Hedgehog came back straight away. He came over to me, took my hand and placed in it a pike. The pike.
‘This is yours. May the Lord help you and your hand grow strong and sure…’
From the way he looked at me, it was clear that he was happy too.
I looked at my pike and couldn’t believe it was real. It was heavier and bigger than I had imagined.
I released the safety catch by lowering a little lever, and then pressed the button. The sound of the knife opening was music to my ears; it was as if the metal had given voice. The blade flicked out sharply, in a split second, with immense force, and at once remained firm and straight, steady and fixed. It was shocking: this strange object, which when closed had seemed like some sort of writing implement from the turn of the century, was now a beautiful, graceful weapon, with a certain nobility and allure.
The haft was made of black bone – that’s what we call the antlers of the red deer, which are dark brown, almost black – with an inlay of white bone, in the form of an Orthodox cross, in the middle. And it was so long I had to hold it with both hands, like the sword of the medieval knights. The blade, too, was very long, sharp on one side and polished till it gleamed. It was a fantastic weapon and I felt as if I were in heaven.
From that day on, my authority among my friends shot up. For a week I received visits from swarms of little boys who came from all over the district to see my pike; my house had become a kind of sacred shrine, and they were the pilgrims. My grandfather would let them into the yard and offer everyone cold drinks. My grandmother would hardly have time to make some kvas before it was all gone, so I spread the word that anyone who wanted to come and see the first six-year-old boy to be the proud owner of a real pike had to bring something to drink with him.
I was very flattered and proud of myself, but after a while a strange form of depression came over me; I was tired of telling the same story a hundred times a day and showing the pike to everyone. So I went to see Grandfather Kuzya, as I did whenever I had a problem or felt depressed.
Grandfather Kuzya was an elderly criminal who lived in our district in a small house by the river. He was a very strong old man; he still had a full head of black hair and was covered all over with tattoos, even on his face. Usually he took me into the garden to show me the river, and told me fairy tales and various stories about the criminal community. He had a powerful voice, but spoke in a quiet, languid way, so that his voice seemed to be coming from far away, not from inside him. Down the left side of his wrinkled face ran a long scar, a souvenir of his criminal youth. But the most striking thing about him was his eyes. They were blue, but a dirty, muddy blue, with a hint of green; they seemed not to belong to his body, not to be part of it. They were deep, and when he turned them on you, calmly and without agitation, it was as if they were X-raying you – there was something really hypnotic about his gaze.
Well, I went to see him and told him the whole story, making it clear that I was pleased to have the pike, but that my friends treated me differently from before. Even my good friend Mel, who was ‘hewn with the same axe’ as me, as we say, behaved as if I were some kind of religious icon.
Grandfather Kuzya laughed, but not unkindly, and told me I clearly wasn’t cut out to be a celebrity. Then he gave me one of his long lectures. He advised me to do whatever came naturally. He told me that the fact of having a pike didn’t make me different from the others, that I had simply been lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and that if Our Lord had so willed it I must be ready for the responsibility he had given me. After his talk, as always, I felt better.
Grandfather Kuzya taught me the old rules of criminal behaviour, which in recent times he had seen change before his very eyes. He was worried, because, he said, these things always began with small details which seemed to be trivial, but the end result was a total loss of identity. To help me understand this he often told me a Siberian fairy tale, a kind of metaphor, designed to show how men who lead the wrong kind of life because they are led astray end up losing their dignity.
The tale was about a pack of wolves who were in trouble because they had had nothing to eat for ages. The old wolf who was the leader of the pack tried to reassure his companions – he asked them to be patient and to wait, because sooner or later herds of wild boar or deer would come along, and then they would be able to hunt to their hearts’ content and would at last fill their stomachs. One young wolf, however, was not prepared to wait, and started looking for a quick solution to the problem. He decided to leave the woods and go to ask men for food. The old wolf tried to stop him. He said that if he accepted food from men he would change and would no longer be a wolf. But the young wolf wouldn’t listen. He replied bluntly that if you needed to fill your stomach it was pointless to follow strict rules – the important thing was to fill it. And off he went towards the village.
The men fed him on their leftovers whenever he asked. But every time the young wolf filled his stomach and thought of going back to the woods to join the others he would get drowsy. So he put off his return until eventually he completely forgot the life of the pack, the pleasure of the hunt and the excitement of sharing the prey with his companions.
He began to go hunting with the men, to help them, instead of the wolves with whom he had been born and raised. One day, during the hunt, a man shot an old wolf, which fell to the ground, wounded. The young wolf ran towards him to take him back to his master, and while he was trying to get hold of him with his teeth he realized that it was his old pack leader. He felt ashamed, and didn’t know what to say. It was the old wolf who filled the silence with his last words:
‘I have lived my life like a worthy wolf, I have hunted a lot and shared many prey with my brothers, so now I die happy. But you will live your life in shame, and alone, in a world to which you do not belong, for you have rejected the dignity of a free wolf to have a full stomach. You have become unworthy. Wherever you go, you will be treated with contempt; you belong neither to the world of wolves nor to that of men… This will teach you that hunger comes and goes, but dignity, once lost, never returns.’
That concluding speech was my favourite part of the story, because the old wolf’s words were a true distillation of our criminal philosophy, and as Grandfather Kuzya spoke those words he reflected in them his own experience, his way of seeing and understanding the world.
The words returned to my mind a few years later, when a train was taking me to a juvenile prison. A guard decided to hand round some pieces of salami. We were hungry, and many threw themselves greedily on that salami to devour it. I refused it; a boy asked me why and I told him the story of the unworthy wolf. He didn’t understand me, but when we reached our destination the guard who had distributed the salami announced in the main yard, in front of everyone, that before giving it to us he had dipped it in the toilet.
As a result, according to the criminal rule, all those who had eaten it had been ‘tainted’ and had therefore fallen to the lowest caste of the criminal community, and would automatically be despised by all, even before they got into the prison. This was one of the tricks the cops often played, to use the criminal rules as a weapon against the criminals themselves. These tricks were most successful with youngsters, who often didn’t know that an honest criminal is not allowed to accept anything from a cop. As my late lamented uncle used to say: