Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  Eddie-baby still has doubts, however, about the amount of money actually taken in today at the cafeteria on First Cross Street, and he therefore can’t decide whether or not to burgle it. He lies in the darkness for a while and thinks. The cries of the late-night revelers gradually die out in the fall Saltovka air as the last groups finally begin to break up and go home.

  “I’ll go,” Eddie decides. “I’ll take a look. If there’s an opportunity, I’ll slip in. The only bad thing is that they leave the light on all night in the cafeteria, so you can see everything that’s happening inside through the big new glass door and the huge windows.” One of the windows, however, leads to the semibasement, and that’s the one Eddie is thinking of using to break into the cafeteria. Nobody will see him when he knocks out the glass.

  He has already decided to go, but after checking all his pockets, carefully turning over in the sleeping bag for that purpose, which makes the springs and tubes of the folding canvas cot squeak, Eddie-baby suddenly realizes that he has left his glasses in the other room. That circumstance immediately cools his ardor, and he lies still for a while, having decided not to break into the cafeteria after all.

  “But where will I get the money to take Svetka to Sashka Plotnikov’s?” Eddie asks himself in dismay. “If I don’t get it, the fickle Svetka will start going with Shurik.” She has already boasted that Shurik, who works as a clerk in a shoe store, makes a lot of money and never comes to see her without a box of chocolates and a bottle of champagne. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re poor!” the insolent Svetka once told Eddie, puckering up her little doll’s face. Eddie-baby pictures Svetka’s little doll’s face to himself and smiles. Svetka also has terrific long, long legs exactly like the ones belonging to the women in the foreign magazines that Kadik once showed him. Sashka Plotnikov has the same kind of magazines – French, German, even American ones. They belong to his father.

  Svetka’s mother, regardless of what they say in the district about her being a prostitute, still dresses Svetka according to the latest fashion. Svetka wears starched crinolines and dresses trimmed with lace, which makes her look even more like a doll.

  Eddie-baby is proud of his Svetka and regards her as the best-looking girl in the district – among the minors, obviously… “Yes, and among the grown-ups too,” Eddie decides after thinking about it…

  Eddie-baby has finally made up his mind to go. And to go without his glasses, since getting them from the other room would mean waking his mother up; she’s a very light sleeper and would certainly wake up as soon as he opened the door. “I’ve got to go, I’ve got to,” Eddie says to himself by way of bolstering his courage. “There’s no other way to get the money.” The cafeteria really does seem to him to be his only chance. The idea first came to him that afternoon as he walked past it with Asya and Tomka, and it came to him precisely because of the crowds of customers he saw in there. “They’ve obviously taken in a lot of money over the holidays,” Eddie continues to reassure himself, “since who worries about spending money when it’s a holiday?”

  Eddie carefully climbs out of the sleeping bag, and after checking the contents of his pockets one more time and buttoning up his jacket, he pushes his body through one of the openings in the paneless window frames. A minute later and Eddie is already sitting on the balcony’s concrete cornice. He could jump down – after all, it’s only the second floor – but he’s afraid of waking his mother and Tolik Perevorachaev downstairs, since they might hear him land. So he grabs hold of the still open framework covering the balcony and hangs by his hands. Like Eddie’s family, the Perevorachaevs long ago built themselves an additional room on their own first-floor balcony, and Eddie therefore has to take extra precautions in order not to break one of the Perevorachaevs’ windows. He slides his body over the glass, seeking a foothold below, but unable to find it, he releases his hands: plop! He lands safely on the asphalt path that goes around the perimeter of their building.

  32

  Eddie sits without moving for a while, just as he landed. He doesn’t want to be seen either from the neighboring buildings, which are actually a good distance away, or from his own. He needs to have an alibi, as Kostya has taught him. After taking care of “business,” Eddie will climb back up to his balcony and lie down on the cot again just as if he had never left it.

  Kostya, however, didn’t teach him to steal on his own street. According to Kostya’s theory, stealing in your own neighborhood is the very last thing you should do. “No self-respecting criminal would allow himself to burgle a cafeteria on his own street,” Eddie-baby thinks a little guiltily. But what can he do? He has no alternative, and he knows the cafeteria on First Cross Street very well.

