I gripped the broken piece of blade and gently pulled. As I watched the blade emerge and grow ever longer, I felt my head throb. I stopped halfway, turned on the tap and damped my brow. Then I pinched the blade again and pulled it right out. It was about ten centimetres long; I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was part of the blade of a saw for cutting metal, filed by hand till it was razor sharp on both edges, and with a thin, fragile tip. They’d chosen that weapon specially, so they could jab it in and then snap it off, so that it would stay in the wound and be more painful.
The wound was bleeding. I opened the wall cupboard and treated myself as best I could: I put a bit of cicatrizing ointment on the cut, and all around it a tight bandage, to stop the blood. I threw all my clothes and my shoes out of the bathroom window and put on some dirty clothes from the basket next to the washing machine. I washed and dried the knife and went back into the other room.
Mel and Aunt Irina had already left. Uncle Vitaly had arrived; he had his car keys in his hand, ready to take Geka to hospital.
Fima and Ivan were sitting at the kitchen table, and my mother was serving them soup with sour cream and meat stew with potatoes.
‘Well, bungler, what have you all been up to this time?’ asked Uncle Vitaly, who was in a cheerful mood, as always.
I was drained of strength; I didn’t feel much like joking.
‘I’ll tell you later, Uncle, it’s a nasty story.’
‘Did you have to go and get into trouble on your birthday, of all days? All your friends are already drunk, they’re waiting for you…’
‘No party for me, Uncle. I can hardly stand up, I just want to sleep.’
I spent two days in bed, only getting up to eat and go to the bathroom. On the second day Mel came to see me with the Guardian, Uncle Plank, who wanted to hear what had happened.
I told him the whole story, and he promised me he would sort it out in a matter of hours and prevent any reprisals being taken against Geka, Fima and Ivan in Railway. Finger, meanwhile, would be staying on in our district.
About a week later Plank called me round to his home to speak to a man from Railway. He was an adult criminal, an Authority of the Black Seed caste; his nickname was ‘Rope’, and he was one of the few criminals in Railway who was respected by our people.
I found them sitting round the table; Rope got up and came to meet me, looking me in the eye:
‘So you’re the famous “writer”?’
A writer, in criminal slang, is someone who’s skilled at using a knife. Writing is a knife wound.
I didn’t know what to say in reply or whether I was allowed to reply, so I looked at Plank. He nodded.
‘I write when I feel the urge to, when the Muse inspires me,’ I replied.
Rope smiled broadly:
‘You’re a smart young rascal.’
He had called me young rascal – that was a good sign. Maybe the matter was going to be resolved in my favour.
Rope sat down and invited me to join them.
‘I’ll ask you only once what you think about this business, then we won’t discuss it again.’ Rope talked with a great calm and confidence in his voice; you could tell he was an Authority, a man who was able to handle things. ‘If, as far as you’re concerned, the matter ends here and you don’t want to take revenge on anyone, I give you my word that all those who have bothered you and your friends will be severely punished by us, the people of Railway. If you want to take revenge on someone in particular, you can do so, but in that case you’ll have to do it all on your own.’
I didn’t think about it for a moment; the reply came to my lips at once:
‘I’ve got nothing personal against anyone in Railway. What’s done is done, and it’s right that it should be forgotten. I hope I didn’t kill any of your people, but in a fight, you know how it is – everyone’s intent on his own survival.’
I wanted him to understand that revenge wasn’t important for me, that well-being and peace in the community came first.
Rope looked at me earnestly, but with a kindly, amiable expression:
‘Good, then I promise you the person who organized this shameful action against you, while you were guests in our district, will be punished and expelled. Your friends can live their worthy life and walk with their heads held high in Railway…’ He paused, glancing at a door on the other side of the room. ‘I want to introduce you to my nephews; you’ve already met them, unfortunately, but now I want you to accept their apology…’ At these words, two boys with gloomy faces and bowed heads came in. One I recognized immediately – it was Beard, the little bastard whom we had beaten up and locked in the school – while the other’s face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I noticed he was limping, and that under his trousers, on his left leg, there was the swelling of a bandage: it was the guy I’d stabbed when I was giving him my message for Vulture, after the first fight.
The two boys approached and stopped in front of me, with all the enthusiasm of two condemned prisoners in front of a firing squad. They greeted me in unison. It was very sad and humiliating; I felt sorry for them.
Rope said to them sternly:
‘Well, then? Begin!’
Immediately, Beard, the little junkie, jabbered out what was clearly a prepared speech:
‘I ask you as a brother to forgive me, because I’ve made a mistake. If you want to punish me I’ll let you, but first forgive me!’
It wasn’t as moving as it might sound; it was clear that he was just going through the motions.
I too had to act my part:
‘Accept the humble greetings of a fond and compassionate brother. May the Lord forgive us all.’
It was pure Grandfather Kuzya, that speech. If he’d heard me he would have been proud of me. Poetic tone, Orthodox content, and spoken like a true Siberian.
After my words Plank sat with a contented smile on his face, and Rope looked astonished.
