30
Early the next morning Eddie emerges from Vovka Zolotarenko’s shed, where he spent the night completely frozen. He didn’t feel like going home. He didn’t want to see the sleepy face of his mother, he didn’t want to answer her questions, and he didn’t want to refuse the food she would offer him and have to listen to her complaints about the fact that everybody else has children who are children, whereas her son is a rogue who comes home at four in the morning. Eddie-baby wanted to be alone and think.
Vovka gave Eddie the keys to the shed a long time ago, “just in case.” Eddie had never used them until now, when that “in case” finally came along. Vovka didn’t tell Eddie that the shed was full of rats, although it’s possible he didn’t know about that.
Clambering up onto an old door that he had placed on top of two barrels, Eddie lay there calmly for a little while, or rather, not so calmly, since he was thinking about what Svetka had said to him, but at least the first few minutes in the shed were quiet. Then Eddie heard the first rustling sound, and soon the whole shed was filled with an invisible clamor. Eddie-baby first thought it was mice, but in the dull light of the shed’s single half-meter window, he suddenly, even with his nearsightedness, saw eyes. He was chilled to the bone, and he started lighting matches one after another in an attempt to see what was going on…
Dozens of rats were wandering around the shed. Squeaking, long-tailed, and disgusting, they poked in the corners and scurried around some boards, pattered on the old suitcases and baby carriages belonging to the large Zolotarenko family, and jumped up onto the Zolotarenkos’ coal pile. Eddie-baby felt that the whole horde of rats was quite capable of climbing up the barrels to his door, or of dropping down on him from the ceiling, which was full of chinks and did not at all inspire confidence, and he therefore decided to take drastic measures. Picking up his notebook of poems, Eddie started tearing out the blank pages, setting fire to them, and throwing them at the rats. The rats were in no hurry to get away, although it was obvious the fire did frighten them. They moved away deliberately, and not all at once. They merely gathered in the corners of the shed, as far as possible from Eddie and his burning missiles, and there in the corners they squeaked invisibly.
When the blank sheets finally came to an end, Eddie, after thinking it over for several seconds, decisively tore out the first sheet with a poem on it and lit it. The lines of “Natasha” curled and writhed in the fire: “In a white dress on a sunny day / You’ve come out to take a walk…”
“In a white dress,” Eddie whispered bitterly, and hurled “Natasha” at the rats. “In a dirty dress… In a greasy dress… In a dress covered with lard…,” he whispered maliciously. “In a Ukrainian peasant dress, in a dress covered with lard!” he said out loud, and then resolutely climbed off the door.
Standing in the corner for who the fuck knows how long, obviously from some previous holiday, was a Christmas tree, or rather the skeleton of one, with a few reddish-brown needles still attached to it here and there. Eddie-baby dragged the tree into the center of the shed and set fire to it, using one of his poems. The tree burst into flames, and for a brief instant the flames almost shot up to the ceiling of the shed.
“I’ll burn up!” Eddie thought, but for some reason he remained wistfully calm. “So what the fuck if I do,” he thought, “I’m already burned up anyway.”
Frightened by the bright flames, the last rats withdrew into their holes, pulling their tails in behind them.
Eddie-baby sat by his improvised bonfire and passed what was left of the night, setting fire to whatever wood was in the shed. He sat and thought and waited for the dawn.
And finally the dawn arrived…
31
Swinging his arms as he walks and doing exercises in order to warm up, Eddie-baby moves in the direction of the trolley stop, in the direction of the “circle” line. From the circle, the trolley goes into the city. Eddie-baby is on his way to the train station. And from the station, he’s going to Vladivostok, because here in Saltovka there’s nothing left for him to do.
Only a few people are sitting at the trolley stop under the shelter, all hunched over with their noses wrapped in scarves as they finish their dreams through half-shut eyes. Even the earliest workers are not yet on their way to work, although Eddie knows that in half an hour the trolley will be crammed full. The holiday is over.
Only after he has taken a seat on the cold bench does Eddie realize that his friend and hetman Kostya is sitting on the same corner, hunched over like everybody else. And that he has a knapsack on his back.
Eddie-baby stands up and goes over to Kostya. Kostya’s eyes are closed. It’s possible he’s asleep.
“Cat!” Eddie calls out.
Kostya shudders, but seeing Eddie, he smiles in wonder. “What are you doing here so early in the morning?” he asks, astonished.
“That’s what I was going to ask you – what the fuck are you doing here so early?” Eddie says.
“I’m on my way to the station,” Kostya says, becoming serious.
“That’s where I’m going too!” Eddie exclaims. “I intend to get the fuck out of here and go to Vladivostok.”
“Without taking anything?” Kostya asks in amazement. “Just as you are?”
“What do I need things for?” Eddie says sadly. “I can steal whatever I need,” he adds, surprising himself. “Where are you going?” he asks Cat.
“To Novorossisk,” the serious Cat answers. “Novorossisk is the biggest port on the Black Sea. I plan to buy some chewing gum and foreign cigarettes from the foreign sailors,” he says. “You can get them for just kopecks there.”
“How will you understand each other?” Eddie-baby asks, puzzled. “You don’t know any foreign languages. How will you explain to them what you want?”
“It’s easy,” Kostya says. “Yura Gi-Gi wrote down in a notebook what I need to say and how to haggle with them. He’s been to Novorossisk several times. It’s warm there now, and the kids all wait until the sailors come ashore, and then they sneak up to them.”
The trolley arrives with a ringing of bells, and the conductor jumps off to take a leak. Kostya and Eddie-baby, sitting as far as they can from the door, where it’s warmest, continue their conversation.
“What made you decide to go all of a sudden?” Eddie asks. “And without even telling anybody. After all, I could have come with you.”
“Well, why don’t you come?” Kostya says. “What sort of business do you have in Vladivostok?”
“I don’t have any fucking business there,” Eddie says, making a clean breast of it. “I don’t even know anybody there, not even one person. I just want to get away from Saltovka. I can’t stay here any longer…” He turns away from Kostya and is gloomily silent for a while, and then he adds, “I’ve had a fight with Svetka. It’s all over between us…”
Kostya remains silent for a while out of sympathy, and then he says, “Well then, come to Novorossisk with me. It’ll be more fun together. And it’s a lot warmer there than it is in Vladivostok. The Caucasus is right nearby. If we want, we can get there from Novorossisk. The only thing is, we don’t have passports…”
32
An hour later they are sitting, or rather standing, between two passenger cars belonging to the Moscow-Tbilisi train, Kostya a little higher on the ladder that goes up to the roof, and Eddie a little lower down, almost next to the buffers. Kostya finally breaks down and tells Eddie-baby his story. It turns out that Cat isn’t going to Novorossisk merely to buy gum and cigarettes.
“I’ll kill him,” Cat says. “Not now, but I’ll kill him… He’s not a true criminal; he’s a bastard. Real gangsters don’t act like that. The filthy bastard!” Kostya says. “I’ll get him, even if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get him…”
The gang leader Zhora punched Kostya in the mouth in front of all the other thieves and pickpockets. Eddie has seen Zhora and can easily imagine what an animal he is. The gang leader Zhora just got out of prison
a little while ago after serving a long sentence, and now he’s at large and greedily taking advantage of his freedom. He’s a huge gorilla, and it was a low thing for him to punch Kostya for no reason at all except as a display of drunken bravado, since even though Kostya’s broad-shouldered, he’s still pretty small.
“I should have done it right then, right by the store, I should have cut him then,” Kostya says gloomily from up on the ladder.
“Yes…,” Eddie says, at a loss for words. “But didn’t he serve time for armed robbery?”
“He did,” Kostya reluctantly confirms, “but he’s still not a true gangster. A true criminal would never raise his hand against a minor, against a brother thief,” Kostya says.
But he’s not as confident now as he used to be when he extolled the virtues of serious criminals to Eddie. In Kostya’s descriptions of them, they had seemed elegant, generous, and heroic. But now it turns out that they’re worse even than the petty thieves that populate Saltovka’s criminal world. Eddie isn’t at all sure how he would act in Kostya’s place. Would he kill Zhora?
They’re silent for a while as they huddle in the wind. It’s very cold – not really the season for a journey of this kind. In the summertime it’s nice on the roof of a train. Now, however, the kids have to keep crawling up and down the ladder, have to keep moving around in order to stay warm.
Their shared misfortune has in a way brought them together, and Eddie decides to tell Kostya about what’s bothering him most – about Svetka.
“You know, Cat, last night was the first time I ever fucked Svetka. I never had before that,” he says, and then stops.
“I figured as much,” Kostya says.
“Tell me, Cat,” Eddie asks tentatively, “did you ever hear that Svetka hasn’t been cherry for a long time?”
“Yes,” Cat says from up above. “All the kids knew about it, but nobody told you, since you were so in love with her. You really doted on her, and for nothing… Women like men who don’t dote on them,” Kostya says in a sadly philosophical tone. And then he adds, “She’s been fucking for a long time. She’s even fucked your Red Sanya -”
“Sanya?” Eddie asks, thunderstruck.
Even though he realizes that he has said a bit too much, Cat confirms his words. “Yes, but only once, and that was because he raped her.” And then he falls silent.
Eddie is silent too. It seems to him that he’s suddenly grown very old and very tired.
“Tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu,” go the wheels of the train.
“Tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu – Eddie’ll do, and Cat will too,” Eddie rhymes mindlessly. He doesn’t have any idea what he’ll do or what will be. Just that something will.
33
Even though they climbed down off the roof during several of the train’s stops and ran along the tracks to warm up, Eddie-baby and Cat are so close to perishing from the cold as they approach Rostov that they have finally decided to jump off the train. All they’re waiting for now is for the train to come to a bend and slow down.
