HOW SENKA SETTLED IN AT
THE NEW PLACE
So this was the way he and the lads lived.
During the day they went ‘snitching’, and at night they went ‘bombing’.
They did most of their thieving round that same Old Square where the market was, or on Maroseika Street, where all the shops were, or on Varvarka Street, from the people walking by, and sometimes on Ilinka Street, where the rich merchants and stockbrokers were, but definitely no farther than that, oh no. Prokha – he was their leader – called it ‘a dash from Khitrovka’. Meaning that if anything went wrong, you could hightail it to the Khitrovka gateways and side alleys, where there was no way anyone could catch a thief.
Senka learned how to go snitching quickly enough. It was easy work, good fun.
Mikheika the Night-Owl picked out a ‘gull’ – some clueless passerby – and checked to make sure he had money on him. That was his job. He moved in close, rubbed up against the gull and then gave them the nod: yeah he’s got a wallet on him, over to you. He never pinched anything himself – his fingers weren’t quick enough for that.
Then it was Senka’s turn. His job was to surprise the gull so his jaw dropped open and he forgot all about his pockets. There were several ways of going about it. He could start a fight with Night-Owl – people loved to gawp at that. He could suddenly start walking down the middle of the road on his hands, jerking his legs about comically (Senka had been able to do that ever since he was a little kid). But the simplest thing of all was just to collapse at the gull’s feet, as if he was having a fit, and start yelling: ‘I feel real bad, mister (or missus, depending on the circumstances). I’m dying!’ If it was someone soft-hearted, they were bound to stop and watch the young lad writhing about; and even if you’d picked a real cold fish, he’d still look round, out of sheer curiosity, like. And that was all Prokha needed. In and out like a knife, and the job was done. It used to be your money, but now it’s ours.
Senka didn’t like bombing so much. In fact, you could say he didn’t like it at all. In the evening, somewhere not far from Khitrovka, they picked out a ‘beaver’ who was all on his own (a beaver was like a gull, only drunk). Prokha did the important work here too. He ran up from behind and smashed his fist against the side of the beaver’s head – only he was holding a lead bar in that fist. When the beaver collapsed, Speedy and Night-Owl came dashing in from both sides: they took the money, the watch and a few other things, and tugged off the jacket and the low boots, if they looked pricey. If the beaver was some kind of strongman who wasn’t felled by the lead bar, they didn’t mess with him: Prokha legged it straight away, and Skorik and Filin never stuck their noses out of the gateway.
So bombing wasn’t exactly complicated, either. But it was disgusting. At first, Senka was terrified Prokha would hit someone so hard he’d kill them, but then he got used to that. For starters, it was only a lead bar, not knuckledusters or a blackjack. And anyway, everyone knew that God himself looked after drunks. And they had thick heads.
The lads sold their loot out of Bunin’s flophouse. Sometimes they only made a rouble between them, but on a good day it could be as much as fifty. If it was just a rouble, they ate ‘dog’s delight’ – cheap sausage – with black rye bread. But if the takings were good, they went to drink wine at the Hard Labour or the Siberia. And after that the thing to do was visit the tarts (‘mamselles’ they were called in Khitrovka), and horse around.
Prokha and Filin had their own regular mamselles. Not molls, of course, like proper thieves had – they didn’t earn enough to keep a moll just for themselves – but at least not streetwalkers. Sometimes the mamselles might even feed them, or lend them some money.
Senka soon acquired a little lady-friend of his own too. Tashka, her name was.
That morning Senka woke up late. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened the day before, he had been too drunk. But when he looked, he saw he was in a small room, with just one window, curtained over. There were plants in pots on the windowsill, with flowers – yellow, red and blue. In the corner, lying on the floor, was a withered old woman, a bag of bones, tearing herself apart with this rasping cough and spitting blood into a rag – she had consumption, for sure. Senka was lying on an iron bedstead, naked, and there was a girl about thirteen years old, sitting at the far end of the bed with her legs crossed under her, looking at some book and laying out flowers and muttering something under her breath.
‘What’s that you’re doing?’ Senka asked in a hoarse voice.
She smiled at him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s white acacia – pure love. Red celandine – impatience. Barberry – rejection.’
Queer in the head, he thought. He didn’t know then that Tashka was studying the language of flowers. Somewhere or other she’d picked up this book called How to Speak with Flowers, and she’d really taken to the idea of talking with flowers instead of words. She’d spent almost all the three roubles she got from Senka the night before on flowers – run to the market first thing and bought a whole bundle of leafy stuff, then started sorting it all out. That was what Tashka was like.
Senka spent almost the whole day with her that time. First he drank brine to cure his sore head. Then he drank tea with some bread. And after that they sat there doing nothing. Just talking
Tashka turned out to be a nice girl, only slightly touched. Take the flowers, for instance, or that mum of hers, the miserable drunk with consumption, no good for anything. Why did she bother with her, why waste her money like that? She was going to die anyway.
And in the evening, before she went out on the street, Tashka suddenly said: ‘Senka, let’s you and me be mates, shall we?’
‘All right,’ he said.
They hooked their little fingers together and shook them, then kissed each other on the lips. Tashka said that was what mates were supposed to do. And when Senka tried to paw her after the kiss, she said to him: ‘Now what do you think you’re doing? We’re mates. And mates don’t go horsing around. And you shouldn’t do it with me, anyway, I’ve got the frenchies, picked it up off this shop clerk. You do the jig-a-jig with me and that snotty nose of yours will fall right off.’
Senka was upset.
‘What do you mean, the frenchies? Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?’
‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘you was no one, just a customer, but now we’re mates. Never mind, Senka, don’t be scared, it ain’t a sickness that takes to everyone, especially not from just one time.’
He calmed down a bit then and started feeling sorry for her.
‘What about you?’
‘Phooey,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty round here have got that. They keep going somehow. Some mamselles with the frenchies lives to be thirty, even longer, sometimes. Thirty’s more than enough, if you ask me. Mum over there’s twenty-eight, and she’s an old woman – her teeth have all fallen out, and she’s covered in wrinkles.’
Senka still called Tashka his mamselle in front of the lads. He was ashamed to tell them the truth – they’d just laugh him down. But it was okay, what did that matter anyway? You could horse around with anyone you wanted if you had three roubles, but where could he find another good mate like her?
Anyway, it turned out it was possible to live in Khitrovka, and even better than in some other places. Of course, the place had its own laws and customs, like anywhere else, you had to have those, to make it easier for people to live together and understand what they could and couldn’t do. There were lots of laws, and you needed to live in Khitrovka a long time to remember them all. Mostly the way of things was clear and simple, you could figure it out for yourself: treat outsiders anyway you like, but don’t touch your own; live your own life, cause your neighbour no strife. But there were some laws you couldn’t make any sense of, no matter how hard you racked your brains.
For instance, if someone crowed like a cock any earlier than two in the morning – out of mischief, or drunkenness, or just playing the fool – you were supposed to thrash him within an inch of his life. But no one in Khitrovka could explain to Senka why. There must have been some point to it at some time, only now even the oldest old men couldn’t remember what that was. But even so, you still couldn’t crow like a cock in the middle of the night.
Or take this, for instance. If any of the mamselles started putting on airs and cleaning her teeth with shop powder, and her client caught her out, then he had the right to knock all her teeth out, and the mamselle’s pimp had to accept the loss. Clean them with crushed chalk if you want to be posh, but stay clear of that powder, that was invented by the Germans.
There were two kinds of laws in Khitrovka: those from times gone by, the way things used to be in the olden days, and new ones – those were announced by the Council when they were needed. Say, for instance, a horse-tram sets off down the street. Who ought to work it – the ‘twitchers’, who dip their fingers in all the pockets, or the ‘slicers’, who cut them open with a sharpened coin? The Council deliberated, and decided it wasn’t a job for the slicers, because the same crowd rode the horse-tram all the time, and soon they wouldn’t have any pockets left.
The Council was made up of ‘grandfathers’, the most respected thieves and tricksters, those who had come back from doing hard labour, or were so old and feeble they didn’t work any more. The grandfathers could untangle any kind of tricky knot, and if anyone offended against the Council’s rules, they meted out the punishment.
If someone made everybody else’s life a misery, they threw him out of Khitrovka. If he really fouled things up, they could even take his life. Sometimes they might give someone up to the law, but not for what the Council really thought he was guilty of – they ordered him to take the rap for someone else’s crimes, one of the ‘businessmen’s’. That way things worked out fairer all round. If you tried to cheat Khitrovka, you had to answer for it: purge your crime, bleach yourself white and help the good people, and they’d put in a good word for you in the jailhouse or in Siberia.
And they didn’t hand over a rogue they’d convicted to just anyone in the police, only to their own man, Boxman, the senior constable in the Khitrovka precinct.
This Boxman had served more than twenty years around here; Khitrovka wouldn’t be Khitrovka without him. If Khitrovka was a world, then he was like the whale it rested on, because Boxman was authority, and people can’t live without any authority at all, otherwise they start forgetting who they are. There has to be a little bit of authority, a tiny little bit, and not according to some rules on a piece of paper, thought up by some outsider in some place no one had ever seen, but according to justice – so that every man could understood why his face was getting blacked.
Tough but fair, that was what everybody said about Boxman, and Boxman really was his surname. He wouldn’t deliberately do you wrong. Everyone called him ‘Ivan Fedotovich’ to his face, as a mark of respect. Only Senka couldn’t tell if it was just a nickname that he’d got from his surname, or if it was because in olden times, so they said, all the constables in Moscow were called ‘boxmen’, because of the kiosks they used to stand in. Or maybe it was because he lived in the official police box on the edge of the Khitrovka market. Any time when he wasn’t pounding his beat, he sat at home in front of an open window, keeping a watch on the square, reading books and newspapers and drinking tea from his famous silver samovar with medallions that were worth a thousand roubles. And there weren’t any locks on the box. What would Boxman want locks for? In the first place, what good were they, when the place was surrounded by top-class lock-pickers and window-men? They could open any lock, easy as falling off a log. And in the second place, no one would go trying to filch anything from Boxman – not unless he was tired of living, that is.
From his window the constable could hear everything and see everything, and what he couldn’t see or hear was whispered to him by his loyal informers. That was above board, it wasn’t forbidden by the Council, because Boxman was part of Khitrovka. If he’d lived by the written laws and not the laws of Khitrovka, they’d have knifed him ages back. No, when he took someone into the station, it was all done with the proper understanding: he had to do it, to show his bosse she was doing something. Only Boxman didn’t put anyone away very often – not unless he absolutely had to – mostly he taught people their lesson with his own hands, and they kowtowed to him and said thank you very much. In all the years he’d been there, only one pair of shysters had ever gone for him with a knife – escaped convicts, they were, not from Khitrovka. He beat the two of them to death with his massive great fists, and the police superintendent gave him a medal. Everyone respected him for it, and the Council gave him a gold watch for the inconvenience.
So once Senka had settled in a bit, it was clear enough that Khitrovka wasn’t such a terrible place. It was more cheerful there, and freer, and it goes without saying that he ate better. In winter, when it got cold, it would probably be tough, but then winter was still a long way off.