Now it was the other wretch’s turn:
‘Please, forgive me like a brother, for I have committed an injustice and…’
His voice was less resolute than Beard’s; it was clear that he couldn’t remember all his lines, and had shortened them. He threw a helpless glance at Rope, but Rope remained impassive, though his hands involuntarily clenched into fists.
Then I decided to kill them all with my kindness, and after taking a deep breath I reeled off the following sentence:
‘As our glorious Lord Jesus Christ embraces all us sinners in His gentle love, and affectionately impels us towards the way of eternal salvation, so with equal humility and joy I enfold you in brotherly grace.’
Saintly words: my feet were almost lifting off the ground and it seemed as if a hole were going to open up in the ceiling for me.
Plank didn’t stop smiling. Rope said:
‘Forgive us for everything, Kolima. Go home and don’t worry; I’ll sort everything out myself.’
A month later I heard that Vulture had been given a savage beating: they had ‘marked’ his face, giving him a cut that started from his mouth, ran right across his cheek and ended at his ear. Then they had forced him to leave Railway.
One day someone told me he’d moved to Odessa, where he’d joined a gang of boys who stole wallets on trams. People who had no respect for any law, neither that of men nor that of the criminals.
Some time later I heard he’d died, killed by his own cronies, who had thrown him out of a moving tram.
*
Geka soon recovered; no sign of the fracture remained on him – later he went to university to study medicine.
Fima, to his misfortune, was taken by his family to Israel. I heard that when they tried to get him to board the plane he started to protest, shouting that it was shameful for a sailor to travel by air. He punched a co-pilot and two customs officials. In the end they had to knock him out with a sedative.
Ivan continued to play the violin in the restaurant, and after a while found a way of consoling himself for the ab
sence of his friend: he met a girl and went to live with her. In fact it was rumoured among the girls of the town that Ivan had been endowed by nature with another talent besides his musical one.
Finger lived in our district for a while, then robbed banks with a Siberian gang, and finally settled in Belgium, marrying a woman of that country.
After the trouble in Railway, for a couple of years I would occasionally bump into boys I didn’t know around town, who would greet me and say:
‘I was there that day.’
Some of them showed me the cuts behind their knees and the scars on their thighs, almost with a sense of vanity and pride, saying:
‘Recognize that? It’s your work!’
I remained on friendly terms with many of them. Luckily no one had been killed that day, though I had wounded one boy quite seriously, by stabbing him near the liver.
Grandfather Kuzya, after hearing from Plank how I’d behaved towards Rope’s nephews, congratulated me in his own way. A lopsided smile and a single sentence:
‘Well done, Kolima: a kind tongue cuts and strikes better than any knife.’
I didn’t get any birthday presents that year – my father was angry with me and kept repeating: ‘You can’t keep out of trouble, even on your birthday.’ My mother was offended because I’d kept from her what had happened to me that day, and in the midst of all this mess nobody gave me anything, except Uncle Vitaly, who brought me a genuine leather football, a beautiful one, but my dog tore it to shreds that very same night.
No presents, and above all a nasty wound which encouraged me to reflect on, and to understand better and put into perspective, the life I was leading.
After many thoughts and debates with myself I came to the conclusion that knives and fisticuffs didn’t get you anywhere. So I moved on to guns.
JUVENILE PRISON
One evening I was returning home with Mel; the weather was hot: it was late August. We were coming from the Centre district, and we had almost reached Low River when from a little garden about twenty metres away from us three boys aged about sixteen came out, rolling drunk, with empty bottles in their hands.
From the many curses that they uttered we immediately realized that there was going to be a fight.
Mel said in a sad and very calm voice:
‘Holy Christ, these bastards were all we needed… Kolima, if they make a single move towards us I’m going to kill them, I swear to you…’ He put his hand in his pocket and slowly pulled out his knife. He propped it against his hip, pressed the button to open the blade and hid the knife behind his back. I did the same, but hid the hand holding the knife in front of me, under my T-shirt, pretending to tighten my belt.
‘I hope for their own sakes they’re intelligent. Who needs trouble at this time of night…’ I said as we walked on.
Suddenly, when we had gone past them, one of the three threw an empty bottle at Mel’s back. I heard an unnatural noise, like that of a snowball against a wall. Then immediately afterwards another more natural noise: that of a bottle smashing as it hits the ground.
In a second, before I could even react, Mel was already punching one of them, and the other two were surrounding him, trying to hit him with their bottles. I jumped on the first one I could reach and stabbed him in the side. Another smashed a bottle on the ground and cut my face with the piece that was left in his hand. I got really angry and gave him a series of stabs in the leg. At that moment, behind my back I heard the sound of the cocking lever of a Kalashnikov, and immediately afterwards a burst of gunfire. I dropped to the ground, instinctively. A voice shouted:
‘Throw your weapons well away from you! Hands up, legs apart, face down! You’re under arrest!’
I felt as if I’d fallen into a bottomless pit.
‘No, it can’t be. Anything in the world, but not this.’
Pending further inquiries, which in the event took exactly two weeks, they locked me up in a cell in Tiraspol police station. The three guys who had attacked us withdrew their accusations, after my father sent the right people round to their houses.
Mel got out after a week, because he hadn’t used his knife.
