Eddie immediately sees Tuzik and his gang. On steps of the same kind they have on the front side of the Victory, the boys are sitting in picturesque poses around one unmistakable center – their hetman. After the lighted square, Eddie at first has trouble getting used to the dark rear of the movie theater, where the gang has evidently made a point of eliminating all the streetlights. In keeping with the architectural plan of the Victory, there aren’t any windows on this side of the building.
The wind whistles in the trees and the bare bushes along the fence. It is strangely quiet, except for the occasional roar of the human sea carried on gusts of wind from the other side of the square. The sea laps and then recedes…
There are maybe twenty or thirty punks sitting on the steps. Tuzik, in a black jacket and white shirt, his heavy reddish face standing out sharply against the background of the movie theater, has his arm around a blonde with brightly painted lips whom Eddie has never seen before.
“What are you squinting at, poet?… Come on over…,” Tuzik says.
“He guessed, the bastard,” thinks Eddie. “Is it really that obvious I’m nearsighted?” Vitka Golovashov is only a little nearsighted, and he squints a lot more than Eddie does. Eddie tries not to squint.
Disentangling himself from the girl, Tuzik gets up and offers Eddie his hand.
“How’re you doing, poet!” he says. His hand is wide and strong. They say he’s as strong as a machine – not hands but flywheels. “Just the kind of hands a hetman ought to have,” Eddie thinks with respect. Even though Tuzik drinks like a horse and doesn’t do sports.
Eddie-baby is seeing Tuzik up close for the first time. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about his face. Tuzik maybe looks like the overfed sailor in the movie An Optimistic Tragedy. He’s not very tall, but he’s as broad as a gorilla in the zoo. There’s nothing sinister about his face, but judging from his reputation and his actions, he must be sinister. To tell the truth, Eddie was expecting to see a face disfigured by scars and sporting a black eye patch like the ones Stevenson’s pirates wear.
“This is Kokha,” Tuzik says, introducing the blonde. The girl offers Eddie her warm little hand.
“My real name is Galya,” she says. “‘Kokha’ is my nickname.”
“Here, have a swig, poet,” Tuzik says, holding out a bottle of vodka, and then, nodding toward the girl, he adds, “She liked your poem about Natasha. Could you write something like that about Galya?”
The weight of uncertainty falls from Eddie’s mind. It all makes sense. Tuzik’s girl wants a poem written about her. Svetka asked him to write poems about her more than once, too. Eddie knows that women are vain and there’s nothing you can do about it. After taking a swig of the vodka, Eddie answers, shrugging his shoulders slightly,
“Sure, why not?”
“What kind of a prize did they give you?” Tuzik wants to know, taking a long pull from the bottle Eddie has just handed back to him.
“Just some crap,” Eddie wavers, “…dominoes.”
“What whores,” Tuzik smirks. “You wouldn’t call them generous. I’ll pay you cash – just get it written. She really wants a poem about herself,” he says, indicating Kokha with his head, even a bit shyly, as it seems to Eddie. A shy Tuzik.
“Only I can’t do it right away,” Eddie warns him. “I’ll need time.”
“Well, sure,” Tuzik agrees. “You need inspiration. When can you do it?”
“In a week, or maybe two…,” Eddie decides.
“All right,” says Tuzik. “But remember, I’m going to pay you. It’s not for free.” And then, in a different voice, as if now that he’s finished with the official part he can settle down and enjoy himself, he adds, “Why don’t you sit down? What are you standing for?” and throws the empty vodka bottle into the dark, where it smashes against the asphalt. “Sit down, we’ll smoke some dope now. Timur!” Tuzik calls.
A gloomy-looking, dark-haired, long-waisted kid in a soldier’s overcoat with torn-off buttons who is sitting a little bit higher up on the steps than they are climbs down to Tuzik and hands him a cigarette box.
“Iosif Vissarionovich’s favorite brand,” Tuzik observes ironically.
And in fact, embossed on the cardboard box in gold is the brand name Flower of Hercegovina. Even five years after Stalin’s death, the whole country still knows what kind of cigarettes the leader and teacher smoked.
“But inside,” Tuzik continues, “there’s a totally different kind of filling.” Tuzik opens the box and takes out one of the cigarettes. Dymok, sitting at his feet, immediately offers the hetman a light. Just like a magician.
“They’re filled with grass,” Tuzik explains. “Timur was born in Tadzhikistan. They serve hashish and weed there in the morning instead of tea. Here.” Tuzik offers Eddie the cigarette. “Do you know how to smoke it?”
Since Eddie-baby says nothing, not wishing to admit that he’s never tried dope before in his life, Tuzik considers it necessary to give him a short course on how to smoke grass. “Draw it in really deep, as much as you can, and hold the smoke. Don’t exhale for as long as possible; otherwise it won’t work.”
Eddie has heard a lot about dope, but he’s seeing it for the first time. He takes the cigarette from Tuzik. It looks just like an ordinary cigarette, only the smell is unusual – stifling. Eddie draws on the cigarette just as Tuzik has shown him, but carefully.
“Well, what do you think?” Tuzik asks happily. “Is it working? Do you feel anything, poet?”
“Nah… nothing…,” Eddie answers in annoyance. “I don’t feel anything.”
Tuzik sucks in smoke with such intensity that the cigarette visibly diminishes. “What else would you expect with a rib cage like he has?” Eddie thinks in awe.
“Here, swallow some more,” says the hetman, giving the cigarette back to Eddie. “I’m already feeling good,” he announces in a changed voice.
Eddie takes another drag, but he still doesn’t feel anything, just the reek of the cigarette and an unpleasant burning in his throat.
“All right,” Tuzik decides, “it’s not working. Don’t waste good stuff. Go get some vodka from the guys!” Tuzik nods toward the punks higher up on the steps.
Eddie climbs the steps, and a kid in a goatskin coat with its sleeves and collar torn off, so that fur curls up around his throat, hands him a bottle.
Eddie drinks and looks at their faces. Nobody he knows. These kids are probably the nucleus of the gang… Eddie knows the relatively harmless Tyurenka kids, the ones who go to school in Saltovka and live around the pond in Vitka Nemchenko’s neighborhood. But Tuzik’s kids are older, for one thing, and besides that they’re obviously almost all from the other side of Tyurenka, the one that borders on Zhuravlyovka, which is why Eddie doesn’t know them.
“So the goods really go for the poems?” the kid in the coat asks Eddie as he hands him a piece of cheese. “Here, have a bite! I heard that Esenin was a fearful fucker,” the kid says. “He couldn’t keep the whores off him.”
“Goods” are girls in Kharkov language. Eddie bitterly thinks to himself that his own goods – Svetka, that is – likes, or rather used to like, his poetry, but she doesn’t really understand it very well. Her mother, Auntie Klava, likes Eddie’s poems a lot more, even though everybody says she’s a prostitute. She likes Eddie.
Out loud, however, Eddie says something quite different. “What goods really go for is cash. And the good life. That’s the best way to lure them.”
To Eddie these words seem very sad, but the kids laugh for some reason. They hand the bottle back to Eddie, and this time he takes a good swig in order to forget about Svetka and her mother and everything else. They can all go fuck themselves. Right now, right here, he’s fine!
“Hey, poet,” Tuzik calls, “come here!”
Eddie goes down to the hetman.
“Keep her warm while I go take a leak,” Tuzik laughs as he gets up from his girl. “Sit down.”
Somewhat dumbfounded b
y this strange invitation, Eddie stands there hesitating, not knowing what to do. He’s starting not to like the situation. Tuzik’s voice is already stoned, no longer steady. Eddie-baby suddenly remembers the crazed sergeant and his blackass soldiers.
“Sit down, sit down!” Tuzik pushes him to the ground. “It’s her idea. Sit down! She likes you.”
The hetman staggers down the steps and goes over to the fence to take a leak. The hetman’s girl, Galya-Kokha, laughs in the dark.
“Are you scared?” she asks Eddie-baby.
“No,” Eddie lies. “Is there some reason I should be?”
“Everybody’s scared of him,” Galya-Kokha says, and laughs again. “Except me, that is. Hold me if you’re not scared. I’m cold!” she exclaims in a mock-pitiful voice.
Eddie throws his arm around Galya and starts to embrace her. “She’s very warm,” Eddie-baby thinks to himself. “The hetman’s girl could warm up anybody you like. So why warm her?”
Galya-Kokha turns her face toward him, and Eddie-baby sees her up close for the first time. She’s not the kind of girl he thought she was at first. She’s old! She has to be over twenty. Maybe even twenty-five. Most of the Tyurenka girls are bleach blondes, but the hetman’s girl’s hair isn’t bleached – you can tell by her light gray eyes. Or maybe they’re blue. Eddie isn’t sure in the dark.
“What are you looking at?” Galya-Kokha asks.
“I’m studying you,” Eddie improvises. “I have to write a poem about you.”
Galya-Kokha laughs.
Tuzik comes back after taking his leak.
“That’s enough sitting,” he says patronizingly, slapping Eddie on the neck. “Anyway, it’s time for her to go home. Would you like to walk her?” he asks Eddie-baby.
Eddie-baby is afraid of the hetman’s girl. He doesn’t want to walk her home. Besides, he knows that he absolutely must see Svetka tonight and have it out with her. Otherwise, he’ll just keep thinking about her, and his broken heart, or whatever it is that hurts there on the inside, will start to ache. His soul, maybe? Medicine has determined that man has no soul. So what is it that aches, then?
“I can’t. I have to meet somebody later,” he forces out. And then he adds, “It’s business.”
“You’re a busy man, poet,” says Tuzik in a voice that also contains a threat. Eddie is starting to get the idea that Tuzik isn’t as simple as he first thought. In any case, he has beautifully mastered the art of commanding his subordinates. Everything he says is double-edged, a mixture of threat and encouragement that makes you nervous and unsure of yourself.
“Zhorka! Vladimir Ilich!” Tuzik shouts. “Take her home!”
Eddie has heard about Vladimir Ilich. Bald virtually from the age of fifteen, the Tyurenka kid looks, so they say, like a young Lenin, which is why they call him “Vladimir Ilich.” Here in the dark, of course, Eddie can’t get a really good look at him, especially since Vladimir Ilich is wearing a white cap pulled down over his eyes.
“So long, poet!” Kokha says, and unexpectedly kisses him on the mouth. Eddie doesn’t even realize what has happened before the girl unglues herself from him and leaves in the company of the two punks.
“I said she likes you,” Tuzik grins. “And now let’s have something to drink!” he shouts. “Sashka, play us the one about Lyolya!”
To his surprise Eddie realizes that one of his classmates, Sashka Tishchenko, is sitting by the fence with his guitar.
In a hoarse and very unschoolboylike voice Sashka begins to sing:
Lyolya was a Komsomolka. Yeah-yeah!
(The rest of the kids join in: “Yeah-yeah!”)
She had a gang of hoods. Yeah-yeah!
As soon as evening falls,
Lyolya walks into town
With her gang of hoods. Yeah-yeah!
Eddie-baby knows this song very well, and it has always bothered him. In the song the punks “gang-bang” Lyolya, only it’s not clear whether she’s giving it to them herself or whether they’re raping her each time. Judging from the song, it seems it ought to be rape. But then why is it “with her gang of hoods”?
…Skirt torn up to her navel,
A foreskin sticking from her twat,
And hetman Grishka laughs!
At this point in the song Sashka stops, and Tuzik drunkenly laughs… And while he laughs, Sashka accompanies him on the guitar. When Tuzik stops laughing, Sashka resumes his song. Its plot unfolds – they gang-bang Lyolya for a long time, just like Mushka… At the point where the punks are fucking Lyolya, an “old fart” turns up and tries to get in line too. But the punks say to him,
“Hey, old fart, what are you doing?
Why don’t you go fuck at home?
Or won’t your old lady let you?!” Yeah-yeah!…
To the punks’ observation about his old lady, the old fart gallantly answers the following (Sashka performs the aria of the old fart in a nasal voice):
“Citizens, is that really your business?
Could be that I’m sick of my old lady.”
The old fart crossed himself
And flung himself on Lyolya,
And the work went on apace. Yeah-yeah!
“Yeah-yeah,” the gang chimes in threateningly, swinging their bottles in the air…
27
An hour later the Tyurenka gang, now swollen into a vast multitude, is surging along Voroshilov Avenue. The punks are on their way home from the Victory. Tuzik is grotesquely drunk. He walks leaning on Dymok and Eddie-baby and from time to time suddenly yells, “Am I really not going to kill anybody today?” He hangs heavily on the two minors. His famous bayonet is stuck in his belt under his white shirt and jacket. “How does he keep from sticking himself in the stomach?” Eddie wonders. “He’s used to it probably.”
