Siberian Education (23 page)

Borishka didn't know what to do. He didn't want to become a Cossack, but nor did he think that the war against the Russians had been a good and just thing. And above all, he hated the Japanese.

So he picked up his sword, kissed it, as the Cossacks kiss their swords, and hung it on his belt, in its place.

The ataman was watching him with interest, trying to understand what he was up to. Many Cossacks were sure Borishka would break their sword.

But instead he picked up the
shashka
, kissed it too and gave it back to the ataman.

Everyone was left speechless, and the ataman burst out laughing:

‘Well, Borishka . . . You're a clever man, Japanese!'

‘I'm not Japanese, I'm from Iga, and my sword is from Iga too,' he replied.

‘Well, you're really a good fellow, Borishka; you must never forget who you are and never betray your tradition . . . You must be proud; only in that way will you preserve your dignity!'

So Borishka stayed with the Cossacks for a long time yet, but from that day on he was allowed to carry his sword with him.

When the Cossacks returned to Siberia, and to Altay, Borishka went with them. The ataman took him into his own house, and there Borishka met his future wife, the ataman's eldest daughter, Svetlana. They got married. Out of respect for her, Borishka was baptized in the Orthodox faith with the name of Boris, so that the ceremony could be held in church. They built their house and lived there, in a little village on the River Amur.

Then one day the ataman was suddenly arrested by Stalin's secret services, and some time later shot as a traitor. Borishka was very distressed; he thought it was all his fault, whereas in fact it was nothing to do with him: during that period many Cossacks were singled out by the Soviet government because they didn't share its communist ideas and still had a certain liking for anarchy and autonomy.

After his death the ataman was declared an ‘enemy of the people', and the members of his family were deported to Transnistria, along with many other Siberians.

Borishka still remembered that long journey. The trains, he said, used to stop for a long time on the rails, and you couldn't get out because they were guarded by armed soldiers. Sometimes two trains travelling in opposite directions would stop alongside each other; on the one there would be people from the European part of the USSR who were being sent to Siberia, and on the other the opposite. He would hear someone shout from one train:

‘Oh God, they're taking us to Siberia! It's too cold there, we'll all die!'

And someone reply from the other:

‘Oh Christ, they're sending us to Europe! There are no woods there, only empty hills, we'll die of hunger!'

During that journey Borishka met some Siberian Urkas. He joined up with them because they were the only ones who didn't seem to be in despair. In a sense they had a secure future; there was already a fairly well-developed community waiting for them in Transnistria.

Borishka told his story to one of them, an elderly man respected by all the others, and was reassured:

‘Don't be afraid, stay with us: our brothers are in Transnistria. If you're a just man, you'll soon have a home and you'll be able to bring up your children with our children, may the Lord bless us all . . .'

The Urkas and the Cossacks had always been on the same wavelength and got on well: both groups respected the old traditions, loved the nation and their homeland and believed in independence of any form of power. Both were persecuted by various Russian governments in different ages, for their desire for freedom. It was just that the Urkas were more extreme, and had a particular hierarchical structure. The Cossacks, on the other hand, regarded themselves as a free army, and so had a paramilitary structure; in peacetime their main occupation was raising livestock.

When they arrived in Transnistria, Borishka and his wife were taken in by a family of Urkas, just as the old man had promised them.

Borishka at once felt at home. To him the Urkas had a lot in common with the people of the land where he came from, Iga. They were united and extremely anarchic and had a strong criminal tradition.

He soon joined in the business activities of the Siberian criminals, who respected him because he understood everything about their law; he was a man of his word and a just one.

And little by little he became one of us. He lived in our area with his family. His wife, whom we all called Grandmother Svetlana, had borne him two sons, who followed the road of the Urkas.

In his old age Borishka exploited a connection with the manager of the food warehouses, who took him on as a caretaker. They came to an agreement: the manager wouldn't make any fuss when goods disappeared, and Borishka would share his slice of the profits with him. He organized every raid to perfection; he was very precise and serious in business matters. In particular, he was very good at controlling his emotions; I never saw him get flustered.

Once, in autumn, when in every home the people make preserves for the winter and light a big fire on which they put a big pot full of water, I saw Borishka save a child's life. As usual at our house, the women gathered to cut the greens and prepare the pulses, and the men tended the fire and prepared the glass jars. We children were nearby, playing among the adults. Old Borishka was there too, with his son and grandchildren.

Suddenly the bar under the big saucepan snapped in two, and the pot overturned and poured out a flood of boiling water in a second. A few metres away sat a little boy, the son of a neighbour of ours, Uncle Sanya. I had gone out into the garden to look for more jars. When I heard the sound of the pot overturning, I rushed into the house and saw old Borishka pick up a big steel alloy bowl, throw it on the ground and jump into it, skimming along as if on a surfboard. And there in the steam, which was as thick and white as the morning fog on the river, I saw slowly emerge the figure of a man standing inside a bowl with a child in his arms, surrounded by boiling water. The child's mother fainted; his father, Uncle Sanya, started screaming; the only two people who were calm were those two, Borishka and the little boy.

He had acted instinctively, without thinking about it, and afterwards had resumed his usual serene expression, as if he did such things four times a day.

He was a very interesting person; I liked talking to him, and hearing him tell the stories of his life. He often went fishing with a rod he had made himself, and while he was fishing he would stand with his feet in the water and sing Japanese songs. When I was small he taught me a very nice one: it was about a mountain and a young man who crossed it to find his betrothed.

