Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  It’s terrible that Eddie is nearsighted, although there are many things in life that he would prefer not to see. For example, until the fourth year, when his parents were finally forced to buy him glasses, he thought his mother was very beautiful. But after he put on his glasses, he not only looked through the window into their snowy yard and saw a group of kids hitting the humpbacked Tolik Perevorachaev, a friend of his at the time, but he also noted with horror that there were wrinkles on his mother’s face and large pores in her skin, a fact that made him very, very sad, and he took off his glasses and decided to use them only to read and write, and then only at home, not at school.

  Eddie-baby did, however, finally manage to get Svetka’s panties off. Svetka drunkenly tried to resist, but there wasn’t much she could do since she didn’t have any strength. She only said, “No! No! Oh, no!” several times in a drowsy drunken voice, and then lay still after her panties were off. Eddie pulled Svetka’s taffeta dress up, but all she did was mechanically put her hand over the place where she had the orifice into which Eddie-baby was supposed to insert his penis.

  Eddie-baby pushed Svetka’s hand away and touched that place with his hand. The place was hot and lightly covered with dark red hair. Taking his hand away, Eddie-baby touched his penis. His penis was cold.

  9

  He just couldn’t get it up. Nothing Eddie-baby did to his penis, pulling it and stretching it, trying to make it hard and strong, had any effect; it still remained a soft, rubbery tube. Eddie-baby even left the bedroom to talk things over with Sashka Tishchenko, but only for a moment, only for a little while, since he was afraid that one of the kids might come into the dark room with the doll-like body of Svetka gleaming white on the bed, and who knows, maybe that kid’s penis would stand up for her.

  Sashka Tishchenko advised Eddie to “beat off.” But Eddie himself already knew that he needed to move his penis with his hand, which was in fact what he had been doing for the last half-hour in Sashka’s parents’ bedroom, turned away from Svetka and her hips and stomach.

  Then Svetka regained consciousness, and Eddie-baby started thinking about the best way to kill himself. Because he simply could not endure the disgrace, the terrible blow to his masculine pride.

  As he was thinking about how to kill himself while writhing in a corner of the bed at Svetka’s feet, Svetka got up, shook herself off, and fiddling around somewhere behind Eddie, put her panties back on, straightened her dress, and then sat down next to him. He had the feeling that she had not been as totally unconscious as he had thought, and from even greater shame he hid his face completely, covering it with his hand.

  “Cut it out,” said Svetka. “So it didn’t work out today. It will some other time. Big deal!”

  “I don’t want to live anymore!” Eddie-baby said dully.

  “You jerk!” Svetka said. “I love you. You’re better than all the other kids.” And Svetka kissed Eddie’s ear, although a bit clumsily, since she wanted to kiss him on the cheek but he moved and she had to kiss him on the ear.

  It’s not clear what would have happened next had they been alone in the apartment. It’s even possible Eddie would have humped Svetka; after all, he didn’t really believe that he was impotent, that he was someone who couldn’t have an erection. Every morning when Eddie woke up he discovered that his penis was erect, even when he hadn’t dreamed of the madwoman Tonka the night before. But they weren’t alone in the apartment, and at that instant both Katka, who for some reason is called Kitty, although she doesn’t look at all like a cat, and Ritka, who goes with Garik the Morphine Addict, came into the room and asked Svetka and him to dance. They had to go, especially since the kids had several times attempted to smoke them out of the bedroom – the apartment didn’t have that many beds, and everybody wanted to try to hump his girl.

  When Sashka Tishchenko asked Eddie if he had humped Svetka, Eddie tersely answered, “Yes,” although a real man should tell the truth.

  10

  An hour after ironing his trousers and eating the potato salad, Eddie-baby is standing next to a dirty stream behind some sheds about a hundred meters from the headquarters of the Fifteenth Militia Precinct, talking about murder with Grishka Primak, who has just returned from reform school again (for the third time, in fact). Grishka doesn’t have any money, and so all he can do for Eddie-baby is drink a bottle of biomitsin with him and talk.

  Grishka’s late grandfather was an aristocrat – a count, according to Grishka – and an old Bolshevik. On the wall of the room where Grishka lives with his deaf and dumb mother hangs a faded photograph of his grandfather embracing Lenin. If it weren’t for that photograph, the desperate Grishka would long ago have been serving time not in reform school but in prison, and would very likely still be there.

  Grishka is a remarkable person in his own way, although Eddie-baby condescendingly regards him as a degenerate. He’s tall, angular, and dystrophically thin, and his small mug is abundantly covered with pimples. He smokes cheap White Sea Canal cigarettes and enthusiastically grabs girls by the ass. When engaged in conversation, he waves his arms, spits, and shouts, his voice passing through his large nose, which he blows into a huge handkerchief since he always has a cold.

  Grishka sometimes hits his deaf and dumb mother when she starts pestering him to quit stealing and go to school. Grishka doesn’t want to go to school; he already knows everything without it. Eddie-baby isn’t so sure that Grishka knows everything, although he’s read as many books as Eddie-baby himself has and maybe even more, only of a different kind – fiction – whereas Eddie has read specialized books.

  Passing the bottle back and forth, Eddie-baby and Grishka take swigs from their fire extinguisher of biomitsin and talk about murder. Grishka has just announced to Eddie-baby that for a year now he has had the amusing desire to murder somebody. He wants to try it, see what it’s like to kill somebody.

  “They say, Ed, that a knife will go into the human body as easily as it will go through butter, unless you strike bone, that is,” Grishka declares, and spits.

  “They’ll give you fifteen years if they convict you as a minor; otherwise they’ll execute you,” Eddie-baby observes impassively. “Either way you’ll get it. They executed Shurik Bobrov, and they didn’t even take into consideration the fact that he was drunk.”

  “Really?” Grishka asks in amazement. “He was such a quiet guy. When did that happen? Probably when I was in reform school.” Grishka’s face suddenly stretches in a grimace and he sneezes, although he doesn’t just sneeze but deliberately draws out the first sounds – “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah…” – and then abruptly ends with the word “shit!”

  Sneezing like that is Saltovka’s own brand of chic. You can also end your sneeze with “bortion!” the way Red Sanya does: “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah… bortion!”

  “It was last winter,” Eddie-baby replies. “He stuck a sharpened file into a guy who insulted him at the dances, called him an asshole or something. He stabbed him in the washroom. Maybe they wouldn’t have sentenced him to death, but the guy he killed turned out to be the secretary of the Communist Youth League at the Turbine Factory foundry. He’d been married only a little while and left two kids behind. The public demanded execution. It was bad luck for Shurik!” Eddie-baby observes, remembering Shurik’s harmless little face, his little blond forelock, and the white shirt he always wore. He was a meticulous person. A metalworker.

  “No,” Grishka says, “I’m not such an asshole as to let myself get all worked up at those dances at the club. I’m a peaceful guy,” he adds, and then grins broadly. “I slept during the day all last week and walked around the outskirts of the city at night, even in the Tractor district, trying to find an old man to kill.” Grishka laughs. “A knife in the back, and your relative is gone.”

  “Is he telling the truth?” Eddie-baby wonders. “Who the fuck knows, maybe he really did look for an old man to kill.” Grishka is crazy enough to do it. His whole family’s crazy and degenerate, as everybody in the di
strict says. His deaf and dumb mother’s a speculator, and his uncle has been in an insane asylum for many years and was elected prime minister by the inmates. It’s a difficult thing, probably, to be elected prime minister of famous Saburka (also known as Saburov’s Dacha), an institution visited by many renowned representatives of Russian culture, including Garshin, Vrubel, and Khlebnikov – as difficult, probably, as it is in the normal world. Grishka’s uncle, however, is obviously crazier than everyone else at Saburka… But that craziness is the reason why Grishka acts the way he does; it’s the influence, so to speak, of his family and inheritance. In spite of himself, Eddie-baby has begun to feel respect for Grishka and for his quest for the truth, for his desire to understand himself and his world. For his restless soul.

  Eddie-baby realizes that Grishka’s search for an old man on a dark street at night is to be explained not by considerations of a petty mercenary nature – to rob and kill his victim, say, and then use the money to buy vodka – but by reasons that are lofty and philosophical.

