Finally Uncle Fedya put on the table a dish of sweets, perfect for tempering the strong taste of chifir that remained in the mouth. My favourites were those that had the flavour of klyuchva, a very sour berry that grows on small bushes in northern Russia, exclusively in marshy areas. As we ate the sweets we started talking again.
Uncle Fedya said that the people who ran his clubs already knew the whole story, and that if any interesting news had been reported at ‘The Cage’ – the largest and most spectacular disco in town, where large numbers of people went – they would certainly have passed it on to him at once.
Then he laid on the table his financial contribution to the cause. One of the guests immediately imitated him, producing a pack of dollars – no less than ten thousand; and finally, without a word, the Siberian giant with the tattooed face, who was known as ‘Cripple’, added another five thousand.
Uncle Fedya also gave us a couple of tips: he advised us to go back to the district of Bam.
‘It’s hard to have an honest conversation with those people; terror tactics are better,’ he said, winking at me. ‘If you fire a few shots and someone gets killed, it won’t matter; they’d kill each other anyway, sooner or later. If you scare them they’ll actually start doing something, and who knows, in the midst of all the trash that lives there perhaps they’ll find your man.’
He also advised us to put more pressure on the people of Centre; after all, it was partly their fault if the girl had been raped in their territory. In his opinion – and people like the Saint were rarely mistaken – all the leaders of Centre might as well ‘write letters home’ – that is, prepare for a violent clash with the unknown.
Uncle Fedya didn’t approve of Gagarin’s generous decision to give the Centre boys half a day to gather information without the Guardian’s knowledge.
‘For the love of Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘what do we care if the Guardian is angry with them? He’d be perfectly right to be angry, because they’re a bunch of incompetent fools. These people of Centre only think about womanizing and playing cards; they look like gipsies with all the gold they wear, and then, when something happens in their area, they’re left with the shit between their legs, stinking in front of the whole town… No, you go straight to the Guardian now, and tell him that if he doesn’t bring you by this evening the idiots who’ve been causing trouble in his area while he and his men were sleeping, you’ll tell all the Authorities about the matter… They’ll bring them to you on a blue-edged salver, you’ll see…’
While he was saying all this, I was already imagining the scene. We wouldn’t even be allowed to see the Guardian of Centre, let alone rebuke him and threaten him. However, as my late lamented uncle used to say: ‘A person who takes no risks drinks no champagne.’
Thanking Uncle Fedya for his hospitality, his excellent advice and the money for increasing the reward, we went to join the rest of our group so that we could plan our rendezvous with the Centre guys.
We had arranged to meet the others at a bar owned by old Plum, a criminal who hadn’t participated in any criminal activities for a long time and just ran his bar, or rather, sat at a table drinking or eating, while two young girls, his granddaughters, did all the work.
Plum was well known in the town for the life of hardship and suffering that he had led. He wasn’t born into a criminal family: his parents were educated people, intellectuals – his father was a scientist, and his mother taught literature at the University of Moscow. In the late 1930s, when Stalin’s regime unleashed a wave of terror, his parents were arrested and declared enemies of the people. His father was accused of having links with American and British spies, his mother of anti-Soviet propaganda. The whole family, including the two children – Plum, who was twelve at that time, and his sister Lesya, who was only three – were deported to the gulag of Vorkuta.
There the communist comrades, patriots and builders of peace throughout the land, subjected political prisoners to the most inhuman tortures. Plum’s father, who was physically very weak, died in the train from the beatings he had taken, and a bad attack of pneumonia. When they arrived in Vorkuta, the mother and the two children were not separated, but only because the children’s block had not been built yet. They lived in Vorkuta for a long time, seeing many people die around them of cold, disease, parasites, mistreatment and malnutrition.
Plum told how one day he, his sister and his mother had been taken to a place where the so-called ‘special squad of internal investigators’ operated: a gang of butchers who tortured condemned people – not in order to obtain information, but for ‘re-educational’ reasons. The mother was made to strip and to undress her children in front of the guards, after which they had started to beat her, standing the children in a corner and forcing them to watch their mother being tortured. Then those animals took Plum and invented a game: they told him that if his mother didn’t break his sister’s little finger with her own hands, they would break all his fingers, one by one. In a long and terrible process of torture, they broke six of his fingers in front of his mother. He said he had been terrified and kept screaming that he couldn’t stand any more, and eventually his mother, in a fit of madness and desperation, took little Lesya, whom she was holding in her arms, and dashed her head against the wall. Then she tried to kill him too, but the cops managed to stop her and beat her savagely. She was never to leave that block alive.
Plum was thrown outside on the snow to die of cold, with his fingers broken, and half-dead. He said the only thing he had hoped for was to die as soon as possible, so he had started to eat the snow, in order to freeze more quickly. At that time a group of ordinary prisoners were working nearby, cutting wood to build the huts that were needed for the enlargement of the gulag. When they saw the little boy in the snow they picked him up and took him under their protection. The guards turned a blind eye because in the gulags the ordinary prisoners – at least at the beginning, before the Soviet penitentiary system became a kind of perfect mechanism, a production line – were treated differently from the political ones. They were criminals and the administration feared them because they were united and very well organized, and if they wanted to they could start a real rebellion.
So Plum went to live with them in the huts. One of them healed his broken fingers by putting sticks of soft wood along them and carefully binding them on. From that day onwards the criminals looked after him and brought him up. They called him ‘Plum’ because of the colour of his face, which was always blue because he was always cold.
At the age of sixteen Plum became the ‘executor’ of the gang that had found him and taken him in. A war had broken out among the criminals in the camp, between those who supported the old Authorities – who included Plum’s friends – and those who proclaimed themselves to be new Authorities, proposing new rules. The latter were in the majority; they came from the lowest social classes and belonged to the generation of war orphans; they represented a criminal reality which had never been seen before, there or anywhere else in Russia, where characteristics such as ignorance, ferocity and the absence of moral laws were respected. One night Plum and his friends entered the huts of the shigany – the young, unscrupulous criminals – and stabbed them to death as they slept. Before the victims even realized what was happening half the hut had been killed.
Plum killed enormous numbers of people; I may be mistaken, but I suspect that is why he survived. Perhaps he managed to stay sane, despite the terrible trauma of his childhood, by giving vent to his anger in this way. Plum endured many prisons and also lived a long time as a free man, always acting as a criminal executor. He married a good woman and had three sons and two daughters. On his right hand, where they had broken his fingers, he had a tattoo of a skull with a policeman’s hat. On its forehead was written: ‘Az vozdam’, which in the old Russian language means ‘I will avenge myself’.