Shura was a strong man and as such he was sought after by several criminal groups – in prison the Authorities of the castes or families always try to make alliances with people who are strong and intelligent, so that they can dominate the others. But he kept to himself, didn’t take anyone’s side and lived his sad life like a hermit. Now and then some member of the Siberian family would invite him to drink tea or chifir, and he would come willingly because, he said, we were the only ones who didn’t invite him to play cards in order to cheat him and then use him as a hitman. He spoke very little; usually he listened to the others reading their letters from home and sometimes, when somebody sang, he would sing too.
After the story of Fog’s tattoo and my sudden fame, he took to spending more time with the Siberians; nearly every evening he would come to our bunks and ask if he could stay with us for a while. Once he arrived with a photograph which he showed to everyone. It was an old picture of an elderly man with a long beard, holding a rifle. He wore the typical Siberian hunting belt, hanging from which was the knife and the bag containing the lucky charms and the magic talismans. On the back of the photo was a note:
‘Brother Fyodot, lost in Siberia, a good and generous soul, an eternal dreamer and a great believer’, and a date: ‘1922’.
‘That’s my grandfather; he was Siberian… May I be part of the Siberian family, since my grandfather was one of you?’ He seemed very serious, and his question was entirely devoid of vanity or any other negative feeling. It was a genuine request for help. Shura, it seemed, must be tired of living on his own.
We told him we would examine the photograph and ask some questions at home, to see if any of the old folk remembered him.
We didn’t send the photo anywhere and we didn’t ask anyone; during those years in Siberia lives were swallowed up in a great maelstrom of human history. We decided to wait a while and then take the giant Shura into our family – after all, he was quiet, he had already served two years without creating any problems, and we didn’t see any reason for preventing a human being from enjoying some company and brotherhood, if he deserved it.
A week later we told him he could enter the family, provided that he promised to respect our rules and laws, and we gave him back the photo, saying that unfortunately no one had recognized his grandfather. He thought about this for a while and then confessed, in a trembling voice, that the photo wasn’t really his – he had got it from his sister who worked in some historical archive in a university. He apologized to us for deceiving us; he said he really liked us as people, and that that was why he was so keen on entering our family. I felt sorry for him. I understood that as well as being simple, he had a kindly soul, and there was nothing bad in him. In prison people like him usually died after a few months; the luckiest ones were used as puppets by one of the more experienced criminals.
We took pity on him.
‘Shura has become one of us,’ we announced that same evening, and everyone in the cell was very surprised.
We allowed him to live with us, in the family, even though he wasn’t a true Siberian, forgiving him because he had confessed his error.
He soon learned our rules; I explained everything to him as you might to a child, and he discovered them as children do, not concealing his astonishment.
When the time came for me to be released, he bade me an affectionate farewell and said that if it hadn’t been for the story of the tattoo he would never have decided to join the Siberians, and would never have discovered our rules, which he considered just and honest.
‘Perhaps my humble trade has saved his life,’ I thought. ‘Without the family in prison he would have died in some brawl.’
To me tattooing was a very serious matter. To many of my young friends it was a game – they only had to see a few scrawls on their skin and they were satisfied. Others took it a little more seriously, but not very.
Conversations on the subject would go something like this:
‘My father’s got a big owl with a skull in its claws…’
‘An owl means a robber, I assure you…’
‘And what does a skull mean?’
‘It depends.’
‘I know. An owl with a skull means a robber and a murderer, I swear it does!’
‘Don’t talk rubbish! A robber and a murderer is a tiger’s face with oak leaves – my uncle’s got one!’
In short, everyone fired out theories at random.
For me, however, it was a very different affair, a complicated business. I liked subjects which left a trace of the hand that had made them. So I asked my father, my uncles and their friends to tell me about the tattooists they had known. I would study their tattoos, trying to understand what techniques they had used to create different effects. Then I would talk about them with my master, Grandfather Lyosha, who helped me to understand the techniques of others better and taught me to adapt them to my own way of seeing the subjects, drawing them and tattooing them on the skin.
He was pleased, because he saw that I was interested in the subjects not just because of their links with the criminal tradition, but because of their artistic qualities.
Even during the preparatory phase of the drawings, I began to wonder, and to ask him, why each tattoo couldn’t be understood exclusively as a work of art, irrespective of its size. My master used to reply that true art was a form of protest, so every work of art must create contradictions and provoke debate. According to his philosophy, the criminal tattoo was the purest form of art in the world. People, he would say, hate criminals, but love their tattoos.
I suggested it might be possible to establish a connection between high-quality art and the profound meaning – the philosophy – of the Siberian tradition. He would reply to me, with great confidence in his voice:
‘If we ever reach the point where everybody wants to be tattooed with the symbols of our tradition, you’ll be right… But I don’t think that will happen, because people hate us and everything connected with our way of life.’
BORIS THE ENGINE DRIVER
In the mid-1950s the Soviet government declared it illegal to keep mentally ill people at home, thus forcing their relatives to send them to special institutions. This sad state of affairs compelled many parents who didn’t want to be separated from their children to move to places which the long arm of the law could not reach. So in the space of ten years Transnistria was filled with families who had come from all over the USSR because they knew that in the Siberian criminal tradition both mentally and physically handicapped people were considered sacred messengers of God and described as ‘God-willed’.
I grew up among these people, the God-willed, and many of them became my friends. To me they didn’t seem normal, they were normal, like everyone else.
They are not capable of hatred – all they can do is love and be themselves. And if ever they are violent, their violence is never driven by the force of hatred.
Boris was born a normal child in Siberia and lived in our district with his mother, Aunt Tatyana. One night the cops arrived at his parents’ house – his father was a criminal, and had robbed an armoured train, getting away with a lot of diamonds. The cops wanted to know where he had hidden the diamonds and who else had been involved in the train robbery. The man refused to talk, so the cops took little Boris, who was six years old, and clubbed him on the head with a rifle butt to make his father talk. His father didn’t talk, and eventually they shot him.