Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 19

  Once again without speaking, Vovka goes over to the sideboard, opens it, and takes out a few small glasses. After that, he goes into the kitchen and comes back with a large plate of pickled cucumbers, a hunk of bologna already carefully sliced, and some pieces of black bread. Putting the plate on the table, he looks thoughtfully at Grishka’s fire extinguisher and then goes back into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of vodka and three forks. After placing the bottle on the table, he goes over to his panel and moves one of its levers. Western music flows into the room from invisible speakers. Vovka is no less a specialist in Western music than Kadik is, although he doesn’t play the saxophone, merely the guitar.

  As they are sitting down at the table, Grishka asks,

  “Where’s Mashka, Vovets?”

  Grishka wants to be polite and start a conversation.

  It’s apparent that he has hit the nail on the head. Vovka’s face, in any case, becomes noticeably livelier.

  “She hauled her ass off to visit her little kurkul brother in the country,” Vovka says, pouring vodka into the faceted glasses. All his movements are amazingly precise and professional. He pours out the vodka remarkably evenly, although he hardly looks at the glasses. It’s clear that Zolotarev has been doing this all his life.

  Looking at Vovka, Eddie-baby is reminded of a machine designed to pour mineral water into bottles, a machine of the kind he recently saw in a documentary film on television. “Clack – pour…, clack… clack… clack… next… clack!”

  “May she be bull-fucked while she’s there,” Vovka says.

  Eddie-baby saw Mashka the last time he visited Vovka. Nothing special – a woman like any other. Large, a bit of a bumpkin, a fool probably, but the sort you’d wish a bull on? That’s just talk on Vovka’s part. Eddie-baby imagines Mashka with a bull and surprises himself by snorting.

  “What is it?” Grishka asks.

  “I was just imagining Mashka with a bull,” Eddie answers, smiling.

  Grishka neighs loudly, holding his abundantly pimpled neck in the vicinity of his ear. Grishka likes to laugh emphatically and at length; it’s a way he has. Maybe he wants to seem relaxed or grown-up – Eddie-baby has no idea. Grishka, laughs now for a particularly long time, and Eddie-baby feels awkward with Vovka around.

  Grishka stops laughing and they lapse into silence again, although it is eased by the music – saxophones droning and trumpets blaring in a boogie-woogie. It occurs to Eddie that if Kadik were here, he would know at once what the piece is and who’s playing it.

  Several minutes pass while Vovka and the kids chew, snap cucumbers, squeak their chairs, and slap their hands on the table in time to the music, but are otherwise silent. It’s always like that with Vovka – you don’t know what to say until you get drunk, and then it’s a lot more fun. After that Vovka is just another member of the group – they’re all hosts – and it gets noisy and smoky, and the kids laugh and tell jokes. If any of the kids bring girls to Vovka’s, they get up and dance. It turns into something like a club, with Vovka as the director.

  “Well, let’s get on with it and have another one,” Vovka suggests, and without waiting for their consent, he again fills up their faceted little glasses. And again just as precisely as a machine.

  “You, Vovets, could get a job at the philharmonic with that number,” Grishka says in a nasal twang, snickering and pointing to the glasses.

  Vovka doesn’t reply but takes his glass and lifts it into the air. “Cheers!” Vovka toasts, and then empties the glass into his large, toothy mouth. Besides his ugly mouth, Vovka has another defect – he stoops and is shorter than Eddie, although the girls still like Vovka, probably because he plays the guitar and sings. In fact, Eddie’s father once tried to teach him how to play, encouraging him with the promise that the girls would like him better if he could play the guitar and sing. It turned out, however, that Eddie had no ear or voice for music.

  Still, he does like to sing. When he was little and had a good relationship with his mother and father, he would sometimes sing for them. His mother and father would sit on the couch, and Eddie would stand next to the table with a songbook in his hands and sing. Eddie-baby’s preference was for folk songs. His favorite song was the old ballad about Khaz-Bulat.

  The ballad’s story is a bit unusual and is constructed in the form of a conversation between an old warrior from the mountains and a young, obviously Georgian prince. The prince is trying to persuade the old man to give him his wife:

  “Bold Khaz-Bulat! Your saklya is poor,

  Let me shower you with golden coins!

