Siberian Education (41 page)

Nixon couldn't stand having my friend Mel around: for some unknown reason he was convinced he was a spy; once he had even given him a couple of blows with an iron bar because he was so scared of him. Because of this I had told Mel to stay in the car and not show himself, so as not to stir up a quarrel in the middle of the night. However, when Nixon had gone to call Stepan, Mel had got out of the car to relieve himself in the nearby bushes. And while Mel peed, making a noise like a waterfall, Nixon arrived, pushing a wheelchair with a still half-asleep Stepan on it.

Since I knew Stepan better than the others did, I stayed to talk to him, with Speechless; the others either waited in the cars or drank beer by the kiosk.

Stepan must have guessed that something important was at stake, because he didn't joke as he usually did. I apologized for waking him at that time of night and told him our sad story. As I talked I saw the living side of his face become a kind of mask, like the ones the Japanese use to represent their demons.

He was angry. When I mentioned the reward he made a contemptuous gesture with his hand and said he had something to give us. He called Nixon and gave him an order: the boy disappeared and returned after a few minutes with a cardboard box in his hands. Stepan gave it to me, saying he was a humble and poor person and couldn't give us anything more, but in its own small way this was the most beautiful and useful thing he had.

He opened the box: inside was a Stechkin with silencer and stabilizer, and six magazines full of ammunition. A splendid and pretty expensive weapon: the only pistol made in the USSR that could fire a continuous burst, with twenty shots in the magazine.

I thanked him and said that if it was all right with him I would gladly pay for it, but Stepan refused, saying it was okay, all he asked was that I tell our elders about his gesture. He promised me he would keep his ears open, and that if he heard anything interesting he would let me know at once. Before leaving I tried at least to pay for what the boys had consumed at his kiosk – a few beers, cigarettes and some food – but again he wouldn't hear of it. So I slipped a little money into the pocket of Nixon, who waved to us delightedly, like a little child, as we got into the cars.

Two hundred metres further on Mel was waiting for us: to avoid a clash with Nixon he had gone through the bushes, and he was angry, because in the darkness he'd got scratched all over his face.

Nobody wanted to take Stepan's gun, because – it emerged – they all had at least two on them already. So I took it myself.

We were approaching Centre, and the dark of the night was becoming ever more transparent: day was breaking, the second day of our search.

In the car I slept for a while, without dreaming about anything in particular, as if I'd fallen into a void. When I woke up we were already in Centre and the cars had stopped in the yard of a house. Except for me and Mel, who was still asleep, the boys were all outside, talking to two guys by a door.

I got out of the car and went over to the others. I asked Grave what was happening and he replied that the two people Gagarin was talking to were assistants of the Guardian of Centre.

‘What have they been saying?'

‘That they don't know anything about what happened by the phone boxes. And they haven't heard anything about strangers pestering a girl in their district.'

Shortly afterwards the two guys went away.

‘Well?' I asked Gagarin.

‘It's a challenge for them now: admitting they know nothing about it is like admitting they're out of the loop. It might land them in serious trouble, if that really is the case. Anyway, they've asked us to give them time to check all the facts. And not to tell the Guardian, for the time being. They've assured us of their complete cooperation. We've arranged to meet again at noon under the old bridge.'

So we got back into the car and decided to go and have breakfast in a place called Blinnaya, which means ‘The Pancake Parlour', in the district called The Bank.

The Bank was situated in the most attractive part of the town, where there was a big park on the river with beaches and places where you could relax and pass the time pleasurably. The most expensive restaurants, bars and night clubs were all there. There was also a clandestine gambling den, where admission was strictly by invitation.

The district was run by various Bender criminals, and was a kind of tourist attraction: a lot of people came from Odessa – rich Jews and merchants of various kinds – because it was highly fashionable to breathe a bit of the scent of exotic criminality. But the real criminals of the town were forbidden to settle their personal scores in the Bank; if some people created a few problems or got a bit rowdy it was only an act put on specially for the guests, to make them believe they'd come to a disreputable area: a way of making them feel a bit threatened, to raise their adrenaline. In reality no one ever committed any serious crimes in that district.

The Blinnaya made the best pancakes in the whole town. In Russia pancakes are called
bliny
, and everyone has their own way of cooking them: the best ones are those made by the Cossacks of the Don, who add yeast to the mixture, which they then quickly scorch on red-hot pans smeared with butter, so that the
bliny
turn out thick and very greasy, crisp and with an unforgettable flavour.

There at the Blinnaya people ate them in the Siberian manner, with sour cream mixed with honey, drinking black tea with lemon.

We were pretty tired. There were quite a few people in the restaurant. We ordered fifty
bliny
, just to start with (on average a Russian will eat at least fifteen
bliny
at a time, and guys like Mel and Gagarin as many as three times that number). In three minutes the plate was empty. We ordered several more helpings. We took the tea straight from the samovar that stood on the table; every now and then the waiter came to add more water to it. That's normal in my country: in many restaurants you can drink as much tea as you like; every person, however much food he orders, can drink all the tea he can get inside him, and it's free.

As we ate and drank we discussed the situation. The morale of the group was fairly high, as was our anger and our desire for justice.

‘I can't wait to break the back of the bastard who raped her,' said Speechless.

I thought our situation must be really exceptional, seeing as that was the second time Speechless had spoken in two days.

Then I thought we were really a strange group. I thought about the lives each of us had led. Gigit and Besa, in particular.

Gigit was the son of a Siberian criminal; his mother was an Armenian woman who had died when he was six, murdered by one of her brothers because by marrying a Siberian criminal she had insulted the name of the family.

He was a bright boy, with a strong sense of justice: in fights he was always one of the first to enter the fray, so he had a lot of scars. A couple of times he had been wounded quite seriously, and on one of those occasions I had given him my blood, which is compatible with all groups. Since then he had been convinced that we had become blood brothers; he tried to watch my back in every situation, and would always be there when I needed him. We were friends; we understood each other almost without speaking. He was a quiet person; he liked reading, and I could talk to him about literature. Quiet up to a point, though: he had beaten a Centre boy to death with a hammer for trying to humiliate him in the eyes of a girl he wanted to impress – a girl Gigit had gone out with for a while and remained good friends with afterwards.

Besa was a real tough guy. He was a year younger than me, but looked much older, because he already had a lot of white hairs. He wasn't born in our area; he came from Siberia. His mother, Aunt Svetlana, was the leader of a small gang of robbers, with whom she carried out
turne
, literally ‘tours', series of robberies carried out from town to town. They used to rob rich people – local politicians, but especially the so-called ‘hidden industrialists', people involved in illegal production and trade, who had links with the managers of the big factories. The phenomenon of a woman leading a gang was quite common in Siberia: women with a criminal role are affectionately called ‘mama', ‘mama cat' or ‘mama thief', and are always listened to; their opinion is considered to be a perfect solution, a kind of pure criminal wisdom.

Besa's mother had been in prison several times, and he had been born in the special-regime women's prison of Magadan, in Siberia. Born in jail, he had experienced freedom for the first time at the age of eight. His prison upbringing was very obvious, and had left an indelible mark: an immense anger, above all.

Besa had never known his father. His mother said she had spent one night, out of pity, with a man who had been condemned to death, after being moved by train to the prison of Kurgan. She was put in a special block, and as soon as she arrived in her cell she received a letter from the next cell: a young boy nicknamed ‘Besa', which means ‘little devil', asked her to spend the night with him. Out of compassion and a sort of criminal solidarity she agreed to the condemned man's request, and after paying the guards she was taken to his cell. She became pregnant. A few months later she learned through the prisoners' secret mail system that the biological father of the son she was carrying in her womb had been executed a week after their meeting. So she decided to give him his name. All she knew about the man was that he had been a killer of policemen, that he had been good-looking and that he'd had a lot of white hairs; and Besa must have inherited them, because, as his mother used to say, he was as close a likeness to his father as Adam was to God the creator.

