Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 13

  They walk for a while without speaking, and then Eddie says to Hollywood,

  “Aren’t you celebrating anywhere today?”

  “What do you think we’ve been doing, Ed?” Hollywood asks in a melancholy voice. “We’ve been celebrating, and now we’re finished and are on our way back home.”

  “No,” Eddie insists, “I mean in the company of other people.”

  “I’ve got too much company already at the dorm,” Hollywood sighs. “They’ll be drunk all night long, and there’s no fucking way you’ll get any sleep. They’ll be drinking in every room. And then they’ll get into fights.”

  “A-a-ah!” Eddie-baby answers sympathetically. He’s never lived in a dormitory, although he has visited them more than once. Both men’s dormitories and women’s. He didn’t care for them. Even though living in a dormitory is very cheap. But Eddie-baby couldn’t live in a single room with three other men who were complete strangers to him. He wouldn’t even mind getting rid of his own parents if he could. The balcony he sleeps on is almost a separate room, but in the first place, they haven’t had a chance to winterize it, so he sleeps there only when the weather is warm, and in the second, he still has to go through his parents’ room to get there. Although his parents aren’t strangers, of course, and there are only two of them, not three, as in the dormitory where Hollywood lives…

  Eddie-baby and Hollywood separate at the fork in the old asphalt path built by the first residents of Saltovka so they wouldn’t sink into the mud, and now worn through to the ground here and there.

  “So long,” Eddie says.

  “When the brilliant tropical night casts its star-studded velvet black cloak over the streets of Rio…,” Hollywood begins the next of his movie quotations, but then, obviously recalling the dormitory he’s on his way back to, he waves his hand in annoyance and interrupts the quote with a simple, “So long, Ed!”

  28

  Eddie-baby enters his building. Coming from the doorway of the apartment of the Auntie Marusyas are laughter and music. Obviously his mother is still there. There are three rooms in the apartment, with a different family in each one. In one of the rooms live Auntie Marusya Chepiga, her husband, the electrician Uncle Sasha, who has lately been drinking more and more, and their son, Vitka. In another, somewhat larger room live Auntie Marusya Vulokh, her husband, Uncle Vanya, very good-looking and a womanizer, their son, Valerka, and their daughter, Raya, who was named after Eddie-baby’s mother. Living in the apartment’s third room, which is directly below the room where Eddie and his family live, are the Perevorachaevs, including old Perevorachaev himself, an unsociable and taciturn man who is a stovemaker by trade and slow-witted even by the standards of Saltovka, his wife, a cleaning woman nicknamed “Blackie,” whose real name Eddie-baby doesn’t know, even though the Perevorachaevs have been living in their building ever since it was first built, and their three children, the grown-up whore Lyubka, the humpbacked Tolik, and “Baby” Nadka. Nadka is ten years old now and already has quite noticeable breasts, but her family still calls her Baby Nadka just as they did five years ago. When the dim Nadka was a toddler, she served Eddie-baby as a model for the study of female anatomy. The lesson took place in the basement of their building, to which Eddie-baby lured her with the aid of some chocolate candy.

  The Perevorachaevs aren’t home today, except for the lonely hunchback Tolik, who at this minute is probably lying on a soldier’s blanket reading a book, his ears plugged with cotton wadding. The other Perevorachaevs have all gone to the country, since many of the residents of Saltovka still have links to the villages beyond the city.

  Uncle Sasha Chepiga’s grandfather and grandmother live in a village called Old Saltov. It’s a good distance away – several hours by truck. To get to Old Saltov, you take the Saltov Highway, or the Saltov Highroad, as it used to be called.

  Eddie-baby spent a summer, the summer after his escape to Brazil, in fact, with Uncle Sasha’s grandfather and grandmother. There, in a shallow, swampy creek filled with green water, he learned to swim, and there, while he was lying on a bank of that creek with geese wandering nearby, Uncle Sasha Chepiga complimented him on his nose. Eddie-baby had complained to Uncle Sasha about his pug nose. By way of answer, Uncle Sasha had said that he would with pleasure, with the very greatest of pleasure, as he reiterated, exchange noses with Eddie-baby. Eddie-baby looked carefully at Uncle Sasha’s nose and was instantly ashamed. In the first place, it was of a permanently reddish color, and in the second, its shape was reminiscent of an ugly, far from purebred potato – as if nature had been intending to produce three separate potato tubers but then had changed its mind and fashioned them all into one.

  Eddie-baby ran away from Old Saltov too – on a day when he, Grandfather Chepiga, and Uncle Sasha, who was then on a two-week vacation, were tending cows in the forest and had some bad luck: two cows got separated from the herd. The forest near Old Saltov is no artificial strip of woodland but a real old-growth forest, dense and large. One might ask what kind of fool pastures his cows in a forest when there’s a meadow for that. But the explanation for the behavior of the strange herdsmen who had suddenly chased their cattle into the forest was simple: the cows were the private property of the collective farmers, whereas the meadow belonged to the collective farm itself. The state permitted the collective farmers to have their own cows, but they had to pasture them wherever they could, only not in the meadow. Which is why they pastured them in the forest or on the railroad verge. They took turns pasturing everyone’s cows, one household doing it one week, another taking over the next. That week it was Grandfather Chepiga’s turn.

  After the sun had gone down, Eddie-baby overheard Uncle Sasha and Grandfather Chepiga’s conversation about how, as soon as they returned to the village, they would be killed by the owners of the lost cattle, and he decided he didn’t want to be killed. Even so, Eddie-baby still believes that it was not cowardice that governed his actions when he stepped away from the campfire the three of them were sitting around and disappeared into the underbrush on the pretext of having to do a big job.

  Eddie-baby walked through the already dark forest and calmly sang a tune he had made up himself. He had no supplies at all with him, just a herdsman’s staff and Uncle Sasha’s large knife, but he was rather glad that he didn’t have even so much as a piece of bread with him: it would be an excellent opportunity to test his knowledge of which wild plants might be used for food.

  It was August, and Eddie-baby had no doubt that he could easily live in the fields and forests until late fall at least, all the time moving steadily south. A thrilling picture of his future life in the forest presented itself… He immediately thought of attaching his knife to the staff by means of a vine so that it could be used as a spear to throw at small game.

  Eddie-baby didn’t last long in the forest, however. And it was not hunger that drove him out but loneliness. Eddie-baby’s book knowledge in fact proved useful after all; he calmly lived on berries and the roots of plants of the temperate zone that had been identified in his books, only occasionally discovering for himself that one or another root was impossible to chew because of its almost eau-de-cologne-like taste. Eddie-baby had not been afraid of the dark even as an infant. But he couldn’t tolerate the loneliness. That summer Eddie-baby discovered for the first time that he was a social animal.

  He is ashamed around Uncle Sasha and Auntie Marusya to this day about the commotion he caused in Old Saltov. Actually, thanks to him, Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga became celebrities of a kind. Pointing to them, the village residents would say, “Theirs was the hut that the city kid ran off from.”

  Coming out of the forest onto the highway, which he had found long before, the city kid waved down a passing car, and within half an hour or so he was at the village store two houses away from the thatched hut where Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga lived. It turned out that the cows had been found the same evening, had come quietly out of the forest by themselves to rejoin th
e herd. The kid rejoined the human herd two days later.

  29

  Eddie casts a sidelong glance at the door of the Auntie Marusyas – apparently they’re dancing – and then resolutely goes on up to the second (and top) floor and opens his own door.

  It’s quiet in Apartment No.6. The drunk-tank major Shepotko disappeared from the apartment a week before the holidays started, and their other neighbors, Lidka and Uncle Kolya, took their newborn baby to see relatives.

  Eddie-baby goes into the kitchen and finds the food his mother has left for him under a clean towel – his favorite macaroni with meat patties already placed in the frying pan with a pat of butter. “My mother really is a decent person,” Eddie suddenly decides, even though he called her a fool and a prostitute during a terrible argument that morning.

  Eddie-baby puts the frying pan on the gas range – a recent innovation. The Saltov district was connected to a gas line about two years ago. Until then, part of the kitchen had been occupied by a coal-burning stove. They all used to bake pies in the stove’s oven then, but with the arrival of gas, Eddie-baby’s mother has been baking pies less and less often.

