“Great job, Ed, you old cocksucker!” Arkashka shouts. Sometimes Arkashka hangs out at the benches under the lindens by right of being an athlete, and so he knows about their idiotic flourish. Eddie isn’t offended – Arkashka’s just teasing him. Whenever necessary, he sticks up for Eddie and quietly backs him in a fight, even though as a boxer he’s not supposed to get involved in street fighting – he could be disqualified.
At that moment up to the microphone steps some bald old fart whom the master of ceremonies has identified as the Kharkov writer Boris Kotlyarov, if Eddie has heard right.
“Kotlyarov?” he asks the kids.
“Yah, something like that… Kuntlyarov…,” the always mocking Yepkin answers.
“That’s right, Eddie, it’s Kotlyarov,” Kadik confirms as he listens in annoyance. Kadik doesn’t like Yepkin, or Dipkin, as he calls him, and maybe he’s afraid of him, because he always gets nervous when Dipkin’s around. “He’s already getting nervous,” Eddie thinks, “and pretty soon he’ll be on his way.” Kadik obviously resents Eddie’s other friends, and he avoids the punks in particular.
After a speech of several minutes whispered into the microphone, so that even the attentive Kadik can’t hear anything, Eddie-baby finally hears the “Kharkov writer” Kotlyarov pronounce his name.
“Go on! Go on.” The kids push him forward. “It’s first prize. Go on!”
Eddie, Vitka Golovashov, Yepkin, Kadik, and Lyonka Korovin, Vitka’s invariable drinking partner and friend, who has just joined them, all push forward to the steps, duck under the rope surrounding the stage, and move in the direction of the microphone.
“Not everybody! Not everybody! Just Eduard!” the alarmed master of ceremonies says, stopping them. “Eduard, you go over to Comrade Kotlyarov, please. And you guys wait here.”
Eddie goes up to the “Kharkov writer.” Eddie has never in his life heard of the writer Kotlyarov, but who cares about that?
“Congratulations!” Kotlyarov says to him. “Permit me to shake your hand, poet Eduard Savenko,” Kotlyarov says, opening and closing his pink mouth in his pink face, “and to award you,” he continues, “this certificate of victory in the poetry contest of the Stalin District House of Culture.”
“Certificate?” Eddie thinks. “What the fuck do I need with your certificate! What about the prize?”
“Let’s give a big hand, comrades, to the winner of the poetry contest!” the master of ceremonies says to the crowd after running up to the microphone.
The crowd loudly claps its hands the same way that penguins in the Kharkov zoo slap their flippers together. For a while the noise thunders over the square, and the Saltovka and Tyurenka punks roar and whistle as their contribution to the tumult. Eddie-baby sticks the certificate in his pocket and is about to leave when a small object wrapped in red paper appears in the writer’s hand.
“In addition to the certificate, allow me, Comrade Savenko, to give you this gift as a memento,” says the pink Kotlyarov.
“Right!” yell Yepkin, Vitka, Lyonka, and Kadik from where they’re standing next to the rope. “Right!”
Eddie takes the package from the writer, and they once again shake hands. The crowd, no longer interested in the show, claps weakly. Eddie runs down the steps to his friends. Yepkin, seizing the red package from his hands, immediately begins to tear off the wrapping paper, while the master of ceremonies has already begun to announce the next attraction on the program, a tug-of-war for those wishing to participate.
“Dominoes!” Yepkin howls in disappointment. “The faggots! They couldn’t give you anything more valuable than that, not even a small radio? Dominoes!” he says again with contempt.
All come to the unanimous conclusion that the House of Culture got greedy and that its administration probably drank up the money that had been set aside for the prizes and instead bought whatever crap they could find. All the other participants in the contest received their prizes earlier, so nobody knows what they got, but obviously it was shit too.
Yepkin whistles scornfully, and so does Lyonka, but not Kadik and Vitka. Eddie, however, indifferently sticks the box of dominoes in his pocket.
“I’ll give them to Uncle Sasha,” he says. “Let the old guys slap them around. Their set’s pretty badly broken from the way they bang the dominoes down on the table. They’re an excitable lot, the goat herd!”
The kids squeeze through the crowd.
“We ought to have a drink to celebrate,” Vitka Golovashov observes.
“Right, a drench in honor of the first prize,” Lyonka says in support of his pal. “It’s on you, Ed.”
