‘I can’t give any more because I’m a humble old man.
Please, Gagarin, take it all to Aunt Anfisa and ask her to forgive us all; we’re sinners, wicked people.’
We finished the third bottle in silence, and by the time we left Caucasus it was already dark; I almost fell asleep in the car. A lot of things were spinning round in my head, a mixture of memories and unpleasant sensations, as if I had left behind something unfinished, or poorly executed. It was a sad moment for me; I felt no satisfaction. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to Ksyusha. It was impossible to feel at peace.
Some time later I discussed this with Grandfather Kuzya.
‘It was right to punish them for what they did,’ I said, ‘but by punishing them we haven’t helped Ksyusha. What still tortures me is her pain, against which all our justice has been useless.’
He listened to me attentively, then smiled at me and said I should retrace the path of my grandfather’s elder brother, go and live on my own in the woods, in the midst of nature; because I was too human to live among men.
I handed the Nagant back to him, but he wouldn’t take it; he gave it to me.
A month or so later we heard that Pavel had been killed, along with three of his men who had participated in the plot against the criminal community. Their executioners had tied them to trees in the park, opposite Tiraspol police station, and hammered nails into their heads.
It was rumoured that the plot had in fact been hatched by the police, in an attempt to weaken the criminal community of our town.
They finally succeeded in doing this five years later, when they set many young criminals against the old ones and sparked off a bloody war. That was the beginning of the end of our community, which no longer exists as it did at the time of this story.
Grandfather Kuzya died of old age three years later, and his death – in addition to other events – caused an upheaval in the Siberian community. Many criminals of the old faith, unhappy with the military and police regime that had been established in our country, left Transnistria and returned to Siberia, or emigrated to far-off lands.
My father went to live in Greece, where he spent five years in prison. He still lives in Athens today.
Old Plum is still alive and still lives in his bar; he has gone deaf, so he shouts when he talks. His granddaughter, the one who made the best apple cakes in town and who was a good friend of mine, married a nice guy who sells accessories for personal computers, and together they went to live in Volgograd.
Uncle Fedya was strongly opposed to the advent of the government regime in Transnistria: he put up a stubborn resistance, trying as hard as he could to persuade the criminals to fight, but eventually he gave up and went to live in Siberia, in a small village on the River Lena, where he continues to perform his role as a Saint.
Barbos, meanwhile, has become a very important person in the criminal community: he made a deal with the police and now holds enormous power in our town. In fact, Black Seed is the only caste that is protected by the police. They are hated by everyone else, but no one can do anything about it. They are in charge now; they control all the prisons and all criminal activities.
In the Georgian community there has been a bloody war with the Armenians, which brought the young to power. They are still at war with them now. Mino was killed in the course of the fighting. He arrived with a gunshot wound at the hospital where his wife had just given birth to a son. He never got to see his baby.
Grandfather Frunzich decided to leave Bender, also because of the war between the Georgians and the Armenians. Like many old men of both those communities, he went to live in his homeland, where now he does some small-scale alcohol trafficking.
Stepan still runs his street kiosk, but no longer sells weapons; the criminals of Black Seed have stopped him, so he now makes his living by selling cigarettes and the occasional batch of counterfeit vodka. His daughter has finished her studies and found a job in an architects’ studio in Moscow. Nixon helps Stepan as loyally as ever; he still hates communists and blacks but has finally made friends with Mel, although to achieve this Mel had to sacrifice his Game Boy.
Mel says, though, that Nixon has grown a lot more white hairs lately and is ageing too quickly.
Gagarin only lived for three years after this story: he was killed in St Petersburg because he had got involved in business with some people who enjoyed the protection of the police and the former KGB. We didn’t hear about his death until later, when a girlfriend of Gagarin’s contacted his parents to tell them he was buried in the cemetery of Ligovo.
Cat moved to southern Russia, where for a while he belonged to the gang of a Siberian criminal who robbed HGVs en route from the Asiatic countries. Then he met a girl from Rostov, a land of Cossacks, and went to live with her in the countryside by the River Don. Officially he is no longer involved in criminal activities; he has three children, two boys and a girl, and goes hunting and does carpentry jobs with his wife’s father and brothers. Mel has been to visit him several times, and on those occasions Cat unsuccessfully tried to persuade Mel to marry his wife’s younger sister.
Grave was arrested in Moscow during the attempted robbery of an armoured van, and sentenced to sixteen years in prison. In jail he killed two people, so was sentenced to life and transferred to the special prison of Ust-llimsk, where he still is. It’s impossible to contact him because of the strict regime at the prison.
Gigit and Besa robbed a number of banks together, then the anti-robbery squad managed to track them down and kept them under surveillance for a while. At that point they fell into an elaborate trap. Acting on information provided by an informer who was being manipulated by the police, Gigit and Besa robbed a certain bank: that same evening, however, they were killed in their room in the Inturist Hotel of the town of Tver by the police, who walked off with the loot. Mel went on his own to bring their bodies home, and buried them in the old cemetery of Bender; hardly any of us went to the funeral – only Mel and a few relatives.
Mel still lives in Transnistria, close to his parents. We chat on the phone now and then. He no longer carries out any criminal activities, because he has no one to work with and can’t manage on his own. For a while he worked as a bodyguard for an Authority from the new generation, but he tired of that. After doing a course, he tried teaching aikido to a group of children, but that came to nothing because he always turned up for lessons drunk. Now he doesn’t do anything; he spends all his time playing on his PlayStation, goes out with the occasional girl and now and then helps someone collect their debts.
Ksyusha never got over it. From the day of the rape she didn’t communicate with anyone; she was always silent, with downcast eyes, and hardly ever went out. Sometimes I managed to coax her out and took her for boat trips on the river, but it was like lugging a sack around with you. Previously she had loved going out in a boat: she would constantly change position, lie down in the bows and trail her hands in the water, lark about, get tangled up in the fishing nets, play with the fish we had just caught, talk to them and give them names.
After the rape she was motionless, limp; the most she would do was stretch out a finger to touch the water. Then she would leave it there and sit watching her hand immersed in the water, until I picked her up in my arms to lift her on to the bank.
For a while I thought she would gradually recover, but she got worse and worse, until she stopped eating. Aunt Anfisa was always crying; she tried taking her to different hospitals, to various specialists, but they all said the same thing: this behaviour was due to her old mental disturbance, and there was nothing to be done about it. At the worst moments Aunt Anfisa gave her vitamin injections and put her on a drip feed to keep her alive.
The day I left the country, Ksyusha was sitting on the bench outside the front door of her house. She was holding her game, the woollen flower, which in Siberia is used as a decorative detail on pullovers.
Six years after this sad story, one night I received a phone call from Mel: Ksyu
sha had died. ‘She hadn’t moved for a long time,’ he told me. ‘She let herself die, little by little.’ After her death, Aunt Anfisa went to live in the house of a neighbour, who needed someone to help his wife with their children.
I left my country; I’ve been through many different experiences and stories, and I’ve tried to do what I thought was right with my life, but I’m still unsure about many things that make this world go round. Above all, the more I go on, the more convinced I am that justice as a concept is wrong – at least human justice.
Two weeks after we had handed out our own kind of justice, a stranger arrived at our house; he said he was a friend of Paunch’s. He explained to me that Paunch had gone away somewhere and would not be coming back, but before leaving he had asked him to give me something. He handed me a little parcel; I took it without opening it, and out of politeness I asked him in and introduced my grandfather to him.
He stayed in our house until the next day. He ate and drank with my grandfather, talking about various criminal questions: ethics, the lack of education among the young, how the criminal communities had changed over the years, and above all the influence of the European and American countries, which was destroying the young generation of Russian criminals.
I sat near them all the time, and when they emptied the bottle I would hurry down to the cellar to refill it from the barrel.
After our guest had gone I opened Paunch’s parcel. Inside it I found a knife called finka, which means ‘Finnish’, the typical weapon of the criminals of St Petersburg and north-western Russia. It was a used – or, as we say in Russian, ‘worldly-wise’ – weapon, with a beautiful haft made of white bone. There was also a sheet of paper, on which Paunch had written in pencil:
‘Human justice is horrible and wrong, and therefore only God can judge. Unfortunately, in some cases we’re obliged to overrule his decisions.’
FREE FALL
On my eighteenth birthday I was abroad. I was studying physical education in a sports school, trying to build myself a different future, outside the criminal community.
It was a very strange time for me: I read widely, met more and more new people and was beginning to understand that the path of crime, which I had previously seen as good and honest, was an extreme one, which society saw as ‘abnormal’. But ‘normal’ society didn’t impress me greatly either; people seemed blind and deaf to the problems of others, and even to their own problems. I couldn’t understand the mechanisms that propelled the ‘normal’ world, where ultimately people were divided, had nothing in common and were unable to feel the pleasure of sharing things. I found the standard Russian morality annoying: everyone was ready to judge you, to criticize your life, but then they’d spend their evenings in front of the television, they’d fill the fridge with good cheap food, get drunk together at family parties, envy their neighbours and try to be envied in their turn. Flashy cars, preferably foreign, identical clothes, to be like everyone else, Saturday evening in the village bar showing off, drinking a can of Turkish-made beer and telling others that everything was fine, that ‘business’ was going well, even though you were only a humble exploited worker and couldn’t see the true reality of your life.
Post-Soviet consumerism was an appalling thing to someone like me. People wallowed in branded detergents and toothpastes, no one would drink anything unless it was imported and women smeared themselves with industrial quantities of French face-creams they saw advertised every day on television, believing they’d make them look like the models in the commercials.
I was tired and disorientated; I didn’t think that I’d ever succeed in fulfilling myself in some honest and useful way.
However, I had never stopped attending the sports club in my town. I did yoga: I was slim and supple, I could do the exercises well and everyone was pleased with me. One of my wrestling coaches had advised me to attend the yoga lessons given by a teacher in Ukraine, a man who had studied for many years in India. So I often went to Ukraine for advanced courses, and every year, with a group from my sports club, I spent a month and a half in India.
By the age of eighteen I was about to take my diploma as a yoga instructor, but I didn’t like the way things were run at my school; I often quarrelled with the teacher, who told me I was a rebel and only let me stay on because many of the other boys were on my side.
