The Saint has no right to judge other criminals, and must remain neutral in all conflicts, but he may help to resolve them by communicating with all parties without getting personally involved. However, unlike the old Authorities he is allowed to touch money and commit crimes himself.
No one can become a Saint through his own wishes: it is a role that, like all roles in the criminal community, is given to you on the basis of your abilities and your particular talents.
The position of Saint is the rarest of all in the criminal community: in practice it is these men who administer the circulation of funds. It is they who collect the money from all the communities and send it to the prisons, either as cash or in the form of material aid. Consequently, Saints are closely protected.
In the whole of Bender there had only ever been three Saints. The first, Grandfather Dimyan, known as ‘Fur Hat’, died of old age in the late 1980s, and was a Siberian of our district. The second, Uncle Kostya, known as ‘Wood’, also from our district, was killed in a gun battle with the police in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. The third was Uncle Fedya, the last Saint of Bender.
He was a cheerful and very optimistic person; he seemed more like a monk than a criminal. In his youth he had killed three policemen and been condemned to death, but later the sentence had been reduced to life imprisonment. After he had spent thirty years inside a special-regime prison they had released him, judging him to be an ‘individual suitable for reintroduction into society’. He was over fifty by then. Soon he became a Saint. He organized various black market operations with a group of loyal Siberian criminals, and ran a bar. They lived together in the same house, without families: they were completely at the service of the criminal world; they helped people in prison and those who had just been released, and they supported the families of deceased criminals and elderly ones.
If anything happened in town you could be sure Uncle Fedya’s men would know about it. They were also in contact with prisoners held in even the most distant jails, as far away as Siberia, and could get any information they needed extremely quickly.
In view of their position in our society I thought it was very important to tell them what had happened. Even if it didn’t produce any positive leads for our inquiries, it would be a sign of respect on our part, and might win us some secondary assistance in gathering information.
We reached the Saint’s house. It was a kind of tenement block, with a yard and a fine garden full of small tables and benches. In accordance with the old tradition, the front door had been taken off its hinges and thrown on the ground, as a sign that the house was open to all, and indeed there were always guests; people came from all over the USSR to visit the Saint and his friends.
I too had often been a guest in that house, because my father was a good friend of Uncle Fedya’s. They had done business together and shared a passion for pigeons. My father used to give him pigeons because he couldn’t buy anything for himself: the Saint would keep them but say they were my father’s, and if in conversation I should let slip a compliment to one of ‘his’ pigeons, Uncle Fedya would always correct me, saying that those pigeons weren’t his, and that he only kept them because there was no room at our house.
As usual, Uncle Fedya was on the roof, where he kept ‘my father’s pigeons’ in a special shed. He saw me and beckoned to me to come up; I pointed to my companions and he repeated the gesture, inviting us all up. We went indoors and walked up three flights of stairs, greeting everyone we met, until we came to the door that led up to the roof. Before opening it we took off the weapons we were carrying, leaving them on a shelf on which there was a bucket of food for the pigeons. According to the rules, no one may appear before a Saint armed. You can’t even carry a knife, and that should be stressed, because usually the knife is regarded as a cult object, like the cross, which you must always have on you. Even the knife must be laid aside when you meet a Saint, to emphasize each criminal’s position with respect to his power, which is greater than that of force and of money.
While we were leaving our guns and knives, Mel saw me putting Grandfather Kuzya’s Nagant on the shelf. He looked amazed and asked me where I’d got it.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story.’
I opened the little door and at last we went up the narrow stairway that led to the roof. Uncle Fedya was standing there among the pigeons, which were pecking at grains of wheat; he had a pair of pigeons in his hand. I noticed that they were of the Baku breed, so they would be good at flying and especially at ‘hitting’ – that’s what we call the way the males of some breeds have of displaying their agility to attract the attention of the females.
We greeted Uncle Fedya, and my friends introduced themselves. As tradition requires, first I had to talk for a while about matters which had nothing to do with our visit: this is not just a formal rule; it is done to enable you to assess the other person’s state of mind and to judge whether that is the right moment for discussing the matter that is your main concern. So I asked him about his health and made some small talk about pigeons, until he asked me what brought me there.
‘I came for “a bit of a chat”,’ I replied.
In conversation, especially with important figures in the criminal world, it is usual to talk ironically about the problems you need their help in solving. In the same way the Authorities themselves never begin discussions about their life or about some personal question as if they were matters of the greatest importance: they speak of themselves with lightness and humility. For example, if you ask a criminal how his affairs are going, he will answer ironically that his affairs are all under investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s office, and that he is only occupying himself with bagatelles, trifles, matters of no importance.
That is why I was obliged to present our problem rather nonchalantly, saying that I’d come for a ‘bit of a chat’, something of no great consequence.
He smiled and said he already knew what had happened. He asked me to tell him how our inquiries were going. Briefly, and without going into too much detail, I explained the situation to him; he listened calmly and patiently, but now and then he sighed heavily.
When I had finished he stood motionless for a while, thinking it over; then suddenly he said it would be better if we went downstairs and sat at the table and drank some chifir, because ‘it’s hard to find the truth standing up’.
We went downstairs with him. There were already two old criminals sitting at the table, whom Uncle Fedya at once introduced to us. They were guests of his who had come from a little Siberian village on the River Amur.
The tea ceremony began.
Uncle Fedya prepared the chifir himself. All his teeth were dark, almost black: an unmistakable sign of the habitual chifir drinker. After heating the water on the wood stove, he took the chifirbak off the fire, put it on the table and poured a whole packet of Irkutsk tea into it.
As we waited for the chifir to brew, Uncle Fedya recounted our story to his guests, who listened to him sadly. One of the two, a big, strong man with a tattooed face, crossed himself every time Ksyusha’s name was mentioned.
Uncle Fedya poured the chifir into the mug, took three long swigs and passed it on to me. It was strong and boiling hot and ‘caught’ welclass="underline" that’s what we say when the chifir has an immediate effect, giving a slight sensation of light-headedness. We passed the chifir round three times; Mel took the last swig, then washed the mug, as tradition prescribes.