  I’ll give you my steed, my dagger, and my rifle,

  And all I ask in return is your wife!

  You’re already old and already gray

  And there’s no life for her with you,

  She’s at the dawn of her years, you’ll ruin her!…”

  Eddie-baby sang away in all seriousness, holding the songbook in front of him like an operatic recitalist. His mother and father would fall over from laughing. Veniamin Ivanovich told Eddie that he had an excellent bleat. Not a bass, not a baritone, but a bleat. Eddie, however, like a true artist, was for some reason unabashed by their laughter. He felt the main song in his repertoire with all his heart, and therefore, whenever he performed it, he derived pure aesthetic satisfaction from it. In the end Khaz-Bulat murders his beautiful wife and contemptuously sends her body to the prince, and Eddie-baby, whose whole life still lay ahead of him, dreamed of being both the young Georgian prince who falls in love with the wife of Khaz-Bulat, and then years later the bold life-scarred Khaz-Bulat himself, who proudly murders the beauty, thereby preserving his honor.

  Somewhere among the old photos kept by his mother is one of Eddie-baby dressed in a pair of knickers and standing with his mouth open wide – singing. In his hand is a plump, pocket-size songbook.

  The knickers were connected with Eddie-baby’s family’s desire – his mother and father’s desire, that is, since there wasn’t anybody else – to be an intellectual family. The first knickers with cinch straps were obviously purchased from somebody, somebody who had been to Germany and had brought them back as a kind of trophy. All the subsequent pairs, which got bigger and bigger as Eddie-baby grew, his mother made herself. It was only in his fifth year of school that Eddie finally got rid of the knickers and his family was finally and decisively defeated by Saltovka. All that remained was their love of books and their bookshelf crammed to bursting.

  13

  “Why don’t you play something, Vovets!” Grishka asks after the fifth round of vodka. “Make my heart gay!”

  Eddie-baby thinks that Grishka’s behavior with Vovka isn’t natural, that he’s trying to act like some old muzhik and strike a pose of hearty peasant simplicity, although there’s really much more to him than that. “And what’s ‘Make my heart gay’ supposed to mean, anyway?” Eddie wonders. If it had occurred to Grishka to ask Eddie for something, he would never have used that expression. “Make my heart gay!” That’s the way merchants talk in old books or in those awful Ostrovsky plays they’ve started to study at school.

  Vovka picks up his instrument and, like every other guitarist, starts plucking at the strings in order to tune it. Eddie-baby’s father plays the guitar better and tunes faster than anybody else.

  After tuning the guitar, Vovka asks what he should sing.

  “Vovets, why don’t you do ‘The days and years are passing…!’” Grishka exclaims. “That is, The Wine of Love,’” he adds by way of clarification.

  Vovka nods, makes himself more comfortable in his chair, and strumming the guitar, he begins to sing.

  The days and years are passing,

  And how fleeting are the centuries;

  Peoples go, taking with them

  Their customs and their fashions,

  But the wine of love is the only

  Truly unchanging thing in the world…!

  Then, glancing at Grishka and Eddie and nodding to them to sing along,
he shifts to the chorus:

  The wine of enchanting love

  Is given to people to make them happy,

  The wine of love burns

  Like a fire in the blood!

  Eddie-baby and Grishka join in the chorus, and Eddie thinks that it’s a strange thing how this song with its (as the poet Eddie knows) rather trite words always manages to affect him, making him at once happy and sad that the days and years and even the centuries are passing, though love remains to intoxicate the residents of Saltovka and Tyurenka and Kharkov just as it always has. Eddie-baby thinks tenderly about Svetka, about her little doll’s face and her vanity. “Dear Svetka!” he thinks. “I love her.”

  14

  The main singer, guitarist, and accordion player in Eddie-baby’s life was the blond, blue-eyed, curly-haired Vitka Nemchenko. But in September Vitka’s father came to Tyurenka, where Vitka was living with his grandfather and grandmother, and took him back to the Urals. It was very hard on Eddie-baby when Vitka left. He had lived in Tyurenka only two years, and he and Eddie had been friends less time than that, but he brought something into Eddie-baby’s life that neither Kostya nor Kadik nor Red Sanya had given him – nature, song, the village, the peasant house, and his grandfather and grandmother.

  One day last spring they were assigned a desk together, and after school they discovered that they lived in the same direction. Usually Vitka took the trolley to the Electrosteel stop and then walked the rest of the way with Vika Kozyrev, Vitka Proutorov, Sashka Tishchenko, and the other kids from Tyurenka. On the day in question, however, after a stop at Eddie’s building, Vitka came with Eddie-baby past Asya’s building and then to the vehicle maintenance lot and from there across the Russian cemetery to Tyurenka. When they reached Eddie’s building, Eddie-baby tossed the field bag he used as a briefcase and the bag with his slippers in it up onto the balcony. As in all the other schools in Kharkov, it is the custom in Secondary School No.8 to take off your footwear and put on slippers as soon as you enter. They won’t let you past the first floor in muddy boots or shoes. It may in fact be necessary to do that, since in the spring and summer the area around Secondary School No.8 is inundated with immense quantities of mud, but Eddie regards it as degrading for a man to walk around in light slippers. Deprived of your heeled shoes or your heavy boots, of that necessary weight on your feet, you are in a sense deprived of your manhood.

  Once rid of the hated slippers, Eddie-baby walked Vitka home.

  The apple trees were already blooming in the cemetery, so that it resembled a half-wild orchard. The kids walked along exchanging remarks, and the sunshine was so warm that the flies, bumblebees, butterflies, and wild bees were all out. Eddie even took off his black velveteen jacket with the white collar sewn on in keeping with the strict rules of the school, and went on with his shirt unbuttoned at the chest…

  It was quiet and very bright in Tyurenka, and it smelled of fresh new growth and old wooden houses with chimneys billowing varicolored smoke for some reason. In faded pastels like the Impressionist landscapes Eddie-baby had seen in large books belonging to Borka Churilov, Tyurenka lay peacefully upon the afternoon hills.

  “It will be Easter in a few days,” Vitka said. “You see the different-colored smoke? It means our people are making home brew. See that pinkish smoke?” Vitka asked. “That’s home brew from pears. Auntie Galya always makes it from pears.” Vitka grinned.

  Eddie couldn’t really imagine what Easter was. He knew that they colored eggs at Easter, that eggs were essential, and that the kids fought each other with colored eggs at school. Each clutched an egg in his hand and tried to break his opponent’s egg without breaking his own. The winner got the loser’s egg to eat.

  Eddie-baby’s mother has recently started coloring eggs too, yellow with pieces of onion, and purple with a manganese solution, even though she doesn’t actually believe in God. As Eddie’s classroom teacher, the bastard Yakov Lvovich, once told him, their family is a synthetic one; it has no roots. Yakov Lvovich doesn’t believe in God either, unless he does so secretly, and then in a Jewish God, although that’s quite unlikely, since he’s too big and too tall to believe in God. What he said about Eddie’s synthetic family, however, he said as a condemnation. But is it really Eddie’s fault that they only stopped transferring his military father from city to city seven years ago, and that he has hardly any relatives since they were all killed or died young?

  “What’s Easter, Vit?” Eddie asked in embarrassment.

  “Well, it’s the day when Christ was resurrected after they crucified Him on the cross,” Vitka explained.

  “Resurrected?” Eddie said skeptically. “What does resurrected’ mean?”

  Eddie knew all the details of Livingstone’s journey through Africa, he could tie mariner’s knots of any difficulty with his eyes shut, he could probably give lectures on the Spanish conquest of Mexico or of the Incas, he knew that when you’re on a burglary job you should wear rubber-soled shoes, and he knew how to pick almost any lock, but he knew very little about God.

  “‘Resurrected’ means He came back to life,” Vitka said. “He was dead, but He came back to life.”

  “I’m not too crazy about God; it’s boring,” Eddie said, justifying himself. “I’ve never even been inside a church.”

  “I like Easter,” Vitka said. “It’s always warm and a lot of fun at Easter time. What are you doing for Easter?” he asked Eddie.

  “Nothing,” Eddie answered in confusion. “We don’t celebrate. Maybe my mother will go visit the neighbors, the Auntie Marusyas. My father’s a Communist, so he can’t celebrate. And he’s in the army. Anyway, he’s away on a business trip.”