The teacher exploited a lot of his students. He would get them to do his accounts, paying them a pittance, and then justify his behaviour with strange arguments connected to yoga philosophy, but which in my view were simply opportunistic. The only reason I put up with all this was that I needed to get that diploma, which would enable me to continue my studies at any state university, and so avoid compulsory military service. I dreamed of opening a sports school of my own and teaching yoga to the people of my town.
But it was to remain just a dream. Because just before the end of the course something very unpleasant happened: one of the boys in our yoga class died of a heart attack.
Many people who do yoga believe in things that are remote from everyday experience. This teacher always used to tell us about people who after years of exercises had been able to fly, or turn into various life forms, and other such claptrap; I never listened to him, but there were others in my group who believed those things. Among these people was Sergey. He had had heart problems since birth, and he needed regular medical treatment and supervision from doctors, but our teacher had led him to believe that the problem could be resolved with the help of exercises. Sergey really believed his weak heart could be cured in that way. I often tried to explain to him that yoga couldn’t treat serious illnesses, but he wouldn’t listen to me; he always said it was just a matter of exercise.
One day Sergey went to a big gathering of the schools of yoga in Hungary, and on the way back, in the train, he had a heart attack and died. I was upset, nothing more than that; I wasn’t particularly close to him and we weren’t great friends, but to my mind his death was entirely on the conscience of our teacher.
The upshot was that I told the teacher exactly what I thought, and we quarrelled. He expelled me from the school, so I didn’t get my diploma; instead they gave me a kind of certificate of participation which entitled me to perform some disciplines in public. A complete farce, in other words.
All this happened in the spring, when Transnistria was blooming like a bride dressed in white, full of scents and refreshing breezes.
I did nothing for a while, except think about what had happened; then I went to stay with my Grandfather Nikolay in the Tayga. We hunted together, made nets and traps for catching fish in the river, took saunas and talked a lot about life.
Grandfather Nikolay had lived alone in the woods since the age of twenty-four, and had a wisdom all of his own. It was good for me to be with him during that period.
*
When I returned to Transnistria I organized a big party on the river with my friends to celebrate my birthday, which was already a few months past. We took ten boats, filled them with bottles of wine, some of the bread that Mel’s grandmother made and our fishing equipment, and set off upstream for a place called ‘The Big Drip’.
The spot was renowned for its beauty and tranquillity, and was situated about fifty kilometres from the town. At this point the river widened out and here and there formed clusters of little interlinked pools, where the water was warm and still. The current hardly ever reached there, except when the river was high in March and early April, the period of the floods. Many fish, especially the wels catfish, would stop there, and we used to go and catch them. We would set out at night in our boats, turn on a big torch, and shine it down into the water: attracted by the light, the fish would come up to the surface, and then we’d kill them with a sort of long-handled wooden mallet specially made for that kind of fishing. One person would hold the torch while another stood ready to strike with the mallet; everything had to be done in silence, because the slightest noise or movement would frighten the fish, and then it would
be at least another couple of hours before you could entice them back up to the surface.
I used to team up with Mel, because nobody else would fish with him, as he would never keep quiet at the crucial moment. He was also a menace with the mallet: once he had missed the wels but hit his fishing partner, our friend Besa, breaking his arm. Since then, whenever he asked anyone if he could go with them they would make excuses, claiming they’d already agreed to go with someone else. As a result he often got left on the bank, but sometimes I relented and took him along; unlike the others, I could usually get him to behave at the critical moment.
We had a pleasant trip upriver to the Big Drip; the weather was beautiful and the water seemed blessed by the Lord – it offered no resistance, even though we were going upstream. My boat’s motor worked very well that day and didn’t stall even once. In short, everything was perfect, like on a picture postcard.
When we arrived we had lunch, and I overdid the wine a bit, which made me too good-humoured – unusually so – and as a result for the umpteenth time I agreed to team up with Mel, who was delighted we weren’t going to leave him ashore.
I was feeling so relaxed I allowed him to hold the mallet. Well, ‘allowed’ isn’t really the right word; he just sat down in my boat and, without asking, picked up the mallet, with a nonchalant glance at me. I said nothing; I just showed him my fist to indicate that if he made a mistake he was in serious trouble.
We set off for our pool. Each boat entered a different one: you had to be absolutely alone, because if everyone had hunted in the same pool, at the noise of the first blow the fish would have hidden on the bottom and the other boats wouldn’t have caught anything.
The night was beautiful; there were lots of stars in the sky and in the middle a faint tinge of white which gleamed and shimmered – it seemed like magic. In the distance you could hear the sound of the wind blowing over the fields, and sometimes its long, thin whistle came close, as though passing between us. The scent of the fields mingled with that of the woods and was constantly changing – you seemed to catch the smell of acacia and lime leaves, separately, and then that of the moss on the river bank. The frogs sang their serenades in chorus; now and then a fish would come up to the surface and make a pleasant sound, a kind of plash, in the water. At one point three roe deer came out of the wood to quench their thirst: they made a lapping noise with their tongues and afterwards sneezed, as horses do.
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