Siberian Education (38 page)

While Gagarin listened to what Lynx and the Wheel had to say to him, the others started talking amongst themselves; perhaps Grave's crying had woken us all up and somehow helped to make us united and focused again.

Suddenly Mel started telling me a story he always repeated whenever he got drunk, and had done since the age of ten – a childhood fantasy of his. He had met a girl, he claimed, on the river bank, and had promised to take her to the cinema. Then they had made love; and when he reached this point in the story he always commented:

‘It was like screwing a princess.' Then he would launch into a detailed description of the sex they'd had, Mel depicting himself as a vigorous and expert lover. The story ended with her weeping on his shoulder and asking him to stay a little longer, and him reluctantly having to leave her because he was late for fishing.

It was the most incredible, ridiculous nonsense, but since Mel was a friend I listened to him with feigned interest and genuine patience.

He would talk to me with such rapture that his only eye became as thin as a scar. He would accompany the story with ample gestures of his gigantic hands, and whenever one of his hands passed over the bottle of vodka I would have to grab it, to stop it falling over.

The supper, as always, turned into a drunken binge. We went on and on drinking, and to stop us getting too drunk, Grandmother Masha kept bringing us plates of the food we ate as an accompaniment to vodka.

Shortly before midnight Begunok returned, with some news: a group of boys from the district of Caucasus, during the very hours when Ksyusha had been raped, had seen some strangers wandering about in Centre.

‘They were hanging around near the phone boxes,' said Begunok, with a serious expression on his face, ‘pestering a girl.'

Without waiting to hear more, we dashed out to the cars.

Caucasus was a district almost as old as our own. It was so called because many of its inhabitants came from the Caucasus, but also because of its position: it stood on a cluster of hills. The criminals of Caucasus belonged to various communities, but the leading one was the so-called ‘Georgian Family'. Then came the Armenians, who formed the
Kamashchatoy
– Armenian organized crime – and lastly people from many other regions: Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The Georgians and Armenians got on well together, being united by the fact that they were both Caucasian peoples of Orthodox Christian religion, whereas the other inhabitants of the area were either Muslims or atheists of Islamic tradition. The criminal communities of the Georgians and Armenians had a family structure: in order to become an Authority you didn't need to earn the respect of others, as among us Siberians; you merely had to be in the right family. The clans were made up of the members of the families, and they dealt in various kinds of criminal business, black marketeering, protection rackets, minor thefts and murder.

Because of their way of operating the Georgians were viewed with distaste by our community: often our criminals refused to communicate with them simply because they introduced themselves as the sons or relatives of some Authority. Among the Siberians such behaviour is unacceptable, because in our culture everyone is judged for what he represents as a person, and his roots come second; in Siberia you appeal to the protection of the family when you really can't avoid it, solely in matters of life or death.

For these and other reasons there was a lot of friction between us and the people of Caucasus: if we met up somewhere in town, it always ended in a fight, and occasionally someone got killed.

Two years earlier a friend of ours, Mitya, known as ‘Julich', which in slang means ‘little criminal', had stabbed a Georgian because he had insulted him by speaking the Georgian language in his presence. Julich had warned him, saying he was behaving in an offensive manner, but the other had made it clear that he intended to go on speaking Georgian because he despised the Russians, whom he called ‘occupiers'. That was a political provocation: Julich reacted by stabbing him, and he later died in hospital. After his death the Georgians appealed to the old criminals of Black Seed for justice, but the verdict went against them, because according to the criminal law the Georgian had committed two serious errors: first, he had been discourteous to another criminal for no reason; secondly, he had dared to make a political allusion, which is condemned by the criminal regulations as a grave form of insult to the entire criminal community, because politics is cops' stuff, and criminals must have nothing to do with it.

After the verdict, however, the Georgians didn't calm down at all. They tried to get revenge a couple of times: first they shot a friend of ours called Vasya, who fortunately survived, then they tried to kill Julich in one of the discotheques in the town. They started a fight to tempt him outside the disco, where a number of them then attacked him. Luckily we were with him on that occasion, and we plunged into the fray to cover his back.

While we were fighting we noticed that they kept launching ‘torpedoes' at Julich: that's what we call a method of killing a particular person during a fight, while pretending that it's an accident. Some guys, two or three of them, bump into the person – the victim, or ‘client' – as if by mistake, and in the confusion they give another guy – the torpedo – the chance to make a precision strike to kill him, after which they merge back into the crowd; and in the end, if the torpedo has been skilful, nobody will have noticed anything and the whole action will have been carried out in a swift, professional manner. The client's death is treated as a normal consequence of the fight, and therefore forgotten immediately afterwards, because a fight is considered to be an extreme method of obtaining satisfaction, and every participant knows from the outset the risks he is running. But if during the brawl someone is caught launching a torpedo, he must be killed for violating the rules of the fight: his action is interpreted as outright murder. The premeditated murder of a colleague, a criminal, is considered an act of cowardice. The murderer's criminal dignity dies at that moment, and as the criminal law says, ‘when his criminal dignity dies, the criminal himself dies too'.

On this occasion there were far fewer of us than there were of them. They intended to beat us up and launch the torpedo at Julich, but unfortunately for them, after a couple of minutes we were interrupted by the boys of Centre, the district where we were at the time. Exercising their right as the ‘owners' of the area, they ordered us to stop fighting.

Just at that moment the Georgians' torpedo charged at Julich in full view of everyone, trying to stab him, but Julich managed to ward off the blow. The torpedo fell on the ground and started screaming something in his own language, ignoring the requests of the owners of the area that he calm down and put away the knife. In the end he actually cut the hand of one of the Centre boys, who had only asked him to give him his knife.