Eddie is drunk too, although not of course in the same way that Tuzik is. He could have detached himself from the gang a long time ago, but for some reason, vanity probably, he’s walking along holding up the hetman of the Tyurenka punks and following the trolley line on Voroshilov Avenue, which goes past the tight-shut gates of the one-and even two-story private dwellings that face the street there. The people who live on Voroshilov Avenue are well-to-do; everywhere German shepherds – or kabyzdokhi, as they’re called in Tyurenka, from the expression kaby sdokh, which means “drop dead” in Ukrainian – are growling and struggling against their chains.
“Well, am I really not going to kill anybody today?” Tuzik howls again, wrapping his arms around the minors’ necks. His shirt has come out of his pants and is sticking out from under his jacket. He has an insanely sinister look. Eddie wouldn’t want to run into him as an enemy.
Any chance pedestrians, hearing the racket and rumble and noise made by the gang (from an excess of youthful strength, several of the kids have been ripping boards off fences and throwing cobblestones at the kabyzdokhi or at windows that have foolishly been left unshuttered), have obviously gone into hiding, perhaps turning quickly into one of the little alleys that lead off of Voroshilov Avenue. At least, the kids haven’t run into anybody so far.
“Tuz, Tuz!” Kolya the Gypsy runs up to Tuzik. “There’s some dressed-up dude up there with two girls. What the fuck does he need two of them for, eh, Tuz? Let’s take one of them for ourselves!”
“All right, let’s,” Tuzik drunkenly agrees. “Dymok!” he yells, although Dymok is right next to him. “Dymok, go over and politely ask that dude to give us one.”
Dymok slips out from under the hetman’s arm and runs off with Kolya the Gypsy.
Kolya the Gypsy has been Eddie-baby’s enemy for a long time. Several summers ago, when Eddie was swimming in Tyurenka Pond, Kolya grabbed Eddie’s new navy blue T-shirt, put it on, and never gave it back. Even though Eddie by that time was hardly an exemplary boy anymore, he was still afraid to demand his T-shirt back. But now Kolya the Gypsy is acting like he’s Eddie-baby’s best friend. The hetman doesn’t entrust himself to just anyone, and he doesn’t put his arm around just anybod
y’s shoulder. Despite the drunken apprehension the intuitive Eddie is feeling, he has to admit to himself that he likes playing the role of the hetman’s friend, his pal, and enjoys walking along with him at the head of a multitude of cutthroats, at least half of whom are prepared to follow Tuzik through fire and water. Eddie looks back. Armed with whatever they’ve happened to pick up, the gang surges along… “Now, that’s power!” Eddie thinks delightedly.
At that moment Tuzik lurches forward and just about falls over Eddie and himself.
Ahead of them, by the gate of one of the houses, Dymok and Kolya the Gypsy are talking to a man and two girls. Not shouting. Just quietly talking.
“Am I really not going to kill anybody today?” Tuzik groans in an intentionally loud voice as they walk over to the group.
“He doesn’t want to give one of them to us, Tuz. He says he needs them both. He says one of them’s his sister…,” Kolya the Gypsy affectionately informs Tuzik, and then comments almost indifferently, “He’s lying, of course.”
Tuzik frees himself from Eddie’s support and seems to sober up some. “You don’t want to give us one?” he asks the man.
The man doesn’t say anything.
Walking up behind Tuzik to the group, Eddie finally takes a good look at the man and the girls. The man is large, large and adult, which is why he didn’t hide in an alley like a normal pedestrian – he was relying on his strength. He’s about thirty years old, and judging from his clothes, he has just come from downtown. He’s wearing a short beige cloth coat, he has dark hair, and he’s bareheaded. He’s standing there with a blank look on his face as the approaching punks gradually close him in tighter and tighter.
The girls are huddled next to the fence in terror. They’re adults too. Probably they live in a Saltovka dormitory. Girlfriends. And as usually happens in such cases, one of them is ugly and fat, while the other you might even call pretty. She is, in any case, tall, and her blond hair is brushed up off her temples, and you can see traces of violet lipstick on her lips. The man probably met them at the Victory and is walking them home. “Asshole,” thinks Eddie contemptuously. “What would it have cost him to hide in an alley and wait for the gang to pass by? No, the fucker decided to play the hero for the girls. And now he’ll pay for it… The idiot!”
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 25
