Afterwards we all lay on the ground, lit up by the firelight. We all kept burping because of all the pop we’d drunk.
Ten metres away from us lay the body of the man we’d fished out in the afternoon. We put a cross and a candle in his hands so that he wouldn’t be angry. Someone also brought him a glass of mineral water and a piece of bread, in accordance with the Siberian tradition of always offering something to the dead.
We decided that next day we’d better ask the people of the other districts to help us, since the river was still full of junk, as well as other corpses. With the warmth the bodies would start to decompose, and then it would be unbearable. We thought we’d be able to clear the river quickly with the help of other kids.
Next day, at around ten, the reinforcements arrived. Many boys from the Centre, and some from Caucasus and Railway: they had all come to help us, and we were pleased.
To avoid any risk of them falling in the water (many of them couldn’t swim – they hadn’t grown up on the riverside like us), we got them to work on the bank. They carried the stuff away in wheelbarrows or bags.
We sold a lot of bottles of pop to people who came in cars to pick it up and then sell it on to shops. We asked a low price, basing it not on the number of bottles we gave them but on the number of trips they managed to make in their cars: fifty roubles per trip, and they could take as much as they could carry. If they were quick they would earn three times as much. It was a good deal for everyone – we cleared the bank quickly, and even made a bit of money out of it, they got for next to nothing goods that they could sell on.
One of the boys who worked with us was Vitalich.
Although he lived in Centre, we were good friends with him.
He often came to bathe with us in the river; he was an excellent swimmer. He competed in rowing races, so he had an athletic physique and plenty of stamina, and when we swam together he never got tired; he could keep going upstream for hours.
Since he was so good, we got him to lead the team of boys who were untying the objects from the boat near the bank. You had to be a good swimmer to do this, because the boat couldn’t get very close to the bank. Once it was untied, the object was carried to the bank by five or six swimmers. This was a tricky operation because it was impossible to see underwater – the river was clogged with earth and leaves and other stuff, so you couldn’t even make out what the thing you were carrying was. One boy had been hurt the previous day – while he was moving a trunk, a branch had impaled his calf, he’d lost a lot of blood in the water, and before he’d even realized what had happened, he had passed out. Luckily the others had noticed immediately and had carried him to the bank straight away, so it had all ended well.
At noon some relatives of the people who had disappeared in the river arrived. Each of them walked round the body of the drowned man, till a woman recognized him:
‘It’s my husband,’ she said.
She was accompanied by the man’s brother and two other men, friends of the family. There was also a ten-year-old girl, a tiny little thing, with the black hair and eyes that so many Moldovans have.
The woman burst into tears, screaming and throwing herself on her husband’s body. She embraced him and kissed him. Her little daughter started crying too, but silently, as if she were embarrassed to do so in front of us.
The drowned man’s brother tried to calm the woman; he took her to the car, but she went on crying and screaming there.
The three men loaded the body onto the back seat of their car. They thanked us and offered us money, but we refused it. One of us filled the boot with bottles, and they looked at us with a question in their eyes.
‘That way you’ll save money on the drinks, at the funeral,’ we said to them.
At this they thanked us profusely. The woman started kissing our hands and to evade all those kisses we went back to work.
Other people, in the meantime, were looking for their own dead. One of them offered us his help and we accepted it: poor devils, they hoped they could help us recover the bodies of their dear ones. But it’s not easy to find a drowned person. Usually the bodies stay underwater for at least three days, and only later, when they begin to putrefy and fill with gas, do they rise to the surface. It had been pure chance that we had found the body of that poor Moldovan; he must have been carried up to the surface by a strong current, and if we hadn’t grabbed him straight away he would certainly have gone under again.
Vitalich, with five other boys, was pulling towards the bank a tree with a lot of branches sticking out of the water – you could tell that underneath it must be enormous.
They had decided to turn it round back to front, with the foliage towards the bank, so as to create more handholds for those who had to grasp it from the land.
While they were turning it, Vitalich got his foot tangled up in the branches. He managed to shout, to let the others know that he’d got caught, but suddenly the tree worked like a propeller: it rolled over with all its weight, pulling Vitalich under.
We couldn’t believe it.
Everyone jumped into the water to get him out, but he was no longer there, either close to the tree or anywhere else, for several metres around.
We immediately blocked off the surrounding area with the net, to stop the current carrying him away. Then we started to search the river bed.
We dived into the dirty water, where you couldn’t see a thing, at the risk of crashing into something. One of us did indeed get hit by a trunk, but luckily not too hard.
Of Vitalich, however, there was no trace.
I remember continually diving into the water: I went right down to the bottom, some five or six metres, and groped with my hands in the void.
Suddenly I found something, a leg! I gripped it tightly, resting it against my body, and bending down I put my feet on the river bed; I gave myself a hard shove, as if I were suddenly releasing a spring, and a second later found myself back on the surface.
Only then did I realize that it was Mel’s leg I had grabbed. His head was sticking out of the water and he was looking at me in bemusement.
I lost my temper and punched him in the head, and he responded in kind.
We didn’t manage to find Vitalich’s body in the first hour of searching.
We were all tired and irritable, many had started quarrelling among themselves, insults flew, and everyone wanted to shake off the blame by putting it on others. At times like these, when everyone is totally disloyal, you begin to see what people are really like, and you feel disgust for what you are and where you are.
I had lost all feeling in my arms and legs and couldn’t swim any more, so I returned to the bank and lay down.
I don’t remember how, but I fell asleep.
When I woke up it was evening. Someone was asking me if I was okay. It was my friend Gigit; he had a bottle of wine in his hand.
The others were sitting round the fire getting drunk.
I felt full of strength again and asked Gigit if Vitalich’s body had been found. He shook his head.
Then I went over to the others and asked them why they were drinking, when our friend’s body was still in the river.
They looked at me indifferently; some were pissed out of their minds, most were tired and depressed.
‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I’m going to cast the nets at the Scythe.’
The Scythe was a place about twenty kilometres downstream. They called it that because at that point the river described a wide curve resembling a scythe. On that bend the water stopped and flooded the bank, so that the current seemed almost stationary.