  Eddie-baby sneaks down First Cross Street, staying close to the walls of the buildings. He doesn’t want to run into acquaintances who’ve been out on a spree, since by morning everybody in Saltovka will know that the cafeteria on First Cross Street has been broken into.

  Creeping past Karpovs building, Eddie continues on his way. Next to the women’s dormitory on First Cross Street, several drunken men or boys (it’s impossible to tell which in the darkness) and the dormitory super’s wife are raucously abusing each other. “It’s pretty obvious,” Eddie thinks. “They want to visit the girls, and the girls want them to, but the super won’t let them: It’s against the rules!’ It may be against the rules,” Eddie thinks with a smirk, “but there are probably men and boys hiding out in half the rooms right now. Usually they climb in the windows. It’s only the drunks who try to go in through the front door.”

  It’s a five-minute walk from Eddie’s building to the cafeteria. Just as he expected, the interior of the cafeteria is flooded with light. Eddie stands for a while on the other side of the street next to the front garden of another women’s dormitory (there are four in all on First Cross Street) and, squinting hard, tries his best to take a good look around. Only now does he realize how stupid it was, with his nearsightedness of -6, to attempt a burglary without bringing his glasses.

  Eddie-baby is well acquainted with the burglar’s first rule: You must act boldly and decisively, without waiting for an “ideal” situation. There won’t ever be one. Therefore, after taking another look around, he crosses the cobbled street without any wasted movement, heads for the recess in front of the semibasement window, and quickly jumps down into it.

  It’s damp and dirty in the recess and smells a little of urine, but Eddie-baby pays no attention to such unimportant details. Taking a knife from his pocket, he at once sets to work removing the putty in the right corner of the lower windowpane. On the basis of some strange, idiotic logic, the pane has been installed from the outside rather than the inside, which makes Eddie’s work much easier. His delight is premature, however. The putty turns out to be as hard as cement, obviously made that way by the rain or the frost or all of the elements combined. It doesn’t want to be removed, and Eddie’s knife slips off it, taking just a few tiny fragments from its rock-hard surface.

  Eddie realizes there’s no choice but to break the window. In a situation like this, the professional Kostya would have brought a towel with him and, squeezing a tube of BF-2 glue onto it, would have placed the towel against the windowpane and popped it out easily and noiselessly. Eddie, however, is unprepared and poorly equipped, and he therefore decides to break the glass and then pull out whatever pieces remain.

  Taking off his jacket, Eddie places it over a corner of the window and strikes through his jacket at the windowpane with the haft of his heavy knife. The glass doesn’t break at first, and despite the jacket there is still too much noise when it does. Eddie-baby freezes and listens to see if anything is happening on the street. Nothing, apparently.

  He wants to stick his head up out of his hole to look, but he waits before doing so. Just then he distinctly hears the bootsteps of a trash – a unique sound impossible to confuse with the light steps of a civilian. A heavy, proprietary tread: Eddie-baby crouches in his hole without moving, p
ressing against its cold wall.

  The steps come closer. Eddie-baby’s stomach churns. As always in moments of danger, he suddenly feels an overwhelming urge to defecate.

  The steps come to a halt at the front door of the cafeteria, and for a while no sound is heard, and then the steps suddenly begin again, this time moving away. Eddie-baby breathes a sigh of relief. His stomach is no longer churning. The trash has tried the door and continued on his beat. He obviously heard something when the glass was being broken, or something else in the cafeteria seemed suspicious to him, and he decided to investigate. If it had occurred to him to take a look in the hole, Eddie-baby would have been done for.

  “I’ve got to hurry,” Eddie-baby thinks. Eddie knows that the trash has just come on duty, and he is familiar with his beat. The trash will go up First Cross Street and check several stores and kiosks in the vicinity of the vehicle maintenance lot, and then he’ll turn in the direction of the hospital. Next to the hospital is a large grocery store that has just recently been built and has already been burgled several times by the punks, since it’s so far from the streetlights of civilization and the trolley stops. Eddie-baby doesn’t have a lot of time, but he has enough. He quickly sets to work removing the pieces of glass from the window frame, using his jacket to grab hold of them. What he really should have brought with him is a pair of gloves.

  A couple of minutes later Eddie-baby is inside the cafeteria. It’s stuffy there, and the stoves visible in the kitchen are still hot, since the cafeteria has only been closed for a few hours. Losing no time, Eddie gets to work on the hardest part. He goes to the wooden cashier’s cage, which is in the middle of the dining room and is brightly lit and can therefore be seen through the window by any passerby, and tries the door.

  It won’t open. For some reason Eddie imagined that it would be held by a lightweight bolt, but instead there is an extremely heavy Moscow-type padlock hanging from it. Eddie-baby knows from experience that opening or breaking such a lock is no easy matter, especially if you don’t even have a crowbar with you. But looking up, Eddie-baby realizes that there’s no need to remove the lock at all, since there’s at least half a meter between the top of the open cage and the very high ceiling. Eddie-baby quickly moves a couple of chairs over and climbs up onto them, taking hold of the cage’s top edge. He then pulls himself up, throws his leg over, and slides down inside.

  This is the most dangerous moment. Because the cage is so well lit and is in the center of the dining room, anyone passing by on the street will be able to see the pyramid of chairs. Eddie-baby is in a hurry and pulls at the drawer of the cash register. It’s locked, but he forces his knife into the crack above the drawer and tears away its thin sheet-iron covering and the lock along with it. The drawer slides out. Squinting nearsightedly, he bends over its compartments and swears to himself in disappointment: “Cocksuckers!” There’s nothing in the compartments but some small change and a thin packet of fresh new rubles. About twenty in all. Or maybe thirty.

  Eddie-baby quickly rummages through the drawers of the cashier’s desk, which aren’t even locked, but all he finds in them are bundles of invoices and some other worthless papers stuck on spindles, as well as several rubber stamps, some paper clips, a dried-up leftover sandwich, a couple of forks and knives from the cafeteria, a green comb with a few of the cashier’s gray hairs stuck in it, a mirror, and some pomade in a crumpled bronze tube. There isn’t any more money.

  Eddie-baby looks around the primitive structure. The only things in it are a chair and the desk with the cash register on it, and above the register a price list pinned to the wall. That’s all the cage contains. Not much.

  Eddie rakes the change into his pockets and puts the thin packet of rubles in the same place. And then, without hesitating, he climbs up onto the desk, stands on the cash register, and in a single leap vaults over the side of the cage, hangs from his hands, and drops down to the floor. Eddie is always annoyed by movie heroes who stop to think in perilous situations or take too long to part with their brides, which lack of haste ultimately lands them either in prison or on the gallows. “Get out of there, you asshole!” Eddie always whispers in the darkness of the movie theater on such occasions. Once back on the floor, Eddie himself immediately grabs the two chairs and returns them to the little table where he found them, and then, without even looking out the window to make sure that nobody has seen him, he hides in the kitchen.

  The kitchen is even hotter and reeks of overcooked soup or borsch. Eddie-baby feels like something to eat and lifts the lids of a couple of saucepans, but either they’re empty or they don’t contain anything interesting – the brown leftovers of borsch or soup that the cook’s helper will pour down the drain the next morning without regret.

  Eddie-baby looks around. There can’t be any money in the kitchen, of course, but he soon notices another door next to the entrance to the dining room. He rushes over to it, opens it, and finds himself in a small, cool, somewhat dank little corridor with two other doors opening off it. Affixed to one of the doors is a small sign with the word “Manager” on it.

  It is in fact the manager’s office that Eddie-baby wants. To his relief, it isn’t locked. Eddie turns the black light switch by the doorway and goes into the office.

  A glance at the large gray safe in the corner immediately tells him that the game is over. That all is lost. “You went through all this for nothing, you feeble asshole – just so you could stand gaping at a steel box.” It isn’t the first time that something like this has happened to him. Only recently he and Kostya spent a long time trying to drill out the lock of a safe in a shoe store that by their calculations should have contained from 150,000 to 200,000 rubles! It just wasn’t working, and there was nothing to do but give up the whole thing and get out of there. Kostya is trying to learn how to crack safes, but where can he learn and who is there to teach him? The only safecrackers, or “bear hunters,” left are those in the novels of Sheinin, the real ones having long ago been liquidated as a class. There’s nobody to apprentice with, and Kostya isn’t a good enough locksmith and mechanic to figure out for himself how it’s done.

  Eddie kicks the safe in a fury and looks around. A large office desk made of an unknown variety of wood stands in one corner, and above it is a small window covered with a grating. There are no other windows in the office. The window looks out onto the yard shared by Grocery Store No.11 and the Bombay, and it too is a semibasement window, just like the one Eddie climbed through. Over the window is a thick, dark shade, so that there’s nothing to be concerned about. Eddie sits down in the manager’s armchair and starts opening the desk drawers one after another.

  In them are papers, grimy folders with dirty, greasy fingerprints on them – the sloppy bookkeeping of a cafeteria. Eddie systematically opens each folder in the hope of finding a wad of hundred-ruble notes inside. One after another he tosses the inspected folders onto the floor, where an impressive pile of documents quickly accumulates. Eddie-baby is in a rage, and even though he ought to leave, since it’s quite obvious that the cafeteria’s take for the day is locked up in the safe, it pains him to the point of tears to do so. He doesn’t even try to open the safe. What with? His finger?

  In a corner of one of the drawers he finds a half-empty bottle of cognac. Removing the cork, Eddie-baby puts the bottle to his mouth. The manager knows what to drink; his cognac isn’t just three-star (which even at that costs more than vodka) but VSOP, which means “Very Superior Old Pale.” Eddie-baby believes that everybody in business is a crook. That’s what all the punks and workers in Saltovka believe, and Eddie-baby shares a great many of the district’s opinions and misconceptions. Crooks drink VSOP.

  The funny idea suddenly occurs to Eddie-baby that he too is a crook, although he is immediately calmed by the thought that burglary is a noble activity taking place out in the open, so to speak, whereas it’s bad to steal groceries on the sly and cheat on invoices the way all the fat managers and directors do. “Is Red Sany
a a crook, then?” Eddie suddenly thinks, and laughs out loud, realizing that Sanya’s a crook twice over.

  Eddie-baby decides to get going and grabs the bottle, moving toward the doorway. Next to it is a coatrack made of deer antlers, and hanging on the coatrack are a navy blue beret and a white coat that obviously belongs to the manager. Taking down the white coat, Eddie-baby discovers underneath a black wool ratine overcoat with an astrakhan shawl collar. He instantly decides that he can fence the coat to the Azerbaijanis at the Horse Market after the holidays, and so he pulls it on over his jacket and sticks the bottle in one of its pockets.

  Just as he reaches the door leading back into the dining room and is about to open it, Eddie-baby suddenly hears the sound of highly excited voices coming from somewhere outside – not somewhere far away but somewhere nearby, somewhere next to the front door itself. He’s terrified.

  His stomach starts churning again, only this time in earnest, since it’s upset by the cognac as well. Unable to withstand the urgent promptings of his bowels, Eddie is forced to beat a hasty retreat back to the managers office, where he unbuttons his trousers with a jerk and squats down on his haunches. A stream of watery crap shoots out of him all over the documents spread on the floor. Holding up the skirts of the stolen coat with his hands, Eddie-baby sits still for a while and listens.

  When he again makes his way into the dining hall of the cafeteria, now very stealthily, the voices have ceased. No longer expecting any further developments, Eddie heads for the window he came in by and climbs first into the damp recess and then, not hearing any suspicious noises nearby, out onto the street. Like any other nearsighted boy, he puts far more trust in his ears than he does in his eyes. Once outside, he goes as Kostya has taught him, not in the direction of home, but in the direction of the school, where he jumps over the fence and wanders for a while on the dark soccer field, finally sitting down on some bricks in its most poorly lit corner to drink the cognac straight from the bottle.