Siberian Education (30 page)

1
. This term is used for the lowest-ranking members of some criminal castes: the number is that of the lowest-value playing cards in a pack.

1
. Pejorative name for a person who does not respect the rules that govern behaviour among criminals.

JUVENILE PRISON

One evening I was returning home with Mel; the weather was hot: it was late August. We were coming from the Centre district, and we had almost reached Low River when from a little garden about twenty metres away from us three boys aged about sixteen came out, rolling drunk, with empty bottles in their hands.

From the many curses that they uttered we immediately realized that there was going to be a fight.

Mel said in a sad and very calm voice:

‘Holy Christ, these bastards were all we needed . . . Kolima, if they make a single move towards us I'm going to kill them, I swear to you . . .' He put his hand in his pocket and slowly pulled out his knife. He propped it against his hip, pressed the button to open the blade and hid the knife behind his back. I did the same, but hid the hand holding the knife in front of me, under my T-shirt, pretending to tighten my belt.

‘I hope for their own sakes they're intelligent. Who needs trouble at this time of night . . .' I said as we walked on.

Suddenly, when we had gone past them, one of the three threw an empty bottle at Mel's back. I heard an unnatural noise, like that of a snowball against a wall. Then immediately afterwards another more natural noise: that of a bottle smashing as it hits the ground.

In a second, before I could even react, Mel was already punching one of them, and the other two were surrounding him, trying to hit him with their bottles. I jumped on the first one I could reach and stabbed him in the side. Another smashed a bottle on the ground and cut my face with the piece that was left in his hand. I got really angry and gave him a series of stabs in the leg. At that moment, behind my back I heard the sound of the cocking lever of a Kalashnikov, and immediately afterwards a burst of gunfire. I dropped to the ground, instinctively. A voice shouted:

‘Throw your weapons well away from you! Hands up, legs apart, face down! You're under arrest!'

I felt as if I'd fallen into a bottomless pit.

‘No, it can't be. Anything in the world, but not this.'

Pending further inquiries, which in the event took exactly two weeks, they locked me up in a cell in Tiraspol police station. The three guys who had attacked us withdrew their accusations, after my father sent the right people round to their houses.

Mel got out after a week, because he hadn't used his knife.

I had used mine, though – it was found on the spot – and although the victims weren't pressing charges, all the legal system needed was the reports of the policemen who'd arrested us, and my fingerprints on the weapon.

The trial was as quick as lightning: the prosecutor asked for three years' confinement in a high security juvenile prison. The defending counsel – who was a lawyer paid by the state, but nonetheless did his job well, partly because, as I later learned, he had received a certain amount of money from my family – insisted on the peculiarities of the case: the lack of any complaint from the victims, my good behaviour during my first sentence, which I had served at home, and above all the impossibility of proving that the weapon belonged to me. I might have found it on the spot, or even taken it from one of the victims, who indeed in their second statement had declared themselves to be the ‘aggressors'. In the end the judge, a plump old woman, announced in a funereal voice:

‘One year's detention in the strict-regime colony for juveniles, with the possibility of a request for early release after five months' detention in the event of good behaviour.'

I wasn't in the least frightened or surprised. I remember feeling as if I were going on a camping trip somewhere, to rest up for a while and then return home. Indeed I felt like I was about to do something I had been waiting for all my life, something great and important.

And so I was taken to prison, to a place called Kamenka – ‘The Place of Stone', a big jail with various blocks and sections. It was an old construction dating from the time of the tsar, built on three floors. Each floor had fifty rooms, all the same size, each seventy metres square. In each room there were two windows, or rather holes, which had neither frames nor glass, but only a sheet of iron soldered on from the outside, with little holes in it to let the air through.

They escorted me to a room on the third floor. The iron doors opened in front of me and the warder said:

‘Move! Go in without fear, come out without crying . . .'

I took one step and the doors closed behind me with a loud noise. I looked in there and couldn't believe my eyes.

The room was crammed with wooden bunks on three levels, set alongside each other, with very little space in between – just enough to get through. The boys were sitting on the bunks, walking around naked and sweaty, in an air full of the stink of latrines and cigarette smoke and some other disgusting odour, the smell of a dirty, damp cloth which after a while begins to rot.

Only half of the room was visible: a metre and a half from the floor the air became increasingly dense, and from there right up to the ceiling there was a thick cloud of steam.

I stood there trying to work out what I should do. I knew the prison rules very well: I knew I mustn't move a single step inside that room until the Authorities of the cell said I could, but I looked around and couldn't see anyone who was interested in my arrival. What's more, my clothes seemed to me increasingly heavy, because of the humidity in the room. Then I felt something fall on my head; I brushed at it with my hand, but immediately other objects fell on my shoulders. So I moved quickly, to shake them off.

‘Don't worry, it's only cockroaches . . . There are lots of them in front of the door, but they don't go into the room, because we put poison under the bunks . . .'

I looked towards the voice that was speaking to me and saw a very thin boy in dirty, wet underpants, with a shaven head, a gap in his front teeth, and glasses. I couldn't manage to say anything to him; I felt as if I was completely cut off from the rest of the world.

‘I'm Dwarf – I'm the
shnyr
here. Who are you looking for? Tell me and I'll find him.' He came a bit closer and started looking at the tattoo on my right arm.
Shnyr
in criminal slang means ‘the one who darts about': this figure exists in all Russian prisons, he's someone who is not regarded as an honest criminal, but is the slave of the whole cell and takes messages from one criminal to another.

‘Are there any Siberians here?' I asked him coldly, to make it clear to him from the outset that he must keep his distance from me.

‘Yes, there certainly are: Filat “White” from Magadan, Kerya “Yakut” from Urengoy . . .

