After the food warehouses the first houses of the Railway district finally began. This district belonged to Black Seed, and had different rules from our own. We would have to behave ourselves, or we might not come out alive.
The boys of that area were very cruel; they tried to earn the respect of others with the most extreme violence. Power among juveniles had a symbolic value: some kids could order others about, but none of them was respected by adult criminals. So, naturally, boys couldn’t wait to grow up, and to achieve this more quickly many became absolute bastards, sadistic and unjust. In their hands the criminal rules were distorted to the point of absurdity; they lost all meaning, and became little more than excuses for violence. For example, they didn’t wear anything red – they called it the communists’ colour: if anyone wore any red garment the Black Seed kids were quite capable of torturing them. Of course, knowing this rule, none of the people who were born there ever wore anything red, but if you had it in for someone, all you had to do was hide a red handkerchief in his pocket and shout out loud that he was a communist. The hapless individual would immediately be searched, and if the handkerchief was found, no one would listen to anything he had to say in his defence: in everyone’s eyes he was already an outcast.
This sense of a constant struggle for power, or, as Grandfather Kuzya called it, ‘contest of the bastards’, was essential to the ethos of the district. In order to be a perfect Authority among the youngsters of Railway you had to be always ready to betray your own people, not have ties of friendship with anyone and be careful you weren’t betrayed in your turn, know how to lick the arses of the adult criminals and not have any education received from any form of human contact that was deemed to be good.
Those boys had grown up thinking they had nothing but enemies around them, so the only language they knew was that of provocation.
If it came to a fight, however, they behaved in various ways. Some groups fought with dignity, and many of these we were friends with. But others always tried to ‘strike from round the corner’, as we say – in other words attack from behind – and didn’t respect any agreement; they were perfectly capable of shooting you even if you’d previously made a pact with them not to use firearms.
They were organized in groups which, unlike us, they didn’t call ‘gangs’, a word they considered a bit offensive, but kontory, which means ‘bureaus’. Each kontora had its leader, or, as they called him, bugor, which means ‘mound’.
I had a long-standing quarrel with a bugor of that district: he was a year older than me and called himself ‘the Vulture’. He was a lying buffoon, who had arrived in our town four years earlier, claiming to be the son of a famous criminal who went by the nickname ‘White’. My uncle knew White very well; they had been in jail together and he had told me his story.
He was a criminal of the Black Seed caste, but one of the old guard. He respected everyone, and was never arrogant, but always humble, my uncle said. In the 1980s, when a group of young Black Seed men ousted the older Authorities (with the sole aim of making money and setting up as businessmen in civil society), many old men tried with all their strength to prevent it. So the young men started killing their old folk: during that period this was happening all over the place.
White fell victim to an ambush. He was getting out of a car with his men, when some men in another passing car opened fire on him. When they fired with their Kalashnikovs, a lot of people were walking along the street, and some were wounded. White managed to take refuge behind his car, which was armoured, but he saw a woman in the line of fire and threw himself at her to cover her with his body. He was badly wounded, and died in hospital a few days later. Before he died, he asked his men to seek out that woman, ask her forgiveness for what had happened and give her some money. This gesture of his made such a great impression in the criminal society that his killers repented and apologized to the old men, but then they went on killing each other and, as my uncle said, ‘at that point Christ only knew what was in that salad’.
Anyway, in our community White was very highly thought of. So when I heard that his son had arrived in town and that he’d had to leave his village because a lot of people had wanted to take revenge on him after his father’s death, I was dying to meet him. I told my uncle about this at once, but he replied that White hadn’t had any sons, or indeed any family at all, because he had lived according to the old rules, which prevented the members of Black Seed from marrying and bringing up children. ‘He was as lonely as a post in the middle of the steppe,’ he assured me.
Some time later I met the Vulture, and without wasting many words I went straight to the point and unmasked him. We had a fight, and I came off best, but from that day on the Vulture hated me, and tried to get revenge in any way possible.
One winter evening, in 1991, I was returning home dead drunk from a party. I was with Mel, who was even drunker than I was. Around midnight, on the border between our district and the Centre, the Vulture appeared with three of his friends: they overtook us on their bikes and stopped in front of us, blocking our way, and the Vulture pulled a 16-bore double-barrelled shotgun out of his jacket and fired two shots at me. He hit me in the chest; the cartridges were filled with chopped-up nails. Luckily for me, however, those cartridges had been carelessly filled: in one there was too much gunpowder and only a few nails, and the stopper had been pushed too far down; so it exploded inside, and the backfire scorched that poor fool’s hand and part of his face. With the other the opposite mistake had been made: it had too many nails and too little powder, and evidently the stopper hadn’t been closed properly, so the nails came out at a lower velocity and only tore my jacket a little; actually, one got through to my skin, but it didn’t hurt me, and I only noticed it a couple of days later when I saw a slightly red blister. Mel threw himself at them barehanded and managed to knock one of them down and break his bike, so they made off.
After that episode, with the help of the whole gang I caught the Vulture and gave him three stab wounds on the thigh, as was the custom in our community as a sign of contempt. He didn’t give up, but kept saying to everyone that he wanted revenge. But back then he was still a nobody, just one of the many teenage delinquents in Railway. Later though, the Vulture had succeeded in building a successful career, and now he was the leader of a bunch of thugs with whom he did things for which we in our community would have had our balls cut off at the very least.
That February day, as we entered the Railway district, I was only thinking of getting the job done quickly and not running into this fool of an enemy of mine. So as not to bother Mel with that story and not make him anxious – because it was a very serious matter to see him looking worried – I tried talking to him about the birthday party I would be having that evening, and the dishes my mother had prepared for us. He listened attentively, and from his expression it was clear that he was already there at the table, eating it all himself.