Siberian Education

by Nicolai Lilin

  Grandfather Kuzya’s explanation gave me some relief, but although I was pleased that my pike would harm the police, I still missed it.

  I didn’t want to disappoint him and whine in front of him, so I put a lilt in my voice, making it sound as cheerful as possible:

  ‘Okay, I’m happy, then…’

  Grandfather Kuzya smiled.

  ‘Good boy! That’s the way: always hold your chest like a wheel and your pecker like a pistol…’

  A week later I went round to Grandfather Kuzya’s again to take him a jar of caviare pâté and butter. He called me into the living room and stood me in front of the red corner of the icons. There, on the shelf, was a beautiful open pike, with a very thin blade and a bone handle. I gazed at it spellbound.

  ‘I had it sent all the way from Siberia, our brothers brought it for a young friend of mine…’ He picked it up and put it in my hand. ‘Take it, Kolima, and remember: the things that matter are the ones inside you.’

  I was again the happy owner of a pike and I felt as if I’d been given a second life.

  In the evening I wrote in big letters on a sheet of paper the words Grandfather Kuzya had said to me, and hung the paper in my bedroom, near the icons. My uncle, when he saw it, looked at me with a question-mark in his eyes. I made a gesture with my hands, as if to say: ‘That’s how it is.’ He smiled at me and said:

  ‘Hey, we’ve got a philosopher in the family!’

  WHEN THE SKIN SPEAKS

  When I was small I loved drawing. I carried a little exercise book around with me and drew everything I saw. I liked to see how the subjects transferred onto paper, and I loved the process of drawing. It was like being inside a bubble, enclosed in a world of my own, and God only knows what happened in my head during those moments.

  We children all wanted to be like the grownups, so we imitated them in everything we did: our speech, the way we dressed, and also our tattoos. The adult criminals – our fathers, grandfathers, uncles and neighbours – were covered in tattoos.

  In the Russian criminal communities there is a strong culture of tattoos, and each tattoo has a meaning. The tattoo is a kind of identity card which places you within the criminal society – displaying your particular criminal ‘trade’, and other kinds of information about your personal life and prison experiences.

  Each community has its own tradition of tattooing, symbology and different patterns, according to which the signs are positioned on the body and eventually read and translated. The oldest tattooing culture is that of Siberia; it had been the forebears of the Siberian criminals who had created the tradition of tattooing symbols in a codified, secret manner. Later this culture was copied by other communities and spread throughout prisons all over Russia, transforming the principal meanings of the tattoos and the ways in which they were executed and translated.

  The tattoos of the most powerful criminal caste in Russia, which is called Black Seed, are all copied from the Urka tradition, but have different meanings. The images may be the same, but only a person who is able to read a body can analyse their hidden meaning and explain why they are different.

  Unlike the other communities, Siberians tattoo only by hand, using various kinds of small needle. Tattoos done with electrical tattoo machines or similar devices are not considered worthy.

  In the tradition of the Siberian Urkas the process of tattooing continues throughout the life of a criminal. The first few signs are tattooed when he is twelve years old. Then, over the years, other details are added, gradually building up a narrative. Each experience he has in his life is encoded and concealed within this single large tattoo, which becomes increasingly complete as time goes on. It has the structure of a spiral, starting from the extremities – the hands and feet – and ending at the centre of the body. The last parts of the body to be tattooed are the back and chest; this is done when the criminal is about forty or fifty years old. You will never see young people with large, complete tattoos in the Siberian criminal community, as you do in other communities.

  To be able to read bodies decorated with such complex tattoos you need a lot of experience and to know the tattooing tradition perfectly. As a result the figure of the tattooist has a special place within the Siberian criminal community: he is like a priest, trusted by everyone to act on their behalf.

  As a child I was intrigued by this tradition, but I didn’t know much about it – only what my grandfather, my father and my uncle had told me. I was interested in the idea of being able to read everything that was written on their bodies.

  So I spent a long time copying the tattoos which I saw around me, and the more I copied them the more I despaired, because I couldn’t find one tattoo that was the same as another. The main subjects recurred, but the details changed. After a while I understood that the secret must lie in the details, so I began to analyse them: but it was like trying to learn a foreign language without having anyone to teach you. I had noticed that certain images were placed on some parts of the body but not on others. I tried to make connections between the images, venturing hypotheses, but the details felt elusive, like sand that slipped through my fingers.

  When I was about ten I began to do fake tattoos on my friends’ arms, recreating with a biro the images I had seen on grownup criminals. Later, neighbours started asking me to do specific drawings for them, which they would then go and have tattooed on their bodies. They would explain to me how they wanted it to look and I would reproduce it on paper. Many paid me – not much, ten roubles a time, but to me the mere fact that they paid me at all was amazing.

  In this way, without intending to, I became quite well known in the district, and the old tattooist who did all the tattoos based on the drawings that I prepared – Grandfather Lyosha – sent me his regards and his compliments now and then, through different people. I was pleased: it made me feel important.

