Siberian Education (37 page)

Homosexual relations are common among them, especially among the young drug addicts, who often prostitute themselves in the big cities of Russia and are much appreciated in homosexual circles for their youth and their modest demands. In St Petersburg many respectable citizens abuse them, then pay them with dinner in a beer hall or by letting them spend the night in a hotel room, where they can sleep in a warm bed and wash under the shower. The age of these boys ranges from twelve to sixteen: by seventeen, after four years spent in the ‘system' – as drug addiction is called in criminal slang – they're completely burnt out.

According to the criminal rules, a tainted person can never be struck with the hands: if it is necessary to strike him it must be done with the feet, or better still with a stick or an iron bar. But he mustn't be stabbed, because death by knife is considered to be almost a sign of respect for your enemy, something the victim has to deserve. If an honest criminal stabs a tainted person, he too is permanently tainted and his life is ruined.

So when dealing with the people of Bam you had to be careful and know how to behave, otherwise you risked losing your position in the community.

There was a place in Bam called ‘the Pole'. On this site there stood a real pole, made of concrete, which had been put there at some time in the past for an electric cable which had never in fact been completed. The criminals who represented power in the area at the time used to assemble around this pole; it was like a king's throne, you might say. Power changed hands so often that the honest criminals of Low River jokingly called the continual internal wars in Bam ‘the dance around the pole'.

In Bam, since there was no criminal code or morality, the wars between criminals were very violent; they seemed like the chaotic scenes of a horror film. The clans gathered around an old criminal, who with the help of his warriors, all junkies and juveniles, tried to take control of the drugs trade in the area by physically eliminating their adversaries – the members of the clan which was handling the drugs at the time and was therefore the most powerful. They used knives, because they didn't have many firearms, and in any case they weren't very expert at using them, not having been brought up to have a familiarity with pistols and rifles. During their wars they even killed the women and children of the clans they were fighting against – their ferocity knew no bounds.

Entering the district, we headed straight for the Pole. We drove along a series of streets the mere sight of which induced sadness and anguish, but also a certain relief, if you thought how lucky you were not to have been born in this place.

The Pole was in the middle of a small square, round the sides of which there were benches, as well as a school desk with a plastic chair. Sitting round the desk were some kids, about fifteen in all, and on the chair sat an old man whose age was impossible to tell, he was so decrepit.

We got out of the cars. According to the rules we had to act tough, so we took out the sticks we'd brought in the boots of the cars and advanced towards them. The air was filled with a tension which, when we stopped a few metres away from them, became pure terror. It was important not to go too close, to keep our distance, so as to emphasize our position in the criminal community. They said nothing and kept their eyes down; they knew how to behave towards honest people. According to the rules, they could not initiate the conversation; they were only allowed to answer questions. Without giving any greeting, Gagarin addressed the old man, telling him we were looking for the guy who had raped a girl near the market, and that we would give twenty thousand dollars to anyone who helped us find him.

The old man immediately jumped down from his chair, went over to a bench and grabbed by the lapel a little boy whose face was disfigured by a large burn. The boy started screaming desperately, saying it was nothing to do with him, but the old man hit him repeatedly on the head till he drew blood, shouting:

‘You son of a bitch, you bastard! I knew you'd rape her in the end, you scum!'

The other boys, too, jumped down from their benches and all started hitting their classmate.

Leaving him in their hands, the old man turned towards us, as if he wanted to say something. Gagarin ordered him to speak, and he immediately started pouring out a flood of words (mingled with various curses and insults which in our district would have got him killed), the gist of which was what we had already gathered: the person who had raped the girl was the little boy with the disfigured face.

‘We were together at the market,' said the old man. ‘I saw him follow the girl; I shouted to him not to, but he disappeared. I didn't see him again; I don't know what happened afterwards.'

His story was so stupid and naive that none of us believed it for a second.

Gagarin asked him to describe the girl, and the old man became flustered; he started whispering something incomprehensible, gesticulating with his hands, as if to sketch a female figure in the air.

A moment later I saw the stick that Gagarin was holding come down with tremendous force and speed on the head of the old man, who fell down unconscious, bleeding from the nose.

The others immediately stopped hitting the accused rapist – who looked so weak and demoralized he wouldn't even have been able to wank himself off, let alone rape a girl – and fled in all directions.

The only people left under the Pole were the old man with the broken head, sprawling in his own blood, and the boy they had intended to use as a scapegoat in exchange for the money. That scene, and the thought of that treachery, made my already sad and despairing heart sink even further.

So without having achieved anything we left the area, hoping the boys who had fled would start searching for the real rapist in order to sell him to us.

We decided to go to a place called ‘Grandmother Masha's Whistle'. This was a private house where an old woman cooked and ran a kind of restaurant for criminals. The food was excellent, and the atmosphere friendly and welcoming.

In her youth Grandmother Masha had worked on the railways, and she still wore round her neck the whistle she had used to announce the departure of the trains: hence the name of the joint.

She had three sons, who were serving long sentences in three different prisons in Russia.

People went to the Whistle to eat or spend a quiet evening discussing business and playing cards, but also to hide things in the cellar, which was like a kind of bank vault, full of stuff deposited by the criminals: sometimes grandmother gave them a receipt, a piece of paper carefully torn out of her notebook on which she wrote in her almost perfect handwriting something like:

‘
The honest hand
(i.e. a criminal)
has turned over
(in slang the phrase means ‘to deposit something carefully')
into
the dear little tooth
(a safe place)
a whip with mushrooms
preserved in oil, plus three heads of green cabbage
(these are an automatic rifle with silencer and ammunition, plus three thousand dollars).
May God bless us and avert evil
and dangers from our poor souls
(a way of expressing the wish for criminal luck, the hope that some business done together will have a successful outcome).
Poor Mother
(a way of referring to a woman whose sons or husband are in prison; in the criminal community it is a kind of social definition, like ‘widow' or ‘bachelor')
Masha
.'

