Behind me Mel had already felled three, one with half his face burnt, another with three holes in his head from which serious blood was oozing: the black stuff, the kind that comes out when they get you in the liver, only thicker. The third one had a broken arm. Mel was furious, and was walking around with a knife stuck in his leg.
Finger was standing by the wall. At his feet were three others, all wounded in the head; one had a broken bone sticking out of his leg, below the knee.
Geka, too, was leaning against the wall; he had taken a blow to the forehead, nothing serious, but he was clearly scared.
Meanwhile, those two maniacs Fima and Ivan were both laying into a giant, a colossus stretched out on the ground who, for some reason, wouldn’t let go of the wooden club he held in his fist. His face looked like a lump of minced meat, and he must have passed out some time ago, but he still didn’t release the club. I bent down over him and noticed that the club was fixed to his wrist by an elastic bandage. To leave him a souvenir from Siberia I cut the ligaments under his knee. He didn’t even utter a moan, he was completely unconscious.
I pulled the knife out of Mel’s leg, then retrieved the elastic bandage and divided it into two: one part I put over the wound as a plug and with the other I made a tight bandage. Mel had taken off his trousers to simplify the operation and now said that he didn’t want to put them back on. He said he wanted to get a bit of air, the nutcase.
Finger was looking at Fima and Ivan with a smile that didn’t fade. They waved their iron bars proudly, like heroes.
I helped Geka to his feet. He was fine, except that after the blow he felt a bit groggy and at the same time agitated. I took a sweet out of my pocket.
‘Take this, brother; chew it slowly. It’ll calm you down.’
This was bullshit, of course, but if you believe it a sweet works like a tranquillizer. ‘The psychological factor’, my uncle called it; he had induced one of his cellmates to give up smoking by telling him the cock-and-bull story that if he massaged his ears for half an hour a day he would lose the habit in a month.
Geka took the sweet and felt better. He had a long purple bruise which ran across his forehead and down to his left ear. I told him we had to get away fast, leave Railway as soon as possible.
Geka was scared to go home in case they knew where he lived.
‘Don’t worry, little brother,’ I reassured him. ‘When we get to our district I’ll tell the Guardian the whole story. Uncle Plank will sort things out.’
I tried to explain to him that with us he was safe, protected.
‘How can you be sure we’re in the right and not in the wrong?’ he asked me.
At the time his question seemed stupid to me. Only later, with time, did I come to see how profound it was. Because the real question was not whether we boys were right or wrong in that situation, or in other similar situations, but whether our values were right or wrong with respect to the world around us.
He was a philosopher, my friend Geka, but I wasn’t clever enough with words, so I answered him with the first ones that came into my head:
‘Because we’re genuine, we don’t hide anything.’
When he heard my reply he smiled in a strange way, as if he wanted to say something but preferred to keep it for another time.
Meanwhile Mel had searched our enemies’ pockets and come up with three knives, six packets of cigarettes, four cigarette lighters – one of which was made of gold, and which he immediately slipped in his pocket – more than fifty roubles and a plastic bag full of gold rings and chains, which those thugs had no doubt just stolen from someone.
We found more booty inside a cloth bag near the bin. A thermos full of badly made but still quite hot tea, about ten cheese sandwiches and the biggest surprise – a short double-barrelled shotgun, with no butt, and a lot of cartridges scattered here and there, even inside the sandwiches. I checked the cartridges: the original ones I kept, the home-made ones I threw away, because I didn’t trust cartridges made by strangers, especially guys from Railway.
Mel was surprised and kept asking over and over, like a cracked record:
‘Why didn’t they fire at us? Why didn’t they fire at us?
Why didn’t they fire at us?’
‘Because they haven’t got the balls…’ I replied, but only to stop him asking that question, because in fact I couldn’t understand it myself. Maybe the guy who had brought that shotgun with him had been taken by surprise and hadn’t had time to get it out… Maybe, maybe not. The only certain thing was that if he had used it our whole story would have taken a different course and I might not be here now to tell it.
Mel wanted to take the shotgun, but by right of seniority it was due to Finger: I gave it to him, and he hid it well under his jacket. Luckily Mel wasn’t offended, but agreed with the decision; he just started teaching Finger how to shoot with the thing.
We set off at a brisk pace towards the park. As I walked along, chewing a frozen sandwich, I thought to myself what a bad omen it was that I’d got into all this trouble on my birthday.
‘Okay, I’m in for a hard life,’ I said to myself. ‘I only hope it’s not too short.’
By the time we entered the park it was already dusk. In the winter the darkness falls quickly; the daylight retreats without much of a battle, and before half an hour has passed you can’t see a thing. There were no lamp-posts in the park; all we could see was the weak lights of the town twinkling between the trees.
We walked along the main path. As we drew level with the sanatorium I expounded to Geka my theory that the crisis wasn’t over yet. I felt in my heart that there was another ambush waiting for us, and since the park was the best place for laying it, isolated and dark as it was, I feared for all of us.
Geka was of the same opinion:
‘It can’t be a coincidence, can it, that Vulture hasn’t shown himself yet?’
He suggested we all walk close together, so we’d be ready to cover each other’s backs if they jumped out on us suddenly.
We bunched together in an instant, and all walked in step, like soldiers, expecting the enemy attack at any moment.
We went right across the park, but nothing happened. When we saw the lights of Centre we were so pleased we were almost jumping for joy. Mel even started hurling bizarre insults in the direction of Railway.
We entered Centre; walking along the lighted streets we were already quite relaxed and even able to crack jokes. Everything seemed so natural and simple… I felt such a lightness in my body that I said to myself: ‘If I wanted to, I could fly.’
Mel started making snowballs and throwing them at us; we all laughed as we walked homeward.
We took a short cut near the library, along a quiet little street that went past the old houses of the original town centre. I was dying to get back to celebrate my birthday with the others who were waiting for us.
‘They’ll be pissed out of their minds,’ joked Mel.
‘They’ll already have eaten everything, and when we get there we’ll have to do the washing up.’
‘If we do, boys, the next time I have a birthday I’m going to spend it on my own; you can all go…’ I didn’t finish the sentence: something or someone struck me a violent blow on the right side. I fell down on the frozen ground, banging my head. I was in pain, but I reacted at once, and when I got to my feet in one jump, I already had the knives in my hands.