Siberian Education

by Nicolai Lilin

  Well, to return to our story: Geka lived with his mother and an uncle who had had an incredible life; he was the embodiment of divine anger, of the living doom to which this likeable, kindly family was predestined. His name was Ivan, and he had been nicknamed ‘the Terrible’. The allusion to the great tyrant was ironical, because Ivan was as good-natured as they come. He was about thirty-five years of age, short and thin, with black hair and eyes, and abnormally long fingers. He had been a professional musician before he had fallen into disgrace; at the age of eighteen he was playing the violin in an important orchestra, in St Petersburg, and his musical career seemed to be rocketing upwards like a Soviet intercontinental missile. But one day Ivan had ended up in bed with a friendly tart who played in the orchestra, a cellist, the wife of an important member of the communist party. He had become infatuated with her, made their relationship public and even asked her to leave her husband. Poor naive musician, he didn’t know that party members couldn’t get divorced, because they and their families had to be an example of a perfect ‘cell’ of Soviet society. And what kind of cell are you, if you get divorced whenever you feel like it? Russian cells must be as hard as steel, made of the same stuff as their tanks and their famous Kalashnikov assault rifles. Have you ever seen a faulty Soviet tank? Or a Kalashnikov that jammed? Families must be as perfect as firearms.

  So our friend Ivan, as soon as he tried to follow the motions of his heart, was crushed by his lover’s husband, who hired some agents of the Soviet secret services, who pumped him so full of serums they reduced him to a zombie.

  Officially he had disappeared, nobody knew where; everyone was convinced that he’d escaped from the USSR via Finland. A few months later he was found in a psychiatric hospital, where he had been interned after being picked up on the street in a serious state of mental confusion. He couldn’t even remember his own name. The only thing he had with him was his violin; thanks to that the doctors traced him to the orchestra, and later were able to hand him back to his sister.

  By this time Ivan’s health was permanently impaired, and his face was that of a person tormented by one long, enormous doubt. He could communicate perfectly well, but he needed time to reflect on questions and think about his answers.

  He still played the violin; it was his only link with the real world, a kind of anchor which had kept him attached to life. He would perform twice a week in a restaurant in the Centre and then get drunk out of his mind. When he was drunk, he used to say, he managed to have moments of mental lucidity, which unfortunately soon passed.

  The faithful companion of his life, who had always shared in all his drinking bouts, was another poor wretch called Fima, who had caught meningitis at the age of nine and since then been out of his wits. Fima was extremely violent, and saw enemies everywhere: when he entered a new place he would put his right hand inside his coat as if to take out an imaginary gun. He was bad-tempered and quarrelsome, but nobody reproached him for it, because he was ill. He went around dressed in a sailor’s overcoat and shouted out naval phrases, such as ‘There may be few of us, but we wear the hooped shirt!’ or ‘Full ahead! A hundred anchors in the arse! Sink that damned fascist tub!’ Fima divided the world into two categories: ‘our boys’ – the people he trusted and regarded as his friends – and the ‘fascists’ – all those he considered to be enemies and therefore deserving to be beaten up and insulted. It wasn’t clear how he determined who was one of ‘our boys’ and who a ‘fascist’; he seemed to sense it, on the basis of some hidden, deep-seated feeling.

  Together Ivan and Fima got into a lot of trouble. If Fima was wild, Ivan would attack with a natural violence: he would pounce on people like a beast on its prey.

  In short, because of these virtues I really hoped we would find them at home.

  When we arrived, Geka, Ivan and Fima were playing battleships in the living room.

  Geka was relaxed and was laughing, mocking his competitors in the game:

  ‘Glub-glub-glub,’ he repeated derisively, imitating the sound of a sinking ship.

  Fima, with trembling hands, disconsolately clutched his piece of paper: his fleet was evidently in a desperate plight.

  Ivan was sitting in a corner looking crestfallen, and his piece of paper thrown on the floor indicated that he had just lost the game. He was holding his violin and playing something slow and sad which resembled a distant scream.