  While eating his macaroni with meat patties, something he could eat three times a day without getting sick of it, Eddie reflects on how he and his mother never used to swear at each other. Or at least he never called his mother names the way he did today: “Fool! Prostitute!” Eddie-baby is ashamed that he didn’t restrain himself. At the same time, however, he understands perfectly well that his mother is just as responsible as he is for the fact that they have such a terrible relationship. Ever since he started the eighth year, Eddie-baby has considered himself an adult and has wanted other people to treat him as one, but his mother still tries to tell him what to do.

  What’s unfair is that his mother basically doesn’t care how Eddie-baby is – whether he’s happy or sad – or what he’s thinking about. His mother quarrels savagely with him over trifles, over things like whether he’s going to wear pants that are twenty-two instead of eighteen centimeters wide, or the way he parts his hair, or his yellow jacket. It used to be that the only thing she got nervous about was how long his hair was. Eddie’s new classroom teacher, Yakov Lvovich (Rachel finally got so decrepit she had to retire), has managed to create the firm impression in Eddie-baby’s mother that nothing good will ever come of him.

  “Your son will grow up to be a criminal and a parasite,” Yakov Lvovich announced to Eddie’s mother at their first parent-teacher conference. And his mother, rather than taking Eddie’s side in the matter, took Yakov Lvovich’s.

  In Eddie-baby’s opinion, nothing good has come of Yakov Lvovich himself. He’s a swine and a bastard. Taking advantage of the fact that he’s unusually big – more than 1.8 meters tall – the classroom teacher beats his pupils. He calls them into his physics office – the fascist teaches physics – and beats them there where there aren’t any witnesses, and the kids come out with bruised noses and lips. The fascist thinks that by using this severe method he’s teaching the punks a lesson in behavior, although what he’s actually doing is beating up people who won’t fight back. The majority of the punks leave school for the streets or the factories after the seventh year. There aren’t any real punks left in their class. You can’t actually call Sashka Tishchenko or Valka Lyashenko punks. Even though they sometimes act like it and live in Tyurenka, they’re really pretty easygoing kids. In Eddie-baby’s opinion, it isn’t fair to beat them just because they’re lazy or lack ability.

  But Yakov Lvovich has never once laid a finger on Eddie. He knows which ones he can beat and which ones he can’t. He doesn’t hit Sashka Lyakhovich either. Or Vitka Proutorov, although that’s because Vitka has a weak heart.

  The first reason why Yakov Lvovich doesn’t hit Eddie is because of his father. The quiet Veniamin Ivanovich is still in harness with the MVD, and even though Eddie is sure that it would be hard to find a more innocuous person than his father, the magical letters MVD have their effect on the physics teacher Yakov Lvovich Kaprov.

  The second reason is because of Eddie himself. The first time the new classroom teacher beat up one of the kids – Vitka Vodolazhsky, a harmless village fellow who is impatiently sitting through the eighth year with his twin sister so he can transfer to a technical high school – Eddie-baby swore to a group standing around in the toilet while Vitka wiped the blood from his face that if “Yasha” ever touched him, he’d cut the physics teacher with his razor. You can’t let other people insult you, not even once – so he had been taught by Sanya, and all the punks in Saltovka live by that unwritten law. And Eddie-baby tries to live by it too.

  Maybe the kids didn’t believe his oath, but Yasha did – there are informers everywhere, and somebody reported it to him. He believed it because there had been cases like that in the past, especially in recent years, both at their school and at the neighboring ones. In 1956 somebody stabbed the bald gym teacher Lyova in the side during the school New Year’s party.

  Still another reason why Yasha is afraid to touch Eddie is Red Sanya. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Sanya looks out for Eddie-baby, and that Sanya can count on the weight lifters and on all of Tyurenka, and when necessary, on the savage blackasses from the Horse Market. Anybody who touches Eddie-baby is in trouble. Which is why nightmares like Eddie-baby’s fight with Yurka Obeyuk don’t happen anymore. For a while they continued to torment Eddie-baby in his sleep, but they don’t now. Yurka himself went back to Krasnoyarsk with his family, and Eddie-baby never got to take the revenge he used to dream about. Actually, Eddie-baby didn’t dream about it for very long – just for the first six months after the fight. The fight was his own fault, after all, since in poring over his books he had forgotten that he was a man and that a man has to be able to take care of himself. And what did that have to do with Yurka Obeyuk?

  Eddie finishes up the macaroni and in his thoughts returns once again to the argument with his mother. Eddie-baby wonders why she’s always on the side of his enemies. She always is. Other mothers stand up for their children. But not Raisa Fyodorovna. As far as she’s concerned, it’s always Eddie-baby’s fault. Clearly taking revenge on Eddie-baby for his promise to cut him, Yasha always gives him a C in physics, although Eddie, realizing that Yasha finds fault with everything he does, learns his physics lessons by heart, despite the fact that it isn’t his favorite subject. Another student would receive an A or maybe a B for the same answer, but Yasha gives Eddie a C. His mother doesn’t understand; she thinks it’s because Eddie isn’t studying physics the right way.

  “Injustice!” Eddie-baby once wrote on the classroom blackboard. This was meant as a comprehensive explanation of the way the world is. Raisa Fyodorovna wants to raise her son to be a “good person,” as she puts it, and so, although by no means stingy, she thinks that it’s harmful to give a fifteen-year-old child money to cover his out-of-pocket expenses. As a result, that fifteen-year-old is always going around the district looking for money and is forced to steal. “What a fool she is!” Eddie-baby thinks bitterly. His mother believes that if she doesn’t give him any money to buy a bottle of biomitsin to drink with his friends, he’ll settle down and obediently go without both the biomitsin and the friends. She doesn’t know her son and that his character is too strong for that. She has no idea that Eddie has been stealing for a long time now, and that he and Kostya have started breaking into stores and even private apartments.

  And his mother makes fun of his poems too. Asya doesn’t make fun of them, Kadik doesn’t make fun of them, and Captain Zilberman doesn’t make fun of them! Zilberman even says that Eddie is talented, that if he were smart, he would stop hanging around with the punks, finish school with top marks, and go to the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. Raisa Fyodorovna, however, maintains that Eddie-baby’s poems are gibberish and sound just like the poets he’s been reading. He read Blok and they sounded like Blok; he read Bryusov and immediately started writing poems that sounded like Bryusov; he read Esenin and he wro
te poems like Esenin’s…

  Eddie thinks that if his mother and father had given him just a little money, he wouldn’t have started stealing. Or would he have started anyway? He isn’t sure. He really doesn’t know. Probably he would have anyway, since, like Kostya, he steals not so much for the money as because he wants to become a real criminal. Although he needs the money too.

  Kostya claims that in the USSR only the pickpockets have kept themselves together as a more or less organized force. Several times he has pointed out to Eddie the leaders of the pickpockets on Plekhanov Street and at the Horse Market – the so-called pakhany. But real organized crime has been completely stamped out, according to Kostya. Kostya dreams of a revival of organized crime. Their gang is just a first small step on the road to the network of armed gangs that Kostya, and Eddie-baby along with him, will create in the future.

  Eddie-baby is sick of his parents and sick of Apartment No.6 and of the fat-assed, fat-bellied Major Shepotko, who always stinks the place up with his foul cigarettes and his sitting on the toilet by the hour. Eddie wants to leave his parents as soon as he can. Not the way he ran away last time, but quietly. He has four months left before he turns sixteen and gets his own internal passport. Then it’s goodbye to Apartment No.6. “Grown-up children should live separately from their parents,” Asya once told him. And she’s absolutely right. She too dreams of living by herself, even though she has her own room and completely different parents. Eddie-baby would trade parents with her any day.

  30

  After making short work of the frying pan, Eddie-baby goes to the other room and without undressing lies down on his couch, one side of which rests against his parents’ large iron bed. The head of that bed is nickle-plated and tall and consists of a whole set of balls and stalks. When he was little, Eddie-baby didn’t care where he slept. Now he’s bothered by the proximity of his parents. His friends have laughingly told him about catching their own parents “in the act of fucking,” as they put it, although Eddie-baby has never caught his own. Sometimes at night when he was still a little boy he would hear sighs and moans coming from their bed, but he attributed them to bad dreams his parents were having.