Besides doing this, the boys also passed round the latest news: if you wanted to spread some information around, you only had to offer the boys a little money or a couple of packets of cigarettes and within two or three hours the whole town would know about it. They were also very useful in the struggle against the police: if there were trouble in any district of Bender and the police came to arrest someone, the boys would spread the word and the people concerned would turn out to set the arrested man free or to have a little gunfight with the police, just for the hell of it.
We needed the help of Grandmother Masha’s boys now, to spread the news around town about our inquiries and our honest offer, but we were a little tired, and we were hungry.
When we reached the Whistle, darkness was falling. She welcomed us as she always did, with a smile and kind words, calling us ‘little ones’ and kissing us on both cheeks. To her we were all children, even the older ones. We sat down at a table and she joined us; she always did this with everyone: she would chat a bit before bringing you something to eat. We told her about our disaster; she heard us out, then said she’d already heard the story from her boys. We sat for a while in silence while she, with the cloth she always had in her hands, dried the tears from her wrinkled face. To look at that face you felt as if you were in the presence of the incarnation of Mother Earth.
Grandmother Masha started bringing us cutlery and something to drink. In the meantime we called over one of her boys, a thin little lad with one eye missing and snow-white hair, who was the brightest of them all; his name was ‘Begunok’, which means ‘the one who runs fast’. He was a very serious boy; if he said he would do something you could be sure he would do it. We asked him to spread the word among the people he knew in town, and in particular to go round all the bars where people gathered to drink and hang out together. Mel slipped a packet of cigarettes and a five-dollar bill into his hand, and a second later we heard his bike setting off at top speed.
We ate our supper in silence, with none of our usual lively chatter. I was ravenous but found it very hard to eat. As I chewed the food I felt a pain in my chest. I couldn’t swallow anything without washing it down with alcohol, so before long I was drunk and beginning to get maudlin. The others were in a similar state. Supper went slowly, without enthusiasm. Everyone’s eyes became increasingly glazed, and the atmosphere was really gloomy.
Suddenly, amidst the heavy sighs and whispered moans, one of us started crying, but very softly, ashamed at this manifestation of weakness. It was the youngest of the gang. He was thirteen and his name was Lyocha, nicknamed ‘Grave’ because of his cadaverous appearance: he was thin and always ill, as well as being constantly in a bad mood. He had already tried to hang himself ten times, but had always been saved by one of us. Once he had even tried to shoot himself in the heart with his uncle’s gun, but the bullet had only punctured his lung, further seriously impairing his already poor health. Another time, when blind drunk, he had jumped in the river, trying to drown himself, but hadn’t succeeded because he was a very good swimmer, and the survival instinct had prevailed. The only reason he had never tried to slit his veins was that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood: even in fights he never used a knife, but only hit people with a knuckleduster or an iron bar.
Grave was a boy with a lot of problems, but in spite of everything he fitted in well with our group, and he was like a brother to all of us. His suicidal tendency was like a ghost that lay hidden inside him; none of us could be sure when it would pop out, so he was constantly watched over by an older boy, Vitya, who was nicknamed ‘Cat’, because his mother said that just after he was born their cat Lisa had given birth to four kittens and at night she used to go into his cradle and suckle him, so that, according to his mother, he had become half cat. The two of them, Grave and Cat, always went around together, and their main occupation was fishing and stealing motorboats; they were the experts on the river, they knew all the particular points – where the water was still or swift, where the current swirled back, where the bed was deepest – and always knew with absolute precision where to find the fish, all year round. They never returned from a fishing expedition with empty boats, never.
At parties, and whenever we drank together, a sudden flood of tears from Grave was a sure sign that he would soon try to kill himself: so, in accordance with a rule laid down by us and approved by Grave himself (who when sober, despite all his psychological problems, had a great zest for life), we would take away his drink, and in extreme cases even tie him to his chair with a rope.
So on this occasion too, at the Whistle, while Grave was trying to stop crying, wiping his face with a handkerchief, Gagarin made a sign to Cat, who instantly replaced the bottle of vodka in front of Grave with a fizzy drink called Puppet, a kind of Soviet Coca-Cola. Grave stopped crying and drained the bottle of Puppet, ending with a long, sad burp.
Gagarin was talking to our drivers, Makar, known as ‘Lynx’, and Ivan, known as ‘the Wheel’. They were in their early twenties, and both had just finished a five-year prison sentence. They were bosom pals. Together they had carried out a lot of robberies, and in the last one, after a gunfight with the police, the Wheel had been wounded and Lynx had refused to desert him and so he had been arrested too, because of his loyalty.
During our mission, according to the rules, they couldn’t help us to communicate with the criminals of the various areas of the town, which was a pity: it would have been very useful, since we were all under age, and the criminals who didn’t embrace our Siberian faith took the idea of dealing with juveniles as a personal insult. What Lynx and the Wheel could do was advise us how to behave, how to negotiate with people who obeyed rules different from our own, and how to exploit the peculiarities of each person and each community. It was important, part of our upbringing, this continual relationship between youngsters and adults who explained each individual situation according to the law observed by our elders.
While Gagarin listened to what Lynx and the Wheel had to say to him, the others started talking amongst themselves; perhaps Grave’s crying had woken us all up and somehow helped to make us united and focused again.
Suddenly Mel started telling me a story he always repeated whenever he got drunk, and had done since the age of ten – a childhood fantasy of his. He had met a girl, he claimed, on the river bank, and had promised to take her to the cinema. Then they had made love; and when he reached this point in the story he always commented:
‘It was like screwing a princess.’ Then he would launch into a detailed description of the sex they’d had, Mel depicting himself as a vigorous and expert lover. The story ended with her weeping on his shoulder and asking him to stay a little longer, and him reluctantly having to leave her because he was late for fishing.
It was the most incredible, ridiculous nonsense, but since Mel was a friend I listened to him with feigned interest and genuine patience.
He would talk to me with such rapture that his only eye became as thin as a scar. He would accompany the story with ample gestures of his gigantic hands, and whenever one of his hands passed over the bottle of vodka I would have to grab it, to stop it falling over.
The supper, as always, turned into a drunken binge. We went on and on drinking, and to stop us getting too drunk, Grandmother Masha kept bringing us plates of the food we ate as an accompaniment to vodka.
Shortly before midnight Begunok returned, with some news: a group of boys from the district of Caucasus, during the very hours when Ksyusha had been raped, had seen some strangers wandering about in Centre.