Siberian Education (26 page)

Inside the flat it was so cold we could see his breath condense into white vapour. He looked at us calmly; he seemed a normal kind of guy. He waited.

Mel stared at him speechless, and the man raised his hand and scratched his neck, as if to indicate that our silence was making him feel ill at ease.

I gave Mel a gentle kick and he started off straight away, spraying out words as a machine gun does bullets. He did everything according to the rules, and after the introductions he said he was carrying a letter.

Finger immediately changed his expression, smiled and invited us in. He led us to a table on which stood a saucepan full of freshly made chifir.

‘Go ahead, boys, help yourselves. I'm sorry, but I haven't got anything else, only this. I've only just got out – the day before yesterday . . . What a terrible thing, this freedom! So much space! I'm still feeling dizzy . . .'

I liked his sense of humour; I realized I could relax.

We sat down, saying he shouldn't worry about us. While we were passing the cup of chifir round between the three of us, Finger opened the letter from our Guardian. After a few moments he said:

‘I have to go back to your district with you; it says here that they want me to speak . . .'

Mel and I looked at each other. We would have to tell him about our adventure; it would be treacherous to take a person with you without telling him you were in trouble.

I decided to do the talking; letting Mel talk would only complicate things. I filled my lungs with air and blurted it all out: my war with the Vulture, the trap set by Beard and his gang of young junkies, the school . . .

Finger listened attentively, following every little detail as prisoners do. Stories are the criminals' only entertainment in jail: they take turns at telling each other the story of their life, one piece at a time, in episodes, and when they've finished they go on to somebody else's life.

At the end I told him that if he didn't want to run a risk by coming with us, he could put off his visit to the next day.

He opposed this:

‘Don't worry, if anything happens I'll be with you.'

I wasn't happy, because I knew that in Railway the young didn't respect the old. Often they would lie in ambush for them outside their houses, when the old men came home drunk, and beat them up to get something they were carrying, and afterwards show it off to the others as a trophy. Moreover, Finger wasn't an Authority; from what could be read in his tattoos he was a guy who had for some reason joined up with the Siberians in jail: he had a Siberian signature on his neck, which meant that the community protected him, perhaps because he had done something important for us.

While I was thinking about all this, Finger had got dressed, in a jacket covered with sewn-up tears, battered shoes, and a green scarf that almost touched the ground.

Along the way we got talking. Finger told us he had been in prison since the age of sixteen. He had been sent there because of a stupid incident: he had been drunk, and without realizing it had clubbed a cop a little too hard, killing him stone dead. In juvenile prison he had joined up with the Siberian family, because, he said, they were the only ones who stuck together and didn't beat people up; they did everything together and didn't take orders from anyone else. He had arrived in the adult prison as a member of the Siberian family, and the others had welcomed him. He had served twenty years in prison, and when he was about to be released an old man had suggested he go and live in the apartment we had seen.

Now he wanted to move closer to the people of our district: they, he said, were his family. So he had asked the old Siberian Authorities in prison to contact the Guardian of Low River.

He felt part of our community, and this pleased me.

While we were walking, I had an idea. Since we needed reinforcements, I had decided to drop in at the house of a friend who lived nearby. He was a boy called ‘Geka', which is a diminutive of Evgeny. He and I had known each other since childhood; he was the son of an excellent paediatrician called Aunt Lora.

Geka was a well-read, intelligent, polite boy; he didn't belong to any gang and preferred a quiet life. He had many interests and I liked him for this; I had been at his house several times and had been fascinated by his collection of model warplanes, which he assembled and painted himself. His mother allowed me to borrow some books from her library; that's how I got to know Dickens and Conan Doyle, and above all the only literary upholder of justice I had ever found congenial: Sherlock Holmes.

