Eddie has even forgotten his fear of the crowd, so completely delighted is he with his friend-impresario. That’s how he said it – just like a responsible comrade: “It was announced in the press…”
“Well, we have five people now. It’s not a lot, but I think it will be enough for a contest,” the master of ceremonies says, making up his mind. “Four poets just wasn’t enough,” he justifies himself to Kadik.
“The public has come to hear a contest for poets,” Kadik declares, waving his hand over the sea of people below them. “You can see how excited and full of anticipation they are,” he adds.
The crowd really is excited, but Eddie-baby, Kadik, and the master of ceremonies know it couldn’t be less interested in poetry. “It would watch the circus with the greatest of pleasure,” Eddie-baby thinks with a grin. “It wants bread and spectacles, biomitsin and the circus. Roll out barrels of biomitsin for them and invite the regional circus to come with its bears, elephants, and clowns, and the crowd at the Victory will be the happiest crowd in the world. They’ll remember it for years afterward.”
The young people have come to the Victory to see each other, to drink together, to get into fights, to pass the time with their friends. Every district has its own place on the square. The half of the square to Eddie’s right belongs to the kids from Tyurenka and Saltovka, to “our guys,” as he puts it. The other half belongs to the kids from Plekhanovka, who share it as hosts with the kids from Zhuravlyovka. That doesn’t mean that the kids from Tyurenka or Saltovka can’t go over to the side belonging to the kids from Plekhanovka and Zhuravlyovka; certainly they can, but officially the gangs congregate on different sides of the square – that’s how the territory is divided. Eddie-baby has no idea who divided it that way, but that’s the way it has always been. It’s a tradition that has been passed down from one generation to the next.
“I’d like to look at your poems before you recite them,” the master of ceremonies says to Eddie. “Forgive me, young man, but what’s your name?”
“Eduard Savenko,” Eddie identifies himself with a certain reluctance. He doesn’t like his last name and dreams of changing it when he grows up.
“All right then, Eduard,” the master of ceremonies says, “I’d like to take a look at your work. Please don’t be offended – that’s the policy around here -”
“Censorship!” the insolent Kadik mockingly interjects. “Show him what you plan to recite, Eddie.”
It’s a good thing that Eddie has brought the notebook with him. He leafs through it now to find the poems he needs. This isn’t the beach, after all; they won’t let you recite poems about the militia and prison. What’s required are poems about love. You can recite poems about love anywhere.
“Here’s one,” Eddie says, sticking his finger in the notebook. “And this one too,” he indicates, turning the page. “And here’s another one,” he says, “just a short one,” and he hands the notebook to the master of ceremonies, who immediately immerses himself in it. The master of ceremonies reads professionally and rapidly, and after a few minutes he gives the notebook back to Eddie.
“Very talented, young man,” he says. “Very. I’m pleasantly impressed. The majority of people who recite here,” he says, taking Eddie by the arm and leading him a little away from the others, “the majority of the poets here are, how shall I put it” – and he frowns – “are not very literate about poetry. And then too,” the master of ceremonies adds condescendingly, “they lack spiritual culture… You understand what I mean?” he says, looking Eddie in the eye. “By the way, what do your parents do?” he asks.
“My father’s an army officer, and my mother’s a housewife,” Eddie succinctly answers. Despite the compliment the master of ceremonies has bestowed on his poems, Eddie doesn’t care for him. There’s something unpleasant about him. “A cultured hireling,” Eddie says to himself.
“That’s what I thought, that’s just what I thought!” the master of ceremonies chirps happily. “Your father’s an officer. Officers are our Soviet middle class… Of course,” he says, “it’s all clear now…”
“And you, young man” – he turns to Kadik, who has come over to listen to what they are saying – “you’re wrong about the censorship. I’m not engaging in censorship here. We don’t have Stalinism in this country anymore, but we do have a huge audience out there” – and the master of ceremonies waves his hand over the square filled to the brim with people – “sometimes in the tens of thousands… No, we aren’t censoring our poets; we’re simply required to protect people from any possible hooliganism, any possible provocation. For example, you kids know what happened several months ago in Ukrainian Pravda, don’t you?” he says, speaking to both of them now, to both Eddie and Kadik.
“No,” they answer.
“A terrible provocation. And very clever, too!” The master of ceremonies smiles venomously. “A letter came to the editorial staff from Canada. In the letter a Canadian Ukrainian, a young man, wrote that he loved our country and that he was a worker, and he asked the staff to publish a poem in which he glorified the world’s leading country of victorious socialism and spoke of his hatred for capitalism, which has condemned the workers to unemployment. They published the poem, but -” And here the voice of the master of ceremonies becomes a loud whisper. “Well, as a poet, Eduard, you must know what an acrostic is. Do you?” Eddie-baby nods. He knows what an acrostic is. “Well, then,” the master of ceremonies announces triumphantly, “it was an acrostic! So that if you read only the first letters of each line, you got the infamous Ukrainian fascist cry: In Muskovite, Polack, and Jew, take your knife and stick it through.’ So you see how it is, young people… And you say ‘censorship,’” the master of ceremonies concludes, walking away from Eddie and Kadik with a smug expression on his face to announce the start of the poetry contest.
Even Kadik is dumbstruck. “Not too fucking bad!” he exclaims, laughing. “The editor was probably prosecuted.”
Not that Kadik feels sorry for the editor or approves of the deceptively provocative actions of the Canadian poet, but like all the residents of Saltovka, for some reason he’s glad whenever the authorities slip up. Especially since Ukrainian Pravda is viewed as a disgusting rag and is moreover in the Ukrainian language, which is considered provincial in Kharkov. Nobody wants to go to the Ukrainian schools, so now all the kids in the non-Ukrainian schools are being forced to study the Ukrainian language, even though the instruction is conducted in Russian. Eddie-baby has been studying Ukrainian since the second form and knows it very well, but where is he supposed to use it – in a village or something? And where is such a village to be found? Even in Old Saltov it’s only the old people who still speak Ukrainian. The young people don’t want to. In Kiev the intelligentsia use it just to show off. They stand on Kreshchatik and loudly “conversate in Ukrainian.” You could just as easily show off by speaking English. “Asya, on the other hand, is a modest person who doesn’t boast about her French, even though she speaks it better than any teacher of the language,” Eddie thinks.
And there’s no more boring subject in school than Ukrainian literature. The endless whining about “serfdom” – it makes your ears burn. There hasn’t been any serfdom for a long, long time, but the whining remains.
23
Eddie is the second to perform. That’s good, because by the fifth poet the audience will be tired out and start whistling and demanding music. The first poet, a muscular guy of about twenty-five, recites his poem about a boxer very badly. “He’s probably a boxer himself,” Kadik whispers. The poem in itself isn’t that bad, although the poet is obviously imitating both Yevtushenko and Rozhdestvensky at the same time, which is fine, but nobody has taught the guy how to recite. He just mumbles into the microphone, when what he needs to do with a crowd like this is recite loudly and clearly.
“And he should stand a lot closer to the microphone,” Eddie reasons, analyzing the mistakes of the boxer-poet. When the latter walks away from the mi
crophone, the applause is pretty sparse. “He could have performed a lot better,” Eddie decides. “Read well, his aggressive poem about a boxer who finally knocks out his opponent would unquestionably have pleased precisely this rowdy group of young people, which respects aggressive strength more than anything else. What a fool!” Eddie says in condescending pity of his own unsuccessful opponent.
The master of ceremonies comes over to Eddie.
“Would you like me to announce you as a Saltovka poet, Eduard?” he asks with a smile.
“Yes,” Eddie answers.
“Of course,” Kadik reiterates. Although Kadik doesn’t like Saltovka, he does appreciate that all the Saltovka members of the audience will root for Eddie and the applause will be that much greater. What self-respecting patriot of Saltovka wouldn’t clap for one of his own?
“And now I would like to present to you,” the master of ceremonies says into the microphone in a hushed voice, “the youngest participant in our poetry contest… The Saltovkan poet, as he calls himself” – and here the master of ceremonies makes a significant and prolonged pause before shouting, “EDUARD SAVENKO!”
“Now, that’s really professional,” Eddie thinks with envy. “Whether you want to or not, you’ll hear him.” Even the part of the crowd that’s farthest away, standing by the trolley stop hidden behind the last lamps, has now heard of the Saltovkan poet, and from all over the square comes the sound of encouraging applause. If Eddie and Kadik have counted accurately, there are thousands of people from Saltovka at the festival. Here and there are heard shouts of “Ed!” as people in the crowd start to recognize Eddie, who has now stepped up to the microphone, and then from the right-hand side of the square, from the place where the Saltovka punks have congregated, comes organized, noisy applause and more shouts of encouragement: “Ed! Ed!”
“Can you hear?” Eddie asks into the microphone in a loud, brash voice. His hands are trembling, his mouth is dry, but he knows that in a moment his stage fright will pass completely. Just as soon as he starts to recite.
“Yes! Yes!” come yells from the crowd.
“‘Natasha,’ do ‘Natasha’!” A heartrending cry is suddenly heard. And from other places in the crowd come other voices in support of the first: “Do ‘Natasha’!” It’s obvious the kids have heard “Natasha” one of the many times he recited it at the beach.
Eddie wrote “Natasha” after spending Easter at Vitka Nemchenko’s. Eddie hadn’t actually intended to recite “Natasha” for the contest and therefore hadn’t shown it to the master of ceremonies. But now, standing face to face with thousands of people, he thinks that maybe he will do “Natasha” after all – why not? His audiences have always liked it. Only he won’t recite the last stanza about the punks, since the master of ceremonies and the auxiliaries might gang up on him and throw him off the stage. Smiling, Eddie almost asks into the microphone in a powerful but friendly way the first lines of the poem:
Who’s that walking home,
Isn’t it our friend Natasha?
Braids in ribbons down her back,
Dear, sweet Natasha!
The crowd has grown quiet and is listening to him now. Eddie sees that even the back rows have quieted down. They’re all listening, unlike when the boxer recited. “You can hear the trolley and the shuffling of thousands of feet, but otherwise the whores are listening,” Eddie thinks delightedly. He knows they won’t listen to more than three poems before they start fidgeting, but while they’re still quiet, he’ll give them a first-class “Natasha” – like a national anthem. And he continues to recite clearly and forcefully:
The wind is fresh, and the lilacs
Are everywhere in bloom.
In a white dress on a sunny day
You’ve come out to take a walk…
After Eddie has chanted all twelve stanzas to them and is concluding with a repetition (except for the last two lines) of the first stanza as a refrain -
Who’s that walking home,
Isn’t it our friend Natasha?
Homeward with a majestic stride,
Dear Russian Natasha!
– the whole square erupts in a roar of applause, and Eddie realizes that whatever happens, however good the poems recited after him, the first prize is his. He therefore recites two more poems and despite the exclamations of “Bravo!” and “More! More!” walks away from the microphone.
“Great job!” the master of ceremonies says to him, for some reason taking a more familiar tone. “Great job! I’m sure the jury will give you first prize. Tell me, did you ever take a speech class or acting lessons?” he asks. “You handled yourself magnificently! And the poems were excellent,” the master of ceremonies says, failing to remember that Eddie didn’t show him “Natasha” beforehand. It’s not for the victor to be judged. “Even though it’s quite possible that ‘Natasha’ is an acrostic, that if you read the first or the last letters in the stanzas, you might come up with some rubbish or other,” Eddie thinks with a laugh. “Maybe it says, ‘Why don’t you all get fucked in the mouth!’”
“Well, congratulations, old buddy!” shouts a happy Kadik, shaking Eddie by the shoulders. “You see how well everything works out if you just listen to old man Kadik? Today the best girls will be ours!” Kadik yelps in delight. “Go up to any one of them and take her! That is, if Svetka doesn’t come to Victory,” he adds, correcting himself.
