Well, to return to our story: Geka lived with his mother and an uncle who had had an incredible life; he was the embodiment of divine anger, of the living doom to which this likeable, kindly family was predestined. His name was Ivan, and he had been nicknamed ‘the Terrible’. The allusion to the great tyrant was ironical, because Ivan was as good-natured as they come. He was about thirty-five years of age, short and thin, with black hair and eyes, and abnormally long fingers. He had been a professional musician before he had fallen into disgrace; at the age of eighteen he was playing the violin in an important orchestra, in St Petersburg, and his musical career seemed to be rocketing upwards like a Soviet intercontinental missile. But one day Ivan had ended up in bed with a friendly tart who played in the orchestra, a cellist, the wife of an important member of the communist party. He had become infatuated with her, made their relationship public and even asked her to leave her husband. Poor naive musician, he didn’t know that party members couldn’t get divorced, because they and their families had to be an example of a perfect ‘cell’ of Soviet society. And what kind of cell are you, if you get divorced whenever you feel like it? Russian cells must be as hard as steel, made of the same stuff as their tanks and their famous Kalashnikov assault rifles. Have you ever seen a faulty Soviet tank? Or a Kalashnikov that jammed? Families must be as perfect as firearms.
So our friend Ivan, as soon as he tried to follow the motions of his heart, was crushed by his lover’s husband, who hired some agents of the Soviet secret services, who pumped him so full of serums they reduced him to a zombie.
Officially he had disappeared, nobody knew where; everyone was convinced that he’d escaped from the USSR via Finland. A few months later he was found in a psychiatric hospital, where he had been interned after being picked up on the street in a serious state of mental confusion. He couldn’t even remember his own name. The only thing he had with him was his violin; thanks to that the doctors traced him to the orchestra, and later were able to hand him back to his sister.
By this time Ivan’s health was permanently impaired, and his face was that of a person tormented by one long, enormous doubt. He could communicate perfectly well, but he needed time to reflect on questions and think about his answers.
He still played the violin; it was his only link with the real world, a kind of anchor which had kept him attached to life. He would perform twice a week in a restaurant in the Centre and then get drunk out of his mind. When he was drunk, he used to say, he managed to have moments of mental lucidity, which unfortunately soon passed.
The faithful companion of his life, who had always shared in all his drinking bouts, was another poor wretch called Fima, who had caught meningitis at the age of nine and since then been out of his wits. Fima was extremely violent, and saw enemies everywhere: when he entered a new place he would put his right hand inside his coat as if to take out an imaginary gun. He was bad-tempered and quarrelsome, but nobody reproached him for it, because he was ill. He went around dressed in a sailor’s overcoat and shouted out naval phrases, such as ‘There may be few of us, but we wear the hooped shirt!’ or ‘Full ahead! A hundred anchors in the arse! Sink that damned fascist tub!’ Fima divided the world into two categories: ‘our boys’ – the people he trusted and regarded as his friends – and the ‘fascists’ – all those he considered to be enemies and therefore deserving to be beaten up and insulted. It wasn’t clear how he determined who was one of ‘our boys’ and who a ‘fascist’; he seemed to sense it, on the basis of some hidden, deep-seated feeling.
Together Ivan and Fima got into a lot of trouble. If Fima was wild, Ivan would attack with a natural violence: he would pounce on people like a beast on its prey.
In short, because of these virtues I really hoped we would find them at home.
When we arrived, Geka, Ivan and Fima were playing battleships in the living room.
Geka was relaxed and was laughing, mocking his competitors in the game:
‘Glub-glub-glub,’ he repeated derisively, imitating the sound of a sinking ship.
Fima, with trembling hands, disconsolately clutched his piece of paper: his fleet was evidently in a desperate plight.
Ivan was sitting in a corner looking crestfallen, and his piece of paper thrown on the floor indicated that he had just lost the game. He was holding his violin and playing something slow and sad which resembled a distant scream.
I briefly explained our situation to Geka and asked him if he could help us to get across the district.
He immediately agreed to help us, and Fima and Ivan followed him like two lambs ready to turn into lions.
We went out into the street; I looked at our gang and could hardly believe it – two Siberian boys and an adult fresh out of jail, accompanied by a doctor’s son and two raving lunatics, trying to escape unharmed from a district where they were being hunted. And all of this on my birthday.
Geka and I walked in front and the others followed. While I was chatting to Geka, I heard Mel telling Finger one of his miraculous stories, the one about the big fish that had swum all the way up the river, against the current, to get to our district, because it had been attracted by the smell of Aunt Marta’s apple jam. Every time Mel told that story, the funniest part was when he demonstrated how big the fish had been. He would open his arms like Jesus crucified, and with an effort in his voice would shriek ‘A brute as big as that!’ As I waited for that phrase with one ear and listened to Geka with the other, I felt really great. I felt like I was out for a stroll with my friends, without any dangers.
When Mel came to the end of his story, Fima commented: ‘Holy fuck, the number of fish like that I’ve seen from my ship! The whales are a real pain in the arse! The sea’s full of the buggers!’
I turned round to see what expression he had as he was saying those words, and saw something fly past close to my face, so close it almost touched my cheek. It was a piece of brick. At the same moment Geka shouted:
‘Shit, an ambush!’ and a dozen boys armed with sticks and knives emerged from each of two opposite front yards, and ran towards us, shouting:
‘Let’s kill them, kill them all!’
I put my hand in my pocket and took out my pike. I pressed the button and with a clac the blade, pushed by the spring, shot out. I felt Mel’s back lean against mine and heard his voice say:
‘Now I’m going to do someone!’
‘Go for their thighs, you fool; their jackets are stuffed with newspapers, don’t you see they’re prepared? They’ve been waiting for us…’ Before I could finish the sentence I saw a big guy armed with a wooden stick in front of me. I heard his stick whistle past my ears once, then a second time; he was quick, the bastard. I tried to get closer so I could stab him with my blade, but I was never fast enough; his blows were getting ever quicker and more accurate, and I was in danger of being hit. Suddenly another guy attacked me from behind; he pushed me hard and I knocked into the giant with the stick. Instinctively I gave him three quick stabs in the thigh, so quick that I felt shooting pain in my arm, a kind of electric shock, from the released tension. The snow beneath us was spattered with blood, the giant elbowed me in the face but I kept stabbing him till he fell on the ground, clutching his leg in the blood-red snow, grimacing in agony.
From behind, the boy who had pushed me tried to stab me in the side, but I was thin and my jacket was big, and he didn’t manage to reach the flesh. The jacket ripped, however, and his hand went through the hole along with the knife. I turned and wounded him with my pike, first on the nose and then above the eye: his face was instantly covered with blood. He was trying to get his hand out of the hole in my jacket, but his knife had got stuck in the material, so he abandoned it there. He put his hands to his face and, screaming, fell on the snow, away from me.