Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  Memoir of a Russian Punk

  Edward Limonov

  Edward Limonov

  Memoir of a Russian Punk

  © Эдуард Лимонов

  © Translated from the Russian by Judson Rosengrant (1983)

  contents

  Part One

  § 1-33

  Part Two

  § 1-34

  Epilogue

  Part One

  1

  Eddie-baby’s fifteen. He’s standing with a disdainful expression on his face, leaning back against the wall of a building containing a drugstore – leaning and waiting. Today is the Seventh of November, and filing past Eddie in the cool noonday is the dressed-up citizenry, or goat herd, as he calls them. Most of the goat herd are on their way back from the parade. The review of the Kharkov garrison on Dzerzhinsky Square has ended, and the citizens’ parade has already begun. The unified masses of the proletarian vanguard have long since marched through in columns, bisecting the German-prisoner-laid pavement of the largest square in Europe and the second largest in the world. “Only Tiananmen Square in Beijing is bigger than our own Dzerzhinsky Square” – Eddie-baby knows that first commandment of Kharkov patriotism well.

  The citizens walking past Eddie-baby now are the lazy, poorly organized, insufficiently committed representatives of small enterprises, of shops, stalls, and repair stands – something on the order of a bourgeoisie. Only now have they dragged themselves out of their houses in their holiday finery, after putting away a couple of preliminary shots of vodka and a bite of holiday food, which, as Eddie-baby knows, is usually potato salad, some sausage, and the statutory herring. The head of the family has squeezed himself into a heavy coat, a black or navy blue suit, a tie, and brand-new shoes that inflict unspeakable pain at every step. The children, dressed like their parents in large, clumsy suits, are gobbling down the inevitable ice cream and dragging several balloons in tow. From time to time, the balloons burst with a startling bang that sounds like a pistol shot. The spouse’s dress and coat no doubt reek of still potent naphthalene – these people take care of their things. Eddie-baby frowns.

  Eddie-baby is different from them. Which is why he’s standing here in torn, wrinkled Polish velveteen pants and a yellow jacket with a hood – standing around like some Hamlet of the Saltov district and spitting with an independent air. Eddie-baby is thinking they can all go fuck themselves. And he’s also mulling over the depressing question of how he can get some money.

  He needs 250 rubles. And he has to have it by tomorrow night. If he doesn’t get it… Eddie-baby would rather not think about that. Eddie-baby promised to take Svetka to Sashka Plotnikov’s. That’s the very best crowd in the district. It’s a big honor to get in there. Eddie-baby has been granted that honor for a second time. But this time his parents really got mad at him; Captain Zilberman’s last visit made a deep impression on them, and they wouldn’t give Eddie any money.

  Eddie-baby grins contemptuously as he recalls his arrest. Zilberman came by with two militia officers at six o’clock in the morning, woke him up (he was asleep on the balcony in a sleeping bag, a gift from the Shepelsky family), and after sticking a yellow piece of paper in his face said, “Citizen Savenko, you’re under arrest!”

  Zilberman is crazy, and he likes to make an impression. Evidently he thinks he’s Inspector Maigret: it’s no accident he’s always smoking a pipe and wearing an idiotic leather coat that reaches down to his heels. Eddie-baby snorts as he remembers the comically diminutive figure of Captain Zilberman. He’s not Inspector Maigret; he’s Charlie Chaplin.

  Captain Zilberman, the head of the juvenile affairs section of the Fifteenth Militia Precinct, is a mistake. First of all, he’s a Jew. A Jewish militia officer sounds like a joke. The only thing more ridiculous would be a Jewish yard worker.

  That time Zilberman had to let Eddie-baby go the same evening. The captain didn’t have any evidence that it was in fact Eddie who had burgled the dry goods store on Stalin Avenue.

  Zilberman won’t leave Eddie-baby alone: he’s teaching him a lesson. He often drops by Eddie’s house in the evening to check up on him. There’s no goddamn way he’ll find Eddie-baby at home now. After a couple of those visits, Eddie started avoiding Zilberman on purpose – going out to dances, for example. Once Zilberman tracked Eddie-baby down at a dance at the Bombay, but Seva the projectionist let Eddie out through the service entrance. The official name of that large room next door to Grocery Store No.11 is The Stalin District Club of the Food Industry Workers of the City of Kharkov, but all the kids call it the Bombay. They’re all Eddie’s friends there, and if he wants, he can go to the Bombay without a kopeck in his pocket and twenty minutes later come out completely smashed. The kids respect him and buy him drinks. True, Eddie doesn’t like to humiliate himself, and so he doesn’t freeload very often, only when he’s in a really rotten mood.

  “Fucking life!” Eddie-baby thinks. “Where am I going to get some money? If I had known my parents weren’t going to give me any, I could have made other plans. Two hundred fifty rubles isn’t much, but if you haven’t got it, then you haven’t.” He had 100 rubles yesterday, but he squandered it without a thought, relying on his parents. He paid Waclaw 30 rubles for a haircut, and who knows what happened to the rest. He treated Tolik Karpov and Kadik, that’s what. He’ll have to get drunk with Waclaw too, since Waclaw never lets Eddie-baby tip him, even though he’s the best barber in a city with a population of over a million people. Waclaw works in the barbershop at Vehicle Maintenance Lot No.3; if he wanted to, he could get a job at the Kremlin, but he’s not interested. Eddie-baby touches the part in his clipped hair. “You should get your hair cut once a week,” the Pole had told him. “It should be no longer than a match.” Haircuts aren’t Eddie’s problem, however. It’s the goddamn money that’s the problem.

  Eddie-baby isn’t just hanging around the drugstore, wasting away the holiday morning; he’s waiting for his friend Kadik. Kadik lives nearby, and from the drugstore Eddie-baby can see the gray corner of his building, No.7 Saltov Road. Kadik’s building is one of the oldest in the Saltov district. It used to be a dormitory, but families live there now.

  Kadik, also known as Kolka and Nikolai Kovalev, is a postal worker’s son. He doesn’t have a father. Or at least Eddie-baby’s mother, Raisa Fyodorovna, has never heard anything about Kadik’s father, and nobody else has either, although everybody knows the postal worker, Auntie Klava, who delivers the mail on “our,” the odd-numbered, side of Saltov Road – a small woman evidently frightened of something. Evil tongues claim that Kadik beats his mother. “The big lug’s fifteen years old,” the evil tongues say, “and what an overfed bull he is! He’s glad he doesn’t have a father so he can abuse his mother.” Eddie knows that Kadik doesn’t beat his mother, but it is true they swear at each other a lot.

  Eddie-baby likes Kadik, although he makes fun of him a little. “Kadik” is a weird synthetic name Kolka invented for himself from the American word “Cadillac.” “Kadillak” sounds a bit pretentious, of course, but Kadik’s been hanging around with “bandmen” – jazz musicians – ever since he was a little kid, so in his case it’s forgivable.

  It was also Kadik’s idea to call him – Edka, that is – “Eddie-baby” in the American style. Kadik even speaks a little American, or a little English, since according to him there isn’t that much difference between the two languages. “Eddie-baby” stuck to Edka, and now a lot of people call him that. Although until he met Kadik, he got along quite well without a nickname.

  In the case of Edka Savenko, of course, “Eddie-baby” is closer to the truth than “Kadillak” is to “Kolka,” since Eddie-baby’s real name is Eduard. There are two Eduards in S
altovka, one of whom works as an apprentice lathe operator at the Piston Factory and makes one-shot zip guns, which he sells to the kids. Eddie-baby bought one of the guns from him a year ago, but it doesn’t work now – something’s wrong with the bolt – and Edka promised to fix it. That Edka has a Russian last name – Dodonov.

  It was Eddie-baby’s father who named him Eduard. When his mother called his father at his unit from the maternity ward and asked what name she ought to give their son (“You have a son, Veniamin Ivanovich!”), his father, who was twenty-five at the time, was sitting in his office reading the poems of Eduard Bagritsky, and he told her to write down “Eduard.” Eddie-baby’s father liked Bagritsky’s poems very much. And so it happened that Eddie-baby was named after the Jewish poet.