‘All right,' I interrupted him brusquely. ‘Go to them quickly and tell them a brother has arrived. Nikolay “Kolima” from Bender . . .'

He immediately vanished behind the maze of beds. I heard him saying, as he went from one bunk to the other:

‘A new arrival, he's Siberian . . . Another Siberian's arrived, another one . . . A Siberian from Bender has just arrived . . .'

In no time at all the whole cell had been informed.

A few minutes later Dwarf popped out from behind the beds. He leaned against the wall, looking back at the area from which he had just emerged. Eight boys came out from there and stood in front of me. The one in the middle did the talking; he had two tattoos on his hands. I read them and quickly learned that he came from a gang of robbers and belonged to an old family of Siberian Urkas.

‘Well, are you Siberian?' he asked me in a relaxed tone.

‘Nikolay “Kolima”, from Bender,' I replied.

‘Really? You're actually from Transnistria . . .' His tone had changed, becoming a little more animated.

‘From Bender, Low River.'

‘I'm Filat White, from Magadan. Come this way, I'll introduce you to the rest of the family . . .'

Contrary to my expectations, the juvenile prison where I had been sent bore no resemblance to the serious prisons I had always heard about and which I had been prepared for since childhood. Here there was no criminal law; everything was chaotic and completely unlike any existing model of prison community.

The harsh living conditions and the lack of freedom, at such a delicate stage in the growth of any human being, complicated everything. The boys were very angry, like animals: they were evil, sadistic and deceitful, with a strong desire to sow destruction and raze to the ground anything that reminded them of the free world. Nothing was safe in that place; violence and madness burned like flames in the minds and souls of the inmates.

Each cell held a hundred and fifty boys. The conditions were awful. There weren't enough beds for everyone, so you had to take turns at sleeping. There was only one bathroom, at the end of the cell, and it stank so much that even if you just went near it you felt like vomiting. The ventilation was non-existent; the only source of air was the holes in the sheets of iron covering the two windows.

It was hard to breathe in there, so a lot of weak boys, who had cardiac or respiratory diseases, couldn't take it for long: they fell ill; often they fainted and sometimes never came to. A few weeks after my arrival, a boy who had a serious lung condition started spitting blood. Poor kid, he asked for something to drink, but the others dumped him in a corner and wouldn't go near him for fear of catching tuberculosis. After he had spent a night on the ground, lying in the pool of blood that had formed from his continual spitting, we asked the administration to move him to the hospital.

The light was always on, night and day. Three feeble lamps lit the space inside a kind of sarcophagus made of iron and thick glass, screwed to the wall.

The tap was always running; the water came out as white as milk, and hot – almost boiling – in winter and in summer.

The beds were three-level bunks, and very narrow. All that was left of the mattresses was the covering; the filling had been worn down, so you slept on the hard surface, on the wood. Since it was always infernally hot, nobody used the blankets: we put them under our heads, because the pillows were as thin as the mattresses, with nothing inside them. I preferred to sleep without a pillow and instead put the blanket under the mattress, so as not to break my bones on the wood.

There was no timetable to follow; we were left to ourselves for twenty-four hours a day. Three times a day they brought us some food – in the morning a mug of tea which looked like dirty water, with a faint trace of something which might have been tea in a previous existence. On top of the mug they put a piece of bread with a knob of white butter which had been thinned in the kitchen by the cooks, who stole the provisions, as though they were the criminals, not us.

Since the third floor, where I was, was that of the ‘special purpose' block reserved for the most dangerous juveniles, we didn't deserve the honour of having spoons or other metal objects at breakfast. We spread the butter on our bread with our fingers. We dipped the buttered bread in the mug of tea and ate it like a dunked biscuit. Afterwards we drank the tea with the grease floating in it; it was very tasty and nourishing.

Three boys would stand by the little window in the door: they would take the food from the guards' hands and pass it to the others. Taking anything from the cops was considered ‘dishonest'; those who did it were sacrificing themselves for everyone, and in exchange for the favour nobody touched them – they were allowed to live in peace.

For lunch we had a very light soup, with half-cooked vegetables floating in the dishes like starships in space. The luckiest boys found a piece of potato or a fishbone, or the bone of some animal. That was the first course. For the main course they gave us a dish of
kasha
: that's the Russian name for cracked wheat boiled and mixed with a little butter. Usually they put in it pieces of something which looked like meat but tasted like the soles of shoes. We also got a piece of bread and the usual knob of butter, and to eat this exquisite fare they even gave us a spoon. To drink we again had tea, identical to that of the morning, but not nearly as warm. The spoons were counted, however, and if at the end – after the quarter of an hour allotted for lunch – there was a single one missing, the squad from the ‘educational' unit would come into the cell and beat us all up, without bothering to make many inquiries. At that point the spoon would be given back, or rather thrown towards the door by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, because otherwise his cellmates would have tortured him and, as we say in such cases, ‘made even his shadow bleed'.

For supper there was
kasha
again, a mug of tea with bread and butter, and once again spoons, but this time we were only given ten minutes for eating.

A lot of trouble arose from food. Little groups of bastards, united by their common love of violence and torture, terrorized all the boys who were on their own and didn't belong to any family. They would systematically beat them up and torture them, and make them pay a kind of ‘tax', forcing them to give up most of their portions.

If you wanted to survive and have a quiet life in juvenile prison, you had to join the families. A family was made up of a group of people who had some common characteristic, often their nationality. Each family had its internal rules, and boys happily obeyed them in an effort to simplify their lives. In a typical family you would share everything. Anyone who received a parcel from home would give some of his stuff to the others. In this way everyone was constantly getting something from outside, which was very important psychologically: it helped to stop you becoming demoralized.

The members of one family protected each other, and ate and organized all their daily affairs together.