Geka would spend the whole summer with us on the river; we taught him to swim, to wrestle and to use a knife in a fight. But he wore glasses, so my grandfather felt desperately sorry for him: to Siberians wearing glasses is like voluntarily sitting in a wheelchair – it's a sign of weakness, a personal defeat. Even if you don't have good eyesight you must never wear glasses, in order to preserve your dignity and your healthy appearance. So whenever Geka came to our house, Grandfather Boris would take him into the red corner, kneel down with him in front of the icon of the Siberian Madonna and that of the Siberian Saviour, and then, crossing himself over and over again, say his prayer, which Geka was obliged to repeat word for word:

‘O Mother of God, Holy Virgin, patron of all Siberia and protectress of all us sinners! Witness the miracle of Our Lord! O Lord, Our Saviour and Companion in life and death, You who bless our weapons and our miserable efforts to bring Your law into the world of sin, You who make us strong before the fire of hell, do not abandon us in our moments of weakness! Not from a lack of faith, but in love and respect for Your creatures, I beseech You, perform a miracle! Help Your miserable slave Evgeny to find Your road and live in peace and health, so that he can sing Your glory! In the names of the Mothers, Fathers and Sons and of those members of our families who have been resurrected in Your arms, hear our prayer and bring Your light and Your warmth into our hearts! Amen!'

When he had finished the prayer, Grandfather Boris would get up off his knees and turn towards Geka. Then, making solemn, spectacular gestures, like those of an actor on the stage, he would touch Geka's glasses with his fingers and, saying the following sentence, slowly remove them:

‘Just as many times You have put Your strength into my hands to grip my knife against the cops, and have directed my pistol to hit them with bullets blessed by You, give me Your power to defeat the sickness of Your humble slave Evgeny!'

As soon as he had taken off the glasses, he would ask Geka:

‘Tell me, my angel, can you see well now?'

Out of respect for him, Geka couldn't bring himself to say no.

Grandfather Boris would turn towards the icons and thank the Lord with the traditional formulas:

‘May Your will be done, Our Lord! As long as we are alive and protected by You, the blood of the cops, the contemptible devils and the servants of evil will flow in abundance! We are grateful to You for Your love.'

Then he would call the whole family and announce that a miracle had just occurred. Finally he would return Geka's glasses to him in front of everyone, saying:

‘And now, my angel, now that you can see, break these useless glasses!'

Geka would put them in his pocket, mumbling:

‘Don't be angry, Grandfather Boris: I'll break them later.'

My grandfather would stroke his head and tell him in a gentle, joyful voice:

‘Break them whenever you like, my son; the important thing is that you never wear them again.'

The next time, so that he wouldn't be angry, Geka would turn up at our house without his glasses; he would take them off outside the door before coming in. Grandfather Boris, when he saw him, would be overcome with joy.

Well, to return to our story: Geka lived with his mother and an uncle who had had an incredible life; he was the embodiment of divine anger, of the living doom to which this likeable, kindly family was predestined. His name was Ivan, and he had been nicknamed ‘the Terrible'. The allusion to the great tyrant was ironical, because Ivan was as good-natured as they come. He was about thirty-five years of age, short and thin, with black hair and eyes, and abnormally long fingers. He had been a professional musician before he had fallen into disgrace; at the age of eighteen he was playing the violin in an important orchestra, in St Petersburg, and his musical career seemed to be rocketing upwards like a Soviet intercontinental missile. But one day Ivan had ended up in bed with a friendly tart who played in the orchestra, a cellist, the wife of an important member of the communist party. He had become infatuated with her, made their relationship public and even asked her to leave her husband. Poor naive musician, he didn't know that party members couldn't get divorced, because they and their families had to be an example of a perfect ‘cell' of Soviet society. And what kind of cell are you, if you get divorced whenever you feel like it? Russian cells must be as hard as steel, made of the same stuff as their tanks and their famous Kalashnikov assault rifles. Have you ever seen a faulty Soviet tank? Or a Kalashnikov that jammed? Families must be as perfect as firearms.

So our friend Ivan, as soon as he tried to follow the motions of his heart, was crushed by his lover's husband, who hired some agents of the Soviet secret services, who pumped him so full of serums they reduced him to a zombie.