  Not long ago – last spring, in fact – Eddie-baby for the first time read some of Bagritsky’s poems collected in a little book with a dark blue cover, and he liked them very much too, just as his father had fifteen years before. He particularly liked the poem called “The Smugglers,” which begins,

  Following the fish and the stars,

  Three Greeks hauling contraband…

  To his amazement he found some indecent lines in the middle of the poem:

  Piles of easy money fell from the stars:

  Cognac, silk stockings, and condoms…

  Eddie-baby showed Kadik the lines – the ones about condoms. Kadik liked them too, although he doesn’t care that much about poetry. He likes jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. He’s learning how to play the saxophone.

  Eddie-baby himself didn’t like poetry for a long time. Whenever it happened at the library that Victoria Samoilovna, wrapped in a shawl and coughing because of her weak lungs, suggested some poetry to him, he would refuse with an ironical smirk. Kid stuff!

  Victoria Samoilovna has known Eddie-baby ever since he was nine. He may be the “oldest” reader in the library. True, Eddie-baby goes to the library less and less often now. He doesn’t have time for libraries. Eddie-baby has become a man, and he has his own concerns. The last time he saw Victoria Samoilovna was in July. It’s already November, and the books are long overdue. Two volumes of Valery Bryusov and some verse by Polonsky. Eddie-baby doesn’t want to return them; he wants to keep them for himself. He’ll say he lost them. But Eddie-baby feels bad about deceiving Victoria Samoilovna and keeps putting off his visit to her. “Tomorrow… next week,” he tells himself, and every day it gets harder and harder to go to the neighborhood library. He hasn’t gone to the school library for a long time either. In the first place, he can’t stand Lora Yakovlevna – she has a disgusting urine smell – and in the second place, there isn’t anything there for him to read; he hates schoolbooks.

  2

  Eddie-baby was lucky with poetry. The first poems he read in his life (Victoria Samoilovna having managed at last to stick a book into his hands) were The Youthful Verses of Alexander Blok, with a picture of a lilac branch on the cover. Eddie-baby discovered Blok’s poems in May, in Vitka Fomenko’s garden just when the lilacs were in bloom. Eddie-baby had gone with the whole class to Vitka’s mother’s funeral. The funeral was delayed, first by a May shower, and then by the old women. Vitka’s grandmother had insisted that a priest come to perform the funeral rites for her daughter, and in the meantime Eddie, breathless with awe and astonishment, sat reading on a woodpile in a corner of the garden, where he was hiding out from his schoolmates:

  “I dream that I am once again a boy and a lover,

  And there is a ravine, and in the ravine a thorny dogrose…

  The old house peers into my heart,

  And turns pink from edge to edge,

  And your tiny window…

  That voice, it is yours,

  And I shall give my life and my sorrow to its incomprehensible sound…,”

  Eddie read as the mournful singing of the old women came from Vitka Fomenko’s old house.

  “And though in a dream pressing to my lips

  Your once gentle hand,”

  – the words made Eddie want to die, to die of love for Svetka, whom he had just met at the May Day celebrations.

  A lot got its start with Vitka Fomenko. Including the career of Eddie the criminal. Vitka’s actually a coward – you can tell that just by looking at him. He’s round, fat, and short. But Vitka has his own home, an old wooden frame house located by the Turbine Factory. On the other side of Vitka’s house – not the side facing the street but the one in back – are cornfields, a ravine, then more fields, and then the outskirts of a real village.

  The Saltov district used to be a village too, but ten years ago they started putting up two-and three-story buildings with two or four entrances, until they gradually built up the district. Eddie-baby will never forget how in 1951 the soldiers brought them – brought his father and mother and him – to Saltovka. Their building was still locked up, and Sergeant Makhitarian took a thick iron rod, hammered it flat on a rock, and then used it to break open the lock so they could move in. Two months later, Major Pechkurov, the man they were to share their apartment with, joined them, and six months after that he was dead. He had checked out.

  Eddie-baby’s father is a first lieutenant who will soon be up for captain. “He’ll never make captain, never,” Eddie-baby thinks, “because he’s as timid as a woman.” Eddie’s mother says his father will be a captain, but Eddie-baby knows his father doesn’t look after his own affairs. His mother says the same thing, but she doesn’t always remember everything she says. Eddie-baby’s father should never have joined the army; he should have been a musician, as everyone says. He’s very talented. He plays the guitar, the piano, and many other instruments, and he even writes music, but for some reason he’s a first lieutenant.

