Siberian Education (46 page)

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.'

1
. An old Jewish name, Gad was used to mean someone utterly evil; it was supposedly the name of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Here it means a person who does not deserve the slightest consideration or forgiveness.

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.

I was carried away by the enchantment of it. If someone had asked me what heaven was I might well have said it was this moment prolonged for all eternity.

The only thing that stopped me rising towards heaven was the presence of Mel: as soon as I looked at him I was filled with a heavy sense of reality, and I realized that as long as that person – like a penance which I was destined to endure – continued to be at my side, I would never be able to free myself completely from my coarse human frame.

‘Keep your mouth shut, Mel, or I'll crown you with that mallet,' I said, starting to row slowly, so as not to make too much noise.

Mel was in a state of absolute concentration. He sat in the middle of the boat, gripping the mallet with both hands, as if he were afraid it would try to get away.

When we got to the middle of the pool I took out an old underwater torch. I turned it on and gradually lowered it, leaning out over the edge of the boat. The light under the water created a beautiful effect – it shone down to a depth of ten metres, where you could see lots of little details – tiny fish circling round the torch in a kind of lap of honour.

Mel stood over me, ready with the mallet, awaiting my signal.

Usually the arrival of the catfish was marked by a large black shadow rising up from the bottom and advancing towards the light. As soon as you saw the shadow it was essential to move the torch at once: to bring it up slowly, without making a noise, so that the fish would follow it, but without ever quite reaching it. When the lamp reached the surface and came out of the water it was the climactic moment: the person with the mallet had to bring it down with all his strength on the spot where an instant before the lamp had been, and hit the fish. If you hesitated a moment and the fish managed to touch the lamp, it would immediately dive down again, because catfish are very cowardly creatures and are frightened of any contact with objects they don't know. So to catch the fish with this technique it was important to move in perfect harmony.