The malyava, on the other hand, was the typical letter that we almost always carried, backwards and forwards. Usually it was sent from jail to communicate with the criminal world outside, avoiding the checks of the prison system. It was a small, concise letter, always written in the criminal language. On a particular day, every second Tuesday in the month, we would go and stand outside Tiraspol prison. That was the day when the prisoners ‘launched the flares’: that is, using the elastic from their underpants, they catapulted their letters over the prison wall, for us to pick up. Each letter had a coded address – a word or a number.
These letters were written by almost all prisoners and used the ‘road’ of the prison, that system of communication from cell to cell which I have already mentioned. During the night prisoners ‘sent the horses’ – various parcels, messages, letters and suchlike – along strings that ran from one window to another. All the letters were then collected by a team of inmates in the blocks nearest to the wall, where the windows didn’t have thick metal sheets over them but only the standard iron bars. From there, people called ‘missilists’ fired the letters one after another over the wall. They were paid to do this by the criminal community and had no other task in prison; they practised their skills every day by firing scraps of cloth over the wall.
To launch a malyava you first made a ‘missile’, a small tube of paper with a long, soft tail, usually made of paper handkerchiefs (which are very difficult to get hold of in prison). This tube was folded over on one side, forming a kind of hook which was fixed to one end of the elastic; then you gripped it between your fingers and pulled. Meanwhile another person lit the soft paper tail, and when it caught fire the little tube was fired off.
The burning tail enabled us to locate the letter when it fell on the ground. You had to run as fast as possible, to put out the fire and not let the little tube with the precious letter inside it get burnt. There were nearly always at least ten of us, and in half an hour we would manage to collect more than a hundred letters. Returning home, we would distribute them to the families and friends of the prisoners. We were paid for this work.
Each criminal community had its own special day on which to fire the letters, once a month. In some cases, if there was a very urgent letter, it was customary for criminals to help each other, even if they belonged to different communities. So sometimes the letters of members of other communities ended up with the letters of our own criminals, but we would still take them to the addressee. Or rather, the rule was that the person who delivered it must be the one who had picked it up off the ground, which served to prevent quarrels among us.
In cases like these we were not paid, but they usually gave us something. We would take the letters to the house of the Guardian of the area, and one of his helpers would take them and put them in a safe: later people would go to see him and say a word or a number in code, and he, if he found a letter marked with the same code, would hand it over to the addressee. This service was not paid for but was one of the Guardian’s responsibilities; if there was any trouble with the post, if a letter disappeared or none of us went to collect it under the prison, the Guardian could be severely punished, even killed.
The rospiska, or ‘signature’, was a type of letter that circulated both inside prison and outside it. It might be a kind of safe conduct provided by an Authority, who guaranteed a peaceful stay and a brotherly welcome for a criminal in places where he didn’t know anybody, for example in prisons far from his region or in towns where he went on business trips. As I have already mentioned, the signature was tattooed directly on the skin.
In other cases the rospiska was used to spread important information, for example about a forthcoming meeting of criminal Authorities, or to send openly and without any risk an order addressed to several people. Thanks to the coded language, even if the signature fell into the hands of the police it didn’t matter.
I delivered letters of this kind a couple of times: they were normal, and always open. The Authorities never seal their letters, not only because they’re in code, but particularly because the content must never throw any shadow over them; usually it has a demonstrative purpose, to exhibit the powers of the laws and spread a kind of criminal charisma.
Once I delivered a signature with an order originating from the prisons of Siberia and addressed to the prisons of Ukraine. It instructed Ukrainian criminals to respect certain rules in prison; for example homosexual acts were forbidden, as was the punishment of individual prisoners by physical humiliation or sexual abuse. At the end of this letter were the signatures of thirty-six Siberian Authorities. The signature which came into my hands was one of the many copies of the document, which was intended to be reproduced and disseminated among all the criminals in prison or at liberty throughout the USSR.
Another form of communication, called the ‘throw’, came about through the delivery of certain objects. In this case, an object which had a particular meaning in the criminal community was given to any messenger, even a child. The messenger’s task was to take it to the addressee, saying who had sent it; there was no need to wait for an answer.
A broken knife meant the death of some member of the gang, or someone close to you, and was a very bad sign. An apple cut in half was an invitation to divide up the loot. A piece of dry bread inside a cloth handkerchief was a precise warning: ‘Watch out, the police are nearby, there’s been an important development in that case in which you’re involved.’ A knife wrapped in a handkerchief was a call to action, for a hired killing. A piece of rope with a knot tied in the middle meant: ‘I’m not responsible for what you know.’ A bit of earth in a handkerchief meant: ‘I promise I’ll keep the secret.’
There were simpler meanings and more complex ones, ‘good’ ones – intended, for example, for protection – and ‘bad’ ones – insults or threats of death.
If it was suspected that a person had relations which compromised his criminal dignity – relations with the police, say, or with other criminal communities (without the permission of his own) – he would receive a little cross with a nail, or in extreme cases a dead rat, sometimes with a coin or a banknote in its mouth, an unequivocal promise of the harshest possible punishment. This was the ‘bad throw’, the worst one, and it meant certain death.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to invite a friend to party, to have fun, to drink and enjoy yourselves, you would send him an empty glass. That was a ‘good throw’.
I often carried messages of this kind, never any bad ones. They were mostly administrative communications, invitations or promises.
Another of our duties was to organize ourselves in a decent manner so as to carry forward the glorious name of our district: in simple words, we had to be able to sow chaos among the boys of the other districts.
This had to be done in the right way, because our tradition requires that violence must always have a reason, even though the final result is the same, since a broken head is still a broken head.
We worked with the elders – old criminals who had retired and who lived thanks to the support of the younger ones. Like eccentric pensioners, they took care of us youngsters and our criminal identity.