Everything carried away by the current fetched up there sooner or later. By blocking the passage along the river bed, we could recover Vitalich’s body.
The only problem was that with the flood the river had filled up with all that junk, so the net would have to be changed continually, otherwise it would get too full and there would be a risk of breaking it when you pulled it up.
Mel, Gigit, Besa and Speechless came with me. We went in my two boats, taking my net and Mel’s.
Nets that are used for fishing out drowned people are thrown away afterwards, or kept only to be used on another sad occasion.
I had a dozen different nets for different uses; the best were the river-bed ones, which could support heavy weights and stay in the water for a long time. They had three superimposed layers, for more effective catching, and were very thick.
I took the best river-bed net that I had and we set off.
We cast the net all night, and kept clearing it of rubbish: there were all sorts of things at the bottom of the river, including many carcases of various kinds of animal. But the worst problem was the branches, because when they got stuck in the net it was hard to get them out, and they broke the mesh.
Our hands remained wet until morning; we hardly had time to dry them before they got wet again, because as soon as you finished clearing the net on one side it was already full on the other, so you would rush over there, and as soon as you emptied it you would have to go back to where you’d been before.
Eventually Gagarin arrived with the others to take over from us. We were exhausted – out on our feet. We threw ourselves down on the grass, and fell asleep instantly.
At about four o’clock in the afternoon Gagarin and the others found Vitalich’s body.
It was covered in scratches and cuts; the right foot was broken, and a bit of bone was sticking out. Vitalich was blue, like all drowned people.
We called the people of our district. They took him home to his mother. We went with them, to tell her how it had happened. She was distraught; she wept continuously and embraced us all together, squeezing us so hard that it hurt. I think she understood of her own accord, or perhaps one of the boys of the Centre had told her, how hard we had worked to find her son’s body. She kept thanking us, and I was touched to hear her say: ‘Thank you, thank you for bringing him home.’
I couldn’t look her in the face, I was so ashamed at having slept when I should have been searching for her son’s body.
We were all shocked, shattered. We couldn’t believe that fate had taken a person like Vitalich away from us.
And so, whenever we were anywhere near the Centre, we would always drop in on Aunt Katya, Vitalich’s mother.
She wasn’t married: her first partner, Vitalich’s father, had been on the point of marrying her when he’d been called up into the army and sent off to Afghanistan, where he had been reported missing when she was still pregnant.
Aunt Katya ran that little place I mentioned earlier, a kind of restaurant, and lived with a new partner, a good man, a criminal, who dealt in various kinds of illegal trade.
Whenever we went to see her we always took her some flowers as a present because we knew she was very fond of them.
One day she had told us that what she would like more than anything else in the world was to have a lemon tree. We had decided to get her one; the only problem was that we didn’t know where to get one from, in fact none of us had ever seen a lemon tree.
So someone had advised us to try in a botanic garden, because it would have plants that grew in warm countries. After a bit of time and exploration we identified the nearest botanic garden: it was in Belgorod, in Ukraine, on the Black Sea, three hours’ journey from our home.
We set off in a highly organized group. There were about fifteen of us: everybody wanted to take part in the lemon expedition, because everybody liked Aunt Katya and tried to help her and please her in every way possible.
When we got to Belgorod we bought just one ticket for the botanic garden: one of us entered, went to the toilet and passed the ticket out of the window to another member of the group, and so on, till we were all inside.
We tagged on behind a visiting school party and approached our objective. It was a fairly small tree, a little higher than a bush, with green leaves and three yellow lemons dangling in the wind.
Mel immediately said the lemons were fake and had been stuck on with glue for appearance’s sake, and that the tree was just an ordinary bush. We had to stop and quickly examine the tree, to see if those damned lemons were real or not. I smelled all three of them myself: they had a characteristic scent of lemon.
Mel got a cuff round the ear from Gagarin and was forbidden to speak until the end of the operation.
We grabbed the pot and went up to the second floor of a building on the edge of the garden. We opened a window and carefully tossed the little tree on to the roof of a lockup garage. We jumped down from there ourselves and ran to the station, clutching that heavy pot with the tree inside it. In the train we realized that despite all the knocks and shakes the lemons hadn’t come off: we were so pleased not to have lost them…
When we brought Aunt Katya our present she wept with joy, or perhaps she was weeping because she’d seen the stamp of the botanic garden on the pot which we had carelessly failed to remove. At any rate, she was so delighted that when she picked her first ripe lemon she invited us all round for a cup of lemon tea.
So on that day too – my thirteenth birthday – as Mel and I were walking across town on our way to the Railway district, we thought of taking her a plant, and called in at old Bosya’s shop.
We always bought our plants and flowers for Aunt Katya in his shop; since we had no idea what they were called, we always asked him to write down their names on a piece of paper, so that we wouldn’t buy the same thing twice.
Every five plants, Bosya allowed us a small discount, or gave us some packets of old seeds, which were no longer any use because they were all dry. We took the seeds anyway and made a detour via the police station. If we found the police cars parked outside the gate we’d pour the seeds into their petrol tanks: the seeds were light and didn’t sink to the bottom straight away, and they were so small that they could pass through the filter of the petrol pump, so when they reached the carburettor the engine would stall. So we made good use of what in other circumstances would have been thrown away.
Grandfather Bosya was a good Jew, respected by all the criminals, although apart from having a flower shop (which didn’t sell much), nobody knew exactly what he did, so secret did he keep his affairs. It was rumoured that he had links with the Jewish community of Amsterdam and smuggled diamonds. However, we never had any actual proof of this, and we always used to tease him when we went to his shop, trying to find out what he really did. It had become a tradition: we tried to get him to talk and every time he succeeded in avoiding the issue.
We would say:
‘Well, Mr Bosya, what’s the weather like in Amsterdam?’
And he would reply in an off-hand manner:
‘How would I know that, a poor Jew like me who doesn’t even possess a radio? Though even if I did have one I wouldn’t listen to it: I’m so old now that I can’t hear a thing – I’m going deaf… Oh, how I wish I could go back to the days when I was young like you, and just play around and have a good time… By the way, what have you boys been up to lately?’
And it always ended with us, like a bunch of idiots, telling him about our own doings instead of hearing about his, and leaving his shop with a vague sensation of having been tricked.
He had a real talent as a conman, and we fell for it every time.