In Railway, as in our district, the boys acted as lookouts: they observed the movements of anyone who came in or left and then informed the adults. So we were immediately spotted by a little group of boys aged six or seven. We were crossing the first yard of the district and they were sitting there in a corner, a strategic point from where they had a good view of each of the two roads that ran from the park to the district. One of the boys, the smallest, received an order from another bigger boy, whereupon he got up and started running like a bullet towards us. In our district we didn’t do that: if you had to approach someone, you went in a group; you never sent just one boy, let alone the smallest. And usually you didn’t go towards anyone at all; you organized things so that the outsiders came to you, so from the outset you put yourself in a position of superiority.
The little boy looked like a little junkie. He was thin and had two blue rings round his eyes, a clear sign that he sniffed glue – a lot of kids in Railway used to get high like that. We took the piss out of them, calling them ‘boyfriends of the bag’, because they always carried a plastic bag around with them. They would put a bit of glue into it and then stick their head in the bag. A lot of them died like that, asphyxiated, because they didn’t even have the strength to take the bag off their heads; an incredible number of them were found in various little hiding places around town, in the cellars or in the central heating boiler rooms, which they turned into shelters.
Anyway, this little boy stood in front of us, wiped his snivelling nose on the sleeve of his jacket and with a voice ravaged by the residue of glue said:
‘Hey, stop! Where are you going?’
To let him know who we were, I gave him a crash course in good breeding:
‘Where have you put your manners? Have you left them in your pocket, along with your dear little bag? Has nobody ever taught you that there are places where if you don’t say hello to people you can end up as a baklan?[9] Go back to your friends and tell them to come all together and to introduce themselves properly, if they want to talk. Otherwise we’ll go on acting like we haven’t seen them!’
Before I had even finished his heels could already be seen kicking up the snow.
Soon the whole delegation arrived with its leader at its head, a small boy aged about ten who to give himself the air of a criminal was turning over in his hands a chotki, a piece of equipment made of bread used by pickpockets for exercising their fingers, to make them more supple and sensitive.
He looked at us for a while and then said:
‘My name’s “Beard”. Good morning. Where are you going?’
There was a lifeless note in his voice. He too must have been ruined by glue.
‘I’m Nikolay “Kolima”,’ I replied. ‘This is Andrey “Mel”. We’re from Low River. We’ve got a letter to take to one of your elders.’
Beard seemed to wake up.
‘Do you know the man you have to deliver it to?’ he asked in an unexpectedly polite tone. ‘Do you know the way, or do you need someone to show you?’
Strange, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone from Railway offering to show you the way; they’re famous for their rudeness. Maybe, I said to myself, they’ve been told not to let anyone who enters the district go around on their own. But it would be crazy trying to follow everyone – they’d be going backwards and forwards day and night.
We didn’t know the addressee or the way to his house.
‘The letter’s for a guy called Fyodor “the Finger”; if you tell us the way we’ll find him on our own, thank you.’ I was trying to get out of his offer to show us the way. I don’t know why, but I felt there was something wrong with that offer.
‘I’ll explain it to you, then,’ said Beard, and he started saying that we had to go that way, turn off there, then again there, and then again there. In short, I realized after a few seconds, since I knew the district well, that he was trying to make us take a needlessly long route. But I couldn’t make out why, so I heard him out to the end, feigning ignorance. Then I said deliberately, as if agreeing with him:
‘Yes, it does seem very complicated. We’ll never find the way on our own.’
He lit up like a coin fresh from the mint.
‘I told you, without the help of a guide…’
‘Okay then, we accept,’ I concluded, with a smile. ‘Let’s go. Lead the way!’
I asked him to take us himself so that I could assess the gravity of the situation. No leader of a group guarding a district will ever leave his station; he will always send one of his underlings. My proposal was a kind of test – if he refused to accompany us, fine, I could relax, but if he agreed, it meant he had orders to take us somewhere, and that we were in for serious trouble.
‘Great, let’s go!’ he replied, almost singing. ‘I’ll just have a word with my kontora, then I’ll be with you.’
While Beard was talking in a corner with his group, I told Mel about my worries.
‘I’ll beat them up,’ he said bluntly.
I told him that didn’t seem to me a very good idea.
If we beat them up, we’d have to leave the district at once, without delivering the letter. And how would that make us look in front of our Guardian?
‘Stupid, Mel, that’s how we’d look, bloody stupid. What would we tell him? “We didn’t deliver the letter because we suspected something strange was going on, so we beat up some nine-year-old kids who were so high on glue they could hardly stand upright?”’
I proposed a different, more risky plan: that we get Beard to show us the way and then, in the first convenient place, ‘split’ him, a verb which in our slang means ‘to beat the truth out of someone’.
We had to find out what we were up against, I explained to Mel, and make him give us this Finger’s right address. If we found out there was a serious risk, we could go back and tell our Guardian all about it; but if the risk was low we would deliver the letter, and when we got home we’d tell everyone about it anyway – and so become the heroes of the district.
He liked the last part of my speech very much. The idea of returning to Low River with a glorious tale to tell definitely appealed to him. He clapped his hands in support of my brilliant strategy. I smiled and reassured him that everything would be fine, but deep down I had some doubts about the matter.
Meanwhile Beard’s boys were huddled in a circle around him; one or two of them burst out laughing and glanced at us. As far as they were concerned we’d already fallen into their trap, and it had all been so easy…
I told Mel to act normal, and when Beard came back over to us Mel flashed him a smile so wide and false that my heart sank.
We set off. Beard walked between the two of us, and we chatted about this and that. We passed a dozen or so deserted front gardens: now the weather had turned cold people were staying indoors.
We walked along the side of a closed and dilapidated old school, where in summer the Railway kids used to get together and mess around. There, two years earlier, a teenage girl had been brutally murdered – a poor down-and-out kid with no family who had been driven to prostitution to survive. It had been her friends, other teenagers like her, who had forced her to work the streets for them, and who had then taken what little money she earned. They had killed her because she had wanted to get out of the scene and go to live in another district, where she’d found a job as a dressmaker’s assistant.
9
Pejorative name for a person who does not respect the rules that govern behaviour among criminals.