Siberian Education (22 page)

Smoking was forbidden in the building, but the nurses secretly brought in cigarettes and sold them to inveterate smokers at three times the normal cost.

Among the patients there were many who were only feigning illness: Authorities of the criminal world who by exploiting their connections had managed to have false medical certificates made out for them which declared them to be ‘terminal'. So they stayed in a comfortable hospital instead of a cold, damp, stinking prison. Whenever they wanted they had prostitutes brought in from outside; they organized parties with their friends and even meetings of Authorities at a national level. Anything was permitted and covered up, provided you paid for it.

The person who guaranteed the Authorities a happy stay in hospital was a woman, a fat nurse of Russian nationality and of a perennially cheerful disposition: Aunt Marusya. She seemed healthier than Our Lord: she had red cheeks and spoke in a loud and extremely powerful voice. She was very popular with the criminals, because there was nothing she wouldn't do for them.

The hospital was divided into three non-communicating blocks. The first and most pleasant was exposed to the sun: it had big windows and a warm swimming-pool; it was the block for the terminally ill, where every patient had his own clean, warm little room and received constant attention from the staff. This was where the Authorities stayed: they pretended to be moribund but were really as healthy and strong as could be; they spent their days playing cards, watching American films on video, screwing the young nurses and receiving visits from their friends, who supplied them with all they needed for an agreeable life full of delights.

Grandfather Kuzya was critical of those people; he called them
urody
, which means ‘freaks': he used to say they were a disgrace to the modern criminal world, and we had the culture that came from America and Europe to thank for the fact that people like them existed.

The second block was intended for the chronically ill. They slept six to a room; no television, no fridge, only the canteen and a bed. Lights out at nine o'clock in the evening, wake-up call at eight in the morning. They couldn't leave their room without the permission of the authorized staff – not even to go to the toilet. In case of need, outside the prescribed hours they could use an old mobile latrine which was emptied every evening. The food was reasonable and was delivered three times a day. This was the block where the genuinely sick were kept – criminals and non-criminals, and also many homeless people and vagabonds. The medical treatment was the same for everybody: pills and the occasional injection, inhalations of steam twice a week. The wards were cleaned by the nurses with a powerful disinfectant, creolin, the same one as was used for cleaning stables: it had such a strong smell that if you breathed it in for more than half an hour you got a terrible headache. In this block even the food smelled of creolin.

The third block was for patients suffering from tuberculosis in the acute phase, those who were infectious. The block was entirely in the shade, facing the trees of the park, with small windows which were always misted over; it was so damp that the water dripped from the ceiling. There were three floors, with fifty rooms to a floor and about thirty people to a room. For sleeping there were wooden bunks like those of the prisons, small mattresses, sheets that were changed once a month and rough blankets made of synthetic wool. Not everyone had a pillow. In these over-crowded rooms people were constantly dying. It was disgusting in there. Many couldn't even get to the toilet on their own, and since nobody helped them they did everything over themselves. What's more, many of them spat blood when they coughed; they spat it continually, straight on the floor. They had no television, radio or any other form of entertainment. They received no treatment, because it was deemed to be pointless. And they were given little or nothing to eat, on the grounds that since they were going to die, food would have been wasted on them.

The nurses' market, of course, didn't reach the patients of the third block, so they had invented an ingenious system for getting hold of cigarettes. They used young boys, people like us, in the street. The patients would throw out of the windows a heavy bolt with a double fishing line tied to it. When the bolt landed over the wall, the boys would hook a little bag containing the cigarettes onto the thread, and the patients would fix on another bag containing the money. By pulling the thread you propelled the two little bags, which thus began their journeys in opposite directions – the money towards the boys and the cigarettes towards the patients.

The boys sold the cigarettes more or less at market price, but they made a profit anyway because the cigarettes were stolen and hadn't cost them anything.