  “Well, did you find one, then?” Eddie-baby asks Grishka in as indifferent a tone as possible, as if he didn’t care one way or another whether Grishka found an old man and killed him.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Grishka laughs. “What can I say, Ed? Do people really tell something like that to somebody else, even a friend?”

  Eddie-baby shrugs his shoulders. Obviously people don’t, but Grishka’s the one who started bullshitting about wanting to see what it would be like to kill somebody, and now he’s backing off. “I wonder,” Eddie thinks, “what you actually would feel. Maybe nothing. Shurik Bobrov went home to bed afterward. But they say he was so drunk he didn’t even know what he was doing.”

  Eddie-baby takes a swig of biomitsin and looks at Grishka out of the corner of his eye. Actually, he probably never stabbed anybody, and maybe he never even planned to and never went to the Tractor district and is merely showing off.

  Grishka, however, just gazes at Eddie and smiles enigmatically.

  Eddie-baby senses that Grishka has an undoubted psychological advantage over him at the moment, and so in order to compensate for Grishka’s advantage in the realm of the transcendental, in order to keep Grishka from being too proud of the fact that “dark forces incomprehensible even to him” (his own expression) are pushing him toward murder, Eddie-baby recites a poem he has just written about a militia car that is taking Eddie to prison to be executed:

  And in the morning the chief shyly said

  They’d given me the “tower” for it,

  And that in an hour they’d take me

  To the hall and there execute a poet,

  That if I wanted cigarettes and wine,

  They’d bring them to me without complaint,

  And that “she” had sent a letter to me,

  But I interrupted him, “The bitch! -”

  But before Eddie-baby can go on, Grishka stops him with another of his typically idiotic questions.

  “Who’s a bitch, the chief or Svetka?” he says maliciously.

  “What has Svetka got to do with it?” Eddie replies. “It’s just a poem.”

  “You need to express yourself more clearly,” Grishka mutters didactically. His attitude toward Eddie-baby’s poems is skeptical: since Eddie-baby won’t improve on Yesenin, there’s no point in his wasting time on such silliness. Not that Grishka isn’t aware of the existence of other poets besides Yesenin, but for the Saltovka kids in their Saltovka environment, Yesenin is much closer to them, much closer than all the others.

  “Go on!” Grishka says.

  “Forget it!” Eddie snaps. “You can go screw yourself, since you obviously don’t have any idea what poetry is and what it isn’t.” And he angrily hands Grishka back his bottle.

  “You’re not going to be offended, are you?” Grishka asks, and touches Eddie-baby on the shoulder. “Don’t be,” he says apologetically. “It’s just that I don’t think it’s one of your best. Personally I’m fond of the other one,” Grishka says, flattering him. “You remember, the one about Natasha. How does it go? Why don’t you recite that one, Ed?”

  “Why the fuck should I recite anything to you?” Eddie says sullenly. “I have to go. I need to get some money for tonight, and there isn’t much time left,” he adds a little less severely.

  “I’ve got a terrific idea!” Grishka exclaims, slapping himself on the forehead. “You know Vovka Zolotarev from my building, right? He’ll lend you the money. He always has funds. After all, he’s got a good job as a foreman at the radio plant. Let’s go visit him!”

  Eddie-baby realizes that Grishka feels in the wrong and is trying to do something to make up for it. “Grishka really isn’t a bad guy,” Eddie thinks, “only he does bullshit a lot, and he can be pretty mean.”

  “All right, then, let’s,” Eddie reluctantly agrees. “Only I don’t know Vovka that well. Borrow money from somebody you’ve only seen a couple of times in your life?” he adds doubtfully.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll vouch for you, since Vovka and I are neighbors. Only don’t let on immediately what we’ve come for, or else he’ll think the only reason all the kids make friends with him is to borrow money. We’ll stay half an hour, and then I’ll ask him.”

  “All right,” Eddie says. What else can he do? He has already dropped by Borka Churilov’s, and there wasn’t anybody home there, since Borka and his mother have gone to see Borka’s sister in Zhuravlyovka. For the holiday.

