Siberian Education (33 page)

So that day we were having our lunch; the Armenians had brought to the oak a piece of cheese which one of them had just received in his parcel from home. After cutting it up into little cubes we were all eating it with relish: it was a taste that came from freedom, a delicious flavour, which reminded us of home, of the life we were all waiting to live again.

Suddenly we heard a shout; I was facing the door, so I didn't really grasp what was going on, but a group of my Siberian brothers near the bunks got up, announcing angrily:

‘Honest people! While we're eating what the Lord has sent us to keep us alive, those bastards are uncorking someone!'

To ‘uncork' meant to rape. What was happening was a very serious matter. Serious in itself, certainly, but there was more to it than that: although we were often forced to turn a blind eye to the homosexual acts of the Little Thieves, this time it was quite impossible. Having sexual relations while, in the same space, in the cell – which in the criminal language is called ‘home' – people are eating, or reading the Bible, or praying, is a flagrant violation of the criminal law.

We got up and ran towards the Little Thieves' black corner. They were holding down one of the usual poor wretches on a bunk, and, wrapping a towel round his neck – so tightly his face had gone all red, and he was croaking for air – they were screaming at him that if he didn't keep still and take it up the arse while he was alive, he would do it when he was dead.

Filat White grabbed one of them by the neck – Filat was a very strong boy but one without heart, as they say in Italian, or with an evil heart, as they say in Siberia (and it's not exactly the same thing): in short, he had no pity for his enemies – and started pounding him with his fists, and his fists were like cannon balls. After a few seconds the guy lost consciousness and his face turned into a raw steak. Both of Filat's hands were covered in blood.

From the Little Thieves' bunks there came a torrent of abuse and threats of revenge, with which they are usually very liberal.

Filat went up to the one who had been about to rape the boy and still had his underpants down. Everyone was half-naked and dripping with sweat in that hellish heat; we Siberians were in our underpants too, but ready to tear those bastards to pieces.

Filat grabbed the rapist by the arm and started hammering him against the corner of the bunk. The guy starting yelling:

‘I'm Bulgarian! You've laid hands on me! All of you here are my witnesses! This guy's a dead man, he's a dead man! Tell my brother! He'll kill his whole family!'

He squealed like a drunken country cop's rusty whistle. Nobody took his words seriously.

Filat stopped banging him against the bunk and released his grip, and the boy staggered and fell on the floor. Then he pulled himself together, got to his feet and said:

‘Your name, you bastard, tell me your name, and this very evening my brother will rip your mother's guts out . . .' At the word ‘mother' Filat unleashed an incredibly hard punch. I heard a strange noise, as if someone, somewhere, a long way off, had split a plank of wood. But it wasn't wood: it was Bulgarian's nose, and now he lay flat on the ground, senseless.

Filat looked at him for a moment, then gave him a kick in the face, then another, and another, and yet another. Each time, Bulgarian's head jumped so far off his shoulders that it seemed not to be attached to his spine; it was as if his skull and the rest of his skeleton were separate: his neck seemed no more than a thin thread, made of rubber.

Filat said to them all:

‘Isn't wanking enough for you any more? Don't you want to wait to get out so you can make love to girls? Do you prefer arses? Have you all turned into bumboys?'

At his last word a ripple of surprise ran along the bunks: to insult a whole group of people is very wrong; according to the criminal law it's an error. But Filat had been clever: he had expressed his insult in the form of a question, and according to our law, in such situations, especially if the name of your mother has been insulted, a slight hint of an insult to a whole group is quite acceptable.

Without another word, Filat put one foot on Bulgarian's genitals, which were sadly shrunken on his inert body, and started crushing them with all his strength. Then he leaped on Bulgarian like a madman, and hurling a fearful yell into the air jumped up and down on his stomach until we all heard a terrible
crack
. I didn't know much about anatomy, but this much was clear to me – he'd broken his pelvis.

The Little Thieves sat there speechless, terrified. Filat said to all of them:

‘Now I'll give you one minute to soap your skis. After that, if any of you remains in this house he'll get the same medicine as . . .'

Before he had even finished the sentence, the Little Thieves had jumped down from their bunks and rushed to the doors, shouting and pummelling on the iron:

‘Guards! Help! They're killing us! Transfer! Immediately! We request a transfer!'

A few moments later the doors opened and the guards of the disciplinary squad came in, armed with truncheons. They carried away the two injured boys, dragging them along like sacks of rubbish, leaving a long trail of blood behind them. Then they started ejecting the Little Thieves.

The following week a letter arrived from outside. It said Bulgarian had died in hospital, and his brother had tried asking the Siberians for justice but they had turned him down flat, so he had started threatening vengeance, at which point they had killed him by knocking him down with a car. He had tried to run away from his murderers, but hadn't succeeded. To remove any doubt a Siberian belt had been left next to the corpse.

And so the war had ended. Nobody sought revenge any more, and everyone kept quiet and behaved themselves. Some other Little Thieves arrived in our cell a few months later, but they didn't make any more mistakes.

For nine months I was in that place, in that cell, in the Siberian family. After nine months they released me for good conduct, three months early. Before leaving I said goodbye to the boys; we wished each other good luck, as tradition requires.