“We’ll fucking freeze to death!” Cat whispers. “If we don’t jump off, we’ll croak from the cold. I can’t move my fucking hands anymore; they’re like iron. My hands are freezing. How about you?”
Kostya at least has gloves, whereas Eddie has stuck his arms behind the ladder and hooked his elbow around one of its rungs. His arm and his joints are shaking painfully, and of course he’ll have terrible black-and-blue marks after this little trip, although that’s the least of his worries. He and Kostya are freezing, and there isn’t any bend in sight. If they try to jump off the train at this speed, they’ll be killed for sure.
“It would be stupid to freeze like this when the sun’s still out, when it’s daylight and we’re so near Rostov, where it’s warm,” Eddie thinks in amazement, no longer able to feel his legs or his body…
They are saved by the sudden opening of the car door. Eddie and Kostya had already tried the door once before, but it was locked, and Kostya even went along the roofs of the other cars to try their doors as well…
Leaning out of the door now is a Georgian girl, one of the train’s conductors, and she’s yelling to them… The wind carries her words:
“You lunatics! Climb down off of there!… We saw the shadows of two people on the roof a long time ago, but we couldn’t believe… that anybody would be crazy enough in this temperature… to climb up there…”
“Oh, sure, we’ll climb down… You’ve probably already got the trashes in there waiting for us!” Kostya squeaks suspiciously.
“What trashes?” yells the Georgian girl.
“The militia,” Eddie says.
“Climb down off of there, you fools! There isn’t any militia here!” the girl yells back.
Holding the ladder with his stiff hands, Eddie climbs down and squeezes into the car, and then Cat comes down too. After the icy roof, the car is like heaven.
“Suicides!” the girl says to them in a mocking voice, and pulls them into her conductor’s compartment. “You’ll have tea in a minute.”
34
An hour later, warmed by the tea, Eddie is sitting in the conductor’s compartment looking out the window. Kostya is asleep in the upper berth, or at least is pretending to sleep. Sitting across from Eddie is a fat Georgian cook from the restaurant car. Selecting the Russian words with difficulty, the latter is telling Eddie about his first impressions of Russia in the winter, since this is the first time he has ever left Georgia, even though he’s already around fifty.
“I look out window,” the naive cook says, “and I see that all trees is dead. All dead.”
Eddie smiles.
“Your have smiling,” the cook says, “but I not know. I have never leave Georgia. ‘Why Russian not cut down dead trees?’ I ask vaiter. Vaiter…”
“Tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu,” go the wheels.
“Eddie’ll do, and Cat will too,” Eddie rhymes sadly. What he’ll do and what will be, he still doesn’t know.
Epilogue
And so it was… In 1962 the Kharkov District Court sentenced Eddie-baby’s friends Kostya Bondarenko, Yurka Bembel, and Slavka, nicknamed the “Suvorovian,” to the ultimate punishment – execution. After several months, during which Kostya turned gray and, strangely enough, suddenly grew, his and Slavka’s sentences were commuted to lengthy prison terms. The oldest of the three, Yurka, was executed. It was only by accident that Eddie wasn’t with his friends that fateful night. Lucky Eddie…
Upon learning about Kostya’s arrest, Grishka Primak’s deaf and dumb mother managed to utter the garbled sentence, “They put Kostya in jail and Edink skipped away abroad.” She could speak a little, Grishka’s mother, and obviously she could also predict the future… Then – in 1962 – her words didn’t make any sense to Eddie. It was only in 1974, when unexpectedly even for him he really did “skip away abroad” and Kostya was exiled in Kolyma after serving twelve years in prison there, that Eddie finally understood what Grishka’s mother meant.
What happened to the others? Vitka Golovashov and Lyonka Korovin graduated from a school for tank commanders, and now both hold the rank of major. Rumor has it they’re stationed in central Asia.
The insane, valiant Antonina Sergeevna passed away – may she rest in peace. Obviously she was in no way responsible for the erotic fantasies of the young Eddie-baby.
Eddie ran into Borka Churilov in Paris in 1980. A Soviet citizen well known in his own country as a skilled craftsman, Churilov came to Paris for an exhibition of his birch bark prints at UNESCO. Borka’s churches and images of saints had finally proved profitable to the Soviet state. Borka and Eddie drank. The two Saltovkans met once more in Paris in 1982 and drank vodka again. Borka has a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter. Borka’s life-loving mother died recently, and as her last will and testament she enjoined her son always to work and to be happy and independent…
Svetka, they say, married a shop superintendent and has two children.
Grishka, having dreamed abou
t murder, became an engineer, although his true passion is solitaire. He’s a professional gambler.
Sashka Tishchenko works as a foreman in a factory.
Of the rest nothing is known. A quarter of a century has passed since that time.
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Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 28
