Insults are forgiven if they are uttered in a state of rage or desperation, when a person is blinded by deep grief – for example, if his mother or father or a close friend dies. In such cases the question of justice is not even mentioned; he is judged to have been ‘beside himself’, and there the matter ends.
Insults are not approved, however, in a quarrel that arises from gambling or criminal activities, or in matters of the heart, or in relations between friends: in all these cases the use of swear-words and offensive phrases usually means certain death.
But the most serious insult of all is that known as baklanka, when a group or a whole community is insulted. No explanations are accepted: you deserve either death or ‘lowering’ – a permanent transfer to the community of the lowered, the tainted, like the people who lived in the district of Bam.
So from childhood onwards we learned to ‘filter words’, and always to keep a check on what came out of our mouths, so as not to make a mistake, even unwittingly. For according to the Siberian rule, a word that has flown can never return.
The insult the Georgian had thrown at us was quite a serious one: he had said ‘you have come like snakes’, so he had offended us all.
So we performed the typical scene known in slang as ‘purchase’. This is one of the many tricks that are used among criminals to conclude a negotiation favourably; we Siberians are adept at these tricks. The principle of the ‘purchase’ is that of convincing your adversary that he is in the wrong and making him yield little by little, until you utterly terrorize him and take complete control of the situation, which in slang is termed ‘purchasing’.
Our whole gang, following Gagarin’s example, turned their backs on the Georgians. This gesture rendered them powerless, because it meant we had deprived them of all rights of criminal communication, even that of starting a fight.
It is normal to turn your back on people who are described as ‘garbage’, policemen or informers – those you despise so much you think they don’t even deserve a bullet. But if you turn your back on another criminal, it’s a different matter. You’re sending a definite signal. You’re telling him his behaviour has cost him his criminal dignity.
On the other hand, turning your back is always a risk. A true criminal will never attack someone who has his back to him, but if the person is not familiar with criminal relations, or if he’s treacherous, you might get a bullet in the back.
As we stood there with our backs turned, Gagarin explained to the Georgians that they had committed a serious error of conduct: they had insulted the juveniles of another district while they were carrying out a task that their community regarded as sacred, a task that must be respected by every criminal community.
‘I renounce the responsibility of holding negotiations with you,’ he added. ‘If you want to shoot us in the back, go ahead. Otherwise, withdraw. In the next few days we’ll present the question to the Authorities of Low River and ask for justice.’
Gagarin concluded with a master-stroke: he asked what their names were. In so doing he underlined another error committed by the Georgians, which was less serious but quite significant. Dignified criminals introduce themselves, exchange greetings and wish each other every blessing even before they start killing each other.
The Georgian spokesman didn’t reply at once: it was clear that the purchase was working. Then he introduced himself as the brother of another man, a young criminal very close to the Count, and said:
‘I’ll let you go this time, but only because I don’t want to complicate relations between our communities, which are already difficult enough.’
‘Well,’ Gagarin rebuked him sardonically, ‘I think you’ve already done enough to worsen the situation – for yourself and for your superiors.’
Without saying goodbye to them we walked towards our cars.
When we left they were still there under the street lamp, talking among themselves. Evidently they still couldn’t understand what had happened.
But it would all become clear very soon.
Three days later, to be precise, when Gagarin, Mel, Speechless and I made a formal ‘request’ to Grandfather Kuzya for the insult to the group and threats.
After diplomatic negotiations with the criminals of various areas of the town, those louts were punished by the Georgians themselves, who were tired of the burden of being boycotted by the communities of other districts. I know for a fact that some people of Centre threatened to close all the shops the Georgians owned in their area.
The thin boy who had spoken to us vanished into thin air. Some said he had been buried in a double grave: that was how troublesome corpses were hidden, by putting them in the same grave with another person. It was a certain way of making people disappear. The grave of one ordinary old man might contain several people who had been given up for lost by their community.
Leaving Caucasus, we headed for Centre, where we wanted to get some more information about the strangers who had been seen by Mino and his friends. We needed to find out if they had anything to do with our own sad case.
The road from Caucasus to the heart of Bender passed through a district called Balka, which in Russian simply means ‘wooden beam’, but in criminal slang means ‘graveyard’. It had earned that name because it was the former site of the old cemetery of the Polish Jews. The Jewish quarter, my grandfather told me, had grown up around the cemetery and then expanded, from the 1930s onwards.
I could never go through Balka without remembering a beautiful and terrible story which my grandfather used to tell me. And which I will now tell you.
The spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Balka was an old man called Moisha. According to the legend he was the first Jew to arrive in Transnistria, and through his character and his strong personality he had earned everyone’s respect. He had three sons and one daughter, who was, as we say, ‘preparing for marriage’ – that is, she was a young woman who had no other social task than that of looking after the house and learning how to obey her future husband, bring up his children and, as we say, ‘cough into her fist’ – that is, show total submission.
The rabbi’s daughter was called Zilya, and she was a really beautiful girl, with big blue eyes. She helped her mother run a draper’s shop in Centre, and many a customer would enter simply for the joy of spending a few moments in her company. Numerous Jewish families had asked the rabbi to give her in marriage to their sons, but he wouldn’t accept any of them, because many years earlier, when Zilya was only a baby, he had promised her hand to a young man of Odessa, the son of a friend of his.
It was customary among Jews to make arranged marriages, on the initiative of the fathers of families that were interested in uniting their stock; on these sad occasions the bride and bridegroom knew nothing of each other, and they rarely agreed with their parents’ choice, but they didn’t dare to contradict them, and above all they didn’t dare to break the traditions: for anyone who did so would be permanently expelled from the community. So they accepted their destiny with heavy hearts, and their whole life would become an eternal tragedy. It was such a well-known custom that even we Siberians used to joke among ourselves about the unhappiness of Jewish women, calling any hopeless and sad situation a ‘Jewish wife’.