Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  Eddie-baby considers Kadik a “rotten intellectual.” Eddie heard that expression for the first time from the militia officer, Major Shepotko. Shepotko recently moved into their apartment when Vovka Pechkurov, the last son of the prematurely deceased Major Pechkurov, moved away to Ivano-Frankovsk after graduating from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. Shepotko stubbornly calls Eddie-baby’s mother “Larisa” Fyodorovna instead of “Raisa” Fyodorovna, although he, that enormous potbelly in navy blue riding breeches, is just the head of a militia drunk tank, and not even one in their district. So that Eddie-baby now shares an apartment with trash.

  Kadik’s a rotten intellectual. Eddie even thinks he’s afraid of the punks, but he finds him interesting anyway. When Kadik’s postal worker mother isn’t at home, Eddie-baby goes over to his nine-square-meter room to listen to music. Kadik has a Mag record player. Very few kids in Saltovka have Mags. Sashka Plotnikov, whose house Eddie-baby promised to take Svetka to tomorrow, also has one. Kadik knows all about musicians like the black Duke Ellington, or Glenn Miller, or Elvis Presley “himself.” Kadik made a laughingstock of Eddie-baby once when he found out that he had no idea who Elvis was or that Elvis had just been drafted (or had just gotten out of the American army, Eddie-baby can’t remember which).

  If Eddie-baby considered Kadik a coward, he wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But Kadik is different; he obviously isn’t a coward. Eddie-baby saw the way he punched Mishka Shevchenko in the mouth after Mishka started making fun of him. The kids were all sitting on the green benches under the lindens on Saltov Road. Usually it’s the older kids who congregate under the lindens – Red Sanya, who is Eddie-baby’s friend and protector, Slavka the Gypsy, Bokarev, Tolik the Worrier, Fima Meshkov, Vitka Cross-Eyes, although he’s in the army now, and the weight lifters Cat and Lyova, who have just come back from prison, where they were sent for beating up a militia officer. Those kids are all over twenty; they’re not minors.

  3

  Aha, here comes Kadik. Wearing a yellow hooded jacket just like Eddie-baby’s and hopping and making faces, Kadik runs out from behind the gray corner of the building and waves. The yellow jackets are something they dreamed up themselves. Kadik’s neighbor, Auntie Motya, did the sewing for them. Kadik has a hundred neighbors, if not more, since he doesn’t live in an apartment but in a room off a hallway. A room left over from a dormitory. The kids took the pattern for their yellow jackets from an Austrian alpine parka Kadik brought back from an international youth festival. Kadik went to the festival along with some older kids who belonged to the Blue Horse. That was a year ago, and Kadik has been hanging out with bandmen ever since he was twelve. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Kadik is the guy who was in the BLUE HORSE and who went to a FESTIVAL.

  “Sorry, old pal,” Kadik says. “My dumb old lady lost the platter I was supposed to take back to Eugene today. I went through everything and I still couldn’t find it. That platter’s valuable. What a bitch she is! What an old whore!”

  Unlike all the other kids in Saltovka, Kadik and Eddie don’t swear that much. After every “normal” word, the other kids say “cocksucker” or “whore” or “cunt,” or they use less common personal curse words. Eddie-baby, however, only swears occasionally. He himself has no idea why it turned out that way.

  Until he was eleven years old Eddie-baby was an unbelievably exemplary boy. Every year he got letters of commendation, and for several years running he was chairman of the Young Pioneer council. Eddie-baby remembers himself as he was then, with a red neckerchief and the little forelock of an idiot, standing with his right hand raised in a Pioneer salute in front of the chairman of the troop council or the senior Young Pioneer leader and reporting, “Comrade Senior Pioneer Leader!” followed by a porridge of words he can’t remember anymore. Raisa Fyodorovna recalls that time as if it were a lost paradise.

  In his time off from school Eddie-baby read everything he could get his hands on. And he didn’t just read; he copied out whatever information interested him in special little notebooks that were carefully classified by theme. At that time Eddie-baby was friends only with Grishka Gurevich; they sometimes played cards together (Grishka cheated and always won) or explored the surrounding fields and ravines. Grishka looked a lot like a frog, but he was an exceptionally intelligent boy and was just as curious about things as Eddie-baby was…

  You could say that Eddie-baby dreamed his way through the first four years of school before his fateful eleventh year. He read, wrote down what he read, and dreamed. He wrote down a lot. From the several volumes of Dr. Livingstone’s account of his travels through Africa, for example, Eddie copied out in his small hand eight (!) forty-eight-page notebooks. An impressive callus appeared on the middle finger of his right hand, and the finger itself became twisted, so that although the callus gradually diminished in size, the finger remains crooked and callused even now. At night on his couch, Eddie-baby would dream he was observing a solar eclipse in Africa while around him in a grass hut lay nickel-plated seafaring instruments – a sextant, an astrolabe, and other things that he had used to determine his location, both longitude and latitude – and a drum pounded, and naked aborigines in grass skirts circled a fence with severed human heads stuck on the palings, their eyes calmly winking.

  Most likely Eddie-baby was in those days a practical romantic. Having only just learned to read, he quickly devoured a vast quantity of the usual books – like the ones about the children of Captain Grant or about fifteen-year-old captains who get involved with treasure islands – in the process going through the whole contents of his parents’ bookshelf, a rather large one that included several odd volumes of Maupassant and Stendhal, although the latter left him pretty indifferent at the time.

  As a practical romantic, Eddie-baby was obviously not satisfied with the unsystematic delights of Jules Verne, Stevenson, and the other authors, and he decided to proceed further, to prepare himself firmly and solidly for the life of a romantic traveler. And so for the next several years, twisting his backbone and writhing studiously at his parents’ round table that stood in the center of the room (they later bought him a small desk of his own when they saw how studious he was), or kneeling in front of a stool on which he had placed his book and notebook, he copied out the Latin terms for different plants and animals, patiently studied methods for obtaining water in the Sahara, or listed the names of cactuses you could eat if you ever found yourself without food in the Sonoran desert.

  His passion for systemization extended so far that Eddie-baby even established a special catalog for himself in which he divided up the plants and animals by family and genus on separate sheets of paper and added meticulously transcribed information about each variety. Included for each plant were its dimensions, what kind of leaves it had, the size of its fruit, its method of cultivation, what parts of it could be used as food, where Eddie-baby might expect to encounter it on his subsequent wanderings, and a picture of it. In a normal country Eddie Baby would have spent most of his time in front of a copy machine. In the city of Kharkov, he used tracing paper to transfer the drawings of the plants and animals, and then pasted the drawings onto the appropriate pages. Strict order prevailed in the world of the future traveler and explorer. It is an interesting fact, however, that Eddie-baby gave pride of place to the exotic plants and animals, and that among the exotic kinds he clearly preferred the species and genera of the tropical regions. Maybe because the cold part of the year in Kharkov lasts much longer than the warm one does?

  It is not difficult to guess that in the realm of seafaring, Eddies preference as a true romantic was for sailing ships. If there had been anyone to talk to (Grishka Gurevich’s parents soon took him away to another apartment), he could have talked for hours about Bermuda and Roman sailing rigs, about rigging in standing and running configurations, about the different kinds of anchors, about tacking and knots, and about how to make a turn to the south-southwest if the winds are unfavorable.

  The librarian Victoria Samoilo
vna at first did not believe that Eddie-baby had read all those books with complicated titles like The Fauna of Patagonia or The Annals of the Russian Geographic Society, or the works of Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, or books about the endless world travels of biologists and zoologists – all those Zagoskins and Zenkeviches unknown to everybody except Eddie-baby. Yet once she started talking to the pale lad who had just brushed the snow from his felt boots with his cap, she suddenly realized that this still green creature knew everything, and if that wasn’t enough, that this creature, who as a general matter had no great liking for the library reading room, had from time to time even been compelled during his investigations to seek the help of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and as a result had spent hours nearsightedly digging (the creature was embarrassed about wearing glasses) in its immense volumes in order to supplement his knowledge.