We had made a deal with Borishka: when we went to the stores we had to pretend not to know him. If we saw him near the gate, we mustn't even greet him. He would often be there keeping guard with an old sheepdog that had something wrong with its hind legs and found it difficult to move; both of them would usually sit on a bench, and while the dog slept, Borishka would read the paper. Borishka read only one paper:
Pravda
, which means ‘The Truth' – the newspaper of communist propaganda, which was read by everyone who wanted to believe in the freest and most beautiful country in the world. In
Pravda
any item of news whatsoever was transformed into a source of pure propaganda: even when you read about disasters and wars, in the end you were left with a sense of happiness and you felt lucky to live in the USSR. I don't know why Borishka was so fond of that paper; once I asked him, and he replied:

‘When you're forced to listen to cattle singing, you must at least exercise your freedom to choose the one that sings best.'

When I passed the gate I always looked away, so as not to see whether Borishka was there or not. But my friend Mel could never remember this simple but important rule. He always stared at the gate, and if he saw Borishka he would greet him, waving his hand in the air and smiling with that disfigured face of his. Then I would glare at him and he would immediately remember the deal we had made with Borishka and start hitting himself, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. As Grandfather Kuzya used to say, a guy like him was enough to drive a madman mad.

Borishka was always furious when Mel greeted him. On his way home from work he would come looking for me or Gagarin and say, in a voice trembling with anger, yet quiet and lilting:

‘So you're wealthy men – you've finally become rich!'

‘What do you mean? We're not rich . . .'

‘You must be, since you can afford to refuse to work with me, and earn money . . .'

At those words my hair would stand on end. To refuse to work with Borishka was to say goodbye to half our earnings.

‘We didn't do anything, Uncle Borishka.'

‘Didn't do anything? Teach that imbecile of a friend of yours how to behave. And if he can't get it into his head, don't bring him past the warehouses any more, take the long way round . . .'

We would talk to Mel, explain everything to him all over again, but it was no use. The next time, as soon as we got near to the stores, he would be looking for the old man, to greet him. It was like a penance to us, having him with us.

One day, as we were walking past Borishka's house, in our district, we stopped to have a chat with him. While we were talking, we realized that Mel was some distance away, on the other side of the road, with his back turned to us. Borishka looked at us all, then pointed to him, and his face suddenly became very serious.

‘For your own good, get rid of your friend,' he said.

‘Don't take him with you any more: he'll only cause trouble. In fact, I'm willing to pay him, if only he'll stay at home and not roam the streets.'

Pretending not to understand, I said:

‘But Uncle Borishka . . . It's true that Mel's a bit thick, but he means well.'

Borishka looked at me as if I'd spoken to him in a language he didn't understand.

‘A bit thick, you say? Look at him: he's a disaster, that one! Even he doesn't know what's going on inside his head! Listen, I like you boys, that's why I'm being frank with you. You're still young; your friend makes you laugh now, but before long he's going to cause so much trouble that you'll be crying.'

What wise words they were! A pity I understood that too late, after many years had passed.

When we left, I asked Mel why he'd kept away from us. He looked at me with the expression of a torture victim, full of suffering, and said, almost in tears:

‘First you tell me not to speak to him, then I speak to him and you scold me, then I don't speak to him and you scold me anyway! I give up; for all I care this Borishka might not even exist!'

I laughed, but Borishka was right – it was no laughing matter. And that was something we should have known by then.

When we were about ten years old, we went to the cinema to see a film called
The Shield and the Sword
. The main character, a Soviet secret agent, appeared in various action scenes, shooting his capitalist enemies with his silenced gun and doing a lot of acrobatics. The guy risked his life as if he were doing something perfectly normal and routine, to combat injustice in the NATO countries. It was a kind of Russian response to the many American and British films about the cold war, where the Soviets were usually portrayed as stupid, incompetent monkeys who played about with the atomic bomb and wanted to destroy the world. We, despite the rule imposed by our elders, had gone to see it in the only cinema in town (they hadn't yet built the second cinema, which was to have a very short life, because it was destroyed in the 1992 war: the Romanian soldiers took up their positions there, and our fathers, in order to kill them, one night blew the whole complex up, including the restaurant and the ice-cream parlour). Well, at one point in the film the main character jumped off the roof of a very tall building, using a big umbrella as a parachute, and landed comfortably without getting hurt. You could say he did a Mary Poppins.

The next day, without saying anything to anyone, Mel, equipped with a big beach umbrella, jumped off the roof of the central library, a three-storey building, below which there was a pleasant green area full of chestnuts and birches. Crashing down onto a tree, a birch, he managed to break a hand and a leg, knock himself out and impale his stomach on the pole of the umbrella. The result was a sea of blood, his mother in despair, and him having to shuttle from one hospital to another for almost six months.

Taking the piss out of him seemed a good way of getting him to understand where his naivety might lead him. Another time, when we were already fourteen or fifteen, Mel was at my house, and we were making some tea to drink in the sauna. All at once he started blathering about tropical countries, saying that it wouldn't be bad to live there; he thought it might suit us, because the weather was never cold.

‘There's too much humidity,' I told him. ‘It never stops raining. It's a lousy place. What would we do there?'

‘If it rained we could shelter in a hut. And think about it – on an island you don't need a car, you can go around on a bike and there's always a boat available. And the Indians . . .'

They were all Indians to him. American Indians. He thought the indigenous people of every country always went around on horseback with coloured feathers on their heads and painted faces.

‘. . . the Indians,' he went on, ‘are clever people. It would be great to become like them.'

‘That's impossible,' I provoked him. ‘They wear their hair long, like homosexuals.'

‘What are you talking about? They're not homosexuals. It's just that they don't have any scissors to cut their hair with. Look,' he said to me, taking out of his pocket a little plastic figure with faded colours that he always carried about with him – an Indian warrior in a fighting pose, with a knife in his hand. ‘You see? If he's got a knife he can't be a homosexual, or they'd never had given him permission to insult a weapon!'