Siberian Education Read online

  ‘Why do I see all these dishonest people with covered faces? Why do they come here to dishonour my home and the good faith of my family and my guests? Here, in our land of simple, humble people, servants of Our Lord and of the Siberian Orthodox Mother Church, why do these gobs of Satan’s spit come to afflict the hearts of our beloved women and our dear children?’ In the meantime another policeman had dashed into the room and addressed his superior:

  ‘Comrade Captain, allow me to speak!’

  ‘Go ahead,’ replied a small, stocky man, in a voice that seemed to come from beyond the grave. His rifle was aimed at the back of my father’s head. My father, with a sardonic smile, went on sipping his tea and crunching my mother’s home-made walnut biscuits.

  ‘There are crowds of armed men outside. They’ve blocked off all the roads and have taken hostage the patrol that was guarding the vehicles!’

  Silence fell in the room – a long, heavy silence. Only two sounds could be heard: the crunch of my father’s teeth on the biscuits and the wheezing of Uncle Vitaly’s lungs.

  I looked at the eyes of a policeman who was standing next to me; through the holes in his hood I could see he was sweaty and pale. His face reminded me of that of a corpse I had seen a few months earlier, after it had been fished out of the river by my friends: its skin was all white with black veins, its eyes like two deep, murky pits. There had also been a hole in the dead man’s forehead where he had been shot. Well, this policeman didn’t have a hole in his head, but I reckon both he and I were thinking exactly the same thing: that before very long he was going to have one.

  Suddenly the front door opened and, pushing aside the policeman who had just delivered his chilling report, six armed men, friends of my father and my grandfather, entered the room, one after the other. The first was Uncle Plank, who was also the Guardian of our area; the others were his closest associates. My grandfather, completely ignoring the presence of the policemen, got to his feet and went over to Plank.

  ‘By Holy Christ and all His blessed family!’ said Plank, embracing my grandfather and shaking his hand warmly. ‘Grandfather Boris, thank heaven no one has been hurt!’

  ‘What is the world coming to, Plank? It seems we can’t even sit quietly in our own homes!’

  Plank started speaking to my grandfather as if he were summarizing what had happened, but his words were intended for the ears of the policemen:

  ‘There’s no need to despair, Grandfather Boris! We’re all here with you, as we always are in times of happiness and trouble… As you know, my dear friend, nobody can enter or leave our houses without our permission, especially if he has dishonest intentions…’

  Plank went over to the table and embraced all the criminals, one by one. As he did so he kissed them on the cheeks and gave the typical Siberian greeting:

  ‘Peace and health to all brothers and honest men!’

  They gave the reply that is prescribed by tradition:

  ‘Death and damnation to all cops and informers!’

  The policemen could only stand and watch this moving ceremony. By now their rifles were drooping as low as their heads.

  Plank’s assistants, communicating through the women present, told the policemen to get out.

  ‘Now I hope all the cops present will leave this house and never come back again. We’re holding their friends, whom we captured earlier; but once they’re out of the district we’ll let them leave in peace…’ Plank spoke in a calm, quiet voice, and if it hadn’t been for the content of his words, from his tone you might have thought he was telling a gentle, soothing story, like a fairy tale for children before they went to sleep.

  Our friends formed a corridor with their bodies, along which the policemen began to file, one by one, hanging their heads.

  I was elated; I wanted to dance, shout, sing and express some great emotion that I couldn’t yet understand. I felt I was part of, belonged to, a strong world, and it seemed as if all the strength of that world was inside me.

  I don’t know how or why, but suddenly I jumped down from the bench and rushed into the main room, where the red corner was. On the shelf, lying on a red handkerchief with golden embroidery, were the guns of my father, my uncle, my grandfather and our guests. Without thinking, I picked up my grandfather’s magical Tokarev and ran back to the policemen, pointing it at them. I don’t know what was going through my head at that moment; all I felt was a kind of euphoria. The policemen were walking slowly towards the door. I stopped in front of one of them and stared at him: his eyes were tired and seemed bloodshot; his expression was sad and desolate. I remember for a moment feeling as if all his hatred was concentrated on me. I aimed at his face; I tried as hard as I could to pull the trigger, but couldn’t move it a millimetre. My hand grew heavier and heavier and I couldn’t hold the pistol up high enough. My father burst out laughing, and called out to me:

  ‘Come here at once, you young rascal! It’s forbidden to shoot in the house, don’t you know that?’

  The policemen left, and a group of criminals followed them, escorting them to the boundary of the district; and then, when the escort came back, the second car, containing the policemen who were being held hostage, started off towards the town. But it was preceded by a car belonging to Plank’s friends, who drove slowly to prevent the policemen from speeding up, so that the locals could insult them at their leisure, accompanying them out of the district in a kind of victory ceremony. Before they started off, someone had tied a washing line onto the back of their car with various things hanging on it: underpants, bras, small towels, dishcloths, and even one of my T-shirts, my father’s contribution to the work of denigration. Scores of people had come out of the houses to watch the sight of this washing line snaking its way along. The children ran along behind the car, trying to hit it with stones.

  ‘Look at those thieving cops! They come to Low River to steal our underpants!’ shouted one of the crowd, accompanying his comments with whistles and insults.

  ‘What do they want with them? The top officials in the government must have stopped giving their dogs a bone. They haven’t got any underpants!’

  ‘Where’s the harm, brothers, in being poor and not being able to afford a pair of underpants? If they come to us with honesty and like real men, with their faces uncovered, we’ll give every one of them a nice pair of Siberian underpants!’

  Grandfather Chestnut had even brought an accordion from his house, and he played and sang as he walked along behind the car. Some women started dancing, as he bellowed an old Siberian song at the top of his voice, raising his head, adorned by a traditional eight-gored hat, and closing his eyes like a blind man:

  Speak to me, sister Lena, and you too, brother Amur![1]

  I’ve travelled the length and breadth of my land,

  Robbing trains and making my rifle sing.

  Only the old Tayga knows how many cops I’ve killed!

  And now that I’m in trouble, help me Jesus Christ,

  Help me hold my gun!

  Now that the cops are everywhere, Mother Siberia,

  Mother Siberia, save my life!

  I too ran along and sang, constantly pushing up the peak of my own eight-gored hat, which was too big for me and kept slipping down over my eyes.

  Next day, however, all my desire to sing melted away when my father gave me a good beating with his heavy hand. I had violated three sacred rules: I had picked up a weapon without the permission of an adult; I had taken it from the red corner, removing the cross that my grandfather had laid on top of it (only the person who puts the cross on top of a weapon can remove it); and lastly, I had tried to fire it in the house.

  After that spanking from my father, my bottom and back were very sore, so, as always, I went to my grandfather for consolation. My grandfather looked serious, but the faint smile that flitted across his face told me that my problems, perhaps, weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. He gave me a long lecture, the gist of which was that I had done something very silly. And w
hen I asked him why the magic gun hadn’t shot the policemen of its own accord, he told me that the magic only worked when the gun was used for an intelligent purpose, and with permission. At this point I began to suspect that my grandfather might not be telling me the whole truth, because I wasn’t convinced by this idea of a magic that only worked with adults’ permission…

  From that time on I stopped thinking about magic and started watching more closely the movements of my uncle’s and my father’s hands when they used their guns, and soon discovered the function of the safety catch.

  In the Siberian community you learn to kill when you’re very small. Our philosophy of life has a close relation to death; children are taught that taking someone else’s life or dying are perfectly acceptable things, if there is a good reason. Teaching people how to die is impossible, because once you’ve died there is no coming back. But teaching people to live with the threat of death, to ‘tempt’ fate, is not difficult. Many Siberian fairy tales tell of the deadly clash between criminals and representatives of the government, of the risks people run every day with dignity and honesty, of the good fortune of those who in the end have got the loot and stayed alive, and of the ‘good memory’ that is preserved of those who have died without abandoning their friends in need. Through these fairy tales, the children perceive the values that give meaning to the Siberian criminals’ lives: respect, courage, friendship, loyalty. By the time they are five or six, Siberian children show a determination and a seriousness that are enviable even to adults of other communities. It is on such solid foundations that the education to kill, to take physical action against another living being, is built.

  From a very early age children are shown by their fathers how animals are killed in the yard: chickens, geese and pigs. In this way the child grows accustomed to blood, to the details of killing. Later, at the age of six or seven, the child is given the chance to kill a small animal himself. In this educative process there is no place for wrong emotions, such as sadism or cowardice. The child must be trained to have a full awareness of his own actions, and above all of the reasons and the profound meanings that lie behind those actions.

  When a larger animal, such as a pig, an ox or a cow, is killed, the child is often allowed to practise on the carcass, so that he learns the right way to strike with a knife. My father often used to take my brother and me to a big butcher’s shop, and teach us how to handle the knife, using the bodies of the pigs that hung from the hooks. A hand soon becomes decisive and expert, with so much practice.

  When he is about ten, the child is a full member of the clan of the youths, which actively cooperates with the criminals of the Siberian community. There he has the chance to face many different situations of the criminal life for the first time. The older kids teach the younger ones how to behave and through the fights and quarrels and the handling of relations with the youths of other communities, each boy is broken in.

  By the age of thirteen or fourteen, Siberian boys often have a criminal record, and therefore some experience of juvenile prison. This experience is seen as important, indeed fundamental, to the formation of the individual’s character and view of the world. By that age many Siberians already have some black marketeering and one murder, or at least attempted murder, to their name. And they all know how to communicate within the criminal community, how to follow, hand down and safeguard the founding principles of Siberian criminal law.

  One day my father called me into the garden:

  ‘Come here, young rascal! And bring a knife with you!’

  I picked up a kitchen knife, the one I generally used to kill geese and chickens, and ran out into the garden. My father, his friend, Uncle Aleksandr, known to everyone as ‘Bone’, and my Uncle Vitaly were sitting under a big old walnut tree. They were talking about pigeons, the passion of every Siberian criminal. Uncle Vitaly was holding a pigeon in his hands; he had opened its wing and was showing it to my father and Bone, explaining something.

