Siberian Education (14 page)

Russian soldiers patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and imposed a curfew from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Many people began to disappear without trace; the bodies of the tortured dead were found in the river. This period, which my grandfather called a ‘return to the Thirties', lasted a long time. My Uncle Sergey was killed in prison by his guards: many people, to save themselves, were forced to abandon their land and take refuge in various other parts of the world.

Boris didn't know anything about this situation. His brain couldn't grasp reality, much less a reality made up of brutal violence and politico-military logic. All he wanted to do was drive his train, and he did so even at night, because, like other trains all over the world, his train sometimes had night schedules too . . .

One evening, as he was walking towards the railway, the soldiers, like cowards, shot him in the back, without even getting out of their armoured car, and left him dead on the road.

When I heard the news I suddenly felt grown-up.

It was a watershed – something inside me died forever. I felt it quite distinctly; it was an almost physical sensation, like when you sense that certain ideas, fantasies or modes of behaviour are things you will never experience again, because of some burden that has fallen on your shoulders.

My grandfather turned pale and shook with rage; he wasn't as upset even when they killed my uncle, his son. He kept repeating that these people were cursed, that Russia was becoming like hell, because the cops were killing the angels.

My father and other men from our district went to the cops' area, and at dead of night, when the lights went out in their huts, they poured a torrent of lead into the buildings. It was an expression of blind and total rage, a desperate cry of sorrow. They killed a few cops and wounded many others, but in so doing unfortunately they only proved to the whole of Russia that the presence of the police in our country was truly necessary.

Nobody knew what was really going on in Transnistria; the television news presented things in such a way that after watching their crap even I began to wonder whether everything I knew was unreal.

I remember Boris's body after they retrieved it from the road and brought it home. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen.

An expression of fear and pain was etched on his face which I had never seen there before. His T-shirt with the doves was riddled with bullet-holes and soaked in blood. He was still clutching his engine-driver's hat tightly in his hands. The position of the body was shocking: as he died he had curled up like a newborn baby, with his knees tight to his chest. You could tell that during his last moments he must have felt intense pain. His eyes were wide open and cold and they still expressed a desperate question: ‘Why do I feel so much pain?'

We buried him in the cemetery of our district.

Everyone went to his funeral, people from all over Transnistria. From his home to the cemetery a long procession formed, and in accordance with an old Siberian tradition his coffin was passed from hand to hand among the people until it reached the grave. Everyone kissed his cross; many wept and angrily demanded justice. His poor mother watched everything and everyone with crazed eyes.

A year later the situation deteriorated. The cops started eliminating criminals in the light of day, shooting in the streets. I got my second juvenile sentence, and when I was eventually released I no longer recognized the place where I'd been born. Since then many things have happened to me, but through all these experiences I have continued to think that the Siberian law was right: no political force, no power imposed with a flag, is worth as much as the natural freedom of a single person. The natural freedom of Boris.

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.