17. A Descendant of Chenghiz Khan

Перевод рассказа "Рассказ наследника Чингиз Хана" из сбороника "Устная традиция"

As I have already said, the parents of my second wife were quite typical people for the circle we moved in at the time: her mother was Russian, a doctor at a local clinic; her father was Kazakh, head of a department in a large republican government office. He did, however, belong to a well-established and extensive family. His relatives held positions in the prosecutor’s office, the police, and higher-education institutions. I had dealings with a couple of them when I was a student, and I remember them in a way that was not particularly favorable to me.

I liked my father-in-law. There was something restless about him. Thin, wiry, energetic. After sitting at the festive table for a little while, taking only a sip from his shot glass but never finishing it, he would suddenly jump up and disappear. My mother-in-law, apologizing, would say that he was tired and needed to rest. Then he would reappear, but he clearly could not sit still in one place. The only place where he could sit for any length of time was at a chessboard, which he was very fond of. When I talked with him, I had the impression that he knew the true worth of everyone, that he could see right through you, but that he readily accepted what he saw and forgave everyone everything in advance.

Once my mother-in-law told us that he had sat down to write his memoirs. Well, let him write.

-He writes, and cries, and writes again, - came the next bit of news.

But eventually the memoirs were finished and printed at the institute’s print shop for family and close friends.

Jesus Christ, what turned out to be in them!

They were descendants of "bais" (very rich and powerful Kazakh aristocrat). His mother was the daughter of a sultan (head of the Kazakh clan) who, by all the rules, should have been a Chingisid to hold such a position. His father was a "biy" (judje), a prominent Kazakh nationalist figure, someone in the leadership of Alash Orda Kazack Nationalist political party) during the Civil War, and when the time came in 1937, he was executed in Tashkent. The family of an “enemy of the people” was poor at first, but then one of the daughters, my father-in-law’s elder sister, became a nationally famous singer, performing even at concerts in the Kremlin. She was the one who became the foundation around which the family began to rise again.

During the war, he was still a teenager when he fell in with bad company.

His mother pleaded with him in Kazakh—for she knew no other language—singing, as in the well-known Russin song:

Не ходи на тот конец,
Не дружи с ворами...

Don’t go to that end of town,
Don’t keep company with thieves…

In vain. He went and he kept company with them. He became a thief himself—or, more precisely, a bandit. Autorities caught him at 1946, imprisoned him, and he ended up in a camp in Kolyma. To save him from execution, his sister gave up the entire Stalin Prize she had just received. He was released from the camp under an amnesty at 1953. Magadan was packed with people released under the amnesty, and he returned by ship in a first-class cabin, according to his status as a "zakonnik" (a criminal who never obeys any laws except the laws of other criminals). That status was not what it is today. Nobody crowned anyone back then; the right to call oneself a thief in law had to be defended in deadly gang wars. He wrote about how, during one fight in a barracks, he suddenly saw, with astonishment, the tip of a knife sticking out of his chest. It took him a moment to realize that the bastards had stabbed him in the back.

Then there was another prison term. During it, he got into the special records section, destroyed the necessary pages in his personal file, and subsequently had his prison regime changed. When he was released, he quit the life.

Apparently, he forged something in his documents and concealed his convictions; his influential relatives covered for him. He got an education, entered government service, married a medical student, built a career, and had children.

You can read about all this in his memoirs. I am going to tell about what did not make it into them. He told us this story himself, sitting at the table.

It is not a particularly interesting story, and it has nothing to do with the narrative that follows. But I feel it is my duty to write it down, and at the end I will explain what that duty consists of.

So, my father-in-law was a boy of twelve to fourteen when he got involved with the street. I remember the landscapes of those times; even in the 1950s they remained much the same: broad floodplains of mountain rivers cutting through the city, strewn with boulders carried down by glacial mudflows. Groves of birch, poplar, and bird cherry grew among the boulders; wild rose bushes grew everywhere, and along the water ran blackberry brambles. Crossing those rivers by wading was impossible—the water rushing among the boulders would knock you off your feet. There were a couple of beer halls along the banks. People drinking beer sat on the stones, with dried fish spread out beside them. All the street punks, professional criminals, and just ordinary boys hung around there: swimming, playing cards, smoking hashish, settling scores among themselves. An unlucky passerby could easily be stripped and robbed, and as for getting beaten up… Knives were carried by almost everyone.

Nevertheless, couples would meet in the bushes. There simply was nowhere else for them to meet. My cousin, who had just returned from juvenile detention, used to go there to see his friends, the bad crowd. A couple of times he took my sister and me along when he had been told to look after us. They played cards, told stories about their prison terms and exploits, and chased us farther away so that we wouldn’t overhear them and repeat their conversations at home.