Officially he had disappeared, nobody knew where; everyone was convinced that he'd escaped from the USSR via Finland. A few months later he was found in a psychiatric hospital, where he had been interned after being picked up on the street in a serious state of mental confusion. He couldn't even remember his own name. The only thing he had with him was his violin; thanks to that the doctors traced him to the orchestra, and later were able to hand him back to his sister.

By this time Ivan's health was permanently impaired, and his face was that of a person tormented by one long, enormous doubt. He could communicate perfectly well, but he needed time to reflect on questions and think about his answers.

He still played the violin; it was his only link with the real world, a kind of anchor which had kept him attached to life. He would perform twice a week in a restaurant in the Centre and then get drunk out of his mind. When he was drunk, he used to say, he managed to have moments of mental lucidity, which unfortunately soon passed.

The faithful companion of his life, who had always shared in all his drinking bouts, was another poor wretch called Fima, who had caught meningitis at the age of nine and since then been out of his wits. Fima was extremely violent, and saw enemies everywhere: when he entered a new place he would put his right hand inside his coat as if to take out an imaginary gun. He was bad-tempered and quarrelsome, but nobody reproached him for it, because he was ill. He went around dressed in a sailor's overcoat and shouted out naval phrases, such as ‘There may be few of us, but we wear the hooped shirt!' or ‘Full ahead! A hundred anchors in the arse! Sink that damned fascist tub!' Fima divided the world into two categories: ‘our boys' – the people he trusted and regarded as his friends – and the ‘fascists' – all those he considered to be enemies and therefore deserving to be beaten up and insulted. It wasn't clear how he determined who was one of ‘our boys' and who a ‘fascist'; he seemed to sense it, on the basis of some hidden, deep-seated feeling.

Together Ivan and Fima got into a lot of trouble. If Fima was wild, Ivan would attack with a natural violence: he would pounce on people like a beast on its prey.

In short, because of these virtues I really hoped we would find them at home.

When we arrived, Geka, Ivan and Fima were playing battleships in the living room.

Geka was relaxed and was laughing, mocking his competitors in the game:

‘Glub-glub-glub,' he repeated derisively, imitating the sound of a sinking ship.

Fima, with trembling hands, disconsolately clutched his piece of paper: his fleet was evidently in a desperate plight.

Ivan was sitting in a corner looking crestfallen, and his piece of paper thrown on the floor indicated that he had just lost the game. He was holding his violin and playing something slow and sad which resembled a distant scream.

I briefly explained our situation to Geka and asked him if he could help us to get across the district.

He immediately agreed to help us, and Fima and Ivan followed him like two lambs ready to turn into lions.

We went out into the street; I looked at our gang and could hardly believe it – two Siberian boys and an adult fresh out of jail, accompanied by a doctor's son and two raving lunatics, trying to escape unharmed from a district where they were being hunted. And all of this on my birthday.

Geka and I walked in front and the others followed. While I was chatting to Geka, I heard Mel telling Finger one of his miraculous stories, the one about the big fish that had swum all the way up the river, against the current, to get to our district, because it had been attracted by the smell of Aunt Marta's apple jam. Every time Mel told that story, the funniest part was when he demonstrated how big the fish had been. He would open his arms like Jesus crucified, and with an effort in his voice would shriek ‘A brute as big as
that
!' As I waited for that phrase with one ear and listened to Geka with the other, I felt really great. I felt like I was out for a stroll with my friends, without any dangers.

When Mel came to the end of his story, Fima commented: ‘Holy fuck, the number of fish like that I've seen from my ship! The whales are a real pain in the arse! The sea's full of the buggers!'

I turned round to see what expression he had as he was saying those words, and saw something fly past close to my face, so close it almost touched my cheek. It was a piece of brick. At the same moment Geka shouted:

‘Shit, an ambush!' and a dozen boys armed with sticks and knives emerged from each of two opposite front yards, and ran towards us, shouting: