Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  From what he said it emerged that Gorkun had not been beaten but had been quietly sitting by himself on the bench in the vestibule of the Krasnozavodsk militia substation. When he saw that the trashes were enraged at Eddie on behalf of their comrade and had completely lost control of themselves and were close to killing the minor, he decided to intervene.

  “I decided to save you, you asshole,” Gorkun said didactically. “According to one law of Kolyma, you should have died that day, and I the next. It’s dog eat dog, right? But after the business at the dancing area, it turned out you were something on the order of a pal, although I didn’t want to have anything to do with you. But according to another law of Kolyma, you’re supposed to help out your pals – whatever it costs you in blood. And so I started screaming as loud as I could, ‘You filthy bastards! You’ll kill the lad! He’s still just a lad! You fascists! You goddamn fascists!’

  “I was screaming,” Gorkun continued, “as loud as I could, but they weren’t paying any attention and were still beating on you all at once. So I got up, ran over to them, and punched the lieutenant in the throat! And then they stopped beating you and turned on me. But I’ve served time,” Gorkun said with pride. “You couldn’t even imagine how many times I’ve been beaten, lad. I know what to do… And anyway, what’s the point of beating me up, I’m a goner anyway, I’ve served three terms, whether you beat me up or not. I used to cut my veins every week with a spoon and wipe blood all over the walls in camp… As a protest. It doesn’t make any difference to me if they send me back to prison. So they didn’t beat me for very long…”

  Eddie-baby had no way of checking on what Gorkun said, but he believed him, and not because he thought the bald Victor Gorkun was some kind of splendid Robin Hood. The thing that actually sounded most convincing to Eddie was Gorkun’s cynical observation that he had had to intercede on Eddie’s behalf because Eddie was bound to him as a pal. Gorkun, it turned out, was a formalist. The code of the experienced criminal required him to hit the lieutenant. And so he did.

  After they were released, Eddie and Gorkun didn’t go their separate ways but instead went straight to Grocery Store No.7, where they drank in honor of their lucky escape. Gorkun, however, never found out about the great friendship between the cadets Ivan and Veniamin. He thought that he and Eddie-baby had simply been incredibly lucky, that the trashes had mixed up their papers or something.

  25

  Eddie-baby returns to the usual meeting place, where the other guys are naturally already gathered. Cat and Lyova and Sanya and two others as well – Slavka Bokarev and “Hollywood.” Cat and Lyova, each augmenting the other, are giving a detailed account of the capture of the ringleader of the soldiers, while Sanya is looking admiringly at the large gold watch on his wrist.

  “How do you like the ticker?” he asks the just arrived Eddie-baby with a little smile.

  “Where’d you get it?” Eddie-baby asks in amazement, although he is starting to remember something.

  “The sergeant gave it to me,” says Sanya. “‘It’s no use to me,’ he said, ‘I’ll lose it, whereas it’s just the thing for you, Red.’” Sanya guffaws complacently.

  “Is it real gold?” Eddie asks.

  “What else?” Sanya answers. “So, did you turn them over?” he asks Eddie-baby.

  “Well, I took them to the precinct like you said, and then I cut out,” Eddie answers, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You did right,” Sanya says encouragingly. “A ticker like this would cost twenty-five hundred in a store. That means I can sell it to the blackasses at the market for at least a thousand, and maybe even more. And what could the goddamn trashes give us, huh? A certificate to stick up our asses? Fuck them and their reward!”

  “I didn’t even see you take it,” Eddie says with admiration.

  “I took it when we were bringing him in. I immediately noticed he was wearing gold, but I didn’t want us to be the only suspects. Now, if they suspect anybody, they’ll suspect the Georgian too. Of course, after a fight and a scuffle like that, it’s possible he could have lost it himself. Maybe it fell off his wrist,” Sanya innocently intones, and then laughs again.

  It’s clear to Eddie-baby now why the guys turned down the triumphant return, the opportunity to ride into the militia station on a white horse. The money is more important, of course. Although if the choice had been Eddie’s, he probably would have chosen the triumphant return. He would have passed up his share of the watch merely for the pleasure of actually seeing Major Aleshinsky shake his hand and express his gratitude. And Zilberman! To get the better of the Jew Zilberman-Maigret is something that Eddie-baby has long dreamed of. To walk into his office, sprawl on the chair by his desk, light a cigarette, and lazily remark, “Yesterday when I was talking to the major…” Or, “Major Aleshinsky and I…” Eddie grins. Zilberman would have gone out of his mind with amazement.

  The watch, however, means money. Eddie-baby painfully remembers that he has to have 250 rubles by tomorrow night. If you divide a thousand by four, you get exactly 250 rubles. He won’t really get that much, of course, since his part in acquiring the watch was an insignificant one. He’ll do well if Sanya gives him a hundred. Maybe he should ask Sanya to lend him the rest?

  “Sanya, hey, Sanya,” Eddie says, “when are you going to sell the watch? Can you do it tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow. The market will be closed tomorrow. It’s a holiday, or did you forget?” Sanya says in surprise. “What’s the matter, do you need cash or something? You had some. When did I give it to you last time? It was less than a week ago.”

  He’s talking about the ring he and Sanya acquired together. Sanya, as if merely playing with the hand of a girl they met, had taken the ring off while Eddie distracted her. He played the part of Sanya’s little brother. They were on a trolley. Not on their own No.24, but on No.3 – in the city, in other words, and not in their own neighborhood. The dumb girl was so pleased that the stylish Sanya (who called himself Richard) had made a date with her that she never suspected he’d repeated the same line dozens of times and had made dozens of such dates. Unfortunately the line doesn’t always work, but Sanya uses it over and over again. His fingers are thick and pink but very nimble.

  “I spent it,” Eddie justifies himself. “I thought my mother and father would give me some money for the holiday, but they haven’t given me a fucking thing!”

  “You should have saved some cash for the holiday,” Sanya says, shaking his head. “Any other time I’d give you something, but I haven’t got anything now either. I’m squeezed dry. I gave everything I earned last week to my mother to buy a coat for Svetka. The little twat has grown, and now she needs a new coat.”

  Eddie-baby’s heart sinks. Sanya was his last hope. The butcher often has money, although unlike the other butchers, Sanya doesn’t hold on to it, he immediately squanders it. He dresses expensively and wears skull rings on his pink fingers, and all that costs money. “Where can I get some money?” Eddie wonders. “Where?”

  “Why don’t you ask Cat,” Sanya says, seeing how crestfallen Eddie is, and without waiting for an answer, he asks Cat himself.

  “Cat, hey, Cat, have you got any cash you can loan Eddie?”

  “How much does he need?” Cat asks from the other side of the bench, and reaches into his pocket.

  “How much?” Sanya asks Eddie.

  “Two-fifty or three hundred…,” Eddie says uncertainly.

  “O-o-oh,” Cat drawls, and takes his hand out of his pocket. “I don’t have that kind of money on me right now. I thought you maybe wanted thirty or fifty rubles. For two-fifty you’ll have to wait until I get paid.”

  “I need it by tomorrow,” Eddie says in a hopeless voice.

  “Eddie, you jerk, how many times have I told you, if you want money, go to the track,” Slavka Bokarev observes pompously.

  The kids all laugh.

  Eddie-baby waves Bokarev away. “You go there every day, so where’s your money?” he asks h
im in an irritated voice.

  “I’m just now finishing going over the data, and pretty soon I’ll have a system that will bring me in a million in no time,” Bokarev answers with conviction.

  26

  Eddie thinks there’s no goddamn way you’ll ever get that million out of Bokarev’s head.

