Siberian Education (17 page)

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.