  ‘Nikolay, son, go and kill a chicken and take it to your mother. Tell her to clean it and make some soup for this evening, because Uncle Bone is going stay here for a chat.’

  A ‘chat’ involves the males of the family sitting together drinking and eating all night long to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse in a heap, one after another. When the males are having a chat, no one disturbs them; everyone goes about their own business, pretending the meeting doesn’t exist.

  I ran to the chicken run at the end of the garden and grabbed the first chicken I could find. It was a normal chicken, reddish in colour, fairly plump and perfectly calm. Holding it in both hands, I walked over to a nearby stump of wood, which we used for cutting off the heads of chickens like this one. It didn’t try to escape and didn’t seem concerned; it just looked around as if it were being taken on a guided tour. I grasped it around the neck and placed it on the stump, but when I raised the knife in the air to deliver the fatal blow, it started wriggling violently, until it managed to free itself from my hold, and give me a sharp peck on the head. I lost my balance and fell on my backside: I’d been defeated by a chicken. Looking up, I saw that my father and the others were watching the show. Uncle Vitaly was laughing, and Bone had a smile on his face too; but my father was more serious than ever – he had got to his feet and was coming towards me.

  ‘Pick yourself up, killer! Give me that knife and I’ll show you how it’s done!’ He walked towards the chicken, which in the meantime had started scratching a hole in the ground a few metres away. Once he was close to the chicken, my father arched his body, like a tiger poised to spring on its prey; the chicken was quite calm, and went on scratching at the earth for reasons known only to itself. Suddenly my father made a quick grab at it, but the chicken repeated its earlier action, and with a lightning-fast movement eluded my father’s grasp and pecked him in the face, just under the eye.

  ‘Damn it! He got me in the eye!’ shouted my father, and my uncle and Bone got up from the bench under the walnut tree and ran towards him. But first Uncle Vitaly put the pigeon back in its cage, and then hung the cage up a few metres off the ground, to keep it away from our cat, Murka, which loved killing pigeons, and always stayed near Uncle Vitaly, since he messed about with them all day long.

  The men started making lunges at the chicken, which remained perfectly calm and deftly succeeded in dodging them every time. After a quarter of an hour of fruitless attempts the three men were out of breath and looked at the chicken, which went on scratching the earth and going about its chickenish business with the same determination as before. My father smiled at me, and said:

  ‘Let’s let it live, this chicken. We’ll never kill it; it can stay here, in the garden, free to do as it pleases.’

  That evening I told my grandfather what had happened. He had a good laugh, then asked me if I agreed with my father’s decision. I answered him with a question:

  ‘Why free that chicken and not all the others?’

  Grandfather looked at me with a smile and said:

  ‘Only someone who really appreciates life and freedom, and fights to the end, deserves to live in freedom… Even if he’s only a chicken.’

  I thought about this for a while and then asked him:

  ‘What if all chickens become like him one day?’

  After a long pause grandfather said:

  ‘Then we’ll have to get used to supper without chicken soup…’

  The concept of freedom is sacred for the Siberians.

  When I was six my Uncle Vitaly took me to see a friend of his whom I had never met, because he had been in prison all my life. His name was Aleksandr, but my uncle called him ‘Hedgehog’. The nickname, an affectionate term for a small, defenceless creature, had been coined when he was a baby and had stayed with him into adulthood.

  Hedgehog had been released that very day, after fifteen years in prison. It was the custom among Siberians that the first people who went to visit a newly released prisoner should take children with them: it was
a form of well-wishing, a lucky charm for his future life, free and criminal. The presence of children serves to demonstrate to people who have been excluded from society for a long time that their world still has a future, and that what they have done, their ideals and their criminal education, have not been, and never will be, forgotten. I, of course, understood nothing of this, and was simply curious to meet this character.

  In our district there was always someone going to prison or coming out of it every day, so there was nothing strange to us children in seeing a man who had been in prison; we had been brought up to expect that we would go there ourselves sooner or later, and we were accustomed to talking about prison as something quite normal, just as other boys might talk about military service or what they’re going to do when they grow up. But in some cases the characters of certain former prisoners took on a heroic stature in our stories – they became the models that we wanted to be like at all costs, we wanted to live their adventurous lives which shone with criminal glamour, those lives we heard the grownups discussing and which we then talked about among ourselves, often changing the details, making those stories similar to fairy tales or fantasy adventures. That was what Hedgehog was: a legend, one of those figures our young imaginations had been nourished on. It was said that he was still a teenager when he had been accepted as a robber into one of the most famous gangs of our community, made up of old Siberian Authorities[2] and run by another legendary figure, known to everyone as ‘Tayga’.

  Tayga was a perfect example of a pure Siberian criminal: the son of criminal parents, as a small boy he had robbed armoured trains and killed a large number of policemen. There were many fabulous tales about him, which portrayed him as a wise and powerful criminal who was expert in the conduct of illegal activities, and yet was also very humble and kind, and always ready to help the weak and to punish every kind of injustice.

  Tayga was already an old man when he met Hedgehog, who was then an orphan child. He had helped in his own way, teaching him the criminal law and morality, and very soon Hedgehog had become like a grandson to him. And Hedgehog had earned his respect.