“That’s bullshit,” Eddie thinks. “Slavka’s wrong.” He, Eddie, has an excellent knowledge of history – it’s no coincidence that the Mop likes him – and the Georgians and the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, who are the same as Turks, were never braver than the Russians. “After all, we’re the ones who conquered them,” Eddie-baby thinks, “and not the other way around. But why has it turned out that they, the conquered ones, live a lot better than we do, the ones who conquered them? Maybe the Georgians live as well as they do because Stalin was a Georgian,” Eddie thinks. “But how come the Azerbaijanis and Armenians are better off than the Russians and a hundred times better off than the kids from Saltovka? It doesn’t make any sense…”
5
After taking care of the spot, Eddie decides that he might as well iron his dress trousers for the evening, just in case he and Svetka do go to Sashka Plotnikov’s after all. Remembering Svetka, the evening, and his dress trousers, Eddie-baby realizes with dismay that he still doesn’t have the money. He sticks his hand in his jacket pocket and counts the rubles and change there: 46 rubles and 75 kopecks, one-fifth of the sum he needs.
As a consequence of the despair that suddenly overwhelms him, Eddie doesn’t feel like doing anything, but after wandering around the empty apartment for a few minutes – neither his mother nor their neighbors are there, a fact that would normally cheer him – he gradually calms down. He realizes that it’s not even twelve and that he’s supposed to pick Svetka up at eight, which means he has over eight hours left. He’ll think of something in the meantime.
For a start, Eddie ransacks the room, opening the bureau and digging around in his mother’s blouses and Veniamin Ivanovich’s military tunics and shirts and in his raincoat and winter coat. All he manages to turn up is four rubles, which he adds to the money he got at the cafeteria. “Cocksuckers!” Eddie-baby swears out loud. If it weren’t for that safe, he wouldn’t have anything to worry about now, and besides spending the evening at Sashka Plotnikov’s, he could take Svetka several times to the Theatergoer downtown, where the music is good and the waiters let minors in. The first time Eddie went to the Theatergoer was with Red Sanya. Where did they get the ridiculous habit of keeping their money in a safe! Usually the managers or cashiers simply hide the money they take in after the regular evening visit of the bank messengers (who only work until six, according to Kostya), stashing it somewhere inside the store. Most of the time they put it in the bottom of an empty or partly empty cardboard box. Now, however, they’ve started using the fucking safes more and more.
Eddie goes out into the hallway, where the neighbors’ coats are hanging behind a white curtain – just Uncle Kolya’s and his wife Lidka’s, since Major Shepotko doesn’t keep his greatcoat in the hallway – and rummages through their pockets. Nothing, unfortunately. “And what did you expect anyway – to find two hundred rubles in Uncle Kolya’s coat pocket?” Eddie thinks in irritated disappointment. Uncle Kolya drinks and sometimes leaves cash in his pockets, but not two hundred rubles.
Moving several pots from their own kitchen table onto Major Shepotko’s, Eddie-baby spreads out an old army blanket he has brought from the other room and starts ironing his dress trousers. As he guides the iron he thinks about what he will do.
“Svetka’s really dumb,” Eddie decides. “What does she want to go to Sashka Plotnikov’s so much for anyway? It’ll just be a bunch of phonies who’ll spend the evening acting phony with each other.” Eddie finds them boring, and if it weren’t for Svetka, he wouldn’t go. No, he wouldn’t go, although it’s quite possible that Asya will also be there. She hasn’t decided yet.
“My mother’s really something too,” Eddie thinks. On the one hand, she wants him to associate with Plotnikov and his crowd, and on the other, she won’t give him any money, as a punishment. The contradiction is idiotic. Hanging out with any other crowd would require a lot less money, since nobody besides Sashka and his friends would expect you to chip in 250 rubles per couple. They drink brandy and champagne and buy the girls fruit and chocolate for dessert. “Fucking aristocrats!” Eddie thinks, and frowns. He doesn’t like dessert and automatically holds in contempt anybody who does, demoting them to the rank of women. Sashka Plotnikov likes chocolate.
6
By the time he’s finished with his trousers, Eddie-baby has a plan. His best bet is to borrow some money from Borka Churilov, his new friend from wrestling. The very first evening Eddie went, Arseny, their coach, paired him with the experienced Boris to be torn apart, and Borka tossed Eddie’s body around to his heart’s content, a body unaccustomed to physical humiliation. The kids standing around at the edge of the ring laughed, and Eddie-baby, getting up from the mat, threw himself at Boris again and again in a helpless rage while the latter easily caught him by the arm or leg, using a surprising new technique to hurl him deftly back to the mat.
Eddie never thought he would survive the humiliation. And he was enraged at the coach for having pitted him, a rank beginner who had come to practice for the first time, against Boris, who was five years older and who had a second-class rating at a time when Eddie was still a long way even from a third-class rating.
Eddie would never have returned to that world of leather mats permeated with the odor of masculine sweat, to that world of athletes in colored wrestling tights, had it not been for Boris. Coming up to Eddie at the entrance to the Construction Workers’
House of Culture after practice, the short-haired, skinny Borka spoke to him in a friendly tone that contrasted sharply with the ruthless person who had virtually broken Eddie’s neck with his iron holds.
“Your name’s Ed?” he asked.
“Yes,” Eddie-baby morosely confirmed.
“Don’t be upset, Ed,” Boris said. “Our Arseny has his own methods. He always pairs beginners with experienced wrestlers, and if the beginner comes to the next practice session, that proves he’s strong-willed and can be a good wrestler. The majority of kids don’t turn up for the next practice. But you’ll come, of course?”
Eddie-baby had already decided that he would never again go to wrestling at the Construction Workers’ House of Culture, would never again permit himself to be humiliated like that, but he was ashamed to let this foundry worker down and came anyway. And he wasn’t sorry he did, because at the next practice Arseny first showed the beginners several easy tricks and then divided them all up into pairs to wrestle with other beginners. It was in a skirmish with the Tyurenka hoodlum Vitka Efimenko that Eddie-baby enjoyed his first wrestling victory. Eddie proved to be very tenacious, as the coach expressed it, and he got the win.
Borka Churilov’s a strange guy. There aren’t any others like him in Saltovka. Or in Tyurenka either. Borka’s sister lives in Zhuravlyovka, but Borka and his old mother live in Saltovka.
Why is he strange? Because you can’t categorize him. Borka is certainly not a punk, and although he’s already worked for several years in the foundry at the Hammer and Sickle Factory, you still wouldn’t call him a normal proletarian. Would a normal proletarian spend his whole salary on books? It’s going pretty far if they have a couple in their homes, whereas Borka’s room, which is long and narrow like a trolley, is crammed with them. Soon it will be impossible to find the lean Borka and his mocking and no less lean old mother behind all their books.
Why else is Borka strange? Well, unlike all the other kids, he doesn’t drink. Although Eddie-baby does, he respects Borka for not drinking. He doesn’t want to drink, and so he doesn’t, and who says he has to anyway?
Borka has no father. Eddie-baby doesn’t know whether Borka’s father was killed at the front or whether something else happened to him, since Borka doesn’t talk about him, which is his business. The only thing Eddie does know about Borka Churilov’s father is that he was a worker like his son.
Borka’s mother believes in God. But she is unlike the other believers Eddie-baby has run into in his life, in that her faith is a cheerful one. She keeps a picture of God called an ic
on in the sunniest corner of their trolley-shaped room. Sometimes an anti-religion agitator visits Borka’s mother to try to talk her into taking the icon down, but she just laughs. Borka, however, though he himself doesn’t believe in God, gets very mad at the agitator for bothering his mother and has even promised to kick the agitator downstairs if he doesn’t stop coming to see her while Borka is away.
Borka says he’s a worker by birth and has had enough of the agitator. Borka loves his mocking old mother very much, and they get along very well, although the Saltovka gossips think that Borka and his mother aren’t normal, that maybe they’re sectarians. The gossips say it isn’t normal for a grown-up fellow like Borka to live with an old woman like his mother and not drink, smoke, swear, go to dances, or take an interest in girls. Therefore he must be a sectarian.
“Idiots!” Eddie thinks. If somebody’s different from the rest of Saltovka society, from all these Auntie Marusyas and Uncle Sashas, then he’s immediately declared a madman or a sectarian. But Eddie knows that Borka’s not a sectarian – he’s a yogi; he has no stomach at all, and he can pull his stomach back to his spine. Borka is a yogi, and Eddie has read about yogis.
7
Eddie-baby leaps from Borka to his own personality. After putting away his trousers, he gets a jar of potato salad out of the large net bag hanging from the transom window in the cool November air – a Saltovkan refrigerator, 1958 model – and not bothering to put it on a plate, starts eating the salad directly from the jar, that being faster.
Everybody thinks that he, Eddie, isn’t normal either, as Asya has told him. “Everybody” doesn’t mean Kadik or Asya or Borka Churilov, but it does mean Red Sanya, since he’s also of the opinion that Eddie-baby isn’t normal. “Why not?” Eddie wonders.
Well, in the first place, Eddie writes poetry, and Red Sanya says that he’s a second Yesenin. Several girls in Secondary School No.8 also write poetry, but Eddie writes the kind of poetry that people remember and enjoy. Last summer he recited his poetry to a crowd at the beach, and they greeted it with delight. After his recitation a bearded man in red trunks came up to him and asked if he might talk to him for a moment.
Sitting with Eddie in the shade under an umbrella and treating him to some wine from a flask – it was a dry wine of good quality, like the wine at Asya’s house – the bearded man said that Eddie was a talented fellow and ought to study. The man provided Eddie with the address of a Kharkov poet named Revolt Bunchukov and told Eddie not to fail to go to Bunchukov’s poetry workshop, since they could teach him a lot there.
“Hey, Ed! Ed!” Sanya started yelling.
The Saltovka punks always come to the beach in groups of no less than fifty, just in case there’s an attack by the Zhuravlyovka punks. At the time in question, they were all spread out under the bushes swilling vodka. Sanya, of course, was ensconced in state, a looming Goering-like presence sitting in the shade with his towel wrapped around his head turban-style, since he’s sensitive to the sun. That’s because he’s got the boiled-lobster skin of a German.
“Hey, Ed!” all the kids started shouting now.
“You seem to be a popular figure with them,” grinned the bearded man. “Their own poet. Go, go,” he said, “I wouldn’t think of keeping you from them. But all the same, drop by and see Bunchukov. You need to develop, you need new, more intellectual friends. With these” – and the bearded man tipped his head in the direction of the Saltovka punks – “you won’t get very far.”
Eddie left him, putting the piece of paper with Bunchukov’s address on it in the pocket of his trunks, but in his mind condemning the bearded man and taking offense on behalf of the Saltovka kids. “That bearded asshole. The Saltovka kids are good kids – friendly, and a lot more interesting than anybody from Tyurenka.”
Eddie eats the potato salad – he likes any food containing meat, and it has meat in it – and thinks, “How come they’ve all started saying, ‘You’re not that kind, you’re different’? First the bearded guy last summer, and then Asya, and Slavka the Gypsy, and Borka Churilov, and…” The most ridiculous part of all is that even Captain Zilberman told him he was special, that he wasn’t like the other kids.
“Eduard,” the captain tried to convince him the last time Eddie was in his office, “stop hanging out with the punks; they’re all on their way to the same place – prison. And I’ll admit I’m not the least bit sorry for them,” Zilberman said seriously and decisively, “but you, Eduard, will ruin yourself if you don’t stop. Give up the thieving – I know you and Kostya Bondarenko have a gang!” Zilberman suddenly announced, looking at Eddie with one of his penetrating gazes, or at least with a gaze he thought was penetrating, since in fact all he did was to widen his brown eyes in a ridiculous way.
Eddie-baby didn’t answer him. Let Zilberman say whatever he wants.
“After all, you’re an intelligent fellow, Eduard. Stop before it’s too late,” the captain continued. “Your mother says you want to quit school. Don’t do it, it would be the stupidest thing you could do, with consequences that would last your whole life. Finish school and you can go to the Gorky Institute in Moscow and become a professional poet. You have the ability; all you need to do is study.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. He was watching a fly try to fuck another fly, although the second obviously didn’t want to be fucked by the first and kept flying away with an annoyed buzzing.
Following Eddie-baby’s gaze with his own, Zilberman shook his head and went on.
“Look at me!” Zilberman said, putting his little foot in its high militia officer’s boot on the chair and rocking it.
Eddie-baby looked at the diminutive Zilberman with a smile.
“I’m already an old man,” Zilberman continued, “and even so I keep working to improve myself,” and he pointed to a bundle of magazines on his desk. “I read Polish magazines. And why? Because I am interested in life and in culture…”
8
“Yes,” Eddie thinks, “there isn’t that much in common between Captain Zilberman and the moocher Slavka the Gypsy, but they say the same thing, word for word.” It seems to Eddie-baby too that he’s a little different from the other Saltovka kids, or rather it seems to him that until his fight with Yurka Obeyuk he was very unlike, very different from the other kids. He’s still different, but not so much now.
Of course, Eddie reasons, the fact that he sees the madwoman Tonka naked in his dreams is substantial proof in favor of his being crazy. Very, very substantial proof. And you wouldn’t call the fact that he masturbates all the time a normal phenomenon either. Eddie-baby is ashamed to recall his private secrets, to recall the stuck-together yellowed sheets of calendar paper. But besides that, there’s another thing that inclines Eddie in favor of the conclusion that he’s abnormal and a freak. And that is that Eddie-baby has never in his life gotten laid. He’s not a man but a boy.
Naturally, none of the kids know that he’s never been laid, or else they’d laugh at him. To hear them talk, all the Saltovka kids have been laid, but sometimes it seems to Eddie-baby that Vitka Golovashov, for example, has never been laid either and is just too embarrassed to admit it. The one in their class who has been laid the most is Borka Khrushkov, but then he’s two years older than the other kids and has been shaving for some time. Borka is a swimmer and a regional champion – if he weren’t, he would have been kicked out of school a long time ago, since he’s such a lousy student. The girls, however, like Borka because he’s famous: his picture is in the regional newspapers year-round, and once it was even published in Kiev in Ukrainian Pravda.
Having eaten the salad, Eddie returns to the balcony for his shoes and his yellow jacket. As he gets dressed, he sadly ponders the fact that all the kids think that he and Svetka are fucking each other, whereas in fact they aren’t. All they do is kiss and feel each other up. Eddie has tried several times to take Svetka’s panties off, but she won’t let him – she’s scared. Svetka tells Eddie-baby that she’s never been laid, and Eddie hi
des from Svetka the fact that he’s still not a man. Actually, fat Adam from Svetka’s building maintains that Svetka has been getting laid for a long time now, and that the fool Eddie just doesn’t realize it. But Eddie doesn’t believe Adam, since Adam used to go with Svetka until she broke up with him because he was so boring.
Once Eddie got Svetka drunk on purpose in order to “hump” her, as the kids say. The very drunk Svetka almost threw up all over the bed at Sashka Tishchenko’s parents’ house, where they had gone for a party. Eddie-baby just managed to push her head off the bed in the direction of the floor so she wouldn’t vomit all over Sashka’s parents’ bed. When Svetka finished throwing up, Eddie-baby had to bring a basin of water into the bedroom to clean up the floor, since Svetka had vomited all over it. She couldn’t even get up to help him and only moaned whenever Eddie-baby started swearing at her.
After cleaning up the floor, Eddie turned out the light again and tried to hump Svetka. Maybe he would have humped her if it hadn’t been for her panties. Svetka had on black panties that fit her doll-like ass very tightly – everything about Svetka is doll-like, her little mug and her cheeks and her long doll’s eyelashes. Sometimes even she makes fun of the fact that she looks like a doll, and falling over backward, automatically closes her eyes and says in a mechanical voice, “Ma-ma!” or “Na-na!”
Eddie was trying with all his strength to pull Svetka’s panties off, but they wouldn’t come off, and when Eddie finally tried to rip them off, he couldn’t do that either, since they were made out of thick black cloth that shone like silk in the light coming through the window from the Tyurenka streetlamp outside. Only after fooling around with the panties for half an hour did Eddie finally figure out how to take them off. All you had to do was unbutton two buttons on the side. The nearsighted Eddie hadn’t noticed that the panties had buttons.
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 17