  I briefly explained our situation to Geka and asked him if he could help us to get across the district.

  He immediately agreed to help us, and Fima and Ivan followed him like two lambs ready to turn into lions.

  We went out into the street; I looked at our gang and could hardly believe it – two Siberian boys and an adult fresh out of jail, accompanied by a doctor’s son and two raving lunatics, trying to escape unharmed from a district where they were being hunted. And all of this on my birthday.

  Geka and I walked in front and the others followed. While I was chatting to Geka, I heard Mel telling Finger one of his miraculous stories, the one about the big fish that had swum all the way up the river, against the current, to get to our district, because it had been attracted by the smell of Aunt Marta’s apple jam. Every time Mel told that story, the funniest part was when he demonstrated how big the fish had been. He would open his arms like Jesus crucified, and with an effort in his voice would shriek ‘A brute as big as that!’ As I waited for that phrase with one ear and listened to Geka with the other, I felt really great. I felt like I was out for a stroll with my friends, without any dangers.

  When Mel came to the end of his story, Fima commented: ‘Holy fuck, the number of fish like that I’ve seen from my ship! The whales are a real pain in the arse! The sea’s full of the buggers!’

  I turned round to see what expression he had as he was saying those words, and saw something fly past close to my face, so close it almost touched my cheek. It was a piece of brick. At the same moment Geka shouted:

  ‘Shit, an ambush!’ and a dozen boys armed with sticks and knives emerged from each of two opposite front yards, and ran towards us, shouting:

  ‘Let’s kill them, kill them all!’

  I put my hand in my pocket and took out my pike. I pressed the button and with a clac the blade, pushed by the spring, shot out. I felt Mel’s back lean against mine and heard his voice say:

  ‘Now I’m going to do someone!’

  ‘Go for their thighs, you fool; their jackets are stuffed with newspapers, don’t you see they’re prepared? They’ve been waiting for us…’ Before I could finish the sentence I saw a big guy armed with a wooden stick in front of me. I heard his stick whistle past my ears once, then a second time; he was quick, the bastard. I tried to get closer so I could stab him with my blade, but I was never fast enough; his blows were getting ever quicker and more accurate, and I was in danger of being hit. Suddenly another guy attacked me from behind; he pushed me hard and I knocked into the giant with the stick. Instinctively I gave him three quick stabs in the thigh, so quick that I felt shooting pain in my arm, a kind of electric shock, from the released tension. The snow beneath us was spattered with blood, the giant elbowed me in the face but I kept stabbing him till he fell on the ground, clutching his leg in the blood-red snow, grimacing in agony.

  From behind, the boy who had pushed me tried to stab me in the side, but I was thin and my jacket was big, and he didn’t manage to reach the flesh. The jacket ripped, however, and his hand went through the hole along with the knife. I turned and wounded him with my pike, first on the nose and then above the eye: his face was instantly covered with blood. He was trying to get his hand out of the hole in my jacket, but his knife had got stuck in the material, so he abandoned it there. He put his hands to his face and, screaming, fell on the snow, away from me.

  I put two fingers into the hole in my jacket and carefully pulled out the blade: it was a hunting knife, wide and very sharp. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘if he’d got through I’d have been killed. When I get home I’m
going to light a candle in front of the icon of the Madonna.’

  Stepping over my enemy’s body and holding his knife in my left hand, I went towards Geka, who was down on the ground, trying to avoid the blows from a stick wielded by a sturdy boy. He was leaning on his right arm and trying to fend off the blows with his left. I surprised his attacker from behind and plunged the blade of my pike into his thigh.

  The blade of my knife was very long and slipped easily into the flesh; it was the ideal thing for putting people out of action, because it had no problem in penetrating muscle right through to the bone.

  Simultaneously, using the hunting knife, I cut the ligaments behind the knee of his other leg. With a cry of pain the stocky boy fell to the ground.

  Geka got to his feet and picked up the stick, and together we rushed towards Mel, who had caught one of them and, yelling like a madman, was stabbing him with his knife in the area of the stomach, while three guys tried to stop him by raining down blow after blow from their sticks on his head and back. If I had taken so many hits I’d have been killed for sure; it was only thanks to his physique that Mel managed to stay on his feet.