  On my twelfth birthday, my father had a serious talk with me: he told me I was old enough and must think about what I wanted to do with my life, so that I could break away from my parents and become independent. Many of my friends had already done a bit of smuggling under the guidance of the adults, and I too had made a number of trips with my Uncle Sergey, crossing the border repeatedly with gold in my rucksack.

  I replied that I wanted to learn the tattooist’s trade.

  A few days later my father sent me to Grandfather Lyosha’s house to ask him if he would take me on as his apprentice. Grandfather Lyosha gave me a warm welcome, offered me some tea, leafed through my drawing-book and examined the tattoos that I’d done on myself.

  ‘Congratulations! You’ve got a “cold hand”,’ he commented. ‘Why do you want to be a tattooist?’

  ‘I like drawing, and I want to learn our tradition; I want to understand how to read tattoos…’

  He laughed, then he got up and went out of the room. When he came back he was holding a tattooing needle in his hands.

  ‘Look at this carefully: this is what I tattoo honest people with. It’s this needle that has won me the respect of many and earned me my humble bread. It’s because of this needle that I have spent half my life in prison, tormented by the cops; throughout my life I have never succeeded in possessing anything except this needle. Go home and think about it. If you really want to lead this life, come back to me: I’ll teach you all I know about the trade.’

  I thought about it all night. I didn’t like the idea of spending half my life in prison and being tortured by the cops, but given that the alternatives that lay ahead promised more or less the same, I decided to give it a try.

  Next day I was back at the door of his house. Grandfather Lyosha explained to me first of all what it meant to ‘learn’ to be a tattooist. I would have to help him with the housework – doing the cleaning, going shopping, gathering firewood – so that he would have time to devote to me.

  And that was how it turned out. Little by little Grandfather Lyosha taught me everything. How to prepare a work-station for the tattooing, how to do a dr
awing, how best to transfer it onto the skin. He gave me homework, too: for example, I would have to invent ways in which images could intertwine, while still remaining faithful to the criminal tradition. He taught me the meanings of the images and their positions on the body, explaining the origin of each one, and how it had evolved in the Siberian tradition.

  After a year and a half he allowed me to retouch a faded tattoo for a client, a criminal who had just been released from prison. All I had to do was go over the lines. The tattoo was a rather poorly executed image of a wolf – I remember that it was out of proportion – so I suggested that I should also alter it slightly from the ‘artistic’ point of view. I drew a new image, which I could easily use to cover the old one, and showed it to my master and his client. They agreed. So I did the tattoo, which came out well: the criminal was happy and thanked me profusely.

  From that moment my master allowed me to fix all the old and faded tattoos, and when I had become more expert, with his permission I began to do new jobs, on virgin skin.

  I started to create images for the tattoos using the symbology of the Siberian criminal tradition with ever greater confidence. Now, whenever Grandfather Lyosha gave me a new assignment, he no longer showed me how to draw the image; he simply told me the meaning that had to be encoded in it. I used the symbols, which I knew by now, to create the image, as a writer uses the letters of the alphabet to build up a story.

  Sometimes I met people with unusual tattoos, which had interesting stories behind them. Many of them came to see my master, and he would show me their tattoos, explaining their meaning to me. These were what the criminals call ‘signatures’: tattoos that have a final meaning which incorporates a symbol, or even the name, of some elderly, powerful Authority. They work like a passport, and often prevent a person being given a hostile reception in some place far from his home. Usually these tattoos are executed in a highly individual style. It is possible to make them unique, without directly linking their meanings with the name or nickname of the person who wears them: you have to exploit the characteristics and peculiarities of the body and connect them with the meanings of the other tattoos. I saw signatures on various people, and each time I discovered different ways of combining the subjects to create unique images.

  Once when I was at home a boy came to call me, saying that Grandfather Lyosha wanted to see me, to show me something. I went with him.

  There were some people in my master’s house – about ten in all. Some were from our district, others I had never seen before. They were criminals who had come all the way from Siberia. They were sitting round a table and talking among themselves. My master introduced me:

  ‘This young rascal is studying to become a kolshik.[6] I teach him well; hopefully one day, with the help of Our Lord, he really will become one.’

  A sturdy man got up from the table. He had a long beard and a number of tattoos on his face which I read instantly – he was a man who had been condemned to death but pardoned at the last moment.

  ‘So you’re Yury’s son?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Nikolay “Kolima”, son of Yury “The Rootless”,’ I replied in a firm voice.

  The criminal smiled, and laid his gigantic hand on my head:

  ‘I’ll come round to see your father later. We’re old friends, in our youth we belonged to the same family in a juvenile prison…’

  My master patted me on the back:

  ‘Now I’m going to show you something that you must be able to recognize, if you want to become a good tattooist…’

  We crossed the room and went out into the back yard, where there was a small garden with a few fruit trees. We entered a small toolshed made of wood and rusty corrugated iron. My master lit a lamp which hung down from the ceiling, dangling at the level of my face.

  On the floor lay a large object which had been covered with a sheet of coarse cloth. My master removed the sheet: underneath was a dead man. He was naked, and there were no signs of knife wounds or blood, only a large black bruise on the neck.

