"I never had the opportunity " says Tarashchenko, “to see a clean deck of seventy-eight cards, although arithmetic clearly shows (by the division of seventy-eight by three and two) that it was only a simplified version of the classical Tarot combination. I am convinced that this simplification was the result of purely technical considerations: these cards were easier to make and hide." As for colors (sometimes designated only by the initial letters), they were reduced to four: pink, blue, red, and yellow. Ideographical symbols were made most often in their elementary outlines, which were the following: a Stick (an order, command, head; but also meaning a split skull); a Goblet (mother, vodka, debauchery, alliance); a Dagger (freedom, homosexuality, cut throat); a Gold Coin (murder, torture, solitary). The other symbols and variations were: the Whore, the Queen, the King, the Father, 69, Troika, the Power, the Hanged Man, the Nameless One (Death), the Bowels, the Devil, the Fool, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, the Trial, the Spear (or Anchor). The Devil or the Mother remains essentially only a variation of that anthropocentric game that reached us from the distant mythical regions of the Middle Ages crossed with Asia: spread out, the cards of the Devil represent the Wheel of Fortune, and for a fanatic have the significance of the finger of fate. Tarashchenko concludes: "In the European Tarot, the connection between the symbols of Chiromancy and the Zodiac has not been lost: the tattoos on the chest, back, and bottom of the prisoners have the same meaning that the signs of the Zodiac have for Westerners, and could be connected with the Devil by the same principle." Tertz also raises this connection between tattooing and mythical symbols to a metaphysical plane: “A tattoo: in front, an eagle tearing the breast of Prometheus in his beak; on the back, a dog in an unusual coital position with a lady. Two sides of the same coin. The head and the tail, light and dark. Tragedy and comedy. A parody of one's own grandeur. The proximity of sex and laughter. Sex and death."
MAKARENKO'S BASTARDS
In the bluish haze of the cell's semidarkness, where clouds of smoke rose in spirals, the four cardplayer-criminals reclined like boyars on bunks infested with bedbugs, turning a dirty straw between their chipped yellow teeth or sucking tobacco wrapped into a thick, slobbery cigar. A colorful mob of spectators watched with admiration the faces of the notorious murderers and their tattooed chests and arms-because they couldn't look at the cards, which were only for the masters; they wouldn't date look at a card except when it was played, or it might cost dearly. But it was a great privilege to be at this criminal Olympus, in the presence of those who in a religious silence held in their hands the fate of others-a fate that, through this magic card dealing, assumed in the eyes of the spectator the guise of chance. It was a great privilege to stoke their stove, to hand them water, to steal a towel for them, to pick lice from their shirts, or, at a single wink, to leap at one of those wretches in the crowd and silence him once and for all, making sure he wouldn't, in his incessant ravings against heaven, interrupt the relentless flow of the game-a game in which the nameless arcanum with the number thirteen, marked with the color of blood and fire, could cut short any illusion or reduce it to ashes. So it is lucky to be up there on the bunks, in the presence of the tattooed gods, the Eagle, the Snake, the Dragon, and the Monkey, and their awful curses, which couple one's mother (the only thing a criminal holds sacred) with a dog or with the devil. Thus out of the blue haze emerged the picture of those criminals, Makarenko's bastards, who, under the mythical name "socially acceptable " have staged shows for the past fifty years in the theaters of the capitals of Europe, with their proletarian caps cocked rakishly to one side and holding red carnations between their teeth-riffraff who in the ballet The Lady and the Hooligan would perform their famous pirouette of the transformation of a hooligan into a troubadour or into a sheep docilely drinking water from the palm of someone's hand.
THE MONKEY AND THE EAGLE
Holding the cards between the stumps of his left hand (by which, now and forever, it would be easy to recognize the famous criminal, while in his police file the fingerprints of the pointer and middle fingers would be mysteriously missing), Segidulin, naked to the waist and sporting on his hairless chest a tattoo of a masturbating monkey, watched Kostik with bloodshot eyes and plotted revenge. There was for a moment deadly silence up there among the criminals, as well as below, among those convicted of the far more dangerous crime: thinking. The spectators held their breath, didn't move or bat an eyelid, but stated somewhere out into space, petrified, with a cigarette butt sibling on their lips (but no one would dare spit it out, move his head, or scratch his hairy chest crawling with lice). The exhausted and halfdead prisoners below stopped whispering: something was happening, A criminal is dangerous when silent. The Wheel of Fortune had stopped. Someone's mother would grieve.
And that was all they knew, all they could possibly know; except for this horrendous language of silence and curses, the politicals were altogether unfamiliar with the coded speech of criminals, and the words whose meaning they did know were of no help anyway because in thieves' slang the meanings are shifted: God means the devil and the devil means God. Segidulin waited for the chief to show his cards; it was his turn. Kruminsh and Gadyashvili, whose names were recorded in rhe history of the underworld, put aside their cards and were now watching the duel between the Monkey and the Eagle with pleasurable trepidation. (Segidulin was the former chief whose place was usurped while he was in the hospital by Kostik, known as the Artist and, to friends, as the Eagle.)
Below, everyone felt uneasy; the silence on the thieves' bunks had gone on for too long; everyone was waiting for the shriek and the curse. However, the duel was between the two chiefs, the old and the new, and so the rules of the game were somewhat different. First, there was the language of competition and provocation. “Well, Monkey,” said the Eagle, "now you can stick your left hand into pockets." A second or two passed before Segidulin, the former chief and famous murderer, could respond to the terrible insult. “We'll see about that later, Eagle. Now show your cards." Someone coughed, no doubt one of the former co-players; who else could have been so careless? "'Which hand should I use, Monkey, left or right?" asked Kostik. "Listen, Bird, you better show your cards, even if you have to hold them in your beak.” The bunks creaked, then all was silent Suddenly Kostik cursed his opponent's crippled mother, the only thing a criminal holds sacred. Everyone understood, even those who were unfamiliar with thieves’ slang- the master had lost; someone's mother would grieve.
THE BITCH
The chances ace that it will never be known who told Dr. Taube how the famous card game In which he was given a death sentence ended, and in which the sly Monkey, aided by luck, defeated the royal Eagle, the master of masters, Kosrik Korshunidze. The most likely hypothesis is that one of the thief-informers-in a nightmarish dilemma whether to expose himself to the disfavor of the authorities or to one of his own kind, finally opted, gambling with fate, for the illusory and treacherous protection of his temporary masters, and reported the matter to the authorities of the prison camp. Taube, who to some decree enjoyed the goodwill of the prison camp's supervisor, a certain Panov, famous for his cruelty, departed with the first transport of prisoners for Kolyma, some three thousand kilometers to the northeast. The hypothesis offered by Tarashchenko seems entirely plausible to me: Segidulin himself informed Taube through one of his underlings, The explanation of Segidulm's action also seems logical to me; the Monkey wanted to humiliate the Eagle. If the one whom fortune did not favor that day, who took upon himself the solemn duty of liquidating Taube on Segidulin’s account, were unable to carry out his sacred duty, he would bear the shameful label "bitch” for a long time. And to be a "bitch” means to be despised by all, which is intolerable to a former chief.