‘What do they want with them? The top officials in the government must have stopped giving their dogs a bone. They haven’t got any underpants!’
‘Where’s the harm, brothers, in being poor and not being able to afford a pair of underpants? If they come to us with honesty and like real men, with their faces uncovered, we’ll give every one of them a nice pair of Siberian underpants!’
Grandfather Chestnut had even brought an accordion from his house, and he played and sang as he walked along behind the car. Some women started dancing, as he bellowed an old Siberian song at the top of his voice, raising his head, adorned by a traditional eight-gored hat, and closing his eyes like a blind man:
I too ran along and sang, constantly pushing up the peak of my own eight-gored hat, which was too big for me and kept slipping down over my eyes.
Next day, however, all my desire to sing melted away when my father gave me a good beating with his heavy hand. I had violated three sacred rules: I had picked up a weapon without the permission of an adult; I had taken it from the red corner, removing the cross that my grandfather had laid on top of it (only the person who puts the cross on top of a weapon can remove it); and lastly, I had tried to fire it in the house.
After that spanking from my father, my bottom and back were very sore, so, as always, I went to my grandfather for consolation. My grandfather looked serious, but the faint smile that flitted across his face told me that my problems, perhaps, weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. He gave me a long lecture, the gist of which was that I had done something very silly. And when I asked him why the magic gun hadn’t shot the policemen of its own accord, he told me that the magic only worked when the gun was used for an intelligent purpose, and with permission. At this point I began to suspect that my grandfather might not be telling me the whole truth, because I wasn’t convinced by this idea of a magic that only worked with adults’ permission…
From that time on I stopped thinking about magic and started watching more closely the movements of my uncle’s and my father’s hands when they used their guns, and soon discovered the function of the safety catch.
In the Siberian community you learn to kill when you’re very small. Our philosophy of life has a close relation to death; children are taught that taking someone else’s life or dying are perfectly acceptable things, if there is a good reason. Teaching people how to die is impossible, because once you’ve died there is no coming back. But teaching people to live with the threat of death, to ‘tempt’ fate, is not difficult. Many Siberian fairy tales tell of the deadly clash between criminals and representatives of the government, of the risks people run every day with dignity and honesty, of the good fortune of those who in the end have got the loot and stayed alive, and of the ‘good memory’ that is preserved of those who have died without abandoning their friends in need. Through these fairy tales, the children perceive the values that give meaning to the Siberian criminals’ lives: respect, courage, friendship, loyalty. By the time they are five or six, Siberian children show a determination and a seriousness that are enviable even to adults of other communities. It is on such solid foundations that the education to kill, to take physical action against another living being, is built.
From a very early age children are shown by their fathers how animals are killed in the yard: chickens, geese and pigs. In this way the child grows accustomed to blood, to the details of killing. Later, at the age of six or seven, the child is given the chance to kill a small animal himself. In this educative process there is no place for wrong emotions, such as sadism or cowardice. The child must be trained to have a full awareness of his own actions, and above all of the reasons and the profound meanings that lie behind those actions.
When a larger animal, such as a pig, an ox or a cow, is killed, the child is often allowed to practise on the carcass, so that he learns the right way to strike with a knife. My father often used to take my brother and me to a big butcher’s shop, and teach us how to handle the knife, using the bodies of the pigs that hung from the hooks. A hand soon becomes decisive and expert, with so much practice.
When he is about ten, the child is a full member of the clan of the youths, which actively cooperates with the criminals of the Siberian community. There he has the chance to face many different situations of the criminal life for the first time. The older kids teach the younger ones how to behave and through the fights and quarrels and the handling of relations with the youths of other communities, each boy is broken in.
By the age of thirteen or fourteen, Siberian boys often have a criminal record, and therefore some experience of juvenile prison. This experience is seen as important, indeed fundamental, to the formation of the individual’s character and view of the world. By that age many Siberians already have some black marketeering and one murder, or at least attempted murder, to their name. And they all know how to communicate within the criminal community, how to follow, hand down and safeguard the founding principles of Siberian criminal law.
One day my father called me into the garden:
‘Come here, young rascal! And bring a knife with you!’
I picked up a kitchen knife, the one I generally used to kill geese and chickens, and ran out into the garden. My father, his friend, Uncle Aleksandr, known to everyone as ‘Bone’, and my Uncle Vitaly were sitting under a big old walnut tree. They were talking about pigeons, the passion of every Siberian criminal. Uncle Vitaly was holding a pigeon in his hands; he had opened its wing and was showing it to my father and Bone, explaining something.
‘Nikolay, son, go and kill a chicken and take it to your mother. Tell her to clean it and make some soup for this evening, because Uncle Bone is going stay here for a chat.’
A ‘chat’ involves the males of the family sitting together drinking and eating all night long to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse in a heap, one after another. When the males are having a chat, no one disturbs them; everyone goes about their own business, pretending the meeting doesn’t exist.
I ran to the chicken run at the end of the garden and grabbed the first chicken I could find. It was a normal chicken, reddish in colour, fairly plump and perfectly calm. Holding it in both hands, I walked over to a nearby stump of wood, which we used for cutting off the heads of chickens like this one. It didn’t try to escape and didn’t seem concerned; it just looked around as if it were being taken on a guided tour. I grasped it around the neck and placed it on the stump, but when I raised the knife in the air to deliver the fatal blow, it started wriggling violently, until it managed to free itself from my hold, and give me a sharp peck on the head. I lost my balance and fell on my backside: I’d been defeated by a chicken. Looking up, I saw that my father and the others were watching the show. Uncle Vitaly was laughing, and Bone had a smile on his face too; but my father was more serious than ever – he had got to his feet and was coming towards me.
‘Pick yourself up, killer! Give me that knife and I’ll show you how it’s done!’ He walked towards the chicken, which in the meantime had started scratching a hole in the ground a few metres away. Once he was close to the chicken, my father arched his body, like a tiger poised to spring on its prey; the chicken was quite calm, and went on scratching at the earth for reasons known only to itself. Suddenly my father made a quick grab at it, but the chicken repeated its earlier action, and with a lightning-fast movement eluded my father’s grasp and pecked him in the face, just under the eye.
1
Lena and Amur are the names of two great Siberian rivers. Traditionally, criminal fortune is linked to these rivers: they are worshipped as deities, to whom you make offerings and whom you can ask for help in the course of your criminal activities. They are mentioned in many sayings, fairy tales, songs and poems. Of a fortunate criminal it is said that ‘his destiny is borne on the current of Lena’.