Grandmother Masha made excellent
pelmeni
, which are large ravioli filled with plenty of meat, a Siberian dish that was common all over Soviet territory. When she decided to cook them she spread the word a couple of days beforehand: she would send out the homeless boys whom she took into her house in exchange for help in the kitchen and the occasional errand. The boys would get on their bikes and ride round all the places where the right people gathered, to tell them what Grandmother Masha was cooking.

Besides doing this, the boys also passed round the latest news: if you wanted to spread some information around, you only had to offer the boys a little money or a couple of packets of cigarettes and within two or three hours the whole town would know about it. They were also very useful in the struggle against the police: if there were trouble in any district of Bender and the police came to arrest someone, the boys would spread the word and the people concerned would turn out to set the arrested man free or to have a little gunfight with the police, just for the hell of it.

We needed the help of Grandmother Masha's boys now, to spread the news around town about our inquiries and our honest offer, but we were a little tired, and we were hungry.

When we reached the Whistle, darkness was falling. She welcomed us as she always did, with a smile and kind words, calling us ‘little ones' and kissing us on both cheeks. To her we were all children, even the older ones. We sat down at a table and she joined us; she always did this with everyone: she would chat a bit before bringing you something to eat. We told her about our disaster; she heard us out, then said she'd already heard the story from her boys. We sat for a while in silence while she, with the cloth she always had in her hands, dried the tears from her wrinkled face. To look at that face you felt as if you were in the presence of the incarnation of Mother Earth.

Grandmother Masha started bringing us cutlery and something to drink. In the meantime we called over one of her boys, a thin little lad with one eye missing and snow-white hair, who was the brightest of them all; his name was ‘Begunok', which means ‘the one who runs fast'. He was a very serious boy; if he said he would do something you could be sure he would do it. We asked him to spread the word among the people he knew in town, and in particular to go round all the bars where people gathered to drink and hang out together. Mel slipped a packet of cigarettes and a five-dollar bill into his hand, and a second later we heard his bike setting off at top speed.

We ate our supper in silence, with none of our usual lively chatter. I was ravenous but found it very hard to eat. As I chewed the food I felt a pain in my chest. I couldn't swallow anything without washing it down with alcohol, so before long I was drunk and beginning to get maudlin. The others were in a similar state. Supper went slowly, without enthusiasm. Everyone's eyes became increasingly glazed, and the atmosphere was really gloomy.

Suddenly, amidst the heavy sighs and whispered moans, one of us started crying, but very softly, ashamed at this manifestation of weakness. It was the youngest of the gang. He was thirteen and his name was Lyocha, nicknamed ‘Grave' because of his cadaverous appearance: he was thin and always ill, as well as being constantly in a bad mood. He had already tried to hang himself ten times, but had always been saved by one of us. Once he had even tried to shoot himself in the heart with his uncle's gun, but the bullet had only punctured his lung, further seriously impairing his already poor health. Another time, when blind drunk, he had jumped in the river, trying to drown himself, but hadn't succeeded because he was a very good swimmer, and the survival instinct had prevailed. The only reason he had never tried to slit his veins was that he couldn't stand the sight of blood: even in fights he never used a knife, but only hit people with a knuckleduster or an iron bar.

Grave was a boy with a lot of problems, but in spite of everything he fitted in well with our group, and he was like a brother to all of us. His suicidal tendency was like a ghost that lay hidden inside him; none of us could be sure when it would pop out, so he was constantly watched over by an older boy, Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Cat', because his mother said that just after he was born their cat Lisa had given birth to four kittens and at night she used to go into his cradle and suckle him, so that, according to his mother, he had become half cat. The two of them, Grave and Cat, always went around together, and their main occupation was fishing and stealing motorboats; they were the experts on the river, they knew all the particular points – where the water was still or swift, where the current swirled back, where the bed was deepest – and always knew with absolute precision where to find the fish, all year round. They never returned from a fishing expedition with empty boats, never.

At parties, and whenever we drank together, a sudden flood of tears from Grave was a sure sign that he would soon try to kill himself: so, in accordance with a rule laid down by us and approved by Grave himself (who when sober, despite all his psychological problems, had a great zest for life), we would take away his drink, and in extreme cases even tie him to his chair with a rope.

So on this occasion too, at the Whistle, while Grave was trying to stop crying, wiping his face with a handkerchief, Gagarin made a sign to Cat, who instantly replaced the bottle of vodka in front of Grave with a fizzy drink called Puppet, a kind of Soviet Coca-Cola. Grave stopped crying and drained the bottle of Puppet, ending with a long, sad burp.

Gagarin was talking to our drivers, Makar, known as ‘Lynx', and Ivan, known as ‘the Wheel'. They were in their early twenties, and both had just finished a five-year prison sentence. They were bosom pals. Together they had carried out a lot of robberies, and in the last one, after a gunfight with the police, the Wheel had been wounded and Lynx had refused to desert him and so he had been arrested too, because of his loyalty.

During our mission, according to the rules, they couldn't help us to communicate with the criminals of the various areas of the town, which was a pity: it would have been very useful, since we were all under age, and the criminals who didn't embrace our Siberian faith took the idea of dealing with juveniles as a personal insult. What Lynx and the Wheel could do was advise us how to behave, how to negotiate with people who obeyed rules different from our own, and how to exploit the peculiarities of each person and each community. It was important, part of our upbringing, this continual relationship between youngsters and adults who explained each individual situation according to the law observed by our elders.