Ever since I'd known him Besa had had an obsession. In the prison where he had grown up he had heard from another child the story of the Kremlin star, the one on top of the main tower, where the gigantic clock is. According to the story, the star weighed five hundred kilos and was made of solid gold, but had been covered with red paint out of prudence. Many similar stories circulate among the children of criminals, especially in the juvenile prisons: they always concern a fabulous treasure hidden in some well-known place in full view of everyone and yet very hard to steal; but if you succeed in stealing it, it will set you up for life. One such story concerns the diamonds that Tsarina Catherine II is said to have hidden in the Bridge of Hope in Moscow, together with the body of her housekeeper, whom she is supposed to have killed with her own hands for trying to steal them. Another concerns the golden armour of the knight Elya of Murom, which is reputed to be buried under the monument of Tsar Alexander III in a monastery near Moscow.

All these stories were told in order to pass the time and create a mystery, but the mystery was always connected with criminal activity, so no one could say when you got to the end of the story that it had been a waste of time. After two hours of intrigue among the bourgeoisie, of descriptions of life in the Tsar's palace, of wars, heroes, knights, ghosts, mysterious thieves, and murders committed with sophisticated techniques, there was always a treasure to be stolen: a treasure that was just waiting for someone to go and get it.

After such a story, nine times out of ten the listeners would ask:

‘Well, since you know the secret, why don't you make use of it? Why don't you get your hands on that treasure?'

The most effective answer was usually:

‘I'm an honest criminal; all I ask is that you give me a little cigarette money for telling you this story.'

Everyone would give a contribution and then they would start planning how to recover the treasure by destroying the national monuments. Besa was no exception: he, too, had worked out a plan for getting the star down from the Kremlin tower. Periodically he would go back to the plan to improve on it a little: for example, at first he didn't know you couldn't just walk into the Kremlin, and when he did find this out (thanks to me), he decided to fake some guards' identity papers, kidnap five of them on their way to work and then enter the Kremlin disguised as guards. Initially he thought of lifting the star down with a crane, which he intended to steal from a building site. Then he decided on a more risky course: he would saw it off manually, after first securing it with ropes, then drop it down to the ground (after all, we didn't care about its condition – we were going to break it up into pieces afterwards anyway, to extract the gold), and finally pick it up and put it into a car to carry it out of the Kremlin. To prevent the star making too much noise when it hit the ground it would be necessary, according to Besa's plan, to cover it with rags.

Besa never stopped planning this crime of the century, and we had the honour of being included in his plan as assistants. He talked about it seriously, and given the vagaries of his fiery personality none of us dared to contradict him.

Meanwhile we continued our humble criminal activities without carrying out any crimes of the century. For the moment we were happy to participate in some black marketeering and try to keep Besa in the creative phase of his plan, so that he never reached the decisive phase, let alone the executive one. But lately he had grown rather restive – I think because he was beginning to realize that we weren't particularly interested in stealing the Kremlin star.

Outside the Blinnaya, our stomachs full, we decided to split up. Gagarin would drive around the bars with Grave, Cat and Gigit, talking to the criminals of the district, while Mel, Speechless, Besa and I would go and see an old friend of my father's, Uncle Fedya, who owned a megadisco on the other side of town and knew everything about everybody, and could even recount events that hadn't yet happened, using his criminal sensibility and his knowledge of human nature.

Uncle Fedya was what in the criminal community is called a ‘Saint'. This is a term of the highest respect. A Saint is a person who lives according to very strict rules of self-control and tries in every sphere of his life to be a perfect example of the criminal ideal. The Saint lives in isolation from everyone, like a kind of hermit, and like the old Authorities he possesses nothing of his own; even the clothes he wears are not his, but gifts from other criminals. But unlike the Authorities he has no real power over other criminals, simply living his life as an example to them.