  Strangled, I thought.

  The skin was very white, almost like paper; he must have been dead for several hours. The face was relaxed, the mouth slightly open, the lips purple.

  ‘Look here, Kolima, look closely.’ Bending down and turning towards me Grandfather Lyosha pointed to a tattoo on the dead man’s right arm.

  ‘Well, what do you say? What is this tattoo?’

  He asked me this with a kind of mystery in his voice, as if the time had come for me to show what I had learned from him.

  Without really meaning to, I began to analyse the tattoo and express my conclusions out loud. Grandfather Lyosha listened to me very patiently, keeping the corpse turned towards me.

  ‘It’s the signature of a Siberian Authority nicknamed “Tungus”. It was done in Special Prison no. 36, in the year 1989, in the town of Ilin, in Siberia. There is also the blessing for the reader, a clear sign that the tattooist who did it is a Siberian Urka…’

  ‘Is that all? Don’t you see anything else?’ my master asked me suspiciously.

  ‘Well, it’s fine, as a tattoo: it’s well executed, perfectly legible, has a classic combination of images and is very clear… But…’

  Yes, there was a but.

  ‘It’s the only tattoo on the body,’ I continued, ‘and yet in the image there are references to other tattoos, which are missing here… It was done in 1989, but it seems to have healed only a few months ago: it’s still too black, the pigment hasn’t faded… Also, this signature is in a strange position. Usually the arm is where you draw “seeds” or “wings”,[7] whereas signatures act as a kind of bridge between two tattoos. They can be done on the inside of the forearm, or more rarely just above the foot, on the ankle…’

  ‘And why are they done there?’ my master interrupted me.

  ‘Because it’s important for the tattoo to be in a place where it can be easily displayed in any situation. Whereas this one has been put in an inconvenient place.’

  I stopped for a moment. I made some calculations and deductions in my poor head, then finally gazed at my master wide-eyed:

  ‘I don’t believe it! Don’t tell me, Grandfather Lyosha… He can’t be a…’ I stopped again, because I couldn’t utter the word.

  ‘Yes, my boy, this man is a cop. Look at him closely, because who knows? Some time in your life you may come across another who tries to pass himself off as one of us, and then you won’t have time to think, you’ll have to be a hundred per cent sure and recognize him straight away. This guy somehow found out that one of us wore a signature, and he copied it exactly, without knowing what a signature really is, how it’s made and how it’s read and translated… He got himself killed because he was too stupid.’

  I wasn’t shocked, either by the body of the strangled policeman or by the story of the tattoo copied from a criminal. The only thing that seemed strange, unnatural and alien at that moment was the cop’s empty, tattooless body. It seemed to me an impossible thing, almost like a disease. Ever since I was a baby I had always been surrounded by tattooed people, and to me this was completely normal. Seeing a body with nothing tattooed on it had a strange effect on me – a physical suffering, a kind of pity.

  My own body, too, seemed strange to me – I found it too empty.

  According to the rule, tattoos are made in particular phases of life; you can’t have all the tattoos that you like done immediately, there is a particular sequence.

  If a criminal has a tattoo done on his body which doesn’t convey any real information about him, or has a tattoo done prematurely, he is severely punished, and his tattoo must be removed.

  After having a particular experience, you describe it through the tattoo, like in a kind of diary. But since the criminal life is hard, tattoos are not said to be ‘done’, but ‘suffered’.

  ‘Look! I’ve suffered another tattoo.’ The expression doesn’t refer to the physical pain felt during the process of tattooing, but to the meaning of that particular
tattoo and the difficult life that lies behind it.

  Once I met a boy called Igor. He was always getting into trouble, and a lot of people regarded him as a hothead. He was the son of a Moldovan woman who worked in a factory and had no connection with the criminal life. She had been married to a Ukrainian criminal who had gambled and owed money to half the town. Then one day he had been killed – someone had cut his hands off and thrown him into the river, where he’d drowned. There was only one thing left of him: his son Igor.

  His son was a lot like him in some respects – he stole money from his mother and then went and squandered it playing cards; he did dirty little jobs for certain criminals of the Centre district, who used him in small-scale scams. Once he was caught at the market trying to steal the handbag of my friend Mel’s mother. In revenge Mel had permanently disfigured and crippled him.

  Anyway, this boy was eventually caught by the policemen of a Ukrainian town trying to rob an old woman by threatening her with violence. Since he was scared of going to prison for this kind of crime, which is despised by the criminal community, he made up an incredible story: that he was an important member of the Siberian community, the police were out to frame him and the old woman was in league with them. To lend his story added credibility, the idiot gave himself some tattoos while he was in a cell at the police station. Using a piece of wire and the ink from a biro, he scored some Siberian images on his fingers and hands, without even knowing their meaning.

  When he got to prison he told his story, hoping his cellmates would believe him. But since the jails are usually full of experienced people who are capable of understanding the psychology of other human beings, they immediately became suspicious of him. They contacted the Siberian community, asking if anyone knew Igor and knew anything about his tattoos. The answer was negative. So they killed him, throttling him with a towel in his sleep.