‘You could have taken that rouble, though,’ said Mel after a while.
I couldn’t kill him because I was fond of him, so I did what Grandfather Kuzya always told me to do with people who can’t understand the important things: I wished him good luck. He was a real imbecile, my friend Mel, and he still is: he hasn’t improved over the years, in fact he might even have got a bit worse.
By this time we weren’t far from the Railway district, where Mel had to deliver the message to a criminal. Leaving the hospital behind us, we passed the food warehouse complex – a place we knew well, because we often went to steal there at night. It was an old, turn-ofthe-century site comprising several brick buildings with high walls and no windows. The railway ran alongside it, so the trains stopped right there and the wagons were quickly unloaded or loaded.
In order to steal from them you didn’t need the agility of a burglar, but simply a bit of diplomacy. We never forced any locks; we had one of our own men inside, an infiltrator, a kind of mole who kept us informed and told us when it was the right moment. After the goods had been loaded, the trains usually stayed where they were for a few hours; the drivers rested and then left later, at dawn. So we would open the wagons at night while they slept and carry off the stuff: it was easier to work on the trains than to break down the doors of the warehouses. We would load everything into a car and drive off.
The trains were bound for the countries of the Soviet bloc – many for Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. They carried sugar, preserves and all kinds of canned food. Sometimes they were already half-full, with clothes, warm coats, workers’ overalls, gloves and military uniforms. In some wagons you might also find domestic appliances, drills, electric wiring, hardware, electric fires and fans. When we got a chance like that we would make as many as three or four trips, to carry off as much as possible. We never managed to get everything into the car: but fortunately our man let us leave the goods temporarily in certain hiding places inside the warehouse.
Our mole was in fact the elderly caretaker of the warehouses, a Japanese who, after years of living with the Russians, now went by the name of Borishka.
He was very old, and had come to our town with the Siberians in the second wave of deportation in the late 1940s, after the Russian victory in the Second World War.
He had been made a prisoner-of-war in the Russo-Japanese conflict, at the battle of Khalkhin Gol. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, and only survived by pure chance, because the Russian tanks drove straight over the dead bodies lying on the ground. After the tanks, the cavalry passed by: they found him there, looking bewildered, wandering around like a ghost in the midst of the dead. Out of pity they took him with them, otherwise he would have been killed by the infantry, who were searching for any Japanese left alive to avenge their comrades who had been killed the previous night, when the Japanese forces had attacked the first Russian divisions.
The Cossacks didn’t hand him over to the armed forces; for some time they kept him on as a stable hand. He had to clean and care for the horses of the Cossacks of Altay, in southern Siberia. They treated him well and a friendship formed between him and the Cossacks.
Borishka came from Iga, a land of ninjas and assassins. Since boyhood he had been trained to fight both with weapons and bare hands. The Cossacks, too, loved fighting with cold steel and wrestling, so Borishka taught them the techniques of his own country and learned theirs.
Borishka hated the Japanese, and especially the samurai and the emperor; he said they exploited the people, who were forced to submit to many injustices. He said he had enlisted only in desperation, because of an unhappy love affair. The girl he had fallen in love with had been given in marriage to another man, who was rich and powerful.
The Cossacks’ ataman, or leader (a big, strong man, a typical southern Siberian), was particularly fond of him. One day, Borishka said, they had called him out of the stables. He had gone out onto the parade ground, where the Cossacks were waiting for him, standing in a circle.
‘Now the Japanese are all dead,’ the ataman said, ‘Japan has lost its war and you can go home. But first I want you to do one thing…’ The ataman motioned to a young Cossack, who brought two swords: one was Borishka’s – he had been wearing it on his belt when the Cossacks had saved him – and the other, the shashka, was the typical sword of the Siberian Cossacks, much heavier than that used by the Cossacks in other parts of Russia, because the Siberians also used it for chopping wood. A sword of that kind can weigh as much as seven kilos, and the men capable of carrying it could, in battle, split a man in two from head to hip.
The ataman took the two swords and said to him, in front of everyone:
‘We have treated you well and you have nothing to complain of, but now I want to find out whether trying to occupy the USSR has served as a lesson to you. Here are the two swords. If you have understood that making war on us was unjust, break your Japanese sword with our Cossack one, and we will let you stay with us and you will be a Cossack yourself. But if you think your war was a just one, break our sword with yours, and we will let you go free wherever you want, and may God assist you; we will do you no harm.’
Borishka didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to become a Cossack, but nor did he think that the war against the Russians had been a good and just thing. And above all, he hated the Japanese.
So he picked up his sword, kissed it, as the Cossacks kiss their swords, and hung it on his belt, in its place.
The ataman was watching him with interest, trying to understand what he was up to. Many Cossacks were sure Borishka would break their sword.
But instead he picked up the shashka, kissed it too and gave it back to the ataman.
Everyone was left speechless, and the ataman burst out laughing:
‘Well, Borishka… You’re a clever man, Japanese!’
‘I’m not Japanese, I’m from Iga, and my sword is from Iga too,’ he replied.
‘Well, you’re really a good fellow, Borishka; you must never forget who you are and never betray your tradition… You must be proud; only in that way will you preserve your dignity!’
So Borishka stayed with the Cossacks for a long time yet, but from that day on he was allowed to carry his sword with him.
When the Cossacks returned to Siberia, and to Altay, Borishka went with them. The ataman took him into his own house, and there Borishka met his future wife, the ataman’s eldest daughter, Svetlana. They got married. Out of respect for her, Borishka was baptized in the Orthodox faith with the name of Boris, so that the ceremony could be held in church. They built their house and lived there, in a little village on the River Amur.
Then one day the ataman was suddenly arrested by Stalin’s secret services, and some time later shot as a traitor. Borishka was very distressed; he thought it was all his fault, whereas in fact it was nothing to do with him: during that period many Cossacks were singled out by the Soviet government because they didn’t share its communist ideas and still had a certain liking for anarchy and autonomy.
After his death the ataman was declared an ‘enemy of the people’, and the members of his family were deported to Transnistria, along with many other Siberians.
Borishka still remembered that long journey. The trains, he said, used to stop for a long time on the rails, and you couldn’t get out because they were guarded by armed soldiers. Sometimes two trains travelling in opposite directions would stop alongside each other; on the one there would be people from the European part of the USSR who were being sent to Siberia, and on the other the opposite. He would hear someone shout from one train: