He Lover of Death (3 page)

As Senka walked along, he dreamed about how time would pass and his life would change miraculously, and he would come back here in a big shiny carriage. The servant would carry in a little card with gold letters, with everything about Senka written in the finest fancy style, and that young lady with the glasses would say to Vanka: ‘Ivan Trofimovich, your brother has come to visit’. And Senka would be wearing a cheviot wool suit and button-down spats, and carrying a cane with an ivory knob on it.

It was already dark when he finally staggered home. It would have been better if he hadn’t come back at all, just run off straight away.

Right there in the doorway Uncle Zot thumped him so hard he saw stars, and knocked out the front tooth that left such a handy gap for spitting. Then, when Senka fell down, his uncle gave his ribs a good kicking: ‘That’s just for starters, you’ll get what you deserve later. I went to the police about you,’ he yelled, ‘I wrote out a complaint for the local sergeant. You’ll go to jail for stealing, you little bastard, they’ll soon straighten you out in there.’ And he just kept on and on barking out his threats.

So Senka did run away. When his uncle got tired kicking and punching and went to take the yoke down off the wall – the one the women used to carry water – Senka darted out of the porch, spitting blood and smearing the tears across his face.

He shuddered through the night at the Sukharevka market, under a load of hay. He was feeling miserable and sorry for himself, his ribs ached, his battered face hurt, and he was really hungry too. He’d spent the half-rouble left over from the horse on food the day before, and now he had nothing but holes in his pockets.

Senka left Sukharevka at dawn, to get well out of harm’s way. If Uncle Zot had snitched on him to the coppers, the first constable who came along would grab him and stick him in the jug, and once you were in there, you didn’t get out in a hurry. He had to make for somewhere where no one knew his face.

He walked to another market, the one on Old Square and New Square, under the Kitaigorod wall, and hung about beside the row of food stalls, breathing in the smell of the pies and the baked goods, shooting quick glances this way and that in case any of the tradeswomen got careless. But he didn’t have the nerve to snitch anything – after all, he’d never stolen openly like that before. And what if he got caught? They’d kick him so hard, it would make Uncle Zot seem like a doting mother.

He wandered round the market, keeping well away from Solyanka Street. He knew that over there, behind that street, was Khitrovka, the most terrible place in all Moscow. Of course, there were plenty of con merchants and pickpockets in Sukharevka too, but they were no match for the thieves of Khitrovka. From what he’d heard, it was a terrifying place. Stick your nose in there, and they’d have you stripped naked before you could say knife, and you could be grateful if you managed to escape with your life. The flophouses there were really frightening, with lots of cellars and underground vaults. And there were runaway convicts there, and murderers, and all sorts of drunken riff-raff. And they said that if any youngsters happened to wander in there, they disappeared without a trace. They had some special kind of crooks there, grabbers, they were called, or so people said. And these grabbers caught young boys who had no one to look out for them and sold them for five roubles apiece to the Yids and the Tartars for depraved lechery in their secret houses.

But as it turned out that was all horseshit. Well, everything about the flophouses and the drunken riff-raff was true, but there weren’t any grabbers in Khitrovka. When Senka let slip about the grabbers to his new mates, they laughed him down something rotten. Prokha said that if someone wanted to grab a bit of easy money off kids, that was fine, but forcing youngsters into doing filthy things – that just wasn’t on. The Council wouldn’t stand for anything like that. Slitting a throat or two in the middle of the night wasn’t a problem, if some gull showed up because he was drunk or just plain stupid. They’d found someone in Podkopaevsky Lane just recently, head smashed in like a soft-boiled egg, fingers cut off to get the rings, and his eyes gouged out. It was his own fault. You shouldn’t go sticking your nose in where you aren’t invited. The mice shouldn’t play where the cats are waiting.

‘Only why put his eyes out?’ Senka asked in fright.

But Mikheika the Night-Owl just laughed and said: ‘Go and ask them as put them out.’

But that conversation came later, when Senka was already a Khitrovkan.

It all happened very quickly and simply – before he even had time to sneeze, you might say.

There was Senka walking along the row of spiced tea stalls, sizing up what there was to filch and plucking up his courage, and suddenly this almighty ruckus started up, with people shouting on all sides, and this woman was yelling. ‘Help! I’ve been robbed, they’ve took me purse, stop thief!’ And two young lads, about the same age as Senka, came dashing along the line of stalls, kicking up the bowls and mugs as they ran. A woman selling spiced tea grabbed one of them by the belt with a great ham of a hand and pulled him down on to the ground. ‘Gotcha,’ she shouted, ‘you vicious little brute! Now you’re for it!’ But the other young thief, with a sharp pointy nose, leapt off a hawker’s stand and thumped the woman on the ear. She went all limp and slipped over on her side (Prokha always carried a lead bar with him, Senka learnt that later). The lad with the pointy nose jerked the other one up by the arm to get him to keep on running, but people had already closed in from all sides. They’d probably have beaten the two of them to death for hurting the woman, if it wasn’t for Senka.

He roared at the top of his voice:

‘Good Orthodox people! Who dropped a silver rouble?’

Well, they all went dashing over to him: ‘I did, I did!’ But he squeezed through between their outstretched hands and shouted to the young thieves:

‘Don’t stand there gawping! Leg it!’

They sprinted after him, and when Senka hesitated at a gateway, they overtook him and waved for him to follow.

After they stopped at a quiet spot to get their breath back and shook hands. Mikheika the Night-Owl (the one who was shorter, with fat cheeks) asked him: ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’

And Senka answered: ‘Sukharevka.’

The other one, who was called Prokha, bared his teeth and grinned, as if he’d heard something funny. ‘So what made you leave Sukharevka in such a hurry?’

Senka spat through the gap in his teeth – he hadn’t had time to get used to the novelty of it yet, but he still spat a good six feet.

And all he said was: ‘Can’t stay there. They’ll put me in jail.’

The two lads gave Senka a respectful kind of look. Prokha slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come and live with us, then. No need to be shy. No one gets turned in from Khitrovka.’

HOW SENKA SETTLED IN AT
THE NEW PLACE

So this was the way he and the lads lived.

During the day they went ‘snitching’, and at night they went ‘bombing’.

They did most of their thieving round that same Old Square where the market was, or on Maroseika Street, where all the shops were, or on Varvarka Street, from the people walking by, and sometimes on Ilinka Street, where the rich merchants and stockbrokers were, but definitely no farther than that, oh no. Prokha – he was their leader – called it ‘a dash from Khitrovka’. Meaning that if anything went wrong, you could hightail it to the Khitrovka gateways and side alleys, where there was no way anyone could catch a thief.

Senka learned how to go snitching quickly enough. It was easy work, good fun.

Mikheika the Night-Owl picked out a ‘gull’ – some clueless passerby – and checked to make sure he had money on him. That was his job. He moved in close, rubbed up against the gull and then gave them the nod:
yeah he’s got a wallet on him, over to you.
He never pinched anything himself – his fingers weren’t quick enough for that.

Then it was Senka’s turn. His job was to surprise the gull so his jaw dropped open and he forgot all about his pockets. There were several ways of going about it. He could start a fight with Night-Owl – people loved to gawp at that. He could suddenly start walking down the middle of the road on his hands, jerking his legs about comically (Senka had been able to do that ever since he was a little kid). But the simplest thing of all was just to collapse at the gull’s feet, as if he was having a fit, and start yelling: ‘I feel real bad, mister (or missus, depending on the circumstances). I’m dying!’ If it was someone soft-hearted, they were bound to stop and watch the young lad writhing about; and even if you’d picked a real cold fish, he’d still look round, out of sheer curiosity, like. And that was all Prokha needed. In and out like a knife, and the job was done. It used to be your money, but now it’s ours.

Senka didn’t like bombing so much. In fact, you could say he didn’t like it at all. In the evening, somewhere not far from Khitrovka, they picked out a ‘beaver’ who was all on his own (a beaver was like a gull, only drunk). Prokha did the important work here too. He ran up from behind and smashed his fist against the side of the beaver’s head – only he was holding a lead bar in that fist. When the beaver collapsed, Speedy and Night-Owl came dashing in from both sides: they took the money, the watch and a few other things, and tugged off the jacket and the low boots, if they looked pricey. If the beaver was some kind of strongman who wasn’t felled by the lead bar, they didn’t mess with him: Prokha legged it straight away, and Skorik and Filin never stuck their noses out of the gateway.

