Siberian Education (13 page)

During those days I told them a lot of the stories that I had heard as a child from my grandfather and from other old men. Many of my cellmates were simple men, who had been sent to prison for ordinary crimes – men with no underlying criminal philosophy. One of them, a strapping young man called Shura, was serving a five-year sentence for killing someone in obscure circumstances. He didn't like talking about it, but it was clear that jealousy had something to do with it – it was a story of love and betrayal.

Shura was a strong man and as such he was sought after by several criminal groups – in prison the Authorities of the castes or families always try to make alliances with people who are strong and intelligent, so that they can dominate the others. But he kept to himself, didn't take anyone's side and lived his sad life like a hermit. Now and then some member of the Siberian family would invite him to drink tea or chifir, and he would come willingly because, he said, we were the only ones who didn't invite him to play cards in order to cheat him and then use him as a hitman. He spoke very little; usually he listened to the others reading their letters from home and sometimes, when somebody sang, he would sing too.

After the story of Fog's tattoo and my sudden fame, he took to spending more time with the Siberians; nearly every evening he would come to our bunks and ask if he could stay with us for a while. Once he arrived with a photograph which he showed to everyone. It was an old picture of an elderly man with a long beard, holding a rifle. He wore the typical Siberian hunting belt, hanging from which was the knife and the bag containing the lucky charms and the magic talismans. On the back of the photo was a note:

‘Brother Fyodot, lost in Siberia, a good and generous
soul, an eternal dreamer and a great believer',
and a date:
‘1922'.

‘That's my grandfather; he was Siberian . . . May I be part of the Siberian family, since my grandfather was one of you?' He seemed very serious, and his question was entirely devoid of vanity or any other negative feeling. It was a genuine request for help. Shura, it seemed, must be tired of living on his own.

We told him we would examine the photograph and ask some questions at home, to see if any of the old folk remembered him.

We didn't send the photo anywhere and we didn't ask anyone; during those years in Siberia lives were swallowed up in a great maelstrom of human history. We decided to wait a while and then take the giant Shura into our family – after all, he was quiet, he had already served two years without creating any problems, and we didn't see any reason for preventing a human being from enjoying some company and brotherhood, if he deserved it.

A week later we told him he could enter the family, provided that he promised to respect our rules and laws, and we gave him back the photo, saying that unfortunately no one had recognized his grandfather. He thought about this for a while and then confessed, in a trembling voice, that the photo wasn't really his – he had got it from his sister who worked in some historical archive in a university. He apologized to us for deceiving us; he said he really liked us as people, and that that was why he was so keen on entering our family. I felt sorry for him. I understood that as well as being simple, he had a kindly soul, and there was nothing bad in him. In prison people like him usually died after a few months; the luckiest ones were used as puppets by one of the more experienced criminals.

We took pity on him.

‘Shura has become one of us,' we announced that same evening, and everyone in the cell was very surprised.

We allowed him to live with us, in the family, even though he wasn't a true Siberian, forgiving him because he had confessed his error.

He soon learned our rules; I explained everything to him as you might to a child, and he discovered them as children do, not concealing his astonishment.

When the time came for me to be released, he bade me an affectionate farewell and said that if it hadn't been for the story of the tattoo he would never have decided to join the Siberians, and would never have discovered our rules, which he considered just and honest.

‘Perhaps my humble trade has saved his life,' I thought. ‘Without the family in prison he would have died in some brawl.'

To me tattooing was a very serious matter. To many of my young friends it was a game – they only had to see a few scrawls on their skin and they were satisfied. Others took it a little more seriously, but not very.

Conversations on the subject would go something like this:

‘My father's got a big owl with a skull in its claws . . .'

‘An owl means a robber, I assure you . . .'

‘And what does a skull mean?'

‘It depends.'

‘I know. An owl with a skull means a robber and a murderer, I swear it does!'

‘Don't talk rubbish! A robber and a murderer is a tiger's face with oak leaves – my uncle's got one!'

In short, everyone fired out theories at random.

For me, however, it was a very different affair, a complicated business. I liked subjects which left a trace of the hand that had made them. So I asked my father, my uncles and their friends to tell me about the tattooists they had known. I would study their tattoos, trying to understand what techniques they had used to create different effects. Then I would talk about them with my master, Grandfather Lyosha, who helped me to understand the techniques of others better and taught me to adapt them to my own way of seeing the subjects, drawing them and tattooing them on the skin.

He was pleased, because he saw that I was interested in the subjects not just because of their links with the criminal tradition, but because of their artistic qualities.

Even during the preparatory phase of the drawings, I began to wonder, and to ask him, why each tattoo couldn't be understood exclusively as a work of art, irrespective of its size. My master used to reply that true art was a form of protest, so every work of art must create contradictions and provoke debate. According to his philosophy, the criminal tattoo was the purest form of art in the world. People, he would say, hate criminals, but love their tattoos.

I suggested it might be possible to establish a connection between high-quality art and the profound meaning – the philosophy – of the Siberian tradition. He would reply to me, with great confidence in his voice:

‘If we ever reach the point where everybody wants to be tattooed with the symbols of our tradition, you'll be right . . . But I don't think that will happen, because people hate us and everything connected with our way of life.'

1
. In the criminal language this means ‘he who stings', i.e. the tattooist.