The words of his friend bring Eddie back to reality and distract him from the greatest social triumph of his fifteen-year-old life. His intuition contributes a certain anxiety on its own. If he had felt that anxiety before his performance, he would have attributed it to stage fright, but now he begins to wonder if something hasn’t happened to Svetka. “Maybe the train went off the tracks?” he thinks with horror, although he immediately pushes that thought out of his mind. “That’s stupid – how often do trains get derailed? Svetka is about as likely to be hit by a falling brick. It’s just stupid.”
24
During the next half-hour Eddie-baby shakes at least a hundred hands, and he receives so many approving slaps that his shoulder aches. He wanders through the crowd on the square with Kadik, greets people he knows, and from time to time one of their acquaintances, taking out from under the flaps of his coat the ubiquitous biomitsin or portvesha – port, that is – gives the two of them a drink. The results of the poetry contest will be announced after an interval of dancing – after the jury, consisting of some completely unknown cultural figures and activists, has finished deliberating inside the movie theater – although all the kids are sure that Eddie will get first prize.
“First prize is yours, old buddy. It’s in the bag,” Kadik says. “You can rest easy. I listened carefully to all the other poets, and they don’t come close,” he says. “It’s your good luck, old buddy, that there weren’t any women poets or members of national minorities in the contest, Chukchis or Evenks, say. Otherwise the jury would award first prize to one of them, even if the poems were complete horseshit. That’s the policy now at all the People’s Festivals. They give them prizes to encourage them,” Kadik says, “so they’ll develop.”
“Right,” mutters the skeptical Vitka Golovashov, who is standing with them. “I wonder, what do you think the prize will be? They’ll probably give you some crap. A book probably.”
“They should award money,” Eddie says. “Even if it’s only a little.”
“I once won a velveteen bear at a shooting gallery,” Kadik says, “shooting at moving targets. I gave the bear to a certain girl who later fucked me for it.”
“Kadik’s probably lying,” Eddie thinks. Kadik never told Eddie about that experience. Of course, he’s not telling the story to Eddie but to Vitka, so it’s forgivable.
Somebody’s hands suddenly cover Eddie’s eyes. Eddie tries to break loose, but the hands are strong ones. After a brief struggle he manages to grab his opponent by the leg and flip him onto the pavement in front of him.
“Oh, you motherfucker!” the oppo
nent says with a slight lisp, and up from the pavement jumps the smiling Arkashka Yepkin. “What the fuck did you do that for?” he asks, although he isn’t offended. “The wrestlers have gotten together and are tossing other people around…”
The wrestlers are Eddie-baby and Vitka Golovashov. Vitka is of course an experienced wrestler with a third-class rating, whereas Eddie is still considered a beginner, but even so, “the wrestlers have gotten together.”
“Why don’t you boxers put up your fists, then?” Vitka answers for Eddie.
Arkashka assumes a boxer’s crouch, and Vitka a wrestler’s. They circle around each other for a while, clearing a space in the crowd for themselves. The onlookers shout encouragement to them: “All right, let’s go, let’s see what you can do!” “Show us what you’ve got!” Vitka and Arkashka, however, have no intention of grappling. After circling around some more and then, as they say in Saltovka, giving each other “tenners” – slapping both their hands together palm to palm, in other words – they finally greet each other:
“Hey, you dipshit boxer!” Vitka declares.
“Hey, you fucking wrestler!” Arkashka replies.
They respect each other. Vitka is regarded as a wrestler with real prospects, and Arkashka is a very good boxer. Very. Even though he’s only just starting out.
There are three Yepkin brothers. Two of them are boxers. The third is still too young, but he’s already begun waving his fists around. Their mother is Russian, and their father is a “Chuchmek,” as they say in Saltovka – some kind of Asiatic, that is, either Uzbek or Kazakh. Whatever the case, all the Yepkins have flat oriental mugs, the sly, narrow eyes of Mongol khans, muscular yellow bodies, and very good boxer’s temperaments. Eddie-baby has yellow skin too, although of course not the same kind as Arkashka Yepkin has. Arkashka’s face is yellow, whereas Eddie’s face and hands are much whiter than the rest of his body.
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 23
