About ten days later we returned home.
I tied my boat to the jetty. It was a beautiful day – warm, even though a bit windy. I left everything in the boat – the bag containing my soap, toothbrush and toothpaste. I even left my sandals there: I wanted to walk with nothing to encumber me. I felt good, as you feel when you’re aware of being really free.
I set my eight-gored hat askew on the right side of my head and put my hands in my pockets, my right hand touching my flick-knife. I picked a sprig from an aromatic herb on the river bank and clenched it between my teeth.
And so, barefoot in the company of my friends, at a relaxed pace I set off for home.
Already in the first street of our district we realized that something was wrong: people were coming out of the houses, the women with little children in their arms were walking behind the men, and an immense line of people had formed. Following the crowd and increasing our pace we caught up with the end of the queue and immediately asked what had happened. Aunt Marfa, a middle-aged woman, the wife of a friend of my father’s, replied with a very scared, almost terrified expression on her face:
‘My sons, what a dreadful thing has befallen us, what a dreadful thing… The Lord is punishing us all…’
‘What’s happened, Aunt Marfa? Has somebody died?’ asked Mel.
She looked at him with a grief-stricken expression on her face and said something I’ll never forget:
‘I swear to you by Jesus Christ that even when my son died in prison I didn’t feel so bad…’
Then she started crying and muttering something, but it was incomprehensible; we only caught a few words, ‘residue of an abortion’ – a very bad insult for us, because as well as offending the person who is called that it offends the name of the mother, who according to Siberian tradition is sacred.
When one woman, a mother, insults the name of another mother, it means that the person at whom that insult is aimed has done something really horrible.
What was going on? We were bewildered.
On top of that, a few seconds later all the women in the procession started screaming, crying and uttering curses together with Aunt Marfa. The men, as Siberian law prescribes, let them scream but kept calm themselves: only the angry expressions on their faces, and the narrow slits of their eyes, near-closed with rage, indicated their state of mind.
Uncle Anatoly came over to Aunt Marfa. He was an old criminal who as a young man had lost his left eye in a fight and was consequently nicknamed ‘Cyclops’. He was tall and sturdy and never wore a bandage over that hole where his eye had once been: he preferred to show everyone that terrible black void.
Cyclops had the job of looking after Aunt Marfa and taking care of her family, while her husband, who was his best friend, was in jail. That’s the custom among Siberian criminals: when a man has to serve a long prison sentence, he asks a friend, a person he trusts, to help his family to make ends meet, check that his wife doesn’t cheat on him with another man (something almost impossible in our community) and watch over his children’s upbringing.
Embracing Aunt Marfa, Cyclops tried to calm her down, but she kept on screaming louder and louder, and the other women did the same. So the little children started crying too, and then the slightly older ones joined in.
It was hellish: I felt like crying myself, though I still didn’t know the reason for all this despair.
Cyclops looked at us, and realized from our faces that nobody had told us yet. He murmured in a sad and angry voice:
‘Ksyusha’s been raped… Boys, this is a world of bastards!’
‘Be quiet, Anatoly, don’t make Our Lord even angrier!’ said Grandfather Filat, a very old criminal whom everyone called ‘Winter’, though I never understood why.
It was said that when he was a boy Filat had robbed Lenin himself. He and his gang had stopped a car carrying Lenin and some senior members of the party on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Lenin, the story went, had refused to hand over his car and money to the robbers, so Winter had hit him on the head, and the shock had given Lenin his famous tic of involuntarily turning his head to the left. I was always very sceptical about this story – goodness knows how much truth there was in it – but it was amusing to see grown people telling these tales in the belief that they were true.
Anyway, Winter was an old Authority, and whenever he expressed his opinion everyone took notice. It was his job to rebuke Cyclops, because he had spoken too angrily, blurting out blasphemies which a well-bred Siberian criminal should never utter.
‘Who are you, my boy, to call this world “a world of bastards”? It was created by Our Lord, and there are plenty of just men in it too. Surely you wouldn’t want to insult all of them? Mind your words, because once they have flown they never come back.’
Cyclops hung his head.
‘It is true,’ went on Grandfather Filat, ‘that a great misfortune and injustice has befallen us; we have failed to protect the angel of Our Lord, and now He will make us pay for it. Perhaps you yourself will be given a long prison sentence tomorrow, someone will be killed by the cops, someone else will lose his faith in the Mother Church… Retribution awaits us all, for we all share in the sin. I too, old as I am, will be punished in some way. But now is not the time to lose our heads; we must show the Lord that we are attentive to His signals, we must help Him to accomplish his justice…’ The rest of Winter’s speech I missed, because I had dashed off towards Ksyusha’s house.
All the doors and windows were wide open.
Aunt Anfisa was wandering around the house like a ghost: her face was white, her eyes swollen from weeping, her hands shaking so much they transmitted their tremor to the whole of the rest of her body. She didn’t scream or say anything; she just kept emitting a long-drawn-out whine, like that of a dog in pain.
To see her standing in front of me in that state scared me. I was paralysed for a moment, then she came towards me and with her trembling hands clutched my face. She looked at me, weeping, and whispering something whose meaning I couldn’t understand. At the same time, I couldn’t hear anything; in my ears there was a growing noise like a whistle, like when you swim underwater, going further and further down. I had a violent headache; I closed my eyes, squeezing my temples as hard as I could, and at that moment I understood the question Aunt Anfisa kept whispering to me:
‘Why?’
Simply a short, sharp ‘Why?’
I felt sick; I had lost all sensation in my feet. I lost all my strength; it must have been obvious I wasn’t well, because as I tried to walk to Ksyusha’s room I noticed two of my friends holding me up with their arms round my waist, gripping my elbows. Step by step I realized I was swaying, as if drunk; a new pain had appeared in my chest, I felt a weight in my heart and lungs, and couldn’t breathe. Everything was whirling around me; I tried to focus my gaze, but the carousel I had in my head was going faster, ever faster… suddenly, though, I managed to catch the image of Ksyusha. It was blurred, but shocking in its very imprecision: she was lying on the bed like a newborn baby, with her knees tucked right up to her face and her arms wrapped around them. Closed, completely closed. I wanted to see her face, I wanted to stop my head spinning, but I couldn’t control myself; I saw a bright light and lost consciousness, falling into the arms of my friends.