  Vitka Fomenko’s father is a foreman at the Turbine Factory. He earns less than Eddie-baby’s father does, but his family is much better off and much happier. And they have a house. Eddie-baby lives with his father and mother in a single room, although it’s a large one and has a balcony.

  Vitka Fomenko came to their class from another school less than a year ago. Even though it was immediately clear that he was a coward, it was also clear that he was a cheerful one, and when Vitka invited Eddie over for New Year’s along with several other boys and girls from their class, Eddie went. At Vitka Fomenko’s he also met Vovka the Boxer, a handsome boy from the Tyurenka district. It was with Vovka that Eddie-baby burgled a store for the first time in his life.

  Tyurenka occupies an important place in the lives of Eddie-baby and the other kids from Saltovka. Tyurenka starts on the other side of the cemeteries. If you go past the overgrown but still used Russian cemetery, and through the no longer used Jewish one with its gravestones and obelisks, following the path worn there by the residents of Saltovka on their way to Tyurenka Pond with its medicinal waters that have flowed from an old iron pipe since time immemorial (people from Saltovka go to the pond in droves to swim in the summer), then on the other side of the Jewish cemetery you’ll come to Tyurenka.

  The kids from Tyurenka are all children of kurkuli, as they’re called in Saltovka – children of Ukrainian peasants, in other words. They live in old private houses, and their parents are traders and craftsmen. The parents of the kids from Tyurenka usually get work in the factories in the late fall and then are laid off as soon as the snow melts. The residents of Tyurenka make a lot more money in the summer selling their cherries and apples and strawberries in the Kharkov farmers’ markets than they do in the winter at the factories. Some of them have small potato fields or raise tomatoes and cucumbers on their own plots. Tyurenka is also called Tyur’s Dacha. They say that a long time ago, before the revolution, there was an estate belonging to somebody named Tyur located near the pond. Or at least that’s what Vitka Nemchenko’s grandmother says.

  Of the kids in their class from Tyurenka, there is, besides Vitka Nemchenko, also Sashka Tishchenko. Vitka Proutorov and Vika Kozyrev, the doctor’s daughter, live near the entrance to the Jewish cemetery. That�
��s not in Tyurenka yet; it’s still the very end of Voroshilov Avenue. Vitka Proutorov and Vika go to a completely different trolley stop.

  Since some of the Tyurenka kids go to school in Saltovka, the relations between Tyurenka and Saltovka are almost always good. Sometimes there are skirmishes, especially with the Tyurenka Gypsies – there’s a whole crowd of them there – but basically the kids from Tyurenka and Saltovka are allies. A certain superiority felt by the kids from Saltovka, who are primarily the children of factory and office workers, to the children of the rural kurkuli is made up for by the fact that the kids from Tyurenka have a source of mineral water on their territory, a pond, and a part of the only river you can swim in in that city of over a million people – or, to be more precise, one of its banks, since the other side is occupied by Zhuravlyovka.

  The Zhuravlyovka punks are the enemies of both the kids from Saltovka, whose territory doesn’t border on theirs, and those from Tyurenka, whose territory does and with whom they’re always fighting. The big battles take place in the summer. The two armies usually meet on the two-square-kilometer artificial island in the middle of the river. On the island are beaches and a large, ridiculous, supposedly modern restaurant made of concrete, although it in fact looks more like a World War II German coastal bunker than a place of recreation for the citizens of Kharkov.

  Last summer, in August, Eddie-baby took part in one of those battles. His arm was cut, and he broke a finger from carelessness. One of the kids from Zhuravlyovka later died in the hospital. Zilberman told him that four hundred people took part in that battle. Eddie pretended to be an innocent minor who hadn’t taken part in anything.

  Kadik, who for some reason is always trying to push Eddie-baby’s other friends out of his life, told Eddie-baby not to go to the gang war. Kadik can no more stand his “own kind” – the kids from Saltovka – than he can the kids from Tyurenka or Zhuravlyovka. He hangs out in the “center,” on Sumsky Street where his friends live – jazz musicians and fancy dudes, all of them much older than Kadik is. “Eddie, what do you want with all those jerks?” Kadik says. It’s his customary tune. “What do you want with all those jerks, Eddie?” That tune is the reason why Kadik is the only one of Eddie’s friends his mother likes – it’s her tune too.