Siberian Education (40 page)

The beautiful Zilya ran away from home that very same night. Under Siberian law she could not take any possession from her father's house except herself, so Svyatoslav had even brought her clothes for her elopement.

Next day the rabbi sent some Jewish criminals to negotiate with the Siberians. Lynx's Paw explained to these men that according to our law any person who reaches the age of eighteen is free to do what they want, and it is a great sin to oppose this, especially when it is a question of forming a new family and of love, which are two God-willed things. The Jews showed their arrogance and threatened Lynx's Paw with death. At that point he lost his temper and killed three of them instantly with a wooden chair; the fourth one he struck on the arm, breaking it, and sent him to Rabbi Moisha with these words:

‘He who names death doesn't know that it is closest to him.'

At this all hell was let loose. Moisha, finding himself up against Siberians, about whom he knew nothing except that they were murderers and robbers who always stuck together, couldn't challenge them on their own territory, so he asked the Jews of Odessa to help him.

The leaders of the Jewish community of Odessa, who were very rich and powerful, organized a meeting to discover where the truth lay, and how justice could be done. Everyone attended, including Svyatoslav, Zilya and Moisha.

After listening to both sides, the Jews tried to blame Svyatoslav, accusing him of kidnapping Moisha's daughter, but the Siberians replied that according to Siberian law she had not been kidnapped, because she had left of her own free will, and this was proved by the fact that she had left in her father's house everything that linked her with that place.

Moisha retorted that there was one thing she had taken away: a coloured ribbon with which she bound up her hair. It was true – Zilya had forgotten to take it off, and Moisha's wife had noticed it.

Such a tiny detail was enough to turn the situation against the Siberians. According to our rules, now the girl would have to be returned to her father. But there was one objection.

Zilya, the Siberians said, had already married Svyatoslav, and in order to do so she had converted to the Orthodox faith and had been baptized with the Siberian Cross: therefore, according to our laws, the powers of the parents could no longer extend over her, since they were of a faith different from hers. However, if Moisha, too, converted to the Orthodox faith, his word would carry a different weight . . .

In a fury, Moisha tried to stab Svyatoslav with a knife, and wounded him.

And thereby he made a serious mistake: he violated the peace in a criminal meeting, a crime that must be punished by immediate hanging.

To take his own life, Moisha decided to use that ribbon of cloth that his daughter wore in her hair. He died cursing Zilya and her husband, wishing every evil on their children, on their children's children and on all those who loved them.

Soon afterwards Zilya fell ill. Her condition deteriorated, and no medicine could cure her. So Svyatoslav took her to Siberia, to see an old shaman of the tribe of the Nency, a people of Siberian aborigines who had always had very close ties with the Siberian criminals, the Urkas.

The shaman said the girl was suffering because an evil spirit always kept her in the chill of death, removing the warmth of life from her. To stop the spirit it was necessary to burn the place that still tied him to this world. So returning to Transnistria, Svyatoslav, with the help of other Siberians, set fire to Rabbi Moisha's house, and later to the synagogue too.

Zilya recovered, and the two of them continued to live in our district for a long time. They had six sons: two of them murdered policemen and died young in prison; one went to live in Odessa, and in time set up a flourishing trade in clothes with fake brand-names (he was the most successful of all the brothers); and the other three lived in our district and carried out robberies; the youngest of them, Zhora, belonged to the gang led by my father.

In their old age Svyatoslav and Zilya went to end their lives in the Tayga, as they had always wanted to do.

After the synagogue was burned down by the Siberians many Jews left the area. The last of them were deported by the Nazis during the Second World War, and all that remains of that community now is the old cemetery.

Abandoned for years, it became a desolate place, where rubbish was dumped and kids went to fight. The graves were looted by some members of the Moldovan community, who committed this outrage against the dead simply to get stone ornaments that they could use as decorations for the gates outside their houses: this custom was the origin of a very offensive proverb: ‘A Moldovan's soul is as beautiful as his garden gate.'