So bombing wasn’t exactly complicated, either. But it was disgusting. At first, Senka was terrified Prokha would hit someone so hard he’d kill them, but then he got used to that. For starters, it was only a lead bar, not knuckledusters or a blackjack. And anyway, everyone knew that God himself looked after drunks. And they had thick heads.

The lads sold their loot out of Bunin’s flophouse. Sometimes they only made a rouble between them, but on a good day it could be as much as fifty. If it was just a rouble, they ate ‘dog’s delight’ – cheap sausage – with black rye bread. But if the takings were good, they went to drink wine at the Hard Labour or the Siberia. And after that the thing to do was visit the tarts (‘mamselles’ they were called in Khitrovka), and horse around.

Prokha and Filin had their own regular mamselles. Not molls, of course, like proper thieves had – they didn’t earn enough to keep a moll just for themselves – but at least not streetwalkers. Sometimes the mamselles might even feed them, or lend them some money.

Senka soon acquired a little lady-friend of his own too. Tashka, her name was.

That morning Senka woke up late. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened the day before, he had been too drunk. But when he looked, he saw he was in a small room, with just one window, curtained over. There were plants in pots on the windowsill, with flowers – yellow, red and blue. In the corner, lying on the floor, was a withered old woman, a bag of bones, tearing herself apart with this rasping cough and spitting blood into a rag – she had consumption, for sure. Senka was lying on an iron bedstead, naked, and there was a girl about thirteen years old, sitting at the far end of the bed with her legs crossed under her, looking at some book and laying out flowers and muttering something under her breath.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’ Senka asked in a hoarse voice.

She smiled at him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s white acacia – pure love. Red celandine – impatience. Barberry – rejection.’

Queer in the head,
he thought. He didn’t know then that Tashka was studying the language of flowers. Somewhere or other she’d picked up this book called
How to Speak with Flowers,
and she’d really taken to the idea of talking with flowers instead of words. She’d spent almost all the three roubles she got from Senka the night before on flowers – run to the market first thing and bought a whole bundle of leafy stuff, then started sorting it all out. That was what Tashka was like.

Senka spent almost the whole day with her that time. First he drank brine to cure his sore head. Then he drank tea with some bread. And after that they sat there doing nothing. Just talking

Tashka turned out to be a nice girl, only slightly touched. Take the flowers, for instance, or that mum of hers, the miserable drunk with consumption, no good for anything. Why did she bother with her, why waste her money like that? She was going to die anyway.

And in the evening, before she went out on the street, Tashka suddenly said: ‘Senka, let’s you and me be mates, shall we?’

‘All right,’ he said.

They hooked their little fingers together and shook them, then kissed each other on the lips. Tashka said that was what mates were supposed to do. And when Senka tried to paw her after the kiss, she said to him: ‘Now what do you think you’re doing? We’re mates. And mates don’t go horsing around. And you shouldn’t do it with me, anyway, I’ve got the frenchies, picked it up off this shop clerk. You do the jig-a-jig with me and that snotty nose of yours will fall right off.’

Senka was upset.

‘What do you mean, the frenchies? Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?’

‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘you was no one, just a customer, but now we’re mates. Never mind, Senka, don’t be scared, it ain’t a sickness that takes to everyone, especially not from just one time.’

He calmed down a bit then and started feeling sorry for her.

‘What about you?’

‘Phooey,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty round here have got that. They keep going somehow. Some mamselles with the frenchies lives to be thirty, even longer, sometimes. Thirty’s more than enough, if you ask me. Mum over there’s twenty-eight, and she’s an old woman – her teeth have all fallen out, and she’s covered in wrinkles.’

Senka still called Tashka his mamselle in front of the lads. He was ashamed to tell them the truth – they’d just laugh him down. But it was okay, what did that matter anyway? You could horse around with anyone you wanted if you had three roubles, but where could he find another good mate like her?