  This small creature was the only one of its kind in the whole district, and although Russian children did traditionally read a good deal in those years and there was always a line at the library, Eddie-baby soon acquired the exceptional privilege of going behind the checkout desk where Victoria Samoilovna was ensconced in order to root around in the books as much as he liked, even all day long. Eddie-baby was very happy to root there, and soon afterward, with the tacit consent of those who shared his apartment, he added a geological catalog to the other extensive catalogs that he kept in the nonfunctioning bathroom (or effectively nonfunctioning, since it didn’t have any hot water). Research was research!

  The fanatical pedantry of their child in the accumulation of knowledge must have seemed quite strange to those outside his world – to his parents, Veniamin Ivanovich and Raisa Fyodorovna – since Eddie-baby never boasted to anybody about his knowledge and never revealed it at school, which hardly made any sense.

  But when, to augment the schists, sandstones, limestones, and basalts of the world, Eddie-baby suddenly made an abrupt turn and began to study and classify the French and English kings, the Roman emperors, and even the emperors of the utterly worthless Austro-Hungarian Empire, his parents became seriously alarmed.

  “Edinka, why don’t you go outside and play?” Mama Raya would say to him. “Why stay locked up inside all the time? Look how pale you are. Genna is always outside; that’s why he has rosy cheeks and a healthy appearance. Go on outside and ski or something.” (Eddie-baby’s first-lieutenant father had just bought his son some skis, which the latter ignored.)

  Eddie-baby couldn’t stand Genna from the apartment unit next door, a boy who was always being held up to him as a model, since he knew that Genna was in fact a complete idiot. Even if Eddie-baby held himself aloof at school until he was eleven, he was still respected (although it wasn’t at all clear why – maybe precisely because he did hold himself aloof), and respected to the point of being elected chairman of the Pioneer council by unanimous vote three years running, although that wasn’t something Eddie-baby was particularly interested in. After sitting through the great torment of six hours of classes every day, Eddie-baby would run off to the library at the other end of the trolley line, going there directly after school, and then home to his notebooks and catalogs. Genna, however, was respected by no one; the kids made fun of him and frequently beat him up. Eddie-baby was beaten up only once, and that one time was inscribed in his psyche forever and even formed his character. But about that later. For now, Eddie-baby and Kadik have set off to the grocery store.

  4

  Kadik and Eddie-baby have met in order to get drunk. A holiday is a holiday, however much you may shun the goat herd, and Kadik will be busy tonight, since he’s going to the center to see Eugene, his hero and the object of his adoration and emulation. Eugene plays the saxophone at the communication workers’ recreation center. Kadik is “doing” the October Revolution holiday with Eugene and his bandmen. A week ago Kadik suggested somewhat tentatively to Eddie-baby that they spend the holiday together at Eugene’s on Sumsky Street, but in the first place, the invitation was rather vague, as Kadik himself said, he isn’t the “boss” – the adult bandmen are merely taking him along with them – and the proud Eddie-baby has no interest in being just another minor. And in the second place, even though Eddie-baby knows Eugene – he’s really Zhenya Zaborov – he doesn’t like him very much. Maybe he’s as amazing a saxophone player as Kadik thinks he is, but neither Eddie nor Red Sanya, whose opinion matters to Eddie (Sanya’s seven years older than he is and a sort of big brother to him, and Eddie trusts his judgment) – neither Eddie nor Sanya likes Eugene.

