Memoir of a Russian Punk

by Edward Limonov

  Mushka’s lilac mouth smiles coquettishly. “They say she takes it in the mouth,” Eddie thinks as he gazes at Mushka. She takes your cock in her mouth and sucks it. It’s called minette. Eddie knows all about it; Slavka the Gypsy told him about minette. Slavka has a great fondness for minette. Eddie knows from Slavka that the best minette is done by girls from the Baltic countries, because they are very Western and not so backward as our Russian and Ukrainian girls. Baltic girls wear different panties too, Slavka told Eddie. “They wear briefs and not those big, ugly, heavy, smelly lilac or light blue drawers full of every kind of nasty stuff from the body that they wear in Kharkov,” Slavka said with a grimace.

  Eddie examines Mushka, trying to understand how such an apparently delicate creature could gang-fuck a dozen Ivanovka hoodlums and suck the cocks of all twelve, including fat Vitka Fomenko. Mushka does have an insolent look about her, it’s true, but she’s pretty skinny, and she’s not even fifteen. Eddie heard about one of Mushka’s more recent escapades: she crawled through the window of a men’s dormitory and spent several days inside, going from room to room and fucking with four men in one room, then with four more in another, since there were four to a room in the dormitory. They say that Mushka did it on a bet and in order to annoy Vitka Kryukov, who’s in love with her. Vitka has gold teeth, and all the kids except Mushka consider him a terrible loner and are afraid of him. She, however, twists him around her little finger.

  Mushka notices that Eddie is looking at her a bit too intently.

  “Are you interested in making a purchase?” she asks, smiling and coyly pressing her cheek to her shoulder. “I don’t come cheap,” she continues, proudly exhibiting her profile to Eddie.

  Eddie-baby has in fact heard that she does come cheap, but he doesn’t say anything to Mushka about that; he only smiles. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s shy with girls. Not with Asya – Asya’s a friend – but with girls like Mushka.

  “He doesn’t have any money,” Vovka suddenly interjects. “He came to borrow some.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Eddie thinks in amazement. According to an unwritten Saltovka law, you just don’t say such things. You can get punched in the mouth for saying things like that, and seriously too. For a moment Eddie doesn’t know what to do, but catching the pleading glance of Grishka, who is on his guard, he decides to ignore the remark. You shouldn’t disgrace a guy in front of girls by saying he doesn’t have any money. It’s an insult.

  “I know your Svetka,” Mushka says all of a sudden. “She and I both went to School No.136. We were even friends.”

  Eddie is genuinely astonished. Svetka never told him she knew Mushka. It somehow hadn’t even occurred to him that Mushka ever went to school, that she ever wore a school uniform and an apron…

  “You did?” is all that Eddie can force out of himself. If he could, he would probably blush.

  “And you’re cute!” Mushka suddenly says across the table. “Only your hair should be longer,” she adds with a giggle. “How come you have an army haircut?”

  Eddie is even more embarrassed. “It’s not an army haircut,” he says. “I have a part, after all. It’s a Polish cut. Waclaw cuts my hair, and he’s a very good barber,” Eddie says, justifying himself.

  “Well, it looks like a bailiffs haircut. Bailiffs before the revolution wore parts in their hair. You would look good in a pompadour,” Mushka goes on, tipping her head to the side and unabashedly examining Eddie. “Like Elvis’s. You have the same kind of face.” Mushka falls silent and looks at Eddie, smiling ambiguously. And rubs her cheek against her shoulder.

  “Does she really like me?” Eddie thinks, now scared. “What a whore!” he thinks. He’s ashamed to admit that he himself likes Mushka very much right now with her bangs and her slender little bare shoulders in her black grown-up’s dress…

  “Let’s have another drink!” Eddie turns to Grishka, who is talking about something with Olga. Olga lives not very far away in a barrack by the creek. She’s poor and has only her mother and two younger sisters. She lives in the same barrack as Slavka Panov and his grandfather. Eddie knows that Olga plans to get married as soon as possible in order to get away from the torment of living in a barrack. She already has a grown-up suitor who’s much older than she is. Who’s bald, in fact.

  “Let’s!” Grishka readily answers. They pour out half a glass each and drink without waiting for Vovka, who’s started to dance with Mushka. Eddie sees Mushka’s narrow back coquettishly arching in Vovka’s hands. The back of Mushka’s dress is cut low, and Eddie can see two reddish, lightly powdered pimples on her back. For some reason, looking at those pimples, Eddie realizes that Mushka could gang-fuck after all, and even suck Vitka Fomenko’s cock with a smack of her lips. For some reason Eddie finds it unpleasant to look at Mushka and Vovka, who from time to time kisses Mushka lightly on the neck with his pink, crusty, chapped lips.

  “Well, I’m off!” Eddie announces. “I’ll try my luck somewhere else.” Wishing to slip away without saying goodbye to Mushka, he begins to take his leave hurriedly, but as soon as she notices that he has stood up and is putting on his jacket, she pulls Vovka over to him.

  “Are we leaving, soldier?” she asks in a cute little voice.

  “We are,” Eddie confirms. “See you!”

  Mushka, insolent Mushka, holds out her hand to Eddie, letting it droop at the wrist as if for kissing.

  “I won’t do it!” Eddie objects in his thoughts, but he kisses her hand anyway. Her hand actually smells very nice, with a fragrance of floral perfume.

  “See you,” Vovka adds. “Sorry.”

  Grishka slaps Eddie on the shoulder. “See you, old man! Drop by tomorrow.”

  Olga waves to Eddie from the table. Obviously she is even now thinking of the moment when she’ll marry the bald guy and leave her barrack behind. Her face is preoccupied.

  19

  It has already started to get dark, and a half-rain, half-snow is falling – barely, but still falling. Eddie’s in a foul mood. He has no idea what he’ll tell Svetka when he sees her at eight. You could burn up with shame over this money business. What a bitch his mother is! They have the money, so what difference would it make to her to give him the 250 he needs? Everything would be all right then. And anyway, all the kids get money from their parents three times a year – on May Day, on New Year’s, and for the October holidays. It’s a tradition. The poorest workers give their teenage children money so they can be “like everybody else” and no worse than anybody else – so they can spend the holidays with their friends and drink and dance a bit to the radio or a record player. Eddie’s father’s an officer, and he makes twice as much as the workers, but Eddie still has to suffer because of their fucking principles.

  Beginning to shiver, Eddie walks down Materialist Street, empty for the second day because of the holidays, and in spite of himself he starts to swear out loud. “We want you to grow up to be an honest man!” he says, aping his father. “I want you to be like your papa! He has never taken anything that belonged to anybody else, and he has never used his position for his own personal advantage,” he mimics his mother.

  “Jesus! I don’t want to be like my papa!” Eddie yells, and then looks around. No, nobody’s there. “So you want me to be an honest person, then?” he continues out loud. “Then give me the miserable money and don’t make me break into a cafeteria and risk five years. Take Sashka Lyakovich. He doesn’t steal because his mother and stepfather not only give him money but let him invite any friends he wants, including girls, and they even let the girls stay overnight if that’s what Sashka wants. Now, those are good parents! And as a result Sashka isn’t a punk! The goddamn whore!” Eddie swears, ending his tirade.

  Eddie decides to go past Borka Churilov’s windows again; maybe they’re lit. Maybe Borka is back from Zhuravlyovka. Wrapped up in their coats, domino players are sitting under an awning at a wooden table in Borka’s yard, by lamplight.

  “It doesn’t make any differ
ence to those assholes whether it’s raining or snowing,” Eddie thinks scornfully, “as long as they can mindlessly slap their dominoes around. They come home from the factory, gobble something down, and then it’s outside to play dominoes.” The domino players play by lamplight until late at night. In Saltovka they can be found in all the yards, or at least wherever there are streetlights. Borka laughs at the domino players, and Eddie-baby holds them in contempt. He’s in fact contemptuous of all workers, except for Borka. He knows that workers are the most uninteresting and backward people. Repatriated people are interesting. Asya is interesting. So is her family. Their neighbor Viktor Apollonovich, who was also repatriated, is interesting too, although he’s probably crazy. Even in winter the bearded Viktor Apollonovich goes around the snowy streets of Saltovka wearing a frock coat, a bow tie, a bowler, and no overcoat – a specter from the tales of the brothers Grimm… “Even Katya Muravyov’s interesting,” Eddie thinks. According to Asya, Katya shot herself – she wanted to kill herself. True, she somehow shot herself in the leg, so that she’s lame now, but at least she tried. Not the proletarians, though; people like that don’t shoot themselves.

  For some strange reason, Eddie’s contempt does not extend to the occasionally employed punks. The punks find work for themselves only when they are pressured to by the militia, and then they only remain on the job for a little while, always looking for a way to get out of it. As a rule, the punks are more likely to work in the winter than in the summer. The hearts of the punks grow restless with the first rays of spring sunshine. “The weather says it’s time to settle up!” as a Saltovka saying has it, and the punks all quit their factories in April.

  “I’ll never work!” the angry Eddie-baby whispers as he walks past the domino players. Turning the corner, he notes in desperation that Borka’s windows are dark.

  There’s nothing for Eddie to do but go home and somehow try to squeeze the money out of his mother. Kadik is supposed to drop by at six. Maybe Kadik, who knows how to talk to Raisa Fyodorovna, can help Eddie induce her to give him something. However feebly, hope springs up in Eddie, and starting to shiver from a sudden sensation of dampness, he turns toward Saltov Road in the direction of his own building.

  20

  “The dictatorship of the adults,” Eddie thinks as he strides along the dark streets of Saltovka, each stone and tree of which he knows by heart. “The dictatorship of the adults and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

  Eddie believes that the things the adults spend most of their time on are chickenshit, that the adults put on a self-important air to do what maybe doesn’t need to be done at all. For example, they use work to cover up their own personal weaknesses. Eddie-baby knows that their neighbors in Building No.22 on First Cross Street do not in fact like working. Uncle Sasha Chepiga really likes to be sick and is very happy if he doesn’t have to go to work. When that happens he plays soccer around the building with his son Vitka and the humpbacked Tolik, and he could play all day long, even giving up vodka for the sake of dribbling a soccer ball.

  Looking around early in the morning, when the sleepy residents of Saltovka are already on their way to work by 7:00 A. M. in a sad and bitter file, it’s impossible to draw any other conclusion than that they detest their plants and factories. They’re happy only twice a month – when they can draw their advances and on payday.

  Eddie-baby started studying a new subject this year: “The Constitution of the USSR.” Studying the constitution is boring and unpleasant. Eddie-baby has no interest at all in memorizing the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Soviet state, the greatest in the world. Yet as a boy with a good mind, he thinks about the constitution from time to time. He was particularly astonished, for example, to learn that the eight-hour workday is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the October Revolution. Before the revolution, it turns out, workers worked for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours a day. “That’s really fucked up!” Eddie thinks. “What kind of slave would you have to be to agree to work twelve hours a day?”

  The well-read Eddie happens to know that the primitive tribes of Australia, Africa, and Oceania, and also of New Guinea, where the explorer Miklukho-Maklay spent so many years, work on average only three hours a day hunting and gathering fruits and roots! “What the hell’s going on here?” Eddie wonders. “It’s a fraud.” Eddie would prefer to live in primitive conditions, if only to work five hours a day less than he would otherwise have to do, since you can’t avoid work altogether.

  Eddie-baby’s father doesn’t care for military service either. And his mother doesn’t care for her husband’s work. Sometimes when she loses her temper, she maintains that their family life has been ruined by Eddie’s father’s work, that Eddie-baby and his mother never see their father and husband. On the other hand, Eddie’s father, angered by his mother’s complaints, very reasonably observes that if his military job that Eddie’s mother hates so much were suddenly to disappear, there would be no way for them to live – they wouldn’t have anything to eat or wear.

  Sometimes Eddie dreams that his family lives differently – in the country, where his father plows the earth dressed in a white peasant blouse. Eddie saw a father like that in a Hungarian film once. In his dreams Eddie-baby and his mother and father have a house like the one Vitka’s grandfather and grandmother have, only bigger. In Eddie’s dreams, however, the family is also bigger: besides Eddie, there are Asya and Kadik and Vitka – his sister and brothers. And in Eddie’s dreams Vitka’s grandfather and grandmother are his grandfather and grandmother too. And they all have lots of flowering apple trees around, and horses, and rifles to defend themselves with. Eddie doesn’t want the militia to protect him; he wants to protect himself.

  And Eddie-baby’s family is almost always dressed in white. No member of the family wants to wear dark rags. And each one of the children has his own separate room. And Eddie-baby at last has a place to put away all of his notes, notebooks, and books, and to put up all of his geographical maps. All that stuff is now lying in a pile in the out-of-order bathroom, but since the builders have promised to have the hot water running soon, it may be necessary for Eddie to move his belongings down to the basement of Building No.22, where his family keeps sacks of potatoes, like all the other families who live there, and where they used to store firewood and coal before they had gas.

  The adults play very seriously at a game that half and maybe even all of them have no faith in – Eddie-baby is certain of that. He knows very well what kind of person his father is, and he knows how weak he is, but just take a sort of sidelong glance at his father when he’s dressed up in his military tunic, with his service ribbons representing different honors and decorations, and he’s walking down the street in his military cap, boots, and riding breeches – oh, then he’s the very incarnation of strength and power! Even if he can’t even wrest an apartment for himself from his superiors!

  Listening to the leaders of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union on television and looking at their faces, Eddie-baby is astonished by how backward they are and how provincial their accents are. Until 1953, when they got their television set, one of the first in Kharkov, Eddie had never seen the leaders of his country in action or heard them speak. Now that he has seen them, he’s amazed. “Why is Khrushchev such a clod, why does he look like a fat Ukrainian pig?” Eddie wonders. “Is there really nobody else in the country who’s better-looking and more distinguished?” The local leaders Eddie has run into in the course of his life – the school principal, the militia precinct chief – have all seemed like dreadful, boorish, provincial fascists given to sneering at children and adolescents. Eddie isn’t very clear about who he’d like to see take their places, just somebody of better quality. Eddie’s mother and father are proud of their pure Russian accents, so how can Eddie, in whose consciousness pure Russian has also taken root, respect that fat, badly dressed man on television with his terrible mumbling accent and his note-assisted speech?

  Eddie has a notebook in which h
e has written down names and offices. Nobody has seen the notebook, since Eddie keeps it hidden in a wooden box under the potatoes in the basement along with the novel he has just started writing. If anyone should see the notebook, it would be the end of Eddie-baby, who would perhaps be executed or taken away to Kolyma by his father. The reason is that the notebook contains the names and offices of the members of the Politburo and of all the generals and ministers and secretaries of the regional committees who need to be eliminated. Who need to be liquidated. Eddie-baby believes that the power of the state should be in the hands of the punks. There should be a dictatorship of the punks in the Soviet Union instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, the punks are much more developed, much cleverer, and much more intelligent than the proletariat. A proletarian will always back down before the knife of a punk. The punk always overcomes the proletarian.

  Eddie-baby wants to talk over his idea with Red Sanya. He wants to, but he’s been putting it off. He plans to do it after the gang robs rich Uncle Lyova, so that Sanya will take them more seriously and not regard them just as minors.

  Eddie-baby is convinced that if the leading people in the state are liquidated, there will be chaos in the country and a well-organized gang can seize power. Maybe Kostya’s gang. Not now, of course, but in twenty years or so. And they – the leaders, that is – will all have to be liquidated in a single day.

  Eddie-baby doesn’t see anything impossible about his idea. Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had a very small gang in 1917, but they still managed to seize power. Kostya, the only person Eddie has told about his red list (“red” because Eddie wrote it out in red ink), says he’s crazy. Even so, Eddie is counting on eventually bringing Kostya around, maybe when they’re adults. “Why do you say I’m crazy?” Eddie asked. “After all, what about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Napoleon? And just recently Hitler and Goering, who looks like Red Sanya? There wasn’t always nothing but thousands of boring Uncle Vasyas who look just like each other, and Uncle Tolyas and Uncle Sashas and Uncle Ivans, was there? After all, Kostya, even though Hitler was our enemy, he was a great man, don’t you agree?” Eddie said.