Boris, having suffered severe brain damage, remained forever a six-year-old.
His mother moved to Transnistria with him. They lived nearby and he was always in our house. My grandfather was very fond of him, and so was I. We flew pigeons together, went down to the river, stole apples from the Moldovans’ orchards, fished with our nets during the summer nights and played by the railway line.
Boris had a fixation: he thought he was an engine driver. In the town, some distance from our area, near the railway, there was an old steam train displayed like a monument, motionless on its sawn-off rails. Boris used to get into it and pretend to be the chief engineer. It was his game. We used to go with him. We would all get into the cabin and he would get angry if we entered with our shoes on, because Boris went barefoot in his train. He even had a broom to sweep up with, and kept the place as clean as if it were his own house.
The train drivers at the station liked him; they had even given him a real train-driver’s hat – it was like those worn by naval officers, white on top, with a green edge and a black plastic peak. It also bore the railway’s golden badge, which shone in the sun so brightly you could see it from a long way off. He was very proud of that present; when he put on his hat he would immediately become serious and start addrressing us like a railway official talking to passengers, saying things like ‘Respectable comrades’, or ‘Citizens, please, I request your attention’. The transformation was hilarious.
My father had once given Boris a T-shirt which he had brought home at the end of a prison sentence he had served in Germany. This T-shirt was emblazoned with two doves: behind one was the German flag, behind the other the Russian one, and it bore the words ‘Peace, friendship, cooperation’, in both languages. Boris had taken it and stood stock still for half an hour, gazing at it. He was astonished by the colours, because there were no coloured clothes in our country in those days, everything was more or less grey, in the Soviet fashion. That garment, however, shone with bright colours, and immediately became Boris’s favourite item of clothing. He always wore that T-shirt – sometimes he would stop abruptly, pull it up with his hands and look at the picture, smiling and whispering to himself.
Boris was a very communicative boy – he wasn’t shy at all and could talk for hours, even with strangers. He was direct; he said whatever came into his head. When he talked he looked you straight in the eye, and his gaze was strong but at the same time relaxed, not tense. He could read; he had been taught by the widow Nina, a woman who lived on her own and whom we boys often went to visit. We used to help her do the heavy jobs in her vegetable garden, and she would give us something good to eat in return. She was a cultured woman. She had been a teacher of Russian language and literature. And so, with the consent of Aunt Tatyana, she had taught Boris to read and write.
Around this time, in 1992, there was a war in Transnistria. After the fall of the USSR, Transnistria stayed outside the Russian Federation and no longer belonged to anybody. The neighbouring countries, Moldova and Ukraine, had designs on it. But the Ukrainians already had difficulties of their own, because of the massive corruption in the government and the ruling administration. The Moldovans, meanwhile, despite the catastrophic situation in their country – the predominantly rural population lived in abject poverty, not so say squalor – made a pact with the Romanians, and tried to occupy Transnistrian territory by military force. According to the agreement with the Romanians, Transnistria would be divided up in a special way: the Moldovan government would control the land, leaving the Romanian industrialists the job of running the numerous munitions factories, which had been built by the Russians in the days of the USSR and afterwards had remained completely under the control of the criminals, who had turned the Transnistrian territory into a kind of weapons supermarket.
Without any warning the Moldovan military swung into action. On 22nd June a division of Moldovan tanks, accompanying ten military brigades, including one of infantry, one of special infantry and two of Romanian soldiers, reached Bender, our town on the right bank of the River Dniester, on the Moldovan border. In response, the inhabitants of Bender formed defence squads – after all, they were not short of weapons. A brief but very bloody war broke out, which lasted one summer, and ended with the criminals of Transnistria driving the Moldovan soldiers out of their land. Then they began to occupy Moldovan territory. At that point Ukraine, fearing that the criminals, if they won the war, would bring turmoil to their territory too, asked the Russians to intervene. Russia, recognizing the inhabitants of Transnistria as its own citizens, arrived with an army to ‘assist the peace process’. This army set up a military regime, reinforced the police stations and declared Transnistria an ‘area of extreme danger’.
Russian soldiers patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and imposed a curfew from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Many people began to disappear without trace; the bodies of the tortured dead were found in the river. This period, which my grandfather called a ‘return to the Thirties’, lasted a long time. My Uncle Sergey was killed in prison by his guards: many people, to save themselves, were forced to abandon their land and take refuge in various other parts of the world.
Boris didn’t know anything about this situation. His brain couldn’t grasp reality, much less a reality made up of brutal violence and politico-military logic. All he wanted to do was drive his train, and he did so even at night, because, like other trains all over the world, his train sometimes had night schedules too…
One evening, as he was walking towards the railway, the soldiers, like cowards, shot him in the back, without even getting out of their armoured car, and left him dead on the road.
When I heard the news I suddenly felt grown-up.
It was a watershed – something inside me died forever. I felt it quite distinctly; it was an almost physical sensation, like when you sense that certain ideas, fantasies or modes of behaviour are things you will never experience again, because of some burden that has fallen on your shoulders.
My grandfather turned pale and shook with rage; he wasn’t as upset even when they killed my uncle, his son. He kept repeating that these people were cursed, that Russia was becoming like hell, because the cops were killing the angels.
My father and other men from our district went to the cops’ area, and at dead of night, when the lights went out in their huts, they poured a torrent of lead into the buildings. It was an expression of blind and total rage, a desperate cry of sorrow. They killed a few cops and wounded many others, but in so doing unfortunately they only proved to the whole of Russia that the presence of the police in our country was truly necessary.
Nobody knew what was really going on in Transnistria; the television news presented things in such a way that after watching their crap even I began to wonder whether everything I knew was unreal.
I remember Boris’s body after they retrieved it from the road and brought it home. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen.
An expression of fear and pain was etched on his face which I had never seen there before. His T-shirt with the doves was riddled with bullet-holes and soaked in blood. He was still clutching his engine-driver’s hat tightly in his hands. The position of the body was shocking: as he died he had curled up like a newborn baby, with his knees tight to his chest. You could tell that during his last moments he must have felt intense pain. His eyes were wide open and cold and they still expressed a desperate question: ‘Why do I feel so much pain?’
We buried him in the cemetery of our district.
Everyone went to his funeral, people from all over Transnistria. From his home to the cemetery a long procession formed, and in accordance with an old Siberian tradition his coffin was passed from hand to hand among the people until it reached the grave. Everyone kissed his cross; many wept and angrily demanded justice. His poor mother watched everything and everyone with crazed eyes.