About three seconds later the Georgians were attacked en masse by the Centre guys, about thirty of them, and savagely beaten.

We apologized and explained the situation. Then we made an orderly retreat, taking a lot of bruises and plenty of cuts home with us.

When we got back to Low River we told the Guardian what had happened. To obtain justice against the Georgians we needed an external witness, someone who was not part of our group. Luckily three people of Centre testified to the old Authorities that they had seen the torpedo with their own eyes.

So a week later the Siberians made a punitive raid into the Caucasus district, which ended with the death of eight Georgians who had participated in the plot against Julich.

Naturally this unpleasant episode considerably worsened our already difficult relations with the Georgians. The Georgians started going around saying we Siberians were murderers and unjust people. We knew we were in the right and that the situation had been resolved in our favour; the rest didn't bother us very much.

We drove to a joint in the Caucasus district called ‘The Maze'. It was a kind of bar-cum-restaurant, with a room where you could play billiards and cards.

Begunok had been very specific: he had said the people who had told him the story about the phone boxes were the sons of the owner of that restaurant. And they were Georgians.

We arrived at the Maze at about two in the morning; there were lots of cars outside and the shouts of the gamblers could be heard outside. They were shouts in Georgian, interspersed with a lot of Russian swear-words with Georgian endings.

We got out of the cars – our drivers said they would keep the engines running just in case – and entered all together.

When I think about it now it makes my hair stand on end: a bunch of juveniles – snotty-nosed kids – not just boldly walking around in a district full of people who want them dead, but actually entering a bar packed with real criminals who were far more dangerous than them. And yet at the time we weren't in the least afraid because we had a job to do.

As soon as we entered the Maze the owner's eldest son, a boy named Mino, came over to us. I knew him by sight; I had heard he was a quiet guy who minded his own business. He greeted us, shaking us by the hand, then invited us to sit down at a table. We did so and he asked a girl to bring wine and Georgian bread – it was on the house. Without our even asking him, he started telling us what he had seen in Centre.

He had been with some friends, including three Armenian boys, one of whom ran a flower stall in the market, not far from there. They had been standing near the phone boxes – where people often arrange to meet – when they had seen about ten youngsters, drunk or high on drugs, pestering a girl, trying to pick a quarrel in a rough and threatening way. One of the Armenians had asked them to stop it and leave her alone, but they had insulted him, and one had even shown him his gun, telling him to get lost.

‘At that point,' said Mino, ‘we decided to back off. It's true, we left the girl in the hands of those thugs, but only because we weren't sure who they were. We were worried they might turn out to have links with the people of Centre, and you never know, they might have closed down my friend's flower stall . . .'

Judging from Mino's description, though, the girl didn't sound like our Ksyusha.

Meanwhile the waitress had brought to our table some Georgian wine with some of their traditional bread, which is baked in a special way, spread on the walls of the oven. It was delicious, and we drank and ate with relish, together with Mino, talking about all sorts of things. Including our relationship with the Georgians.

He said we were right, and that his fellow-countrymen had behaved shamefully, like traitors.

‘Besides, we're all Christians, aren't we?' he said. ‘We all believe in Jesus Christ. We're all criminals, too, and the criminal law applies to everyone – Georgians, Siberians and Armenians . . .'

He told us the Georgian community had recently split in two. One part supported a rich young Georgian of noble blood who liked to be called ‘the Count'. This Count spread a hatred of the Russians and forbade Georgians to marry Russians and Armenians, to preserve the purity of the race. Mino called him ‘Hitler', and was very angry with him; he said he had weakened the whole community. The rest of the Georgians supported an old criminal whom we also knew, because he often came to Low River: Grandfather Vanò. He was a wise man; he had spent a long time in prison in Siberia and was highly respected by the criminal community. It was mainly the old folk who liked him. He wasn't so popular among the young because he stopped them living a life of pleasure and opposed nationalism, which the boys didn't like at all.

From Mino's account we understood that the situation was more difficult than it might seem at first sight, because the division cut across families, and many sons, brothers and fathers had lined up on opposite sides of the barricade. A war in those conditions was impossible, so everything was in a state of suspense, which according to Mino was even more dangerous than open warfare.

At a certain point five people came into the restaurant. They were young – no more than twenty-five years old – and they spoke to Mino in Georgian. He got up at once and went over to them.

They seemed pretty angry, and a couple of times I saw them point at us. At first they all talked at once, then their leader started speaking, a thin boy with eyes that popped out of their orbits whenever he raised his voice.

Mino, however, was calm; he leaned against the counter with a glass of wine in his hand and listened to them, looking at the floor with an indifferent expression.

The leader suddenly stopped talking, and all five of them left. Then Mino hurried over to our table and explained to us in an agitated voice that they were young members of the Count's gang:

‘They said if you don't leave the district at once they'll come back in numbers and kill you.'

After Mino's warm welcome this threat seemed unreal.

Before getting up from the table, Speechless, one of our group, said:

‘I'd be prepared to bet my right hand they've set an ambush for us outside.'

Speechless was so nicknamed because he hardly ever spoke, but when he did speak he always said true things. Once I spent three days fishing with him, and in three days he didn't utter a sound, I swear it, not one.

Gagarin gave the signal to get ready to leave the bar. Everyone put their hands under the table and there was a sound of pistols being cocked one after the other.

We took our leave of Mino. He begged us to use the security exit, but we went through the front door, the way we'd come in.

In the square outside the bar there were about fifteen people waiting for us, gathered under the street light.

Mel and Gagarin stepped forward; I walked behind them with Speechless, then came the others. I saw Mel pull out his Tokarev and at the same time Gagarin hide the hand holding his Makarov behind his back. I was clutching Grandfather Kuzya's Nagant in my jacket pocket.