I put two fingers into the hole in my jacket and carefully pulled out the blade: it was a hunting knife, wide and very sharp. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought, ‘if he’d got through I’d have been killed. When I get home I’m going to light a candle in front of the icon of the Madonna.’
Stepping over my enemy’s body and holding his knife in my left hand, I went towards Geka, who was down on the ground, trying to avoid the blows from a stick wielded by a sturdy boy. He was leaning on his right arm and trying to fend off the blows with his left. I surprised his attacker from behind and plunged the blade of my pike into his thigh.
The blade of my knife was very long and slipped easily into the flesh; it was the ideal thing for putting people out of action, because it had no problem in penetrating muscle right through to the bone.
Simultaneously, using the hunting knife, I cut the ligaments behind the knee of his other leg. With a cry of pain the stocky boy fell to the ground.
Geka got to his feet and picked up the stick, and together we rushed towards Mel, who had caught one of them and, yelling like a madman, was stabbing him with his knife in the area of the stomach, while three guys tried to stop him by raining down blow after blow from their sticks on his head and back. If I had taken so many hits I’d have been killed for sure; it was only thanks to his physique that Mel managed to stay on his feet.
I rushed with my knife at a guy who was about to deal a powerful blow at Mel’s head. I came up from behind, and cut one of his ligaments.
Geka hit another boy on the head, who immediately passed out, blood oozing from his ear. The third ran off towards one of the yards from which they had all emerged a few moments before.
Meanwhile Fima and Ivan, armed with sticks, were standing close to the pavement, clubbing two guys who had fallen on the ground. One was in a very bad way. Fima had definitely broken his nose and his face was covered with blood – he was instinctively holding up his quivering hands to shield his face from the blows, but Fima was hitting him anyway, with such violence that the stick bounced off those hands as if they were made of wood, like a puppet’s: it was clear that Fima had broken them. Angrily, furiously, Fima hit him, shouting:
‘Who is this guy who wants to kill a Soviet sailor? Eh? Well? Who is this damned fascist?’
In the meantime Ivan was trying to club the face of the other attacker, who was doing well to avoid the blows by twisting to one side and the other. At one point he almost hit him, but at the last moment the stick missed his face and slammed into the frozen asphalt covered with red snow – red with the blood which as soon as it fell on the ground became as hard as ice. The stick broke in two; Ivan lost his temper and threw away the piece that was left in his hand. Then he jumped two-footed on the boy’s head and started stamping on his face, letting out a strange war-whoop, like the Indians when they attack the cowboys in American westerns.
They were really crazy, those two.
In an instant the battle was over.
On the other side of the street was Finger, with a knife and a stick in his hands, and at his feet a boy with a cut which started from his mouth and ended in the middle of his forehead: it was too deep: a nasty wound. The boy lay there, conscious but not moving – terrified, I think, by the blood and the pain.
Mel was holding fast by the lapel the guy he had previously been stabbing in the stomach with his knife. He was gazing in astonishment at his blade, which had snapped in two. I went over to him and with a sharp tug ripped open the boy’s jacket, which was full of holes. Out onto the snow fell a couple of dozen thick newspapers, glued together: the missing part of Mel’s blade was sticking out from that pack of paper.
Surprised and incredulous, Mel looked at the scene as if it were a magic show.
I picked up the pack of paper from the ground and held it in my hand for a moment, feeling its weight. Then, putting all the strength I had into it, I slapped Mel across the face with that bundle of newspapers, making a loud noise, like when an axe splits a stump of wood.
His cheek immediately went red, he let go of the boy’s neck and put his hand to his face. In a plaintive voice he asked me:
‘What’s the matter with you? Why the hell are you angry with me?’
I hit him again and he took two paces backwards, putting one hand in front of him, to stop me.
I replied:
‘What did I tell you, you fool? Go for the thighs, not the chest! While you were messing around with that junkie and getting whacked by his three friends, I got the real blade. Shit, it was a damn close thing, I nearly got killed! And where were you? Why didn’t you cover my back?’
He immediately put on a mournful expression – lowered eyes, bowed head, mouth slightly open – and in the voice of a beggar asking for alms he started mumbling incomprehensible words, as he always did when he was in the wrong:
‘Uh-m-m-m… Kolima… o-o-only wa-a-anted…
mm-hm-hm… so-o-orry…
‘Fuck your excuses,’ I interrupted him. ‘I want to go home and celebrate my birthday, not my funeral. Now listen to me. This is no time for pissing about, we’re risking our necks in this fucking business. And don’t forget we’re not alone; there are other people with us, they’re giving us a hand; we can’t expose them too much. And thank God they are here, because with more friends like you I’d already be dead.’
Mel shrank even smaller and, as he always did on such occasions, began to cover my back, though it was a bit late now.
The street was like the scene of a massacre: all the snow was red with blood; our assailants were dragging themselves over to the sides of the pavement, looking decidedly the worse for wear.
I went over to the one Mel had been trying to stab: he was frightened, even though he didn’t have a scratch on him. I had to play tough. I grabbed him by the neck and tried to pull him up, but I couldn’t lift him – he was heavier than me – so I bent down and stuck my knife into his thigh, till a little blood started to ooze out. He screamed and started crying, begging me not to kill him. I gave him a hard slap, to shut him up:
‘Shut your mouth, you little pansy! Do you know who you’ve taken on, you dickhead? Don’t you know us guys from Low River are baptized with knives? Did you really think you could kill us? I’ve been fighting since I was seven; I’ve ripped open so many guys like you, it would take me a lifetime to count them.’
I was exaggerating the number of victims, of course, but I had to scare him, sow fear, because a terrified enemy is already half defeated.
‘I won’t kill you this time, seeing as today’s my birthday and it’s the first time we’ve come up against each other; but if you cross my path again I’ll have no mercy. When you see the Vulture, tell him Kolima sends his regards, and if I meet him before this evening I’ll slit him open like a pig…’
That poor idiot, with the blood welling out of his thigh and his face distorted with terror, looked at me as if I were taking possession of his soul.
We set off again: Fima with a big stick, Ivan with a broken truncheon that he’d picked up off the ground, Geka with an iron bar, Finger with a knife and a stick, I with two knives in my pocket, and lastly my second shadow, Mel, with a sheepish look on his face, holding a stick and a knife with only half a blade.
As we went away, the ‘survivors’ started to come out of the yard. We were twenty metres away when one of them shouted after us: