Boris Akunin - He Lover of Death

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.