‘Oh God, they’re taking us to Siberia! It’s too cold there, we’ll all die!’
And someone reply from the other:
‘Oh Christ, they’re sending us to Europe! There are no woods there, only empty hills, we’ll die of hunger!’
During that journey Borishka met some Siberian Urkas. He joined up with them because they were the only ones who didn’t seem to be in despair. In a sense they had a secure future; there was already a fairly well-developed community waiting for them in Transnistria.
Borishka told his story to one of them, an elderly man respected by all the others, and was reassured:
‘Don’t be afraid, stay with us: our brothers are in Transnistria. If you’re a just man, you’ll soon have a home and you’ll be able to bring up your children with our children, may the Lord bless us all…’
The Urkas and the Cossacks had always been on the same wavelength and got on welclass="underline" both groups respected the old traditions, loved the nation and their homeland and believed in independence of any form of power. Both were persecuted by various Russian governments in different ages, for their desire for freedom. It was just that the Urkas were more extreme, and had a particular hierarchical structure. The Cossacks, on the other hand, regarded themselves as a free army, and so had a paramilitary structure; in peacetime their main occupation was raising livestock.
When they arrived in Transnistria, Borishka and his wife were taken in by a family of Urkas, just as the old man had promised them.
Borishka at once felt at home. To him the Urkas had a lot in common with the people of the land where he came from, Iga. They were united and extremely anarchic and had a strong criminal tradition.
He soon joined in the business activities of the Siberian criminals, who respected him because he understood everything about their law; he was a man of his word and a just one.
And little by little he became one of us. He lived in our area with his family. His wife, whom we all called Grandmother Svetlana, had borne him two sons, who followed the road of the Urkas.
In his old age Borishka exploited a connection with the manager of the food warehouses, who took him on as a caretaker. They came to an agreement: the manager wouldn’t make any fuss when goods disappeared, and Borishka would share his slice of the profits with him. He organized every raid to perfection; he was very precise and serious in business matters. In particular, he was very good at controlling his emotions; I never saw him get flustered.
Once, in autumn, when in every home the people make preserves for the winter and light a big fire on which they put a big pot full of water, I saw Borishka save a child’s life. As usual at our house, the women gathered to cut the greens and prepare the pulses, and the men tended the fire and prepared the glass jars. We children were nearby, playing among the adults. Old Borishka was there too, with his son and grandchildren.
Suddenly the bar under the big saucepan snapped in two, and the pot overturned and poured out a flood of boiling water in a second. A few metres away sat a little boy, the son of a neighbour of ours, Uncle Sanya. I had gone out into the garden to look for more jars. When I heard the sound of the pot overturning, I rushed into the house and saw old Borishka pick up a big steel alloy bowl, throw it on the ground and jump into it, skimming along as if on a surfboard. And there in the steam, which was as thick and white as the morning fog on the river, I saw slowly emerge the figure of a man standing inside a bowl with a child in his arms, surrounded by boiling water. The child’s mother fainted; his father, Uncle Sanya, started screaming; the only two people who were calm were those two, Borishka and the little boy.
He had acted instinctively, without thinking about it, and afterwards had resumed his usual serene expression, as if he did such things four times a day.
He was a very interesting person; I liked talking to him, and hearing him tell the stories of his life. He often went fishing with a rod he had made himself, and while he was fishing he would stand with his feet in the water and sing Japanese songs. When I was small he taught me a very nice one: it was about a mountain and a young man who crossed it to find his betrothed.
We had made a deal with Borishka: when we went to the stores we had to pretend not to know him. If we saw him near the gate, we mustn’t even greet him. He would often be there keeping guard with an old sheepdog that had something wrong with its hind legs and found it difficult to move; both of them would usually sit on a bench, and while the dog slept, Borishka would read the paper. Borishka read only one paper: Pravda, which means ‘The Truth’ – the newspaper of communist propaganda, which was read by everyone who wanted to believe in the freest and most beautiful country in the world. In Pravda any item of news whatsoever was transformed into a source of pure propaganda: even when you read about disasters and wars, in the end you were left with a sense of happiness and you felt lucky to live in the USSR. I don’t know why Borishka was so fond of that paper; once I asked him, and he replied:
‘When you’re forced to listen to cattle singing, you must at least exercise your freedom to choose the one that sings best.’
When I passed the gate I always looked away, so as not to see whether Borishka was there or not. But my friend Mel could never remember this simple but important rule. He always stared at the gate, and if he saw Borishka he would greet him, waving his hand in the air and smiling with that disfigured face of his. Then I would glare at him and he would immediately remember the deal we had made with Borishka and start hitting himself, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. As Grandfather Kuzya used to say, a guy like him was enough to drive a madman mad.
Borishka was always furious when Mel greeted him. On his way home from work he would come looking for me or Gagarin and say, in a voice trembling with anger, yet quiet and lilting:
‘So you’re wealthy men – you’ve finally become rich!’
‘What do you mean? We’re not rich…’
‘You must be, since you can afford to refuse to work with me, and earn money…’
At those words my hair would stand on end. To refuse to work with Borishka was to say goodbye to half our earnings.
‘We didn’t do anything, Uncle Borishka.’
‘Didn’t do anything? Teach that imbecile of a friend of yours how to behave. And if he can’t get it into his head, don’t bring him past the warehouses any more, take the long way round…’
We would talk to Mel, explain everything to him all over again, but it was no use. The next time, as soon as we got near to the stores, he would be looking for the old man, to greet him. It was like a penance to us, having him with us.
One day, as we were walking past Borishka’s house, in our district, we stopped to have a chat with him. While we were talking, we realized that Mel was some distance away, on the other side of the road, with his back turned to us. Borishka looked at us all, then pointed to him, and his face suddenly became very serious.
‘For your own good, get rid of your friend,’ he said.
‘Don’t take him with you any more: he’ll only cause trouble. In fact, I’m willing to pay him, if only he’ll stay at home and not roam the streets.’
Pretending not to understand, I said:
‘But Uncle Borishka… It’s true that Mel’s a bit thick, but he means well.’
Borishka looked at me as if I’d spoken to him in a language he didn’t understand.
‘A bit thick, you say? Look at him: he’s a disaster, that one! Even he doesn’t know what’s going on inside his head! Listen, I like you boys, that’s why I’m being frank with you. You’re still young; your friend makes you laugh now, but before long he’s going to cause so much trouble that you’ll be crying.’