  “Come to our house, then,” Vitka suggested. “My grandma and grandpa believe in God. They can let themselves; they’re not Communists. It’ll be fun. My grandmother has just brewed some new homemade beer. Do you like homemade beer?”

  “I’ve never tried it,” Eddie was embarrassed to say.

  15

  Eddie-baby went to Vitka’s for Easter. He even wore his only sports jacket and one of his father’s white shirts with the collar buttoned, and he put a bow tie – a gift from another Vitka, Vitka Golovashov – in his pocket, just in case.

  Tyurenka was even more beautiful by Easter, since the fruit trees in the little Tyurenka gardens had all finally started to bloom. The big old apple tree in front of Vitka’s house was completely filled with huge flowers and gave off a wonderful fragrance. They had driven their big shepherd dog with its heavy paws and impressive muzzle behind the house and tied it up in the garden, but it could still hear everything from there, and when Eddie walked up to the gate, it started barking.

  From inside the house came laughter and the clatter of dishes and the smell of cooking food, along with a hint of strong cigarette smoke. Opening the gate, Eddie went past the apple tree, and Vitka came out of the house to greet him dressed in black shoes and a light blue shirt that was the same color as his eyes. His short blond curls were carefully trimmed, and he smelled of cologne.

  “Carmen,” thought Eddie, who is good at distinguishing odors. “Carmen. He borrowed it from his grandmother probably.”

  “Welcome!” Vitka said. “Christ is risen!” And then he added, “Let’s kiss each other!” and reached out for Eddie.

  Eddie had heard about this custom and had seen the peasant men kissing each other by the beer stand the Easter before, but Eddie is shy about kissing and only feels like doing it with Svetka. It’s even been a long time since he allowed his mother to kiss him. But there was nothing he could do now. He gingerly kissed Vitka. Nothing particular happened as a result. They just bumped together with their lips and noses and then went into the house.

  Awaiting Eddie inside were at least several dozen more exchanges of triple Easter kisses, since there was an unexpectedly large number of guests already sitting on a wooden bench at the table in the main room. Some of the exchanges were not entirely unpleasant for Eddie – for example, the one w
ith a large, beautiful girl named Lyuda. Lyuda’s lips were soft. By the time he had gone around to everyone sitting at the table, Eddie was a professional kisser.

  After that Vitka took him to see the barrel of homemade beer in the vestibule. The beer was already standing in bottles on the table, but Vitka wanted to show Eddie the barrel. He took the top off and pulled back the cheesecloth covering the beer, and Eddie smelled the fresh, intoxicating, sourish smell. The barrel was filled with a brown liquid.

  Using a wooden ladle, Vitka scooped up some of the liquid and poured it into faceted glasses. After clinking their glasses, they drank.

  “Look,” said Vitka, “I know you’re an experienced drinker, but Grandma’s home brew is worse than vodka – it’s sneaky. You drink it as if it’s nothing, not strong at all, but it’ll make you pretty drunk. It can knock a good-sized man off his feet.”

  They went back to the main room, where the other guests crowded together a little to make room for them on the bench so they could sit down at the table. As the host, Vitka looked after Eddie and served him some of his grandmother’s homemade meat in aspic, and along with that a bit of grated horseradish, which for some reason was bright red.

  “It goes really well with the home brew,” Vitka said. “Grandma made it herself.”

  Just as they do in the country, they cook a lot in Tyurenka and make a lot of their own things. Many people in Tyurenka have their own hogs, and several times a year on holidays they slaughter them and make sausage. Nothing could be more delicious than homemade Ukrainian sausage brought straight from the cellar to the table, cold and hardened in lard… People in Tyurenka also sell their own fruits and vegetables at the markets, and they live a lot better than the people of Saltovka do, which is why the indigent Saltovka proletarians call them kurkuli. The people in Tyurenka are all local people, and their houses are very, very old, having once been the homes of their grandfathers and grandmothers. They’re settled people. The Saltovka poor, on the other hand, come from all over to work in the factories, even from the villages outside the city. Eddie-baby realized that day in Tyurenka just what their classroom teacher Yasha meant when he said that Eddie’s family lacks roots, that it’s synthetic.