When the warder had finished reading out the names on the list, the disgusting voice of Crocodile Zhena rang out:
‘Well, are we all here? March, in single file!’
So we saw them leave the cell. For two days we heard nothing. Expectation hung in the air; nobody mentioned it, but many were worried about what might have happened.
During the night of the third day, when we were all asleep, the doors opened and the Little Thieves came in. The guards forbade us to get up and, sticking our heads out from the bunks, we tried to see what state they were in. When the doors closed, the groans started. Some of them cried, others talked out loud, saying senseless things.
I noticed that the first thing many of them did was to take a towel and go to wet it under the tap. Then I saw two of them pass between the bunks: they were holding the wet towel under their pants, against their backsides. Some of them started to quarrel about the toilet:
‘Let me through, let me through! I can’t wait any longer, I’m bleeding…’
Our boys laughed:
‘Look at the fucking queers run!’
‘They wanted to fuck him in the arse, didn’t they? Well, if you give it you’ve got to take it…’
‘Yeah! What kind of queer would you be otherwise? A semi-queer?’
‘Hey, look at that one! They certainly gave him a good buggering!’
‘He deserved it, the bastard, the fucking pansy…’
Our Filat White got up from his bed and shouted out:
‘You’re all contaminated! Go and sleep in the corner by the door! It disgusts us to have you anywhere near us!’
None of the Little Thieves dared to talk back, they were scared; they must have really been through it. They picked up their things and obediently moved into the corner by the door.
‘Hey, look at that, a migration of queers!’ said another of our group. And we all laughed.
The next day, putting together the rumours that were going round and the scraps of conversation between the Little Thieves, we reconstructed the whole story. Crocodile Zhena had taken them down to the first floor, to the room that was used for meetings with relatives: a large bedroom, with a number of beds, where visiting parents could stay for a day and a night with their children. There they’d been raped for two and a half days by Crocodile Zhena’s friends, who had also filmed the whole thing with a videocamera. It was said that they had rammed a bottle into Fish, and consequently lacerated his anus, and those of a few others, till it bled.
From that moment Fish became a kind of shadow; he moved around the room silently and always looked at the floor. He went to the toilet at night, and by day tried never to leave his bunk.
The Little Thieves mainly took advantage of boys who were defenceless and frightened. Usually they took them, by threats or force, into their ‘black corner’, a block of bunks on which they lived, and there performed the most sophisticated and terrible tortures in front of the others.
They raped someone almost every day; afterwards they would beat the boy up and make him dance on the floor stark naked, with a paper tube stuck up his anus. First they would set fire to the tube, then they would tell the poor bastard to dance. That ritual even had a name: ‘calling a little devil out of hell’. Every torture had a name, almost always a humorous one.
‘The battle with the rabbit’, for example, went like this: the poor bastard in question was stood in front of a wall on which there was a drawing of a rabbit wearing boxing gloves, and he had to hit it as hard as he could. They would all shout ‘Go on! Harder!’ at the tops of their voices. The victim would hit the wall and in a few minutes his hands would be a bloody mess. Then the others would force him to hit the wall with his head and his legs, threatening him:
‘Go on, you pansy, what are you scared of? It’s only a stupid rabbit! Hit it harder – with your leg, with your head! Hit it, or we’ll rip your arse open like a rag!’
And the poor devil would be exhausted, then they’d force him to throw his whole body at the rabbit, but usually he would collapse before then, and pass out from the pain. Then they would leave him there on the floor, saying:
‘You’re a wuss, a sissy! You’re useless! You let a rabbit beat you up, do you realize that? When you come to, we’ll make you into a pretty little girl!’
That was how the Little Thieves sowed fear and chaos among the inmates.
Another torture was ‘the flight of Gagarin’: the victim was forced to throw himself off the highest bunk holding his feet with his hands, forming a kind of ball with his body. Sometimes they would wrap a towel round his head to ‘protect’ him at the moment of impact, but nevertheless this torture would end with broken bones, and the hapless victim would go straight to hospital.
Then there was ‘the Ghost’: they would force someone to go round with a blanket over his head for a couple of days. Anyone could go up to him and hit him at any moment, and he had to reply every time:
‘I can’t feel a thing, because I’m a ghost.’
Usually they hit him with something hard, preferably the tea kettle, with a bag of sugar inside it to make it even heavier. Once in a cell near ours they killed a boy by hitting him too hard on the head. The next day, during the recreation hour, they boasted about it in the courtyard; I heard them with my own ears say, laughing:
‘The ghost was too weak.’
The staff let all acts of violence between juveniles pass as accidents. There were an incredible number of boys who ‘fell out of their bunks in their sleep’; many of them died, some were left permanently disabled.
Nobody dared to tell the truth.
We Siberians were opposed to any manifestation of sexual perversion, bullying and unmotivated violence, so whenever one of us saw that the Little Thieves were about to torture someone, we would start a serious fight, which sometimes ended very badly.
In our cell the Little Thief who dominated all the weaker ones was a really sadistic bastard nicknamed ‘Bulgarian’. He was the son of a Black Seed criminal and the younger brother of a Blatnoy. Bulgarian was quite a thin little boy, more or less like me, except that I did gym and was quite active, whereas he smoked and was always loafing around, so he looked like a little mummy. His skin was a very strange colour, like that of patients suffering from hepatitis, so we Siberians called him ‘Yellow’, not ‘Bulgarian’.
When Bulgarian arrived in our cell the Little Thieves started telling stories about him, to build up the legend. For a week his name was always at the centre of every conversation – Bulgarian here and Bulgarian there – and everything in the world was either him or in some way connected with his legendary figure. We Siberians said to each other:
‘Another bastard, for sure. Let’s just hope he’s not a troublemaker…’
Two weeks after his arrival, Bulgarian managed to pick a quarrel with the Armenians, calling them ‘Black Arses’ (that’s what the Russian nationalists often called anyone who came from the Caucasus and had a darker skin); he shouted that he would use his connections in the criminal world to have them all killed. He was a clown, a spoilt child, who had clearly never seen anything apart from the view from his father’s knees, which he had never got down from until he went to prison.
The Armenians told us about the incident, and we assured them of all our support in the event of a fight, guaranteeing the support of the Siberian community outside the prison as well. We knew that sooner or later the situation between us and the Little Thieves would lead to a war; we were just waiting for the right moment and, above all, an opportunity. They would have to make a mistake, because if we wanted to go through with it and have the backing of our elders, we would have to give them a serious reason which was approved by the Siberian criminal law. This too made us different from them. The Little Thieves could pick on anyone who didn’t belong to their community, infringe the rules of behaviour or do other far more serious things, and they were always supported by the people of Black Seed: confident of their protection, they stopped at nothing. We, by contrast, had a very strict law: any mistake that was made, any insult to a person considered honest by our community, had to be punished. No one, neither a relative nor a friend, would dream of protecting someone who had broken the law.