I had used mine, though – it was found on the spot – and although the victims weren’t pressing charges, all the legal system needed was the reports of the policemen who’d arrested us, and my fingerprints on the weapon.
The trial was as quick as lightning: the prosecutor asked for three years’ confinement in a high security juvenile prison. The defending counsel – who was a lawyer paid by the state, but nonetheless did his job well, partly because, as I later learned, he had received a certain amount of money from my family – insisted on the peculiarities of the case: the lack of any complaint from the victims, my good behaviour during my first sentence, which I had served at home, and above all the impossibility of proving that the weapon belonged to me. I might have found it on the spot, or even taken it from one of the victims, who indeed in their second statement had declared themselves to be the ‘aggressors’. In the end the judge, a plump old woman, announced in a funereal voice:
‘One year’s detention in the strict-regime colony for juveniles, with the possibility of a request for early release after five months’ detention in the event of good behaviour.’
I wasn’t in the least frightened or surprised. I remember feeling as if I were going on a camping trip somewhere, to rest up for a while and then return home. Indeed I felt like I was about to do something I had been waiting for all my life, something great and important.
And so I was taken to prison, to a place called Kamenka – ‘The Place of Stone’, a big jail with various blocks and sections. It was an old construction dating from the time of the tsar, built on three floors. Each floor had fifty rooms, all the same size, each seventy metres square. In each room there were two windows, or rather holes, which had neither frames nor glass, but only a sheet of iron soldered on from the outside, with little holes in it to let the air through.
They escorted me to a room on the third floor. The iron doors opened in front of me and the warder said:
‘Move! Go in without fear, come out without crying…’
I took one step and the doors closed behind me with a loud noise. I looked in there and couldn’t believe my eyes.
The room was crammed with wooden bunks on three levels, set alongside each other, with very little space in between – just enough to get through. The boys were sitting on the bunks, walking around naked and sweaty, in an air full of the stink of latrines and cigarette smoke and some other disgusting odour, the smell of a dirty, damp cloth which after a while begins to rot.
Only half of the room was visible: a metre and a half from the floor the air became increasingly dense, and from there right up to the ceiling there was a thick cloud of steam.
I stood there trying to work out what I should do. I knew the prison rules very well: I knew I mustn’t move a single step inside that room until the Authorities of the cell said I could, but I looked around and couldn’t see anyone who was interested in my arrival. What’s more, my clothes seemed to me increasingly heavy, because of the humidity in the room. Then I felt something fall on my head; I brushed at it with my hand, but immediately other objects fell on my shoulders. So I moved quickly, to shake them off.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only cockroaches… There are lots of them in front of the door, but they don’t go into the room, because we put poison under the bunks…’
I looked towards the voice that was speaking to me and saw a very thin boy in dirty, wet underpants, with a shaven head, a gap in his front teeth, and glasses. I couldn’t manage to say anything to him; I felt as if I was completely cut off from the rest of the world.
‘I’m Dwarf – I’m the shnyr here. Who are you looking for? Tell me and I’ll find him.’ He came a bit closer and started looking at the tattoo on my right arm. Shnyr in criminal slang means ‘the one who darts about’: this figure exists in all Russian prisons, he’s someone who is not regard
ed as an honest criminal, but is the slave of the whole cell and takes messages from one criminal to another.
‘Are there any Siberians here?’ I asked him coldly, to make it clear to him from the outset that he must keep his distance from me.
‘Yes, there certainly are: Filat “White” from Magadan, Kerya “Yakut” from Urengoy…
‘All right,’ I interrupted him brusquely. ‘Go to them quickly and tell them a brother has arrived. Nikolay “Kolima” from Bender…’
He immediately vanished behind the maze of beds. I heard him saying, as he went from one bunk to the other:
‘A new arrival, he’s Siberian… Another Siberian’s arrived, another one… A Siberian from Bender has just arrived…’
In no time at all the whole cell had been informed.
A few minutes later Dwarf popped out from behind the beds. He leaned against the wall, looking back at the area from which he had just emerged. Eight boys came out from there and stood in front of me. The one in the middle did the talking; he had two tattoos on his hands. I read them and quickly learned that he came from a gang of robbers and belonged to an old family of Siberian Urkas.
‘Well, are you Siberian?’ he asked me in a relaxed tone.
‘Nikolay “Kolima”, from Bender,’ I replied.
‘Really? You’re actually from Transnistria…’ His tone had changed, becoming a little more animated.
‘From Bender, Low River.’
‘I’m Filat White, from Magadan. Come this way, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the family…’
Contrary to my expectations, the juvenile prison where I had been sent bore no resemblance to the serious prisons I had always heard about and which I had been prepared for since childhood. Here there was no criminal law; everything was chaotic and completely unlike any existing model of prison community.
The harsh living conditions and the lack of freedom, at such a delicate stage in the growth of any human being, complicated everything. The boys were very angry, like animals: they were evil, sadistic and deceitful, with a strong desire to sow destruction and raze to the ground anything that reminded them of the free world. Nothing was safe in that place; violence and madness burned like flames in the minds and souls of the inmates.
Siberian Education Page 22