The patients were always hungry for cigarettes, always. The hospital administration, in an attempt to stop this kind of trade, had spread a story to scare the street boys, giving them to believe that they might fall ill and die if they touched the patients' money. But the boys, as always, had found a solution: they quickly ran the flame of a cigarette lighter around the banknotes to ‘kill' the mortal bacterium. And besides, the idea of doing something forbidden and dangerous attracted them even more.

The hospital guards were under orders to intervene. Many turned a blind eye, but some bastards took pleasure in thwarting the exchange at the very last minute: they waited for the moment when the patient stretched out his hand to take the packet and –
snip!
– they cut the string. The cigarettes fell to the ground, accompanied by the despairing cries of the patient. The guards had a good laugh: they were scum that deserved to be slaughtered like pigs, in my opinion.

By now Mel and I had crossed the park. Mel continued to apologize to me, and I continued to ignore him and walk on as if I were alone.

Suddenly, as we were skirting the wall of the block, a bolt fell between my feet. I stopped and picked it up: it had the fishing line tied round it. I looked up: leaning out of a window on the third floor was a middle-aged man with a long beard and unkempt hair. He was staring at me with wide-open eyes, making the gesture of smoking, as if he held a cigarette between his fingers.

I made a sign to him that I would see to it at once. I turned towards Mel, who hadn't even realized why I'd stopped, and asked him to give me all the cigarettes he had.

Mel eyed me suspiciously, but I said to him disgustedly:

‘Oh come on! These people haven't got anything to smoke. You'll be able to buy yourself another packet in a minute.'

‘But I haven't got any money on me!'

I felt a terrible anger rising within me, but anger didn't get you anywhere with Mel, so I calmed myself down and told him:

‘If you give me your cigarettes, I'll forgive you and I won't tell the others.'

Without a word, Mel took two packets of Temp – the Soviet Marlboro – out of his pocket.

I pointed to the area of his jacket where he kept his cigarette lighter.

‘But you gave it to me, don't you remember?' he said, trying to save at least that much, but even as he spoke, he was already putting his hand into his inside pocket to get it.

‘I stole it from a kiosk at Tiraspol. I'll steal you another one – a better one, with a naked woman on it . . .'

‘Oh, all right, all right . . .' The ploy of the naked woman had worked, and Mel thought he had made a great bargain. ‘But remember, Kolima, it's got to have a naked woman on it, you've promised!'

‘I always keep my promises,' I told him, taking the lighter from his large but gullible hand.

One of the packets had already been opened and a couple of cigarettes were missing. I slipped the lighter into it and then wound the string all round the bundle, tying it up with a bow like a gift. Finally I added the only thing I had on me, my clean cotton handkerchief, slipping it in between the two packets. Then I started pulling the string. When my bundle reached the window, the man's hand stretched out through the bars and the shouts of joy carried right down to us.

I was left with the patients' little bag in my hands. I opened it: inside was a banknote, torn, dirty and wet. One rouble. Next to it, a scrap of paper with a message: ‘Sorry, we can't afford any more.'

I didn't even touch the rouble; I closed the little bag again and moved the two strings, to alert the patients. The man at the window pulled the string towards him, took back his rouble and shouted to me:

‘Thanks for everything!'

‘God bless you, guys!' I replied, shouting as loud as I could.

At once a guard materialized to the right, waving his Kalashnikov and shouting:

‘Get away from the wall! Get away or I'll fire!'

‘Shut your mouth, you fucking cop!' Mel and I replied simultaneously, though each in slightly different words.

Completely unruffled, we walked on. Then we turned around. The cop was standing there silently, glaring at us with such malice he seemed on the point of exploding. From the window the patient was still watching us: he was smiling and smoking a cigarette.

‘You could have taken that rouble, though,' said Mel after a while.

I couldn't kill him because I was fond of him, so I did what Grandfather Kuzya always told me to do with people who can't understand the important things: I wished him good luck. He was a real imbecile, my friend Mel, and he still is: he hasn't improved over the years, in fact he might even have got a bit worse.