  I rushed with my knife at a guy who was about to deal a powerful blow at Mel’s head. I came up from behind, and cut one of his ligaments.

  Geka hit another boy on the head, who immediately passed out, blood oozing from his ear. The third ran off towards one of the yards from which they had all emerged a few moments before.

  Meanwhile Fima and Ivan, armed with sticks, were standing close to the pavement, clubbing two guys who had fallen on the ground. One was in a very bad way. Fima had definitely broken his nose and his face was covered with blood – he was instinctively holding up his quivering hands to shield his face from the blows, but Fima was hitting him anyway, with such violence that the stick bounced off those hands as if they were made of wood, like a puppet’s: it was clear that Fima had broken them. Angrily, furiously, Fima hit him, shouting:

  ‘Who is this guy who wants to kill a Soviet sailor? Eh? Well? Who is this damned fascist?’

  In the meantime Ivan was trying to club the face of the other attacker, who was doing well to avoid the blows by twisting to one side and the other. At one point he almost hit him, but at the last moment the stick missed his face and slammed into the frozen asphalt covered with red snow – red with the blood which as soon as it fell on the ground became as hard as ice. The stick broke in two; Ivan lost his temper and threw away the piece that was left in his hand. Then he jumped two-footed on the boy’s head and started stamping on his face, letting out a strange war-whoop, like the Indians when they attack the cowboys in American westerns.

  They were really crazy, those two.

  In an instant the battle was over.

  On the other side of the street was Finger, with a knife and a stick in his hands, and at his feet a boy with a cut which started from his mouth and ended in the middle of his forehead: it was too deep: a nasty wound. The boy lay there, conscious but not moving – terrified, I think, by the blood and the pain.

  Mel was holding fast by the lapel the guy he had previously been stabbing in the stomach with his knife. He was gazing in astonishment at his blade, which had snapped in two. I went over to him and with a sharp tug ripped open the boy’s jacket, which was full of holes. Out onto the snow fell a couple of dozen thick newspapers, glued together: the missing part of Mel’s blade was sticking out from that pack of paper.

  Surprised and incredulous, Mel looked at the scene as if it were a magic show.

  I picked up the pack of paper from the ground and held it in my hand for a moment, feeling its weight. Then, putting all the strength I had into it, I slapped Mel across the face with that bundle of newspapers, making a loud noise, like when an axe splits a stump of wood.

  His cheek immediately went red, he let go of the boy’s neck and put his hand to his face. In a plaintive voice he asked me:

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Why the hell are you angry with me?’

  I hit him again and he took two paces backwards, putting one hand in front of him, to stop me.

  I replied:

  ‘What did I tell you, you fool? Go for the thighs, not the chest! While you were messing around with that junkie and getting whacked by his three friends, I got the real blade. Shit, it was a damn close thing, I nearly got killed! And where were you? Why didn’t you cover my back?’

  He immediately put on a mournful expression – lowered eyes, bowed head, mouth slightly open – and in the voice of a beggar asking for alms he started mumbling incomprehensible words, as he always did when he was in the wrong:

  ‘Uh-m-m-m… Kolima… o-o-only wa-a-anted…

  mm-hm-hm… so-o-orry…

  ‘Fuck your excuses,’ I interrupted him. ‘I want to go home and celebrate my birthday, not my funeral. Now listen to me. This is no time for pissing about, we’re risking our necks in this fucking business. And don’t forget we’re not alone; there are other people with us, they’re giving us a hand; we can’t expose them too much. And thank God they are here, because with more friends like you I’d already be dead.’

  Mel shrank even smaller and, as he always did on such occasions, began to cover my back, though it was a bit late now.

  The street was like the scene of a massacre: all the snow was red with blood; our assailants were dragging themselves over to the sides of the pavement, looking decidedly the worse for wear.