After I left, for a long time I kept dreaming about the prison, the boys, that life. Often I would wake up with a strange sense that I was still there. When I realized I was at home I was happy, certainly, but I also felt a mysterious nostalgia, sometimes a regret that remained in my heart for a long time. The thought of no longer having any of my Siberian friends around me was an unpleasant one. Gradually, though, I resumed my life, and the faces of those boys became ever more distant.

Many of them I never heard of again. Years later, in Moscow, one day I met Kerya Yakut, who told me a few things about some of them, but he too no longer moved in those circles; he was working as a private bodyguard to a rich businessman now, and had no intention of returning to the criminal life.

He seemed to be in good form. We talked a little, reminiscing about the times of our Siberian family, and then we parted. Neither of us asked for the other's address; we were part of that past which is not remembered with pleasure.

Ksyusha

Ksyusha was a very beautiful girl with typical Russian features. She was tall, blonde, shapely, with freckles on her face and eyes of a dark, deep blue.

She was the same age as me, and she lived with her aunt, a good woman whom we called Aunt Anfisa.

Ksyusha was a special friend of mine.

I remember the day I first saw her. I was sitting with my grandfather, on the bench. She was walking towards our house with her slightly timid yet at the same time strong and decisive step: she seemed like a wild animal padding through the woods. When she approached, my grandfather looked at her for a moment and then said, as if speaking to someone I couldn't see:

‘Thank you for sending another angel into the midst of us sinners.'

I realized that she was a ‘God-willed' child, as our people say, one who in other places would simply have been called mad.

She suffered from a form of autism, and had always been like that.

‘She has suffered for us all, like Our Lord Jesus Christ,' my grandfather told me. I agreed with him, not so much because I understood the reason for Our Lord's suffering, but simply because I had learned that in my family, in order to survive and have some chance of prospering, it was essential always to agree with Grandfather, even in cases which exceeded the limits of the intellectual faculties, otherwise no one would get anywhere.

Since my childhood I had been surrounded by handicapped adults and children, such as my close friend Boris, the engine driver, who met the tragic end that I have already described. Many mentally ill people lived in our area, and they kept coming to Transnistria until the 1990s, when the law against keeping the mentally ill at home was abolished.

Now I realize that Siberian culture developed in me a profound sense of acceptance towards people who outside my native society are described as abnormal. But for me their condition was simply never an anomaly.

I grew up with mentally ill people and learned many things from them, so I have come to the conclusion that they have a natural purity, something you cannot feel unless you are completely freed of earthly weight.

Like many God-willed children and adults, Ksyusha was a frequent visitor to our house: she entered and left whenever she wanted; sometimes she stayed until late at night, when Aunt Anfisa would come to fetch her.

Ksyusha was expansive, and could be positively garrulous. She liked to tell everyone the latest news she'd managed to gather.

She had been brought up by the criminals, so she was aware that the cops were the baddies and the people who lived in our district the goodies, and that we were all one family.

This fact had created an atmosphere of protection around her, and she felt free to live her life as she wanted.

Even when she was older, Ksyusha continued to come into our house as freely as before: without asking anyone's permission she would start cooking whatever she liked, or she would go out into the vegetable garden to help my aunt, or stay indoors to watch my mother knitting.

Often she and I would go up onto the roof, where my grandfather kept his pigeons. She liked the pigeons very much; when she saw how they walked about and ate, she would laugh and stretch out her hands, as if she wanted to touch them all.

Together with my grandfather we used to fly them. First Grandfather would take a female pigeon, small and poor of colour and feather, and throw her; she would start to rise into the air, and would fly higher and higher, and when she became as small as a dot in the sky Grandfather would pass one of us a big strong male with a rich, glossy plumage, an absolutely beautiful pigeon. At Grandfather's signal we would throw this second, larger pigeon upwards, and he would rise towards the female, turning somersaults in the air to attract her attention. He would beat his wings hard, making a sound like the clapping of hands. You should have seen how Ksyusha laughed at that moment; she was the real beauty.

She liked to imitate Grandfather's gestures and phrases. When she saw a handsome new pigeon she would put her hands on her chest just as Grandfather Boris did, exactly like him, and in a tone of voice identical to his she would say, as if she were singing:

‘What a miracle of a pigeon this is! It has descended straight from God!'

We would all burst out laughing at the way she succeeded in catching Grandfather's manner and the peculiarities of his Siberian pronunciation; and she would laugh with us, realizing that she had done something clever.

Ksyusha didn't have any parents, or any other relatives; her aunt wasn't a real aunt – she let herself be called that for simplicity's sake. Aunt Anfisa had a past as a
klava
or
zentryashka
or
sacharnaya
: these terms in criminal slang denote a female ex-convict who after her release settles down with the help of the criminals, finds a normal job and pretends to live an honest life, so as to deflect the attention of the police from herself. To criminals in difficulty – guys on the run from the police, say, or escaped convicts – such women are a means of support in the civil world; it is thanks to them that they communicate with their friends and obtain help. These women, who are clean and above all suspicion, are highly respected in the criminal world and often run secondary criminal affairs, such as black marketeering or selling stolen goods. According to the criminal law they cannot marry, because they are and must remain the brides of the criminal world. The former USSR is full of these women: people say of them that they haven't got married because they had some bad experience with men in the past, but the truth is different. They live in isolated spots, outside town, in quiet areas; inside their apartments there is no trace of that world to which they are closely and inextricably linked. The only visible sign of their identity might be a faded tattoo on some part of the body.