“I’ll run to the store,” Yepkin readily volunteers. By offering to go to the store, Arkashka is hoping to compensate for his usual lack of funds. He’s not always able to chip in like the other kids, since his family’s large and poor.
Eddie digs in the pocket of his jacket and removes the crumpled certificate, which Kadik at once grabs from him to look at, and then some money.
“It’s my treat,” Eddie says, and pours into Yepkin’s palm all the change he took from the cafeteria and all the rubles. “There’s about thirty rubles there, Dipkin,” he announces. “Buy biomitsin for everybody.”
“Four bottles?” Yepkin asks.
“If it comes out to four, then buy four,” Eddie answers. He has decided that it is after all almost ten o’clock and Svetka has probably gotten stuck somewhere with her mother in Dnepropetrovsk, and thirty rubles won’t save him anyway.
Yepkin for some reason counts the change again. Vitka hands him more money. Vitka always has cash.
“Here!” Kadik says to Eddie, returning the certificate. “Show it to Svetka when she gets back. Let the girl see it. It’s material evidence of the talent of her old buddy.”
“Where’s she getting back from?” Yepkin responds to Kadik’s observation. “Where did she go? I saw her just yesterday.”
“How could you see her yesterday,” Eddie cautiously asks Yepkin, “if she and her mother left yesterday morning to visit their relatives in Dnepropetrovsk?”
Eddie suddenly feels the anxiety rising up in him again, and almost knowing beforehand what Yepkin’s answer will be, he still hopefully asks him,
“Are you sure you saw her yesterday? Maybe it was a few days ago…”
“Do I look like a lunatic?” Yepkin asks, his round Mongol face staring and his cropped head thrust forward. “I saw her last night coming out of her building with another girl and Shurik Ivanchenko. They were carrying satchels with them.”
After blurting all this out, Yepkin suddenly realizes that he has probably said something he shouldn’t have, since all the kids have fallen silent and are looking at Eddie.
“That means she’s betrayed me,” Eddie thinks. “That’s exactly right. She’s betrayed me. She didn’t go to Dnepropetrovsk or anywhere else, she stayed home and spent the holidays with Shurik.” For some reason, Eddie-baby recalls the sparse blond moustache of the seventeen-year-old Shurik and imagines Shurik kissing Svetka, the soft moustache touching her cheek. As far as Eddie is concerned, Shurik is a slave and a fool and has been all his life, and will still be working in his shoe store when Eddie is accomplishing great deeds, but Svetka seems to regard him quite differently. Eddie-baby sees what Shurik is, that he’s a fop and an asshole, and that it’s about people like him that they sing in the thieves’ song that “a fop in a satin tie / is now kissing you by the gate…” The words really apply, even the stuff about the tie, since the neatly dressed Shurik always wears one. “The whore!” Eddie says, his blood boiling. “What am I supposed to do now?” he thinks, and then notices the gazes fixed on him.
“Are the two of you still going together?” Yepkin asks guiltily. “I thought you had broken up a long time ago -”
“Well, are you going to the store or not?” Kadik asks him angrily. “If you’re going, go!”
“I’m going!” Yepkin snarls in reply. “Don’t yell at me, or you’ll be sorry!”
Yepkin leaves, and Kadik tries to calm Eddie down:
“Well, fuck her, then, fuck Svetka, Ed. You need a real girl, not that snot-nosed minor. She doesn’t even have real legs,” Kadik says. “They’re matchsticks instead of legs.”
“Goddamn!” Eddie thinks sadly. “Svetka’s legs are better than anybody’s. They’re long and straight and not matchsticks at all. There’s just not very much flesh on them yet, since she’s only fourteen, but there will be. Svetka’s beautiful, she’s like something from a dream,” Eddie thinks. “What can I do? What can I do?” he reasons feverishly. “Cut Shurik?” Eddie imagines cutting up the face, moustache, and tie of the hated Shurik with his straight razor. “Ftt! Ftt! Ftt!” the razor whizzes. From the deep, instantly swelling gashes on Shurik’s cheeks, nose, and mouth dark red blood suddenly starts to flow. “You bastard! You bastard! You snake! Don’t you dare touch my Svetka!”
“Eddie! Eddie!” Kadik’s voice reaches him from somewhere far away, as if from Slavka’s Vladivostok. “Eddie!”
25
It’s not a very easy thing to be among friends and have to conduct yourself as you normally do when you feel like hell and can’t bear it anymore. Eddie feels like immediately getting on a trolley and dashing over to Svetka’s to look for her and kill Shurik and then go to prison and sit in solitary confinement, just so it will be more bearable, but instead he has to pretend that nothing has happened; he has to be a man, so that later on the kids won’t say he fell apart when he found out that Svetka had betrayed him. That Svetka has betrayed him, Eddie has no doubt. He’s suspected it for a long time, and the only thing now is to decide what to do about it.
Coming back from the store, Yepkin puts his hand on Eddie’s shoulder and in a guilty lisp says,
“If you want, Ed, I’ll punch that clown’s face in for you. Do you want me to?”
“It’s all right,” Eddie says in reply. “Never mind, I’ll take care of it myself. It’s my business.”
And it really is his business, Eddie reasons as he drinks the biomitsin Yepkin brought back. They have gone into the park, which is bare but still provides some protection from a potential militia attack, since drinking in the square during People’s Festivals isn’t allowed – it’s against the law. It’s his business how he’ll straighten things out with that bastard who’s been dishonestly pretending to be Svetka’s friend. “And Svetka’s a whore!” the wounded Eddie thinks. “She preferred me, she preferred me to Shurik. Me!”
Eddie drinks, lifting the bottle skyward, but instead of the dark sky and the denuded treetops, which look more like tangles of barbed wire than treetops, he sees Svetka in the lilac serge dress and crinoline that she wore when she and Ritka came to the party at their school, that she in fact had on when they first met, and he hears the affectionate doll-like laugh she laughed when he kissed her in the empty classroom and the moonlight fell through the window onto the chalk and the blackboard. His Svetka. How could she?
Eddie-baby is hurt in a way he’s unused to. Not hurt the way he was four years ago when his whole body ached from the blows of the young Siberian bull Yurka Obeyuk. A deeper sort of pain hurts Eddie now. “As if somebody cut me up inside with a razor,” he thinks in astonishment. “As if somebody cut my insides up with a razor. And there isn’t any bleeding because it’s inside, but your heart’s all cut up,” he thinks. Encountering pain of that kind for the first time, he understands nothing of his own situation except his sense of injustice. “Why?” he asks himself, tormented by his failure to understand.
The only thing that keeps him from animal-like cries of pain is paragraph one of the Saltovka Youth Code, which says, “Be a man at all times and in all places.” “Only women cry in the presence of other people,” Eddie thinks, “and only women admit that they’re in pain. A man endures it and says nothing.” If he were acquainted with the Japanese code of bushido or with the teachings of the Stoics, if he had read Marcus Aurelius or Yukio Mishima, he would know that the Saltovkan code is not very different from those codes, and in considering the similarities and differences between them, he would have something to occupy his thoughts and might thereby ease some of his pain, but Eddie-baby hasn’t heard of bushido and the Hagakure or the Stoics; he has only his pain – a primitive pain down inside, and the doll-like little face of Svetka before his eyes, and her small, amazingly white breasts, which she would sometimes let him touch…
As the kids are leaving the park after finishing their bottles and are on their way back to the crowd, which is humming like the boiler room of a huge steamship, Kadik walks along beside Eddie and whiningly exhorts him.
“Stop it, Eddie-baby, don’t take it so hard!” Kadik says. “Let’s go rub shoulders with the crowd. We’ll pick up some girls, all right? They all saw you perform. Today it’ll be easy. Or you know what?” Kadik says with more animation. “Why don’t we go to Sums, eh? We’ll take a stroll down there. I’ll introduce you to the best old buddies, all right, Eddie?”
“Why the fuck do you keep pestering me?” Eddie says to him in a remote voice, suddenly coming to a halt. Kadik’s whining is interfering with his thoughts about Svetka.
“Well, why do you think!” Kadik answers, offended. “All I did was make a suggestion. I just wanted to take your mind off that skinny minor, and you start snapping at me…”
Before they get into a real argument, however, a little kid from Tyurenka comes running up to Eddie. Everybody calls him Dymok, although his real name is Dima. He’s only twelve or thirteen, and once he even told Eddie himself that Eddie was already over the hill. Out of breath, he shouts,
“Where the fuck have you been, poet? Tuzik has been looking for you for a long time. He wants to talk to you. Let’s go!” And Dymok grabs Eddie by the sleeve of his jacket. “Tuzik told me to bring you to him.”
Hearing the name Tuzik, Kadik turns pale; Tuzik is the hetman of all the Tyurenka punks. He’s twenty years old, but he’s hiding out from the army and lives… Well, who knows where he lives? Wherever it is, he never goes out without his huge German bayonet and at least a dozen adjutants. According to rumors, the place where he hides out is defended by kids with rifles. Be that as it may, Tuzik is a mysterious and frightening person. Why did he send for Eddie-baby? What does Tuzik want with him?
“Didn’t ‘he’ say what ‘he’ wants Eddie for?” Kadik cautiously asks Dymok.
“Fuck off, dude,” Dymok says to Kadik. “He didn’t send for you. So why don’t you get the fuck out of here!” he adds contemptuously.
Dymok is a famous personality. He’s the pet of everybody in Tyurenka, and as a result, at his twelve years, he’s a pretty spoiled little bastard. When they want to fuck somebody over, the Tyurenka punks always send Dymok in first. Dymok will approach a good-sized adult and, looking up at him from below, shout something very insulting like, “Hey, you stupid prick, give me a light!”
It’s rare that anyone addressed in that fashion can resist the temptation to give Dymok a cuff on the back of the head. Which is precisely what the Tyurenka punks are waiting for. Immediately, as if popping up out of the earth, at least a dozen Tyurenka cutthroats appear, and shouting the classic line, “What do you think you’re doing, you bastard, hitting a minor!” they start beating the man up. They beat him with whatever they have, since the Tyurenka punks aren’t particular – iron rods, brass knuckles, chains – and if the man is very strong, they put their knives into action. However big the man – or even the men – what can he do against a crowd of enraged minors? Even if he’s a world champion in wrestling or boxing or even jujitsu, what can he do against jackals falling upon him in waves? “You won’t get very far against an iron bar,” as the Tyurenka saying puts it.
While all this is going on, Dymok circles around and either tries to kick the fallen man in the face with his heel or cut him a little with the special wooden-handled blade he carries for that purpose. Ev
en if you don’t actually kill the one who’s been knocked down, you can at least decorate his face for the rest of his life.
“You guys stay here. I’ll go by myself,” Eddie tells Kadik and Vitka and Lyonka. Yepkin has already left; he had a date with a girl.
“Watch it…,” Kadik says to Eddie as he walks away. He can’t say, “Be careful!” as long as Dymok’s around.
Eddie-baby isn’t afraid for himself. Tuzik won’t touch him, since even he respects Red Sanya and doesn’t want to spoil his relationship with him by assaulting his best pal. “That would be a really dumb thing to do,” Eddie decides, although why Tuzik has sent for him or what he wants from him, Eddie has no idea…
Although Eddie and Kostya don’t say anything about it, they hold Tuzik in contempt, since they don’t understand why, with more than a hundred punks at his disposal, or even more than that if he wants, he doesn’t try anything big but is content just to make a lot of noise and carry on violently, for the most part beating up and robbing completely innocent pedestrians on Voroshilov Avenue. “A petty gangster,” was Kostya’s reaction to Tuzik once, although he wouldn’t mind having Tuzik’s army. Tuzik has a whole army of punks, and his name strikes terror in all the girls at their school without exception, although Sashka Tishchenko, who is from Tyurenka, once told Eddie that Tuzik even has a wife or something.
26
Once Dymok and Eddie emerge from the crowd, Dymok bounds over to the very tall iron fence that separates the rear courtyard of the Victory Movie Theater from the surrounding square. Eddie follows him. The fence has thick iron spikes five or six meters high that are painted black and end at the top in very sharp points – the kind of spikes that pagans used to impale Christians on in ancient times. Pagan Turks, probably. “I ought to impale that bastard Shurik on one of them,” Eddie thinks with hatred.
Despite the fact that there is no gap to be seen and the gate is locked with a chain heavy enough to stop an elephant, Dymok confidently strides up to the fence. Only after he’s gotten a little closer does Eddie notice that one of the spikes is missing, and that it’s possible to slip through into the courtyard on the other side without any trouble. Which is exactly what they do – Dymok first and Eddie-baby after him.
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 24