  Bokarev used to have a completely different idea for getting rich. He dreamed of organizing a vast network for the production and sale of exam cribs, each no bigger than a small photograph. The cribs were supposed to earn Bokarev a million rubles.

  Cribs of that kind had existed long before Bokarev ever thought of them. Eddie-baby himself had seen photographic cribs for math with the tiny symbols of the basic mathematical formulas thickly covering their whole surface. You could buy cribs like that for whatever subject you wanted.

  Bokarev, however, intended to carry out the manufacture and sale of cribs on an industrial scale. He dreamed of a huge staff of photographers who would flood the entire country with millions of photocribs, from Liepaja in the west to Vladivostok in the east, from the Arctic Circle in the north to the city of Kushka in the south. Inspiration shone in Bokarev’s eyes whenever he spoke of his idea. Thousands of minors organized in disciplined commercial teams would sell his photocribs in the vicinity of every school, university, and technical institute in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That ethnically diverse horde of photographers and minors would in the course of a year fill Bokarev’s pockets with millions of rubles.

  The plan turned out to be less simple in practice than in Bokarev’s inspired calculations. Having barely begun to organize his empire, Bokarev ran up against a number of insoluble difficulties, of which the main one was that the projected number of students and schoolchildren weren’t interested in buying his cribs. Some of them didn’t believe in cribs at all, while others were inclined to make their own – not photographic, of course, but cribs nonetheless. Everything was as smooth as could be on paper – expenditures, the number of students and schoolchildren in the USSR, income, a price per crib of ten rubles, which would obtain you all the knowledge in a given subject area. The problem was that only a few wanted to obtain it.

  Now Bokarev has a new idea. He’s already been working on his “system” for six months. He goes to the track every day and writes down his data – which horse comes in first in which race. He then diligently organizes the data, furrows appearing on his Socratic brow. Bokarev really does have an unusually impressive forehead, and it really does remind you of the forehead of Socrates. The only thing Eddie-baby isn’t so sure of is that such capacious crania and superbly protuberant thinker’s foreheads invariably contain all they’re supposed to.

  Bokarev works tirelessly on his system and maintains that it will soon be perfected. Then he will make his million. Why exactly a million Bokarev himself has no idea. Obviously he’s impressed by the six whole zeroes that follow the one.

  Until that day comes, however, Bokarev continues to attend his polytechnical institute as a fourth-year student and to go around in terribly worn-out shoes, saving all his money – his miserable stipend – to cover his track expenses and buy racing forms and even trolley tickets, since the track is a good distance away.

  The gang on the benches under the lindens accepts Bokarev out of the purest kind of provincial snobbery – whatever he is, however ragged he is, he’s still a student. Both Cat and Lyova, not to mention Sanya, make about ten times as much money at their factories as Bokarev gets on his stipend, and they steal as well.

  Another reason why the kids permit Bokarev to spend whole evenings with them is that he likes to shoot the breeze and knows how to do it. He can talk about anything, an art in which he has only one rival – Slavka the Gypsy. The Gypsy’s chatter, however, is adorned with a kind of dreamy romanticism that always has a geographical flavor to it, whereas Bokarev’s talk gives off a mathematically romantic aura. Bokarev’s hobby is organization, calculations, estimates, and drafts, and his talk is more contemporary than that of the other Slavka – or so it seems to Eddie-baby. And although Eddie, like the other kids, doesn’t believe that Bokarev will ever make a million rubles and laughs at his idiotic ideas, he still has his doubts sometimes – what if he does?

  It’s also indisputable that even though Bokarev is now glad of every scrap he can manage to eat for free, and lives with his grandfather and grandmother in a twelve-meter room, in a little more than a year he will already be an engineer. And the other kids won’t.

  Eddie-baby, like the other kids, doesn’t want to be an engineer, although, as his mother and father and his neighbors and everybody else who knows him admit, he has a good mind. He doesn’t want to be an engineer, and he has no desire whatever to undertake the boring study of mathematics, physics, the tensile strength of materials, and other “hard” sciences for five years. Eddie-baby hates mathematics. What he likes are dates.