  11

  At the door to Vovka’s apartment Grishka smiles slyly. “Listen!” he says, and presses the buzzer.

  Eddie-baby listens. All of a sudden from somewhere in the ceiling comes the sound of Vovka’s gruff voice amplified by a loudspeaker:

  “Who’s there?” the voice asks.

  “It’s your neighbor Grishka,” Grishka answers with a grin.

  “What do you want?” the voice asks just as gruffly. Eddie-baby realizes now that the voice comes from a loudspeaker over the door. The loudspeaker is covered with wire mesh.

  “I need to talk to you,” Grishka answers importantly.

  “With or without a bottle? Alone or not alone?” the laconic Vovka asks.

  “With a bottle,” Grishka lies – the fire extinguisher in his hand is less than half full. It would be nice if there were at least half a bottle of wine left, but there probably isn’t. “And with a friend,” Grishka adds. “With Ed.”

  “All right,” the invisible Vovka Zolotarev concludes, now satisfied. Something hisses and clatters in the loudspeaker. “Press the button to the right of the door and come in.”

  Grishka, winking at Eddie, presses the black plastic button, and the door opens of its own accord.

  “Everything’s automated,” Grishka says enthusiastically, turning to Eddie. “Vovka doesn’t even get up to open the door. He just lies in bed and picks up the receiver and presses his buttons.”

  For all his automation, Vovka still has to share his apartment with somebody else. He has sworn to outlast her and take over her room. For the time being, however, the large room in the apartment belongs to Vovka and one of the two smaller rooms to his mother. Both he and his mother are pressuring their neighbor by every possible means, but basically by tormenting her with Vovka’s music and his way of life. The neighbor, whom Vovka refers to as “Mashka” even though she’s forty years old, calls the militia at least twice a week, which is easy, given the fact that the station’s right next door and you can see its yard from the window. But since Vovka’s outrageous behavior doesn’t actually involve physical abuse, and since he is employed, there’s really nothing the militia can do. They don’t even come anymore. Vovka’s convinced them that Mashka is crazy.

  Now, if Vovka were a parasite like the kids in the Blue Horse, they could do something, such as exile him 101 kilometers away from Kharkov, but since he isn’t, they can’t do anything. Vovka isn’t even a dude or an alcoholic, although he does drink a lot and has company every night.

  Although no
body ever calls him anything but “Vovets” or “Vovka,” Vovka is actually a pretty old guy – more than thirty. But he doesn’t like to associate with men his own age. He prefers schoolboys. Even Sashka Plotnikov drops by Vovka’s from time to time. Vovka maintains that he has a lot more fun with schoolboys. And he sleeps with and screws girls Eddie’s age. Galka Kovalchuk from Eddie’s class humped Vovka for a while, and everybody knew about it.

  12

  Vovka really is lying in bed in his room with his clothes on. On the wall at the head of the bed is a panel with numerous indicator needles, buttons, knobs, and lights, which Vovka himself installed in a very professional manner. That’s his Control Panel. It’s a rare thing in Saltovka for anyone to have a phone, but installed in Vovka’s panel is a telephone receiver that he uses to speak to visitors on the other side of his door. Vovka threatens to “cop” himself a real telephone someday. He says the militia promised to let him tie into their line. “It’s very possible,” Eddie thinks. Vovka is the kind of guy who goes after things, and now that he’s gotten acquainted with the militia through Mashka, he works for them as an electrician – for free, obviously – and has been helping them set up their communications room. He realized that he needed to make friends with them.

  Vovka’s face is almost invariably stern. People who don’t know him might think he’s a boring or somber person, or that he just woke up and is still vividly experiencing a bad dream. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vovka is simply a businesslike person, and everything he does – every one of his movements – is calculated.

  “Greetings!” Grishka says, and puts his fire extinguisher down on the table. Like all the other tables in Saltovka, Vovka’s is in the middle of the room.

  Vovka gets up from the bed without answering, shakes Grishka’s hand and then Eddie’s. His hand is extremely limp. There is a vast gulf between Vovka’s overflowing energy and his external appearance.