From the many curses that they uttered we immediately realized that there was going to be a fight.
Mel said in a sad and very calm voice:
‘Holy Christ, these bastards were all we needed… Kolima, if they make a single move towards us I’m going to kill them, I swear to you…’ He put his hand in his pocket and slowly pulled out his knife. He propped it against his hip, pressed the button to open the blade and hid the knife behind his back. I did the same, but hid the hand holding the knife in front of me, under my T-shirt, pretending to tighten my belt.
‘I hope for their own sakes they’re intelligent. Who needs trouble at this time of night…’ I said as we walked on.
Suddenly, when we had gone past them, one of the three threw an empty bottle at Mel’s back. I heard an unnatural noise, like that of a snowball against a wall. Then immediately afterwards another more natural noise: that of a bottle smashing as it hits the ground.
In a second, before I could even react, Mel was already punching one of them, and the other two were surrounding him, trying to hit him with their bottles. I jumped on the first one I could reach and stabbed him in the side. Another smashed a bottle on the ground and cut my face with the piece that was left in his hand. I got really angry and gave him a series of stabs in the leg. At that moment, behind my back I heard the sound of the cocking lever of a Kalashnikov, and immediately afterwards a burst of gunfire. I dropped to the ground, instinctively. A voice shouted:
‘Throw your weapons well away from you! Hands up, legs apart, face down! You’re under arrest!’
I felt as if I’d fallen into a bottomless pit.
‘No, it can’t be. Anything in the world, but not this.’
Pending further inquiries, which in the event took exactly two weeks, they locked me up in a cell in Tiraspol police station. The three guys who had attacked us withdrew their accusations, after my father sent the right people round to their houses.
Mel got out after a week, because he hadn’t used his knife.
I had used mine, though – it was found on the spot – and although the victims weren’t pressing charges, all the legal system needed was the reports of the policemen who’d arrested us, and my fingerprints on the weapon.
The trial was as quick as lightning: the prosecutor asked for three years’ confinement in a high security juvenile prison. The defending counsel – who was a lawyer paid by the state, but nonetheless did his job well, partly because, as I later learned, he had received a certain amount of money from my family – insisted on the peculiarities of the case: the lack of any complaint from the victims, my good behaviour during my first sentence, which I had served at home, and above all the impossibility of proving that the weapon belonged to me. I might have found it on the spot, or even taken it from one of the victims, who indeed in their second statement had declared themselves to be the ‘aggressors’. In the end the judge, a plump old woman, announced in a funereal voice:
‘One year’s detention in the strict-regime colony for juveniles, with the possibility of a request for early release after five months’ detention in the event of good behaviour.’
I wasn’t in the least frightened or surprised. I remember feeling as if I were going on a camping trip somewhere, to rest up for a while and then return home. Indeed I felt like I was about to do something I had been waiting for all my life, something great and important.
And so I was taken to prison, to a place called Kamenka – ‘The Place of Stone’, a big jail with various blocks and sections. It was an old construction dating from the time of the tsar, built on three floors. Each floor had fifty rooms, all the same size, each seventy metres square. In each room there were two windows, or rather holes, which had neither frames nor glass, but only a sheet of iron soldered on from the outside, with little holes in it to let the air through.
They escorted me to a room on the third floor. The iron doors opened in front of me and the warder said:
‘Move! Go in without fear, come out without crying…’
I took one step and the doors closed behind me with a loud noise. I looked in there and couldn’t believe my eyes.
The room was crammed with wooden bunks on three levels, set alongside each other, with very little space in between – just enough to get through. The boys were sitting on the bunks, walking around naked and sweaty, in an air full of the stink of latrines and cigarette smoke and some other disgusting odour, the smell of a dirty, damp cloth which after a while begins to rot.
Only half of the room was visible: a metre and a half from the floor the air became increasingly dense, and from there right up to the ceiling there was a thick cloud of steam.
I stood there trying to work out what I should do. I knew the prison rules very welclass="underline" I knew I mustn’t move a single step inside that room until the Authorities of the cell said I could, but I looked around and couldn’t see anyone who was interested in my arrival. What’s more, my clothes seemed to me increasingly heavy, because of the humidity in the room. Then I felt something fall on my head; I brushed at it with my hand, but immediately other objects fell on my shoulders. So I moved quickly, to shake them off.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only cockroaches… There are lots of them in front of the door, but they don’t go into the room, because we put poison under the bunks…’
I looked towards the voice that was speaking to me and saw a very thin boy in dirty, wet underpants, with a shaven head, a gap in his front teeth, and glasses. I couldn’t manage to say anything to him; I felt as if I was completely cut off from the rest of the world.
‘I’m Dwarf – I’m the shnyr here. Who are you looking for? Tell me and I’ll find him.’ He came a bit closer and started looking at the tattoo on my right arm. Shnyr in criminal slang means ‘the one who darts about’: this figure exists in all Russian prisons, he’s someone who is not regarded as an honest criminal, but is the slave of the whole cell and takes messages from one criminal to another.
‘Are there any Siberians here?’ I asked him coldly, to make it clear to him from the outset that he must keep his distance from me.
‘Yes, there certainly are: Filat “White” from Magadan, Kerya “Yakut” from Urengoy…
‘All right,’ I interrupted him brusquely. ‘Go to them quickly and tell them a brother has arrived. Nikolay “Kolima” from Bender…’
He immediately vanished behind the maze of beds. I heard him saying, as he went from one bunk to the other:
‘A new arrival, he’s Siberian… Another Siberian’s arrived, another one… A Siberian from Bender has just arrived…’
In no time at all the whole cell had been informed.
A few minutes later Dwarf popped out from behind the beds. He leaned against the wall, looking back at the area from which he had just emerged. Eight boys came out from there and stood in front of me. The one in the middle did the talking; he had two tattoos on his hands. I read them and quickly learned that he came from a gang of robbers and belonged to an old family of Siberian Urkas.
‘Well, are you Siberian?’ he asked me in a relaxed tone.
‘Nikolay “Kolima”, from Bender,’ I replied.
‘Really? You’re actually from Transnistria…’ His tone had changed, becoming a little more animated.
‘From Bender, Low River.’
‘I’m Filat White, from Magadan. Come this way, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the family…’