In the 1970s the Ukrainians started building houses in the old Jewish quarter. A lot of promiscuous girls lived there, and we often had parties with them. All you had to do to pull a Balka girl was buy her a drink, because not having a strict upbringing like the girls of Low River they saw sex as just fun; but as often happens in these cases, their over-lax behaviour became a kind of malaise, and many of them remained trapped in their own sexual freedom. They usually started having sex at the age of fourteen, or even earlier. By the time they were eighteen each one of them was already known to the whole town; it was convenient for the men to have women who were always ready to sleep with them without asking for anything in exchange. It was a game, which lasted until the man got fed up with one and moved on to another.

When they grew to adulthood, many Balka girls became aware of their situation and felt a great emptiness; they too wanted to have a family, find a husband and be like other women, but that was no longer possible: the community had permanently branded them, and no worthy man would ever be able to marry them.

Those poor souls, realizing they could no longer enjoy the positive emotions that are given by a simple life, committed suicide in appalling numbers. This phenomenon of girls killing themselves was rather shocking for our town, and many men, when they realized the origin of their despair, refused to have sex with them, so as not to participate in the destruction of their lives.

I knew an old criminal from Centre called Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Kangaroo', because in his youth he had been wounded in the legs in a gunfight and ever since then had had a strange, hopping kind of walk. He was the owner of a number of nightclubs in various towns in Russia, and had always had a weakness for the girls of Balka. After the first cases of suicide Kangaroo was the first to guess the true extent of the problem, and vowed in front of a lot of people that he would no longer seek their company, and suggested the matter be discussed openly with the girls' families. But the Ukrainians had a strange sense of dignity: they let their daughters put themselves in compromising situations, but then pretended they didn't know anything about it and were furious if anyone spoke the truth. Consequently many of them were hostile to Kangaroo's initiative, saying it was a plot to bring dishonour into their district. Later there were very unpleasant developments: some fathers actually killed their daughters with their own hands just to show others they didn't accept any kind of interference.

The situation deteriorated partly because of the incredible consumption of alcohol by the people of that district. The Ukrainians drank a lot, a habit they shared with the rest of the Soviet population, certainly, but they did so in a particularly unrestrained manner, without the filter of tradition and without a trace of morality. In Siberia alcohol is drunk in obedience to certain reasonable rules, so as not to cause irreparable damage to one's health: accordingly, Siberian vodka is made exclusively of wheat, and is purified with milk, which removes the residue of the manufacturing process, so that the final product has a perfect purity. Moreover, vodka must only be drunk with food (in Siberia people eat a lot, and dishes are very rich, because you burn off a large amount of fat in resisting the cold and preserving vitamins in winter): if you eat the right dishes, it is possible to drink as much as a litre of vodka per person without any problem. In Ukraine, however, they drink vodka of various kinds: they extract the alcohol from potatoes or pumpkins, and the sugary substances make you drunk at once. The Siberians never get too drunk, don't pass out and don't vomit, but the Ukrainians drink themselves unconscious, and it can take them as long as two days to work off the hangover.

So life in Balka, formerly the Jewish and later the Ukrainian quarter, was like one long party, but a party with a sad atmosphere, with a nostalgia for something simple and human which those people could no longer have.

My grandfather always used to say that this happens when men are forgotten by God: they remain alive, but are no longer really alive. My own opinion was that it was an extreme form of social degradation affecting the whole community, perhaps because the young people who had come to live in our town had broken violently away from their parents and had been left to themselves, and without any form of control they had burned themselves up, indulging in all kinds of vice. And, in turn, without the support of their old folk they brought up their own children badly.

The Ukrainians' sons were notorious as mothers' boys, and as people incapable of doing anything useful either for themselves or for others. In Bender nobody trusted them because they were always telling lies to make themselves seem important, but they did it so clumsily that no one could possibly have believed them: we just treated them as poor idiots. Some of them even tried to make money by inventing non-existent laws: for example, that a brother could force his sister to prostitute herself. The exploitation of prostitution had always been considered an offence unworthy of a criminal: men convicted of that kind of crime were liable to be killed in jail; it could happen outside as well, to tell the truth, but it was rare for them to get out of prison alive. The Ukrainians simply didn't understand this; they would wander around the districts of the town, trying in vain to get into the bars and nightclubs. All doors were always closed to them, since the money they wanted to spend had been earned in an unworthy manner. They went on without stopping to wonder why, creating an increasingly deep rift between their community and the rest of the town.

There was only one road through the district of Balka, and by the side of it there was a kiosk run by an old Ukrainian criminal by the name of Stepan, who sold cigarettes, drinks, and now and then drugs, usually the kind you smoke. He would also sell you weapons and ammunitions from the Ukrainian military bases, which he obtained with the help of his elder brother, a career soldier.

Stepan was partially paralysed, because he had once drunk some alcohol intended for scientific use. When he told the story of that terrible day he always made a joke of it: as soon as he realized that the left side of his body was on the point of losing all feeling, he said, in the nick of time he'd flipped his ‘honourable member' over to the right-hand side and thereby saved it.

I often stopped to chat with him, because I loved to see his spirit and his good humour even in his pretty desperate situation. He would sit all day in his wheelchair under a big umbrella, talking to the people who passed by. He had a daughter, perhaps the only respectable girl in the whole district, who looked after him and was studying to be an architect. His wife had left him shortly before he was paralysed; she had run off with her lover, a young male nurse. I respected Stepan for the simple fact that he had succeeded in bringing up his daughter while remaining exactly what he was, a simple, uneducated person, but to judge from the results also a good one, capable of transmitting his natural affability to others.

His kiosk was always open. By day he ran it himself, sometimes with his daughter's help, and at night it was run by his trusty assistant, a boy by the name of Kiril, whom everybody called ‘Nixon' because he was obsessed with American presidents. A lot of people said he was retarded, but I think he just liked to take things slowly. Stepan used to pay him in food and cigarettes. Nixon smoked, and did so in a very theatrical manner: he seemed like an actor. He also had a dog, a small, ugly and very nasty mongrel, who with the most humble and amiable of expressions on its face would bite your ankles when you were least expecting it. Nixon used to call him ‘my secretary', or sometimes
dorogoy gospodin
, ‘my dear sir'. The dog had no other name.

If you got into conversation with Nixon he would start criticizing the communists, saying they wanted to destroy his country and calling them ‘dirty terrorists'. He said he didn't trust anyone except his ‘secretary', who would then demonstrate his devotion by knocking his disgustingly mangy little tail against his master's leg.

‘The Arabs have pissed me off,' he said, ‘and Fidel Castro should be killed, but that's impossible. And do you know why? Because he's hiding in Siberia, where he's protected by the communists. They've replaced him in Cuba with a double who doesn't even look like him: his beard is obviously false, and he smokes cigars without inhaling.'

That was the way Nixon was. ‘And do you know what the American flag represents?' he would ask. ‘I'll tell you: a dead communist. The stars are his brain, which was blown to smithereens when he was shot in the head, and the red and white stripes are his blood-spattered skin.'

He hated blacks – he said their presence had stopped the progress of democracy – and he got Martin Luther King mixed up with Michael Jackson, saying ‘he was a good nigger, he liked dancing and singing', but that some other niggers had killed him just because one day he had decided to become a white.

When we approached the kiosk we found Nixon sitting on his presidential chair as usual, playing Tetris. I was the first to get out of the car, and when he saw me he ran over to to greet me, as he always did with people he liked. I gave him a hug and asked him to wake Stepan because it was urgent. He immediately rushed off to his house, which was only a few dozen metres away.