Sidorov continued to offer his saw for six years. In the end people got to know him and he grew careless, accosting officers when he was already drunk. Finally he was arrested and sent to camp. But he was a born actor and the way I saw it he earned his drinks.
Like Sidorov and Kalinin, plenty of beggars earn their money through guile, but most play on pity. It is simpler and yields good results. I know that almost every human being is capable of feeling pity — perhaps even Cannibal — but I can’t bring myself to exploit this feeling.
For my part, I admit I often earn my drinks through wit. I try to entertain, even when I don’t feel like it. I survive by making people laugh. In a way my crippled leg helps because no one feels threatened by me.
Yet there is a difference between singing for your supper and holding out your hand for it. I fear begging as a way of life. It might be too easy. If I drop anchor outside some church or bazaar I might never return to a normal existence. And I still entertain hopes in that direction. Hope is the last to die and I clutch at it, sustained by memories of the past.
The evening is dark and rainy. When Borya arrives we take shelter in a half-constructed building near the park. I gather some rubbish and make a small bonfire. We spread newspapers on the cement floor and sit talking. I get completely pissed but Borya drinks nothing. He has a hot-water bottle tied to his thigh and urine trickles into it almost constantly. This embarrasses him so he tries not to drink, even refusing water.
Borya tells me more about his life. “Once I went to a public library in Leningrad to try to read something on begging, but I was disappointed. No one writes the truth. They slide over the surface of the question. Perhaps because they never write from the point of view of the beggar. Not even Dostoevsky. As for Tolstoy, he was a great sham. He went out punctually every day to give alms but before he would part with a kopeck he took away the beggar’s very soul with his nosy questioning.
“The truth is, when I beg I inspire pity, and pity is always a blessing, no matter how dirty the soul in which it springs,” Borya concludes.
“I can’t agree with you,” I say. “Pity is a good and natural emotion, but do you remember Yesenin’s lines: arousing tears in my heart is like throwing stones at the glass of my watch? Only a wretch would deliberately try to awaken a person’s compassion. It’s a cheap thing to do.”
Yet I can’t criticise Borya for I realise that my way of life is essentially no different to his. The only distinction between us is that I don’t see myself as a person who does good to others. Anyone who does good becomes a slightly better person himself, but if you plan in advance to do good then the deed loses all its grace. If I do good, then let it be by accident. Most likely I do no good at all in this world, and I certainly won’t do so by begging.
Our divergent views spring from a more fundamental difference. “Borya,” I observe, “you believe in God, but I don’t. If there was a God there would be justice, and as there’s none in this world, so there can be no God.”
Borya objects: “But you can’t judge God by your own standards of right and wrong. It is impossible to comprehend God. You simply have to believe.”
“I can’t ‘simply believe’ when life is so unfair. Why was I born here, now, in a country where it makes no difference which side of the barbed wire you are on? Why did you fall under a train?”
“Humanity doesn’t yet have the wisdom to test whether there is justice or not,’ Marcus Aurelius said that almost twenty centuries ago.”
“Well that was 2,000 years ago.”
“That only proves his point — the time has not yet come.”
Borya and I arrange to meet the following evening but we miss each other and I never see him again.
I board the No. 5 tram on Klara Zetkin street. A man offers me his seat but I shake my head. When the tram moves I take off my beret and turn to the passengers.
As I finish my verse the passengers burst out laughing. The words strike home, because no one can afford to live on their pay, not even the police. A woman holds out a 20 kopeck piece and asks: “You’ll be getting yourself a beer with that, I suppose?”
“Not only beer but vodka too!”
She puts the coin back in her purse, finds a rouble and gives it to me. When I’ve worked the whole tram I get off, board the next one and repeat the performance. By the time I reach Collective Farm Square I have nearly 20 roubles. Some people grumble that I am just collecting money for my hair-of-the-dog, but I’m not offended. It’s up to them whether they give or not. I’m not greedy. Having collected a little money I throw in the towel, buy a bottle and continue to drink throughout the day, inviting anyone who wishes to join me. I have no shortage of companions.
At night I open a bottle to see me through till morning. As I swallow my wine I am struck by guilt over the way I’ve earned it. The cycle of self-recrimination spins round my head as I try to fall asleep. ‘What are you living for?’ I wonder.
Next day I go to work on the tram again, and the next. Begging becomes a way of life that I no longer stop to consider. The police catch me a couple of times, but they either laugh at my verses or throw me off the tram.
Begging is not always as easy as it was that first day. Sometimes the trams are so packed I can’t move among the passengers; sometimes they’re too empty to be worth boarding. Then it rains for nearly three weeks. I freeze and fall ill. For a while I sleep at the top of a lift shaft in an eight-storey block of flats. I crawl up after midnight but I am eventually discovered by a resident who threatens to call the police.
My clothes are filthy and ragged, my shoes split, and I never have enough money for a new pair. I am desperately tired of spending the whole day on my feet. I long for a good night’s sleep but the cops drive me out of the railway station and it’s impossible to take a nap on the short Tblisi underground. Thank God for the bathhouse. It allows me to reheat my bones, but I can’t linger for too long or they might throw me out and bar me from future visits.
Although I’m drinking a lot, alcohol is having less effect on me. Soon I need two or three bottles of fortified wine just to see me through the night, otherwise I can’t even drop off for half an hour. When sleep comes it is crowded with nightmares.
There is a slope between the road and the river where townspeople tip their rubbish. In this place of unimaginable filth I can sometimes find unbroken bottles. The wine shop exchanges these for a bottle of Rkatseli.
At the top of the slope there is a small overhang. It gives me shelter and I’m unseen from the road. Here I huddle at night. The rubbish below me reeks of rotten meat and excrement, but the smell hardly bothers me. I lean back against the earth, with an open bottle between my legs, smoking and taking a swig of wine as soon as I start to feel bad. For months I have derived no pleasure at all from alcohol, but I need it to ward off the dt’s.
When I’ve emptied my bottle I drag myself out of my lair and shuffle down to Klara Zetkin street. There, in a courtyard behind a little gate, is the ‘fountain of life,’ open 24 hours a day for the suffering and the greedy. When I open the gate the house-dogs barely stir; they must be used to night-time callers. I stumble through the courtyard and up a couple of steps to a veranda. Inside the veranda is a table with a three-litre jar of chacha on it. Beside it is a tumbler and a plate of bread and spring onion. An old woman sleeps on a huge bed beside the table — or at least she gives the impression of sleeping.