Siberian Education (18 page)

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.