didn’t get you anywhere. So I moved on to guns.