  Although Eddie no longer writes anything down in his notebooks, he still has an enthusiastic affection for history, and whenever the history teacher, a large redheaded woman whose nickname is the “Mop,” wants to unburden her soul of the bleating and braying of the normal pupils, she turns to Eddie, and without even asking him to come to the board, simply starts a discussion with him, say about the eleventh century in Europe.

  “What happened in the eleventh century, Savenko?” the Mop asks, bearing down on the e in Eddie’s last name, and the whole class sighs in relief.

  It’s clear to them now that nobody will be called to the board, since the Mop and Eddie, each hastening to interrupt the other, will be delightedly shouting till the end of the period about European events in the obscure eleventh century, which not even university students in history are expected to know very much about. The only A in Eddie’s record is in history, although the Mop never formally calls him to the board – in the same way, probably, that mathematics prodigies aren’t bothered with ordinary arithmetic problems. Eddie-baby is a history prodigy. “He could easily teach history in school right now,” the Mop says.

  27

  Eddie-baby departs the benches under the lindens along with Hollywood, who happens to be going the same way. It’s already long past two in the morning, and most of the kids have wandered off home. Sanya’s hairdresser came by – the vulgar Dora who possibly loves him – and took him back to her place. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t anything particularly odd about their argument. Sanya and the hairdresser have been sleeping together for over a year now, but they still get into bitter arguments and even scuffles sometimes – lovers’ quarrels, as the old women say.

  Hollywood lives by himself in a dormitory a few buildings away from Asya’s. Eddie-baby doesn’t even know what Hollywood’s real name is. Actually, it would never enter his head to use it, even if he did know what it was. Everybody in the district calls him Hollywood. He got that nickname from his peculiar habit of explaining everything with quotations from foreign films, especially American ones, although there aren’t enough knowledgeable people in the district to check up on whether Hollywood’s quotations really do come from movies or whether he makes them up himself. Kadik, for example, claims that he makes up half the things he says.

  Even now as the last late November leaves rustle under their feet, Hollywood casually turns to Eddie and says with a cough,

  “These leaves rustle like American dollars, don’t they?”

  Eddie-baby doesn’t know what film this quotation comes from, and so he cautiously replies with a noncommittal, “Uh-huh.”

  Eddie likes movies, but he’s embarrassed about having to wear glasses, and so in order to see a new one, he has to go into the city. There, where nobody knows him, he can calmly watch the movie with his glasses on, giving it his full attention. Eddie’s too lazy to go to the city very often, especially since he has to go by himself, and so it happens that he misses a lot of things.

  Hollywood has a movie quote for every occasion. If the kids decide to go to the store to get some biomitsin they’ve all
chipped in on, Hollywood suddenly steps forward, assumes a heroic stance, and shouts, “Mamelukes! I shall lead you to Cairo! Who has not seen Cairo has seen nothing!” This is a scrupulously accurate quotation from the movie The Mamelukes, which has just been showing on the screens of Kharkov.

  The kids like Hollywood because he always livens up the occasion. He’s about five years older than Red Sanya, or perhaps, since bald spots gleam through his thin blond hair here and there, even the same age as Gorkun, although unlike Gorkun he’s never been in prison. Hollywood doesn’t steal; he works in the foundry at the Hammer and Sickle Factory and lives in a dormitory. The parents of this strong, long-nosed fellow live in a village near Kharkov, according to one of the kids. Both of them are sick and can’t work, and Hollywood sends them money. In the summer Hollywood goes around in swimming trunks with palm trees on them… That’s basically all that Eddie-baby knows about him, but in Saltovka the kids and adults associate not on the basis of what they know about each other but of how they feel. And it is Eddie-baby’s feeling that Hollywood is a good guy. Even if he is a worker, he’s still not one of the goat herd.