1
. The tattoos so called do not represent seeds or wings: they contain various images which allude to the criminal's personal characteristics, the promises he has made and any romantic attachments he might have.

BORIS THE
ENGINE DRIVER

In the mid-1950s the Soviet government declared it illegal to keep mentally ill people at home, thus forcing their relatives to send them to special institutions. This sad state of affairs compelled many parents who didn't want to be separated from their children to move to places which the long arm of the law could not reach. So in the space of ten years Transnistria was filled with families who had come from all over the USSR because they knew that in the Siberian criminal tradition both mentally and physically handicapped people were considered sacred messengers of God and described as ‘God-willed'.

I grew up among these people, the God-willed, and many of them became my friends. To me they didn't
seem
normal, they
were
normal, like everyone else.

They are not capable of hatred – all they can do is love and be themselves. And if ever they are violent, their violence is never driven by the force of hatred.

Boris was born a normal child in Siberia and lived in our district with his mother, Aunt Tatyana. One night the cops arrived at his parents' house – his father was a criminal, and had robbed an armoured train, getting away with a lot of diamonds. The cops wanted to know where he had hidden the diamonds and who else had been involved in the train robbery. The man refused to talk, so the cops took little Boris, who was six years old, and clubbed him on the head with a rifle butt to make his father talk. His father didn't talk, and eventually they shot him.

Boris, having suffered severe brain damage, remained forever a six-year-old.

His mother moved to Transnistria with him. They lived nearby and he was always in our house. My grandfather was very fond of him, and so was I. We flew pigeons together, went down to the river, stole apples from the Moldovans' orchards, fished with our nets during the summer nights and played by the railway line.

Boris had a fixation: he thought he was an engine driver. In the town, some distance from our area, near the railway, there was an old steam train displayed like a monument, motionless on its sawn-off rails. Boris used to get into it and pretend to be the chief engineer. It was his game. We used to go with him. We would all get into the cabin and he would get angry if we entered with our shoes on, because Boris went barefoot in his train. He even had a broom to sweep up with, and kept the place as clean as if it were his own house.

The train drivers at the station liked him; they had even given him a real train-driver's hat – it was like those worn by naval officers, white on top, with a green edge and a black plastic peak. It also bore the railway's golden badge, which shone in the sun so brightly you could see it from a long way off. He was very proud of that present; when he put on his hat he would immediately become serious and start addrressing us like a railway official talking to passengers, saying things like ‘Respectable comrades', or ‘Citizens, please, I request your attention'. The transformation was hilarious.

My father had once given Boris a T-shirt which he had brought home at the end of a prison sentence he had served in Germany. This T-shirt was emblazoned with two doves: behind one was the German flag, behind the other the Russian one, and it bore the words ‘Peace, friendship, cooperation', in both languages. Boris had taken it and stood stock still for half an hour, gazing at it. He was astonished by the colours, because there were no coloured clothes in our country in those days, everything was more or less grey, in the Soviet fashion. That garment, however, shone with bright colours, and immediately became Boris's favourite item of clothing. He always wore that T-shirt – sometimes he would stop abruptly, pull it up with his hands and look at the picture, smiling and whispering to himself.

Boris was a very communicative boy – he wasn't shy at all and could talk for hours, even with strangers. He was direct; he said whatever came into his head. When he talked he looked you straight in the eye, and his gaze was strong but at the same time relaxed, not tense. He could read; he had been taught by the widow Nina, a woman who lived on her own and whom we boys often went to visit. We used to help her do the heavy jobs in her vegetable garden, and she would give us something good to eat in return. She was a cultured woman. She had been a teacher of Russian language and literature. And so, with the consent of Aunt Tatyana, she had taught Boris to read and write.

Around this time, in 1992, there was a war in Transnistria. After the fall of the USSR, Transnistria stayed outside the Russian Federation and no longer belonged to anybody. The neighbouring countries, Moldova and Ukraine, had designs on it. But the Ukrainians already had difficulties of their own, because of the massive corruption in the government and the ruling administration. The Moldovans, meanwhile, despite the catastrophic situation in their country – the predominantly rural population lived in abject poverty, not so say squalor – made a pact with the Romanians, and tried to occupy Transnistrian territory by military force. According to the agreement with the Romanians, Transnistria would be divided up in a special way: the Moldovan government would control the land, leaving the Romanian industrialists the job of running the numerous munitions factories, which had been built by the Russians in the days of the USSR and afterwards had remained completely under the control of the criminals, who had turned the Transnistrian territory into a kind of weapons supermarket.

Without any warning the Moldovan military swung into action. On 22nd June a division of Moldovan tanks, accompanying ten military brigades, including one of infantry, one of special infantry and two of Romanian soldiers, reached Bender, our town on the right bank of the River Dniester, on the Moldovan border. In response, the inhabitants of Bender formed defence squads – after all, they were not short of weapons. A brief but very bloody war broke out, which lasted one summer, and ended with the criminals of Transnistria driving the Moldovan soldiers out of their land. Then they began to occupy Moldovan territory. At that point Ukraine, fearing that the criminals, if they won the war, would bring turmoil to their territory too, asked the Russians to intervene. Russia, recognizing the inhabitants of Transnistria as its own citizens, arrived with an army to ‘assist the peace process'. This army set up a military regime, reinforced the police stations and declared Transnistria an ‘area of extreme danger'.