He had been with some friends, including three Armenian boys, one of whom ran a flower stall in the market, not far from there. They had been standing near the phone boxes – where people often arrange to meet – when they had seen about ten youngsters, drunk or high on drugs, pestering a girl, trying to pick a quarrel in a rough and threatening way. One of the Armenians had asked them to stop it and leave her alone, but they had insulted him, and one had even shown him his gun, telling him to get lost.
‘At that point,’ said Mino, ‘we decided to back off. It’s true, we left the girl in the hands of those thugs, but only because we weren’t sure who they were. We were worried they might turn out to have links with the people of Centre, and you never know, they might have closed down my friend’s flower stall…’
Judging from Mino’s description, though, the girl didn’t sound like our Ksyusha.
Meanwhile the waitress had brought to our table some Georgian wine with some of their traditional bread, which is baked in a special way, spread on the walls of the oven. It was delicious, and we drank and ate with relish, together with Mino, talking about all sorts of things. Including our relationship with the Georgians.
He said we were right, and that his fellow-countrymen had behaved shamefully, like traitors.
‘Besides, we’re all Christians, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘We all believe in Jesus Christ. We’re all criminals, too, and the criminal law applies to everyone – Georgians, Siberians and Armenians…’
He told us the Georgian community had recently split in two. One part supported a rich young Georgian of noble blood who liked to be called ‘the Count’. This Count spread a hatred of the Russians and forbade Georgians to marry Russians and Armenians, to preserve the purity of the race. Mino called him ‘Hitler’, and was very angry with him; he said he had weakened the whole community. The rest of the Georgians supported an old criminal whom we also knew, because he often came to Low River: Grandfather Vanò. He was a wise man; he had spent a long time in prison in Siberia and was highly respected by the criminal community. It was mainly the old folk who liked him. He wasn’t so popular among the young because he stopped them living a life of pleasure and opposed nationalism, which the boys didn’t like at all.
From Mino’s account we understood that the situation was more difficult than it might seem at first sight, because the division cut across families, and many sons, brothers and fathers had lined up on opposite sides of the barricade. A war in those conditions was impossible, so everything was in a state of suspense, which according to Mino was even more dangerous than open warfare.
At a certain point five people came into the restaurant. They were young – no more than twenty-five years old – and they spoke to Mino in Georgian. He got up at once and went over to them.
They seemed pretty angry, and a couple of times I saw them point at us. At first they all talked at once, then their leader started speaking, a thin boy with eyes that popped out of their orbits whenever he raised his voice.
Mino, however, was calm; he leaned against the counter with a glass of wine in his hand and listened to them, looking at the floor with an indifferent expression.
The leader suddenly stopped talking, and all five of them left. Then Mino hurried over to our table and explained to us in an agitated voice that they were young members of the Count’s gang:
‘They said if you don’t leave the district at once they’ll come back in numbers and kill you.’
After Mino’s warm welcome this threat seemed unreal.
Before getting up from the table, Speechless, one of our group, said:
‘I’d be prepared to bet my right hand they’ve set an ambush for us outside.’
Speechless was so nicknamed because he hardly ever spoke, but when he did speak he always said true things. Once I spent three days fishing with him, and in three days he didn’t utter a sound, I swear it, not one.
Gagarin gave the signal to get ready to leave the bar. Everyone put their hands under the table and there was a sound of pistols being cocked one after the other.
We took our leave of Mino. He begged us to use the security exit, but we went through the front door, the way we’d come in.
In the square outside the bar there were about fifteen people waiting for us, gathered under the street light.
Mel and Gagarin stepped forward; I walked behind them with Speechless, then came the others. I saw Mel pull out his Tokarev and at the same time Gagarin hide the hand holding his Makarov behind his back. I was clutching Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant in my jacket pocket.
They were blocking our way towards the cars. Our drivers had got out and were smoking casually, sitting on the bonnets.
We stopped a few metres short of the Georgians.
The thin boy, their leader, came forward to challenge us:
‘You’re finished. There’s no escape for you.’
He spoke with great confidence. In his hands I saw a pistol, and behind him there was another guy with a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘If you don’t want any trouble, you only have one chance: lay down your arms and surrender.’
Then he started joking:
‘Aren’t you a bit young to be playing with guns?’
Quite unperturbed, Gagarin explained to him the reason for our visit, and stressed that it had nothing to do with relations between the Georgians and the Siberians.
‘And anyway,’ Gagarin reminded him, ‘according to the criminal law, in cases like this even wars are suspended.’
He recalled a case in St Petersburg, where because of a hunt for a paedophile who was raping and killing young children a bloody war between two gangs – from the district of Ligovka and the island of Vasilev – had stopped, and the two sides had joined forces to search for the maniac.
The Georgians were rather confused now.
I noticed that while Gagarin was talking to their leader many of them had lowered their weapons, and their expressions had become rather pensive.
The Georgian, however, didn’t give up.
‘Well, in that case,’ he asked suddenly, ‘why didn’t you speak to our Guardian? Why did you come here in secret, like snakes?’
On the one hand he was right: we should have gone to see their Guardian, because making inquiries behind his back was against the criminal regulations. But he was overlooking two things.
First, we were juveniles, and according to the law nothing could be ‘asked’ of us: only other juveniles could ‘ask’ us, adults had no power over us. Out of respect and for our personal pleasure we could choose to obey the rules and the criminal law of the adults, but until we came of age we would not be part of the criminal community. If a Guardian had reported our case to an old Authority, the latter would have laughed in his face: in cases like this the Siberians usually say:
‘Boys are like cats – they go wherever they want.’
The second mistake the Georgian had made was much more serious, and showed that he was inexperienced in negotiations and quite incapable of using criminal diplomacy. He had insulted us.
An insult is regarded by all communities as an error typical of people who are weak and unintelligent, lacking in criminal dignity. To us Siberians, any kind of insult is a crime; in other communities some distinctions can be made, but in general an insult is the quickest route to the blade of a knife.
An insult to an individual may be ‘approved’: that is to say, if I have insulted someone and they take me before an old Authority, I will have to explain to him the reason why I did it, and he will decide how I will be punished. Punishment is inflicted in any case, but if the insult is approved, they don’t kill me or ‘lower’ me; I remain myself and get off with a warning. An insult is approved if you utter it for personal reasons and in a non-serious form: for example, if you call someone who has damaged your property an ‘arsehole’. If, however, you offended the name of his mother, they are quite likely to kill you.