Eddie-baby has no idea when his parents fuck each other. If his father isn’t on one of his long business trips, he usually leaves for work at the crack of dawn, since his military unit is located far away, on the other side of the city, and he has to take two different trolleys to get there. He returns home late, sometimes as late as nine o’clock at night, eats his supper, and goes to bed, or watches television for a while and then goes to bed. “It’s not at all clear when they fuck,” Eddie-baby thinks indifferently. He isn’t very interested in his parents’ sexual life, but he still wonders when they do it.
From the apartment of the Auntie Marusyas down below comes another burst of music and laughter – they’re still at it. Eddie-baby has no idea where the hell his father is celebrating the forty-first anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Maybe in a train traveling through the already snow-covered Siberian taiga. His father’s business trips can last as long as a month, since he now works as chief of escort. For a long time Eddie-baby was unable to imagine what that was, until he happened to See his father in the performance of his military duty. That was about two years ago last spring.
Eddie-baby couldn’t wait for his father to come back then, although now he doesn’t care; he even feels freer when his father isn’t around. Then, however, he still missed his father for some reason and was counting the days till his return from Siberia.
Eddie-baby knew when his father’s train would arrive, and so he decided to surprise him – to meet the weary Siberian traveler at the railroad station. After a bumpy two-trolley ride, Eddie got to the Kharkov station, where he waited for the train to come in.
The train from Siberia – the Kiev-Soviet Harbor – whose arrival time corresponded to that of Eddie’s father’s train wasn’t scheduled to reach Kharkov for another two hours, but the patient Eddie waited on the platform the whole time just to make sure he wouldn’t miss his father, in case the train came in early.
Bringing with it the icy breath of the Siberian expanses, with Siberian dust covering its roof and steps, the train rolled up to the platform, and soon afterward the Kharkov passengers started to get off. There were a lot of them, including a great many in uniform, but Eddie-baby didn’t see his father anywhere.
After waiting until the very last passenger had disappeared, Eddie-baby once again visited the information desk in the station and asked if there would be another train from Siberia. They said that there wouldn’t, that there was only one train from Siberia that day.
Eddie-baby was sure he hadn’t missed his father. Was it possible that his mother had given him the wrong time for the train? But Raisa Fyodorovna was such an incredibly meticulous woman that Eddie-baby simply could not believe it was possible that she had been wrong about the time of her beloved husband’s return from his business trip…
The Kharkov railroad station is immense, one of the biggest in the USSR, since Kharkov is an important industrial city with a population of a million, and the gateway to the south and the rest of the Ukraine. It is in fact just beyond Kharkov that the warm, fertile land of the Ukraine really begins, and beyond it the Crimea and the hot, exotic Caucasus, so that the principal railroad lines to and from those regions all pass through Kharkov. Which is why in the last war the German troops and “ours” took Kharkov from each other several times.
The trains hissed as they vented unneeded steam, and everywhere it smelled of coal, fireboxes, chlorine disinfectant, springtime, and toilets. Racing about were whole trains of baggage carts loaded down with suitcases and luggage belonging to the residents of the different lands that make up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As he looked for his father, Eddie-baby walked among the crowds of passengers who were about to take their seats before departing, or who were getting off the trains after their arrival in Kharkov, or who were in transit and had therefore hurried out onto the platforms to fill their stomachs in the nearby cafeterias and restaurants during the one-or two-hour interval their trains would be halted in one of the country’s biggest railroad stations. He walked among Uzbeks dressed in caftans and embroidered skullcaps, well-scrubbed Georgians wearing large visored caps, and old women from Kharkov, of indeterminate age and nationality, who were wrapped up in scarves and shod in rubber-soled felt boots despite the fact that it was April. The old women had brought out pickled cucumbers and tomatoes in tubs, hot fried potatoes seasoned with dill, and other traditional railroad station fare to sell on the platforms. Hands with rubles were extended to them directly from the windows of the train cars. Without exception, all the old women hawked their wares with raucous cries.
“Pickled cucumbers here!” shouted one.
“Fried potatoes! Who wants fried potatoes!” yelled another.
“Meat pies! Who wants red-hot meat pies!” hollered a third over the voices of the other two.
Standardized and worked out right down to the pauses and bursts of sound, their hawking cries were as ancient as the world of Russia itself. All those “red-hot meat pies” came out of the immemorial depths of the Russian language from as long ago as the time of Batu Khan.
Eddie-baby didn’t know why he had made the foolish decision to plunge into those crowds. Finding anybody in them would have been as hard as finding a needle in a haystack, but rational arguments had often abandoned Eddie-baby in his life, just as they did then and just as they had always done whenever his powerful intuition took over. By some strange reckoning, Eddie-baby still thought he would be able to find his father in the crowds, and so he continued to wander from one platform to another.
And find Veniamin Ivanovich he did. On the verge of complete despair, Eddie-baby had decided to leave the commotion of the railroad station and set off for home. He wanted to take a shortcut to the clearly visible pedestrian bridge that extended over the station and out to his trolley stop, but as soon as he jumped down from the platform to cross over the tracks, he realized he was going in the wrong direction and got lost in the labyrinth of freight trains and sidings. Emerging from behind one freight car and crawling out from under another, Eddie-baby unexpectedly saw his father.
The scene that presented itself to him was utterly mute and austere. From under his freight car Eddie-baby saw a ring of soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets. The soldiers held their rifles with the bayonets forward and slightly toward the ground while people of some kind came single file down planks that extended from a boxcar with gratings on its windows. The file flowed into a Black Maria – a black van. The ring of soldiers, still wearing greatcoats since it was only April after all, broke off in just one place – where the officer was standing. He held a piece of paper in one hand, and his other hand lay on his open holster. The officer was Veniamin Ivanovich.
Eddie-baby hadn’t realized that his father transported convicts. Although he knew theoretically that the MVD to which his father’s unit was attached was made up of both trashes and prisoner escorts, he somehow never connected that circumstance with his father. True, his father went on business trips to Siberia, but how and in what capacity, Eddie had no idea. Now he saw that his father was a real trash, even though he wore a different kind of uniform. And even worse than a trash, since he transported the punks to labor camps and prisons. “Maybe he even took Gorkun to Kolyma,” Eddie-baby thought. At the time Eddie-baby didn’t identify himself with the punks, but he already felt something like solidarity with them, inasmuch as the world of Saltovka basically consists of the punks and their opposite, the trashes. Eddie-baby doesn’t pay any attention to the great sea of workers in between, since their role is a passive one.
Eddie-baby didn’t go up to Veniamin Ivanovich, who was checking and counting off the convicts, since he didn’t want to distract him from his work. He slipped out from under the freight car unnoticed, left the remote dead-end siding, and took the trolley back home. He didn’t tell anybody about what had happened, neither Raisa Fyodorovna nor his father when he returned home several hours later. The fact that his father was a trash became Eddie-baby’s private
secret, one that he carried within himself, since his position in the world of the Saltov district and in the cosmos would have changed abruptly if his friends had ever found out that he was the son of a trash.
In some strange way Eddie-baby doesn’t blame his father for being a trash. It’s his, Veniamin Ivanovich’s, business whether or not he wants to be one, although “military man” sounds a lot nobler, especially if you’re a military man in a victorious country right after a great war. Eddie-baby simply regards himself as very unlucky in respect to his father. After all, he could have been born into the family of a famous explorer and traveler, or at least into the family of a general, a general decorated with medals – but into the family of a trash? Eddie-baby suffers in silence.
There is another thing about Veniamin Ivanovich that bothers Eddie-baby, and that is the fact that his father never served at the front. Eddie-baby is also careful to hide this detail of his father’s biography. All of Eddie-baby’s male relatives perished in the last war, including his father’s brother, Uncle Yura, nineteen years old, whom Eddie-baby, as his father says, very much resembles in both character and physique. Eddie-baby understands that if his father had been at the front, he too would have been killed like Uncle Yura and Grandfather Fyodor Nikitovich, the gallant captain of a penal battalion, and he, Eddie-baby, would perhaps never have had to make his appearance in this world, even though he sometimes feels ashamed around the kids whose fathers were killed in the war. Eddie-baby knows that his father didn’t evade the front, that it just turned out that way against his will, since he was sent to a military academy at the very beginning of the war, and after that to hunt for deserters in the taiga of the Mari Autonomous Republic on a special commission signed by Lavrenty Beria.
The commission signed by Lavrenty Pavlovich, who was executed after the death of Stalin, has also disappeared from the official oral biographies that Veniamin Ivanovich furnishes his friends and acquaintances. But Eddie-baby knows that such a commission existed. The Mari taiga part of his father’s biography doesn’t upset Eddie-baby the way the trash part does, although it intrigues and disturbs him. In spite of herself, his mother sometimes lets details of one kind or another about his father’s life slip out, but they still haven’t taken shape along the orderly lines of a canonical biography. Sometimes when she’s irritated, his mother recalls a certain girl from the city of Glazov in the Mari Autonomous Republic with whom his father obviously lived when he served in the taiga with his terrible commission. Occasionally his mother drops subtle hints to the effect that it’s possible that Eddie-baby has a brother or a sister there in the Mari taiga. The brother and sister leave Eddie-baby cold, but the commission has never ceased to trouble his imagination. “Why doesn’t my father have a commission like that now?” Eddie-baby wonders. His own life would be entirely different if his father did.
Eddie-baby, copying one of his father’s gestures, covers his head with a couch pillow, catching himself in the act as he does so. The main things he has inherited from his handsome father are his gestures and his rolling gait. Eddie’s dark complexion and his prominent cheekbones and pug nose come from his half-Tatar mother.
Eddie-baby is of the opinion that his mother has made a prisoner of his father. In the first years of their marriage, Veniamin Ivanovich still ran around some and tried to slip out from under the stubborn authority of his wife (as Eddie-baby’s mother has told him). He even had lovers then, although he gradually got used to the yoke of family life and learned to bear it patiently. That yoke may have been made somewhat lighter by the fact that Veniamin Ivanovich, after disappearing at sunrise, doesn’t turn up again in the Saltov district until late in the evening. His life is largely spent on business trips and at his military unit. What he actually does there Eddie-baby has no idea. He works.
After witnessing the scene at the railroad station, Eddie-baby started trying to stay awake in order to listen to the nighttime conversations of his father and mother. It turned out that they had the custom, while lying in bed just two steps away from his couch, of talking over in a whisper whatever had happened that day. Once, after his father had come back from one of his business trips, Eddie overheard the following conversation while pretending to be asleep on his couch:
“An amazingly strong person,” his father said. “You know, I’ve seen a lot of them, Raya. Some of them weep like little children, others hide in a corner of the boxcar with their eyes blazing like a wolfs, but this one talks to you calmly and politely, gets up early, does calisthenics, and reads. A person of great dignity.”
“What did they sentence him for, Venya?” Eddie’s mother whispered.
“There wasn’t any file on him. That means even we aren’t supposed to know who he is. A ‘double zero’ is a particularly dangerous individual. He did that the whole trip – read and did calisthenics. He wasn’t supposed to read, but I let him.”
“Why did they drag the poor fellow all the way from Siberia to be executed?” Eddie’s mother whispered.
“Because this year they’ve been carrying out all the death sentences at Krivoy Rog. A couple of years ago they executed them at our prison in Kholodnaya Gora. They introduced this annual system for the sake of maintaining morale among the prison guards. One year they execute everybody sentenced to death on the territory of the USSR in one prison, the next year in another…” Eddie’s father paused for a moment and then continued.
“A courageous man… Still young, no more than thirty-five. Redheaded. Tall. The officer who turned him over to me hinted that there had been something like an attempt on Nikitka himself…”
Eddie’s father fell silent again. He spoke the word “Nikitka” with obvious contempt. Like many other military people, his father doesn’t care for Khrushchev. Khrushchev cut the military pension and is trying in every way possible to “disarm the army,” as Eddie’s father puts it.
“Do you think, Veniamin, that he…?” whispered Eddie’s mother, and frightened by her own thought, didn’t finish her sentence.
“What do you think? Of course!” Eddie’s father confirmed, and then finished his mother’s sentence for her. “He tried to kill him. And they say it isn’t the first time…”
Eddie’s parents didn’t say anything more after that; obviously they’d fallen asleep. And Eddie-baby fell asleep as well.
And on this day too, in the year 1958, Eddie-baby is falling asleep on his couch, and without even taking off his jacket.
31
Naturally just as Eddie is about to fall asleep his mother comes in and wakes him up.
“You’re home?” she says in amazement. “You made a mistake not going with me to Auntie Marusya’s, you fool. We all danced; it was lots of fun. Uncle Vanya even tap-danced.”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie sleepily mumbles, “lots of fun.”
“A lot more fun than with your hoodlums, anyway,” his mother counters, and then takes the offensive. “Why don’t you take off your awful shoes? I always have to clean up the couch after you. There are spots all over it. And what kind of person sleeps in his jacket?! You’re not a son, you’re a barbarian!”
Eddie-baby no longer feels like sleeping. And he also realizes that contrary to his expectations, his mother has come back from Auntie Marusya’s in a brisk and energetic mood, so that he is assured of at least an hour of nagging. He therefore gets up, takes down the suitcase standing in the doorway recess behind the portiere, removes the sleeping bag given to him for his birthday by the Shepelskys, and goes out onto the balcony.
“What are you doing? Are you out of your mind!” his mother exclaims. “It’s November outside! Do you want to catch pneumonia? You’re tetched!” And his mother rotates her index finger next to her temple to indicate just how tetched Eddie-baby is.
It’s Eddie-baby’s view that his mother likes to brag about the purity of her Russian, as if it were unspoiled by the local Ukrainianized pronunciation and Ukrainian usage, but she still uses slang words like “tetched,” and she still pronounc
es them the same way everybody else does.
The tetched Eddie snorts contemptuously and goes out onto the balcony, closing the door behind him.
At Eddie-baby’s request, they finally decided to remodel the balcony into a separate room, following the example of their neighbors, who have successfully created additional living space for themselves that way. The lethargic Veniamin Ivanovich bestirred himself at last and even paid the builders to erect a wide partition between their part of the balcony and Major Shepotko’s, and to put up a whole system of wooden window frames to separate the front part of the balcony from the outside world. That structure still doesn’t have any panes, however, and the temperature on the balcony is therefore the same as it is outside.
Eddie-baby spreads out the sleeping bag on a folding canvas cot and crawls into it. He’s no longer sleepy. The goddamn money problem is bothering him again. “Where can I get some money? Where?” Eddie thinks over and over as he tosses and turns in his sleeping bag.
Eddie believes that if his mother really were a decent human being, she wouldn’t begrudge him the 250 rubles. It’s hardly anything at all! But his mother has dug in her heels. Raisa Fyodorovna is just as stubborn as Eddie is.
The light has been turned out inside; Eddie’s mother has gone to bed. And no sooner has it been turned out than Eddie-baby recalls the cafeteria.
“What a great idea!” Eddie decides. “They probably took in a pile of money that they haven’t had a chance to turn over to the bank messenger for deposit. What kind of bank messenger would there be on a holiday evening anyway?”
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 14
