I invented the method of setting fire to the cars in the yard of the police station using a catapult. The yard was surrounded by a very high wall, and in order to fire something into it you had to venture too close and they would, inevitably, catch you as soon as they saw you arrive. Molotov cocktails were too heavy to throw, and whenever we tried they didn’t even reach halfway up the wall before smashing. We would always end up exchanging disconsolate looks, thinking that all the effort we’d made to prepare those bottles was burnt up in an instant against that grey wall. We had begun to lose heart, until one day I came across some liquor belonging to my uncle in the cupboard. What I found was a lot of small bottles containing various kinds of spirit – those little bottles for alcoholic dwarves. I emptied some of them; after all my uncle was in jail, and in any case he wouldn’t have scolded me, because I was making good use of them. I made a mini-molotov, then I constructed a special catapult, slightly stronger than usual, and after carrying out some preliminary tests, which it passed with flying colours, I prepared a box full of mini-molotovs (which we called ‘mignons’) and ten catapults for firing them.
We broke into an old abandoned printing works near the police station and from there we had a perfect view of our targets. We positioned ourselves carefully, and like a battery of howitzers we fired the first shot. Ten of us did the shooting; one boy would pull back the catapult with the little bottle in it and another boy standing behind him would light his bottle and that of the next shooter, using two cigarette lighters which he held at the ready. All our actions were perfectly synchronized. Our little bottles flew spectacularly, whistling like bullets as they disappeared over the wall of the police station. When I heard the small explosions followed by the cries of the cops and the first signs of black smoke, which rose in the air like fantastic dragons, I felt like bursting into tears, I was so happy.
Our position was ideaclass="underline" before our victims realized what had happened, we had already fired off our whole arsenal and ridden calmly homeward on our bikes.
It was the talk of the town: ‘There’s been an attack on the police station,’ said one. ‘Who was it?’ asked another. ‘A gang of strangers, apparently,’ replied a third – and we felt very important; every time I heard someone talking about that episode I wanted to shout in his face, ‘It was us, us!’
I was proud, no doubt about it. I thought I was a genius and for some time after I behaved towards my friends like a general towards his army.
After that, we set fire to the police station car park a few more times, but then the police covered it with wire netting, so our molotovs couldn’t get through. Many bounced on the netting and then hit the ground, plof!, on the outer side of the wall, but without exploding. It wasn’t very interesting any more.
For a while we tried to think up something new, but then suddenly we grew up and someone suggested simply shooting the policemen with guns. That was interesting, too, but it wasn’t like burning them with mini-molotovs. There was something medieval about those ‘mignons’ which made us feel like knights fighting valiantly against dragons.
And so, as we walked towards Aunt Katya’s restaurant with our beautiful plant, we crossed the Bridge of the Dead. At that time this was a stretch of asphalted road with some old stones sticking out of it, but once it had been a real bridge. When the bridge was destroyed, it had first been covered with earth and then asphalted over, but for some inexplicable reason the stones kept breaking back up to the surface, making holes in the asphalt. It was weird to see those large old black, shapeless patches sticking out of the cracked asphalt. An old man of our area had told me the mystery could easily be explained as an ‘engineering error’. But when I was a child I preferred another story which explained that strange movement of the stones of the Bridge of the Dead as a supernatural phenomenon.
The story ran that during the nineteenth century the workers in our town, tired of being exploited by a rich and noble lord who had a reputation comparable to that of Count Dracula, had revolted. The pretext for their revolt had been the fact that the master had raped a young peasant girl. The girl had not, like many others before her, suffered in silence, but had told everyone the truth, even at the risk of being despised and of losing her dignity. The peasants and the workers, however, had not despised her but had supported her and risen up immediately. They had killed the guards and entered the master’s palace, then dragged him out of bed and taken him into the street, where they had kicked and beaten him to death. Afterwards, they had tied his body to the palace gate and prevented his family from removing it. ‘It must rot up there,’ they had said.
The next day, the revolt had been put down. But the people said that if the master’s body were taken down from the gate and buried under a cross, a curse would fall on all his family. Naturally nobody had heeded those words, and the master had been buried with full honours, like a hero who had fallen in battle.
After a few months his wife had fallen ill and died. His eldest son, now a young man, had also died not long afterwards, having fallen off his horse. Finally, some time later, his daughter had died while giving birth to her first child, a baby boy, who did not survive either.
The palace had been abandoned and soon fell into ruins: nobody wanted to live there any more. The land of that nobleman was occupied by the peasants. Over the family tombs they built a bridge, which was accordingly known as ‘The Bridge of the Dead’.
The legend says that every night the ghosts of the family gather to take the body of that cruel man out of the ground, so that they can hang it up on the gate again, because they want to lay the curse and be able to rest in peace. But they never succeed in getting him out, because the bridge was built over his grave, and all the ghosts manage to do in one night is to pull up a few stones, which the next day the people, when they pass over the bridge, put back in place.
When we were small we sometimes went hunting for those ghosts at night. To keep up our courage we carried our knives, as well as various ‘magic’ Siberian objects, such as the dried foot of a goose, or a tuft of grass taken from the river bank during a night of the full moon.
As we hid in a little ditch and waited for the ghosts we filled the time with horror stories to frighten ourselves so much that we stayed alert. But we soon all fell asleep, one after another.
The first would say:
‘Wake me up if you see something, boys,’ then we’d all fall asleep, lying at the bottom of the ditch like corpses.
In the morning the one who had held out longest would tell the others some tall tale about what he had seen.
The others, of course, would be angry.
‘Why didn’t you wake us up, you idiot?’
‘I couldn’t move, or even open my mouth,’ he would claim. ‘It was like being paralysed.’
Mel had once told us that the ghosts had carried him up into the air and flown him around the town. The idea of Mel flitting around in the company of aristocratic ghosts from the previous century made a deep impression on me.
Whenever we passed that way I would remind Mel of the story of his flight. He would gape at me.
‘Are you taking the piss?’ And I’d burst out laughing, flapping my arms to imitate the movement of the wings, whereupon Mel wouldn’t be able to restrain himself any longer and he too would start laughing.
Crossing the Bridge of the Dead, both flapping our arms, we finally reached the street where Aunt Katya’s restaurant was.