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Eddie-baby afterward takes a circuitous route home, skirting the vehicle maintenance lot and going along the edge of the Russian cemetery just to be sure. He knows that it costs money to call out the militia dog, and that they won’t call it and its special militia handler out just for twenty or maybe thirty stolen rubles. But following Kostya’s instructions, he scrupulously wanders for a whole hour in order to throw the dog off the scent, and when he finally does reach home, he’s terribly sleepy.
Ever since the Perevorachaevs built their room on the balcony, it has been very difficult for Eddie-baby to climb up to his own room. It’s a wonder he hasn’t broken at least one of their windows with his feet – it would be easy to do – but he still uses their window frame for support, uses it only to reach up with his hand to the frame on his own balcony, but uses it nevertheless.
After fifteen minutes of slipping and muffled swearing, Eddie finally manages to climb up to his room, where he stuffs the stolen coat under the cot and lies down in his sleeping bag. His mother, thank God, has not heard him. She’s still quietly asleep in her room.
Already falling asleep, Eddie-baby thinks that the crook-manager will probably use the unsuccessful burglary to write off the loss of thousands of rubles that he has in fact embezzled and squandered himself, and in a couple of days all of Saltovka will be buzzing about the huge sums of money taken in the cafeteria burglary. The bastard!
PART TWO
1
Eddie-baby is sitting without any clothes on in the huge, white, naked lap of crazy Tonka, feeling her powerful thighs pressing up against his buttocks. One of Tonka’s hands is holding Eddie-baby’s stomach (he feels an embarrassed burning in it), and her other hand, which is not so much white as bluish (even when it’s very cold Tonka goes around the district without any gloves on), is slowly moving in the direction of Eddie-baby’s penis. Eddie-baby remains motionless, anticipating what will happen next, and his penis, engorged and erect, trembling and shy, waits for the touch of Tonka’s hand.
At the very instant when crazy Tonka’s rough palm at last takes hold of him and hot white fluid spurts out of his penis in a high arc in response to the warmth of her hand, Eddie-baby wakes up.
He lies still for a moment, trying to separate reality from what he has just dreamed, and then he realizes that he is lying in his sleeping bag on his own balcony, now bathed in dull November sunlight, and sighs in relief. He puts his hand under the blanket, rummages there, touches a wet spot with his palm, and satisfied with that, takes his hand away. He was quite startled the first time he came in his sleep, but now he’s used to it.
He started dreaming about Tonka last summer, and whenever he meets her on the streets of the district or at home – his mother is well disposed toward her and feeds her – Eddie-baby is quite abashed by the fifty-year-old, gray-haired crazy woman. Antonina Sergeevna Chernov, a former lieutenant colonel in the tank forces, sustained a severe concussion at the very end of the war, and ever since she has been notorious for her extraordinarily eccentric behavior verging on insanity. She tells people the truth to their faces regardless of who they are, and she drinks, an exclusively male activity according to the code observed in Saltovka. You often see her at the beer stand, where needless to say she gets her beer without waiting in line, brazenly pushing the men aside and paying no attention at all to their indignant shouts. What is still more shocking to the residents of Saltovka, however, is the fact that Tonka never stands in line for butter* the food item that is for some reason in shortest supply. She walks in with all her medals and decorations pinned to her blouse, including two Red Stars and two Red Banners (since Antonina Sergeevna served with valor), or if it’s winter pinned to her coat, and takes whatever quantity of butter she needs. And she needs a lot, since she buys not only for herself but naturally also for Raisa Fyodorovna, who hates to stand in line, and for several other friends as well. When the militia officer watching the line tries to stop her, Tonka, her hair flying out from under her kerchief, screams in his face that it was in fact for the sake of dogs like him that she lost her health at the front during the Great Patriotic War while he sat it out in the rear, and that if he doesn’t instantly let go of her sleeve, she’ll complain to General of the Army Yepishev, commandant of the Central Political Administration of the Soviet Army and her best friend. If the situation gets serious, however, crazy Tonka doesn’t wait for the help of the General of the Army but happily resorts to her own large tank commander’s fists and to the exceptional strength of her robust Russian womanhood.
The men of Saltovka have beaten up crazy Tonka several times, once for the fact that she pinched somebody’s baby too hard. Tonka, for reasons nobody understands, doesn’t like babies. Eddie-baby happened to witness the final scene of one of these skirmishes, when the bloodied but still unvanquished Tonka, her blouse torn at her breast, threw stones at a scattered group of men standing not far away from her. “You whores, you filthy buggers!” Tonka snarled. “You deserters! If I had run into you at the front, I would have put all of you up against a wall!” As he watched her, the melancholy thought occurred to Eddie-baby that if Tonka had known anything about the Furies, she would have been amazed at how closely she resembled them. Out of Tonka’s torn blouse had tumbled a large white breast with a big rubbery nipple.
Eddie-baby has never forgotten that mighty breast, and it may be that the memory of it is what lies behind all the terrible dreams Eddie-baby’s had in which he and Tonka do disgusting things to each other, and after their often gymnastically complicated frolicking, usually end up fucking. Tonka pursues Eddie-baby in the daytime too: all he has to do is close his eyes somewhere in the sunshine – at the beach, say, where he goes starting in early spring and ending in late fall – and at once the tormentor Tonka appears before him, naked and shaking her gray mane of hair, in order to torture him.
Eddie-baby is embarrassed now even to look Tonka in the face when she comes to visit them. In real life Tonka and Raisa Fyodorovna have become something like friends, although Eddie’s mother maintains that Tonka is secretly infatuated with Veniamin Ivanovich. And really, in spite of her normally coarse and insolent way with men, Tonka is quite shy and timid whenever she catches Eddie’s father’s eye. It’s funny to see how Tonka, that big battle-ax, suddenly becomes very polite, stammers, drops her gaze, and picks at the fringe of their green silk tablecloth with her huge hands. Tonka is a lot taller than Veniamin Ivanovich, who looks like an elegant boy dressed up in a military uniform next to her – especially since he’s also about ten years younger than she is.
Eddie’s mother says that most likely Veniamin Ivanovich reminds Tonka of her fiance, who died a long time ago during the Spanish civil war. His mother also maintains that Tonka isn’t as crazy as the Saltovka residents think – that even though her concussion was certainly a serious one and she is sometimes ravaged by headaches she takes special injections to relieve, it’s also to Tonka’s advantage to seem crazy, since it makes life easier for her.
“Antonina Sergeevna is an intelligent woman,” Eddie’s mother’s declares, “and a real combat officer, unlike a lot of these other invalid-clowns, such as Efim from Tyurenka, who had his leg cut off by a trolley before the war when he was drunk and now drives around in his own specially adapted car all decked out in secondhand medals he bought somewhere, pretending to be a hero.” Antonina Sergeevna just isn’t like anyone else, which is why everybody in Saltovka thinks she’s crazy. Who else in their right mind would abuse Khrushchev in the presence of a militia officer? Antonina Sergeevna and Eddie’s father, like many other military people, dislike Khrushchev for cutting their pensions. She lives alone on what she receives as a retired lieutenant colonel, since all her relatives perished in the war, which may in fact be the reason why she fought so valiantly – she was taking revenge on the Germans for her own family.
2
Eddie-baby can’t get back to sleep again and is now thinking about how to sneak past his mother t
o the toilet so she won’t notice the spot on his pants. Eddie-baby is very ashamed of this secret side of his life. His mother will think he masturbated and will maybe say something to him about it. As soon as he started masturbating (Tonka was mixed up in that business too, since Eddie-baby copied his dreams in his thoughts), his mother knew about it. And Eddie-baby knows how she found out.
Very simple. He used to wipe his penis with sheets from a tear-off day calendar. Sometimes he would throw the sheets in the toilet, although sometimes he forgot to. His mother obviously found the sheets, stuck together with a dry yellow substance very much resembling glue, and obviously guessed at once that that substance was none other than semen produced by her son, who had finally reached the age of sexual maturity.
As gently as she could, Eddie’s mother gave her son a lecture. Raisa Fyodorovna is a well-read woman – the bookcase in their room is packed with books – and since it was clear to her that Eddie-baby understood very little about his own behavior, she decided to warn him about it.
During the lecture Eddie-baby blushed and then turned pale and denied it all. The most he would concede was that, yes, the calendar sheets were his work, but he had only blown his nose on them. Eddie-baby knew his mother didn’t believe that the substance on the sheets was dried snot, but what else could he say? Admit that he abused himself several times a day, panting and moaning with his eyes closed while reviewing in his mind his latest dream about the huge, insolently smirking Tonka sitting with her legs spread wide apart?
Despite his mother’s warnings that masturbation is a dangerous disease, that it dries out the brain and sucks the strength from a boy’s body, Eddie-baby failed even to reduce the frequency of his masturbation. The fact is, he gets tremendous pleasure when he comes, and he hasn’t the strength to deny himself that pleasure. Although he does hide the calendar sheets in his pocket now, throwing them away outside.
3
Eddie-baby tries to recall when he first discovered masturbation. He remembers unconsciously examining his penis, turning it in his hand… Yes, he suddenly recalls, it was after a bath, when he used to go to the baths once a week with his father. His father had pointed Eddie’s penis out to him and told him not to forget to wash it.
Surrounded by clouds of steam and naked men, Eddie watched his father rub and scrape his penis, and for the first time he realized that the tip of his father’s penis was red. Looking at his own sprout, Eddie at once noticed a difference: its tip wasn’t red, it was the same brown color as the rest of his skin, although it was wrinkled and had a little bluish-red skin inside, but only a little, and only around the opening through which his urine passed. After eluding his father, who was trying to catch him in the steam in order to wash his penis for him (Eddie wouldn’t even let his mother touch him), he decided on the way home to examine his penis more closely as soon as he was alone.
It was not until the next day that he managed to do so, since the previous one had been his father’s day off – it was in fact on his day off that he and Eddie took the trolley to the baths. Eddie’s mother used to go to the baths with Auntie Beba, but now she’s going more and more with the Auntie Marusyas.
The day after the incident in the baths, Eddie-baby waited for his mother to go to the store, and then he got undressed, sat down on his couch, and began looking at his penis. It turned out on closer inspection that the design of his penis wasn’t really much different from his father’s. The wrinkled skin covering its tip could be moved back, thereby revealing the same bluish-red skin that Veniamin Ivanovich had on his.
Eddie-baby was astonished by his discovery. Moreover, when he attempted to move the skin even farther back, his penis immediately increased in size, and when he pulled the skin down as far as he could, he suddenly discovered that several centimeters from the tip of his penis was a ring of some yellowish-gray fibrous substance. Picking at it with his fingernail, Eddie-baby lifted some of it to his nose and sniffed. It didn’t smell very good – rather like Roquefort cheese. Picking at it again out of curiosity, he managed to separate a whole layer of the yellowish-gray substance from the tender whitish-pink skin underneath.
That scared him. He thought that he had accidentally destroyed something on his penis. “What will happen now?!” he thought in dismay. The fact is that Eddie-baby’s knowledge in the areas of botany, zoology, or seafaring far exceeded his knowledge in the area of human biology. As far as explaining it to him was concerned, nobody had ever explained anything, and now he was sitting on his couch with his penis in his hand and was quite confused.
After sitting in perplexity for a while, Eddie-baby for some reason decided to remove the rest of the yellowish-gray substance, pulling it off little by little. Without that substance, the tip of his penis looked like the head of a large screw, and his penis like the screw itself, only made out of flesh. Eddie-baby moved the skin back and forth on his penis. Nothing happened. Then he moved it again. The sensation was a pleasant one. He continued moving the skin on his penis until he surprised himself by suddenly emitting a quiet moan and slightly opening his mouth, while from the opening where his urine usually shot out a large yellow drop emerged, remained there for a moment, and then slowly slid down the side. Thus did Eddie-baby come for the first time in his life. A sense of relief as if after deliverance from a difficult thousand-year labor descended on him. Along with anxiety about himself and about his body.
It was at that moment that the bewildered Eddie-baby heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock. And it is precisely to that moment that the emergence of his baneful habit of using the calendar sheets may be traced, a habit that sometimes resulted in his tearing them off for several days into the future. For no sooner did he hear his mother at the door than Eddie-baby grabbed the first thing that came to hand – the calendar – wiped his penis on a couple of its sheets, and climbed back into his pants as fast as he could. Luckily, his mother went into the kitchen first to put away the things she had purchased. Eddie tossed the stuck-together calendar sheets under the couch.
4
Today Eddie-baby gets up from his cot and stealthily opens the door to the other room. Despite his best efforts, the door creaks. With an annoyed expression on his face, Eddie enters the room, trying to walk sideways. His mother isn’t there, thank God. The alarm clock standing on the white lace cloth on top of the television shows eleven, which is hardly surprising, since Eddie-baby slept pretty soundly after dragging himself through the mud of Saltovka in order to cover his tracks. In all probability, his mother is either in the kitchen or has gone to get something from the Auntie Marusyas, inasmuch as the three women are continually scurrying back and forth between the first and second floors. Although she doesn’t work, Raisa Fyodorovna still gets up early.
Eddie-baby carefully goes out of the room into the hallway and listens. No, it’s quiet in the kitchen, not a sound. No longer cautious now, he goes to the toilet, pees, and only then goes into the kitchen and washes himself over the sink. Right there in the kitchen, he takes off his pants and washes out the stain, which is already beginning to dry. If he doesn’t wash it out, as Eddie knows from experience, a white spot will remain on the black velveteen Polish trousers. The Polish trousers have been torn here and there and sewn back together by Eddie-baby himself, but he stubbornly continues to wear them, since Asya once told him that when he has his black Polish trousers and a white shirt on, he looks a lot like the recently deceased American actor James Dean, whose picture she showed him in a book of photographs. And there really is a lot of resemblance between them, although the actor was older. Eddie-baby’s hair is a little shorter than James’s was, but otherwise the similarity is striking. James Dean was a great guy; it’s too bad he was killed. He smashed himself up in a sports car. Eddie-baby asked Asya what movies James was in, but she regretfully told him that his movies aren’t shown in the Soviet Union – Khrushchev didn’t buy any. Although he did buy a lot of American movies, he didn’t buy any with James Dean.
; Eddie-baby cleans his trousers and thinks that while it may be true that Khrushchev looks like a pig, life is still more fun with him around. At least with Khrushchev the country isn’t so bored. As far as the Saltovka kids are concerned, one of Nikitka’s more important services isn’t the corn he introduced but the fact that he bought foreign films that are entertaining and out of the ordinary. The Saltovka punks don’t care about Soviet films. “Which is understandable,” Eddie thinks. “Nobody shows them films about real voyages and adventures.” All the Soviet films, if they show young people at all, show the kind you see in posters – fucked-up types cheerfully working in plants and factories fulfilling and overfulfilling the five-year plan. The Saltovka and Tyurenka and even Zhuravlyovka kids know from their own lives that working in plants and factories is boring, that the only reason anybody works in them is to make money, and that any normal person, if he could, either wouldn’t work at all or would steal or like Red Sanya would get a job as a butcher where he could earn even more money and always bring home the best meat.
“And it’s even better,” Eddie thinks, “to be an Azerbaijani or a Georgian. They have plenty of money. And why is that?” Eddie goes on. “What’s the reason? Russians and Ukrainians don’t have any money, whereas Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and Armenians do. The reason is that their land is richer, and if they come to Kharkov with a boxcar full of tangerines, which grow where they live, they always return from Kharkov with several suitcases of money.”
Eddie-baby remembers the words of Slavka the Gypsy: “…Our ancestors had the souls of slaves, so instead of bravely conquering warm lands for themselves around the Mediterranean where lemons grow, they fled like cowards to this fucking snow!”
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 16
