The flowers in old Bosya’s shop weren’t all that special; I reckon some of them had been there for years. The shop was a long, narrow cubby-hole, with wooden shelves crammed with old plants that no one ever bought. When you entered you felt as if you’d landed in the middle of a jungle; a lot of the plants had grown so much their leaves intertwined with those of the ones next to them, and all the plants together formed a kind of huge bush.
Bosya was a twisted, thin old man; he wore glasses as thick as the armour of a tank and through the lenses his eyes seemed monstrously large. He always wore a black jacket, a white shirt with a black bow-tie, black trousers with impeccably ironed creases and shiny black shoes.
Despite his age (he was so old even my grandfather called him ‘uncle’), his hair was quite black, and he kept it very neat, cut in the style of the 1930s, under a thin layer of brilliantine.
He always used to say that the true weapon of every gentleman is his elegance: with that you could do anything – rob, kill, burgle and lie – without ever being suspected.
When the little bell on the door of the shop rang, Bosya would get up from his chair behind the counter, creaking like an old car changing gear, and advance towards the customer with his hands wide apart, like Jesus does in those sacred paintings, to indicate acceptance and compassion. He looked funny when he walked, because he had a comical face – smiling, but with sad eyes, like those of a dog with no master. And with every step he uttered a sound, one of those groans that old men full of aches and pains utter when they move.
All in all he filled me with sadness: a mixture of melancholy, nostalgia and pity.
When we entered his shop old Bosya would emerge from his jungle and, not seeing who had come in, set off as usual with a saintly aspect, but as soon as his eyes fell on our disreputable faces, his expression would instantly change. First the smile would disappear, to be replaced by a weary grimace, as if he were having difficulty in breathing, then his whole body would become twisted, his legs a little bent, and he would start waving his hands as if to refuse something that we’d offered him. He would turn his back on us and return to the counter, saying in a quavering voice and with a slight hint of irony, in a Russian accent contaminated by the Jewish dialect of Odessa:
‘Shob ya tak zhil, opyat prishli morochit yayza…’
Which meant, ‘What a life I have to live!’ – a Jewish expression, which they stick in everywhere – ‘You’ve come to pester me again…’
That was his way of welcoming us because, in reality, he was very fond of all of us.
He too enjoyed not letting us trick him. We always tried, but Bosya, with his wisdom and his Jewish cunning, which in his case had something humble and worldly-wise about it, would get us to fall into his trap, and sometimes we would only realize it later, after we’d left the shop. He was a genius at mind games, a real genius.
Since he always complained that he was blind and deaf, we used to provoke him by asking him what the time was, hoping he’d look at the watch he wore on his wrist. But without batting an eyelid he would reply:
‘How can I know what time it is if I’m a happy person? Happy people don’t count time, because in their lives every moment passes with pleasure.’
Then we would ask him why he wore a watch, if he never looked at it, and if he didn’t care about the passing of time.
He would put on an astonished expression and look at his watch as if he were seeing it for the first time, and then reply in a humble tone:
‘…Oh, this isn’t a watch… It’s older than I am; I don’t even know if it works…’
He would put it to his ear, hold it there for a moment and then add:
‘…Well, I can hear something, but I don’t know if it’s the ticking of the hands or that of my old heart running down…’
Bosya’s wife was a nice old Jewish lady called Elina. She was a very intelligent woman who had worked as a schoolmistress for many years and had taught my father and his brothers. They all spoke of her affectionately, and even many years later they still respected her authority. The first time my father killed a policeman – in fact he killed two – she boxed his ears, and he knelt down at her feet to ask her forgiveness.
Bosya had a daughter, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Her name was Faya, and she too was a schoolmistress. She taught foreign languages, English and French. But she had grown up with the idea that she was ill, because Bosya and Elina had forbidden her to do all the things that normal children did. She was unmarried and still lived with her parents; she was a calm and very cheerful person. She had a gorgeous figure: hips and curves that seemed to have been drawn with a pencil, so perfect were they, a fabulous mouth, small and with the lips slightly parted and well defined, big black eyes, and wavy hair, which hung down to her bottom. But the most spectacular thing was the way she moved. She seemed like a cat; she made every gesture with a grace all of her own.
I was obsessed by her, and whenever I saw her in the shop I tried to find some pretext for standing near her. I would go and talk to her about the plants or anything else, just to feel her close to my skin.
She would smile at me; she was happy to talk to me and she understood that I liked her. Only later, at sixteen, did I pluck up the courage to get really close to her, by talking about literature. We started seeing each other, and exchanging books, and before long we developed a relationship which polite people usually call ‘intimate’, but which in my district was described with a different phrase altogether: ‘dirtying the sheets together’.
But that’s another story, which deserves to be told separately, and not here.
The story that should be told here is that of old Bosya’s life.
In his youth old Bosya was a bander – the term used at the beginning of the century for a member of Jewish organized crime. The word is derived from banda, which in Russian means ‘gang’.
In the 1920s and 1930s, in Odessa, the Jewish gangs were among the strongest and the best organized: they ran all the smuggling operations and the affairs of the harbour. Their members were united by strong religious feelings and by a code of honour, a kind of internal set of regulations called the koska, a term which in the old Jewish dialect of Odessa means ‘word’, ‘law’ or ‘rule’. In short, contravening the koska was a good way of committing suicide.
In the mid-1930s the Soviet government began systematically combating crime all over the territory, and they dispatched to Odessa – which was deemed to be one of the towns worst affected by rackets and organized crime – special squads which devised a battle tactic called podstava, which means ‘done on purpose’. Through infiltrators they provoked internal conflicts within the gangs themselves.
Donnie Brasco, the famous movie gangster played by Johnny Depp, certainly couldn’t have imagined that his Soviet precursors had exploited the work of undercover agents not in order to obtain information but to create by artificial means situations where criminals went to war against each other and killed each other on an industrial scale. No, Donnie Brasco would never have dreamed of it.
In this way many of the gangs and criminal communities in Odessa were eliminated. Only the Jewish community managed to survive, because there were no Jews in the police force and no one else knew the Jewish culture, language and traditions well enough to be able to pass for one of them.
Later, when the power of the police grew in Odessa and began to threaten the Jews as well, they pooled their forces to form two big gangs, each with thousands of members.
One, the more famous, was led by the legendary criminal Benya Krik, alias ‘the King’, and specialized mainly in robberies and burglaries. The other was headed by an old criminal called Buba Bazich, alias ‘the Squint’, and dealt only in illegal financial dealing.