By this time we weren't far from the Railway district, where Mel had to deliver the message to a criminal. Leaving the hospital behind us, we passed the food warehouse complex – a place we knew well, because we often went to steal there at night. It was an old, turn-ofthe-century site comprising several brick buildings with high walls and no windows. The railway ran alongside it, so the trains stopped right there and the wagons were quickly unloaded or loaded.

In order to steal from them you didn't need the agility of a burglar, but simply a bit of diplomacy. We never forced any locks; we had one of our own men inside, an infiltrator, a kind of mole who kept us informed and told us when it was the right moment. After the goods had been loaded, the trains usually stayed where they were for a few hours; the drivers rested and then left later, at dawn. So we would open the wagons at night while they slept and carry off the stuff: it was easier to work on the trains than to break down the doors of the warehouses. We would load everything into a car and drive off.

The trains were bound for the countries of the Soviet bloc – many for Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. They carried sugar, preserves and all kinds of canned food. Sometimes they were already half-full, with clothes, warm coats, workers' overalls, gloves and military uniforms. In some wagons you might also find domestic appliances, drills, electric wiring, hardware, electric fires and fans. When we got a chance like that we would make as many as three or four trips, to carry off as much as possible. We never managed to get everything into the car: but fortunately our man let us leave the goods temporarily in certain hiding places inside the warehouse.

Our mole was in fact the elderly caretaker of the warehouses, a Japanese who, after years of living with the Russians, now went by the name of Borishka.

He was very old, and had come to our town with the Siberians in the second wave of deportation in the late 1940s, after the Russian victory in the Second World War.

He had been made a prisoner-of-war in the Russo-Japanese conflict, at the battle of Khalkhin Gol. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, and only survived by pure chance, because the Russian tanks drove straight over the dead bodies lying on the ground. After the tanks, the cavalry passed by: they found him there, looking bewildered, wandering around like a ghost in the midst of the dead. Out of pity they took him with them, otherwise he would have been killed by the infantry, who were searching for any Japanese left alive to avenge their comrades who had been killed the previous night, when the Japanese forces had attacked the first Russian divisions.

The Cossacks didn't hand him over to the armed forces; for some time they kept him on as a stable hand. He had to clean and care for the horses of the Cossacks of Altay, in southern Siberia. They treated him well and a friendship formed between him and the Cossacks.

Borishka came from Iga, a land of ninjas and assassins. Since boyhood he had been trained to fight both with weapons and bare hands. The Cossacks, too, loved fighting with cold steel and wrestling, so Borishka taught them the techniques of his own country and learned theirs.

Borishka hated the Japanese, and especially the samurai and the emperor; he said they exploited the people, who were forced to submit to many injustices. He said he had enlisted only in desperation, because of an unhappy love affair. The girl he had fallen in love with had been given in marriage to another man, who was rich and powerful.

The Cossacks' ataman, or leader (a big, strong man, a typical southern Siberian), was particularly fond of him. One day, Borishka said, they had called him out of the stables. He had gone out onto the parade ground, where the Cossacks were waiting for him, standing in a circle.

‘Now the Japanese are all dead,' the ataman said, ‘Japan has lost its war and you can go home. But first I want you to do one thing . . .' The ataman motioned to a young Cossack, who brought two swords: one was Borishka's – he had been wearing it on his belt when the Cossacks had saved him – and the other, the
shashka
, was the typical sword of the Siberian Cossacks, much heavier than that used by the Cossacks in other parts of Russia, because the Siberians also used it for chopping wood. A sword of that kind can weigh as much as seven kilos, and the men capable of carrying it could, in battle, split a man in two from head to hip.

The ataman took the two swords and said to him, in front of everyone:

‘We have treated you well and you have nothing to complain of, but now I want to find out whether trying to occupy the USSR has served as a lesson to you. Here are the two swords. If you have understood that making war on us was unjust, break your Japanese sword with our Cossack one, and we will let you stay with us and you will be a Cossack yourself. But if you think your war was a just one, break our sword with yours, and we will let you go free wherever you want, and may God assist you; we will do you no harm.'