The bad crowd my father-in-law ran with—the years were 1941–43—passed around recent legends of street life. Before the war, the city had been divided among the gangs by districts. The street punks terrorized ordinary people and fought among themselves. In the evening, it was impossible to go out onto the street without risking being beaten half to death.

Ordinary people did defend themselves, though. My father told me that in the mid-1930s he was taking evening accounting courses and had to walk home in the dark. He was an entirely respectable man and was building a career. His route went through a park, and at the time he lived near the zoo. We happened to be walking through that very area together, and he showed me where it had happened.

So, as he approached the park and crossed that same little river, he would pick up a rounded stone and tie it inside his handkerchief. This produced a kind of makeshift flail. One day, someone called out to him from the darkness:

-Hey, buddy, got a cigarette?

And he saw a man running toward him. I can still see that bow-legged little fellow in my mind: boots, a belted "kosovorotka" (kina a Russian shirt) under his jacket, a cap. There is actually a photograph from those days in which my own father is dressed exactly like that.

The man came running up, and my father, without waiting for any further questions, smacked him on the head with his makeshift flail and then walked briskly home. Well, perhaps he broke into a trot. In front of the house he took the stone out of the handkerchief.

The next morning, on his way to work, he inspected the place with interest. The dust was sprinkled with blood, but nobody was lying there—which, as it seemed to me at the time, he had been somewhat afraid of.

I swallowed the obvious question: what if the fellow really had only wanted a cigarette?

Something told me that this was a stupid question.

So, those street gangs gave nobody any peace, and least of all themselves. The writer Eduard Limonov wrote about this brilliantly, and I will not even try to add anything here. It wouldn't turn out as well as his—and if it turned out worse, what would be the point?

Before the war, one end of the city was controlled by a certain Fyrman. My father-in-law told us the boundaries of his territory, but I have forgotten where they ran. Some old cemetery, perhaps, or the meat-packing plant. Or perhaps there wasn’t a meat-packing plant yet.

Fyrman was the terror of the entire district. He aspired to be the top man in the city and fought for the position. Then he was imprisoned for some offense or other. In prison, it suddenly became clear that he had behaved improperly in some way.

The prison at that time was still an old wooden one, with logs held together by iron staples. In the morning, Fyrman was found pinned to the wooden floorboards with one of the staples, straightened out. The staple had gone straight into his forehead. They had great difficulty pulling it out of the floor, but no culprit was found in the cell.

That was what my father-in-law learned as a boy.

Several years later, he was already being transported in a prison convoy to Kolyma. In the transit prison in Novosibirsk, he met some prisoner who worked among the prison staff. When he learned where my father-in-law was from, the man said they were countrymen.

His name was Fyrman.

So he had survived after all.

He told stories about his exploits before the war and remembered his enemies.

-When I get out, - he threatened, - I’ll settle things with them.

It was 1946. His enemies had already died at the front or were hobbling around the markets without their legs.

A cold night, a frost-covered window, a searchlight shining into the yard, clouds of steam.

-I’ll show them all!

A battered skull, sparse hair clumped together, a toothless mouth. The young thief looked at the hero of the city sagas with curiosity and pity.

So this was him—the terror of the outskirts, Fyrman.

Apparently, Fyrman was already a dead man walking. That was how he remained in my father-in-law’s memory: a half-mad wreck by a barred window, surrounded by clouds of steam, showering the world with curses.

-I’ll come back and take revenge!

But where are you going to come back to? The same water?

Now to my duty.

When I was writing the chapter about my mother, about her Uncle Vanya, who was killed in the Civil War, I entered his surname Aphanasiev into a search engine together with the words “Volunteer Army.” The very first thing the computer produced was a list of officers of the Drozdovsky Regiment (White Army Regiment). There were four people with that surname. Two had the wrong initials; the other two had no initials at all, only the surnames.

Memoirist general Turkul writes that the Drozdovsky Regiment passed through Mariupol, and that many officers joined it there. So one of those two could quite possibly have been our Uncle Vanya. But even if he wasn't, there were plenty more materials there to continue the search.

At that moment I felt a duty toward the nameless workers of the Internet, toward those people who had put that list online.

Nowadays, I am probably the only person in the world who knows about Fyrman’s period of life in Novosibirsk, Fyrman, the terror of the republic’s prewar capital.

When I finish these notes, I will put them online. Then anyone who types Fyrman’s name into a search engine—or simply “the prewar street gangs of Semirechye”—will find this information and may be able to add it to their own.

And perhaps, with time, someone will create a program capable of recognizing, classifying, and stitching together such scattered pieces of information.

And when such a database grows large enough, there will emerge a kind of machine-made equivalent of oral tradition, one that will not let our history disappear.

And then, perhaps, children will grow up on it.