We shout over to each other and pass food and cigarettes across by bribing the guards. Usually the girls have more to give than us poor tramps.
From time to time a fight blows up in the girls’ cell. They need to relieve their tension somehow. Vera can’t exist for one minute without trying to start a fight. Perhaps having her head shaved has traumatised her. They say it is to get rid of lice, but really it’s because it is harder for bald girls to work. Clients are suspicious of their state of health.
I savour my daily exercise in the courtyard, it restores my spirits to look at the sky, hear the noises of the town and feel the rain on my face. One day an elderly man falls into step beside me. He introduces himself as Uncle Misha the Railwayman.
“It’s my first time in the spets. It was my own bloody fault for getting drunk and going to the end of the line. In all my 60 years I’ve never made that mistake. They defrocked me — took away my cap and hammer.”
Uncle Misha is a robber who works the railway lines. “I began my career in the 1920s. I was an orphan — my parents died in the civil war. I soon learned that stations are the best places for stealing. People are tightly packed together and they don’t know their surroundings. I got caught a few times but no one handed me in. People would rather beat me up themselves and leave the authorities out of it. I guess they had their reasons.
“Then I learned how to rob goods wagons. I climbed onto their roofs and let myself down inside. I’d pick what I wanted, jump off the train and sell my haul to a fence. The only tricky parts were keeping an eye out for the guards and jumping off the moving trains. You have to be fit for that.” He glances at my leg.
“When I got older I found a job on the railways. It didn’t last long, but I kept my cap and hammer, the tools of my trade. Since then trains have been my home. I know every station in the USSR. Even the smallest country halt. When I get off at a station the first thing I do is study the timetable. I learn them by heart, both summer and winter versions. They’re my daily bread.”
I laugh. “You remind me of George Peters, a man I read about in a book. He avoided the police thanks to his excellent knowledge of train times.”
Uncle Misha opens his toothless mouth in disbelief: “Did you really read that?”
“Yes, it’s in a book by an American writer, O. Henry.”
Uncle Misha whistles: “Whew! I never thought you could learn a thing from books. Everything in them I already shat out the day before yesterday!”
He takes a surreptitious puff on a roll-up cupped in this hand. “Sometimes I notice a lonely-looking suitcase. Then I wait for everyone to fall asleep. But it drives me mad when some bloody intellectual takes out a book and reads. You can’t tear him away. It’s like trying to snatch a baby from its bottle. But it also works the other way. A man might bury himself in the book so deep you could stuff him up the arse and he’d never notice. So there’s a use for books all the same.
“When everyone’s asleep I get down to business. I grab the case, jump off the train, hide alongside it and wait for the next express. Two or three minutes before it leaves I push the suitcase into an axle-box with my long hammer and then climb inside a carriage. I sit in an empty place, wearing my railway cap so the conductor won’t ask to see my ticket.
“When he’s passed by I start to tell the other passengers stories that I’ve picked up on my travels. They’re always willing to share their food in return for the entertainment. When I’ve eaten my fill and slept a bit I get out at a suitable stop.
“In any new town the first thing I do is memorise the timetable. Then I go to the nearest beer shop for a few drinks. After that I collect empty vodka bottles — only the cleanest ones, mind. I take them out somewhere quiet on the edge of town and fill them with water. I use my bootlaces to close the caps. Then I wait till evening and go back to the station. I wander along the platform with a bottle in my hand and almost always get lucky. My bottle reminds passengers they’re thirsty so they call out: ‘Oi, mate! Where can I get one?’
“‘Not far from here, not far at all. About half a kilometre,’ I tell them.
“The shop might as well be on the moon. The greedy wretches beg me to sell the bottle. I hum and haw until the train is about to depart and then I give in. They even want to tip me. ‘No, no, you’re all right,’ I say to them. As soon as their train starts I hop on one going in the opposite direction.”
I lie awake listening to Uncle Misha snoring beside me. He revolts me. I wonder how he can take advantage of people’s trust and their simple desire to drink. I think about it for a long time before concluding that his crimes are nothing new. People deceived others like that even before the revolution.
The June dawn breaks at 4am. I awake to find I’ve run out of matches so I go to get a light from the joggers who are already pounding the sand. To my annoyance everyone turns out to be a non-smoker. Damn sportsmen.
I notice an ugly, squint-eyed fellow studying me.
“Got a light, mate?” I ask, “I’ve been looking for one for an hour.”
“I don’t smoke,” but he adds, “I drink, though.”
He picks his jacket off the ground to reveal a bottle of cognac.
“A man after my own heart!” I cry. “Wait five minutes while I get a light. I want a smoke so badly my arse is dizzy!”
“Go ahead. I’ll be here!” he says, pulling his jacket back over the bottle. When I return we silently pass the bottle back and forth between us, each trying to take smaller and smaller mouthfuls. It’s early morning and the shops won’t open for a long time. We introduce ourselves.
“I’m from Kuibyshev.”
“And I’m from Tambov,” he says, although his plastic cap proclaims: I am from Sochi!
“Could you be the Tambov Wolf?”
“I could be. And what’s your name?”
“Hodja Nasreddin.”[31]
Tambov Wolf laughs. “Oh, Hodja Nasreddin, why do you wear such a high collar on your jacket?”
“To protect my neck from the sun.”
“And if the sun is shining in your face?”
“I turn around and walk in the other direction. Where did you get the cognac?”
“Ask me something easier,” replies Tambov Wolf. He pulls a three-kopeck piece out of his pocket and says, as though pronouncing Newton’s fourth law of physics: “One coin does not clink.”
“And two do not make the right sound.” I produce another coin from my pocket.
“Another eight and we’ll be OK,” he says. I pull all the small change out of my pocket, but he takes only two kopecks from me.
“But you said eight,” I point out.
“Quite right. Two kopecks and six o’clock in the morning make eight.”
The shops open at six. The sun has risen above the horizon so we only have to wait a while longer. However, alcohol is not sold before 11 o’clock. The battle against alcoholism is in full swing and the masses have to be prevented from getting tanked up before work.
At six Tambov Wolf joins the crowd of grandmothers by the shop doors. After a few minutes he emerges and disappears behind the monument to drowned fishermen, signalling for me to follow. We sit down on the nearest bench. From his pocket Tambov Wolf pulls out the sister of the bottle we split earlier and a quarter of a loaf of bread.
“For breakfast,” he says. “Don’t argue, the bread was come by honestly. The bottle I picked up in passing, to give us something to wash it down with.”
“I couldn’t do that,” I say.
“You don’t need to. We have enough.”
When I took to the road I made a pledge that I would never steal or get into a fight. That would keep me out of jail, leaving me free to wander until I grew tired of the life. I soon realised that was naive. Christ himself couldn’t have wandered the USSR unmolested. His attitude, ‘take therefore no thought for the morrow’ would have earned him a year at least, so there was not much hope for the rest of us poor sinners. And sinners we certainly are. We all smoke and curse and most of us drink.
31