  I went over to the one Mel had been trying to stab: he was frightened, even though he didn’t have a scratch on him. I had to play tough. I grabbed him by the neck and tried to pull him up, but I couldn’t lift him – he was heavier than me – so I bent down and stuck my knife into his thigh, till a little blood started to ooze out. He screamed and started crying, begging me not to kill him. I gave him a hard slap, to shut him up:

  ‘Shut your mouth, you little pansy! Do you know who you’ve taken on, you dickhead? Don’t you know us guys from Low River are baptized with knives? Did you really think you could kill us? I’ve been fighting since I was seven; I’ve ripped open so many guys like you, it would take me a lifetime to count them.’

  I was exaggerating the number of victims, of course, but I had to scare him, sow fear, because a terrified enemy is already half defeated.

  ‘I won’t kill you this time, seeing as today’s my birthday and it’s the first time we’ve come up against each other; but if you cross my path again I’ll have no mercy. When you see the Vulture, tell him Kolima sends his regards, and if I meet him before this evening I’ll slit him open like a pig…’

  That poor idiot, with the blood welling out of his thigh and his face distorted with terror, looked at me as if I were taking possession of his soul.

  We set off again: Fima with a big stick, Ivan with a broken truncheon that he’d picked up off the ground, Geka with an iron bar, Finger with a knife and a stick, I with two knives in my pocket, and lastly my second shadow, Mel, with a sheepish look on his face, holding a stick and a knife with only half a blade.

  As we went away, the ‘survivors’ started to come out of the yard. We were twenty metres away when one of them shouted after us:

  ‘Siberian bastards! Go back to your fucking woods! We’ll kill you all!’

  Mel turned round and quick as a flash hurled his broken knife at him. It flew in a strange trajectory and landed smack in the face of a boy standing next to the one who had shouted. More blood, and they all scattered again, leaving another wounded comrade on the snow.

  ‘Holy Christ, what a massacre…’ said Geka.

  We walked fast. When we came out into wide open spaces we almost ran. We tried to avoid yards and narrow passageways.

  We passed the last row of houses before the food warehouses and hid among the illegally built garages and lockups. I suggested we should explore the area carefully before crossing the road in a group: I sensed that there were surprises in store for us.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take off my jacket so
I can run faster. I’ll cross the road further down, where it bends round and goes into the trees, then I’ll go on to the warehouses and see what the situation’s like. If there are a lot of them waiting for us, we’ll go another way. If there are only a few of them we’ll attack them from behind, and rub them in the shit… It’ll take me a quarter of an hour, no more; in the meantime, have a look in the garages, maybe there’s something handy we could use as a weapon, but be careful not to attract attention…’

  Everyone agreed. Only Mel didn’t want to let me go on his own: he was worried.

  ‘Kolima, I’ll come with you: anything might happen…’

  I couldn’t tell him he was a burden; I had to find a kinder way.

  ‘I need you here. If they discover where you guys are, it’ll be your job to defend the group. I can get away from any shit on my own, but do you think they can?’

  At these words Mel became serious, and his face took on the same expression the Japanese kamikazes might have worn before boarding their aircraft.

  I took off my jacket and was about to leave, but Mel stopped me, putting the iron bar in my hand, and in a trembling voice he said:

  ‘You might need it…’

  I looked at him in wonder: what a fool that human being was, and how he loved me!

  The fewer things I carried in my hands the better it was. But to avoid pointless explanations I took the bar and ran off. I threw it away as soon as I disappeared behind the garages. I was moving fast; the air was cold and breathing was easy.

  I got to the bend, crossed the road and headed toward the stores. From a distance I saw a dozen boys sitting around an iron bin, where they had lit a fire to warm themselves. I counted the sticks and bars leaning against the wall. I waited a moment, to make sure there wasn’t anyone else there, then I turned back.

  When I reached them, my friends had already opened five garages. Mel had turned out a cupboard full of gardening equipment and armed himself with a small hoe which had on one side an iron blade for hoeing and on the other a little fork, which I think was for picking things up: I don’t know the first thing about gardening – in our district gardens were only used for hiding weapons.