  But there’s another reason why Eddie doesn’t want to spend the October holiday with Eugene, one that he doesn’t tell Kadik. It’s because of Svetka. Eddie is a bit afraid of taking Svetka into the company of grown-up guys. Svetka’s beautiful, and all the kids envy Eddie because he and Svetka are “going together,” as they say in the district. It is really Svetka who is taking Eddie-baby to Sashka Plotnikov’s – a boy who doesn’t go to their school, Secondary School No.8, but to a different one. Eddie-baby knows all the boys and girls who will be there. They’re all a little affected, especially Garik, who goes by the nickname “Morphine Addict,” and his Ritka, but Eddie-baby at least knows what to expect of them. Eddie-baby started going with Svetka during the May Day celebrations, and he has already gotten into several fights because of her. Svetka’s a flirt. Eddie-baby doesn’t like anybody to get his Svetka drunk, but she always manages to do it by herself, and one of the grown-up guys might try to fuck her. Even if she is a little shit, Eddie-baby still loves Svetka, and he’s heard about that kind of thing happening before.

  Kadik’s a very kindhearted guy. He knows Eddie-baby doesn’t have any money, so he treats him. Usually they chip in on a bottle, the same way all the other kids do. But since Eddie treated Kadik and Tolik Karpov only yesterday, it’s Kadik’s turn to treat him today.

  As usual on holidays, there’s a particularly big crowd next to Grocery Store No.7. Always present, of course, are the “moochers,” people who hang around the store on workdays from opening till closing time in hopes of getting drunk at somebody else’s expense – people who “play for the grocery store all-stars,” as they say in the district, and are well known to the salesgirls. On holidays, however, the sidewalk in front of the grocery store seethes with all kinds of human slosh – the usual customers having now been joined by fancily dressed workers who have managed to sneak away from the parade, many of them wearing ties and brown or green velour hats, and some with white scarves draped around their necks in local Kharkov fashion. You can tell at once that the workers aren’t used to either hats or ties – their hats don’t sit right and their ties cut into their necks – and as soon as they’re flushed with drink, one by one they take off their ties and stick them in their coat pockets.

  Scurrying here and there among the different groups are the workers’ children, also very dressed up and with the obligatory balloons in tow. No self-respecting Saltovka child could get through the holiday without at least three balloons. The wives try to separate their already pretty loaded family heads from their comrades, and little arguments ensue as a result, but in general the atmosphere is a festive one, and the workers laugh in a friendly way if a wife goes too far in trying to pull her spouse away from his circle of neighbors or comrades from work. “My sleeve! My sleeve! Watch out, you’ll tear it off!” they laugh.

  Only a few of the workers have been drinking vodka here in front of the grocery store since morning. Since they have a whole day and night of drinking ahead of them, the others are saving themselves, and if they do drink, then they buy a bottle not for three, say, but for five. For the most part, however, they drink a local Ukrainian wine whose slang name is biomitsin – from bele mitsne, the Ukrainian for “fortified white wine.” The workers’ slang for vodka is “mug twister,” obviously because a grimace can’t help appearing on the face of anybody who might swallow that liquid.

  Holding out their glasses, the moochers walk among the groups of animated, festive work
ers, and a few of them, the more enterprising ones, even have something like snacks with them – a huge pickle or some processed cheese wrapped in foil. In exchange for their snacks, these “businessmen,” as Kadik jokingly calls them, obtain the right to the empty bottles. This exchange makes sense, since the empties can be turned in immediately for cash. An empty half-liter bottle is worth 1 ruble and 20 kopecks (remember, this is before the 1960 currency revaluation), and a large 0.8-liter vodka bottle, 1 ruble and 80 kopecks, while a half-liter bottle of biomitsin (full, obviously) costs 10 rubles and 20 kopecks. It follows that the moochers are never sober.

  There is an unimaginable hubbub in front of Grocery Store No.7.

  “The proletariat is on a spree,” Kadik observes ironically as he squeezes through the doorway of the store. Eddie-baby follows him inside.

  The two salesgirls don’t have time today to give personal service to the wine-craving Saltovka population. Clusters of bottles hurtle across the counter, since nobody wants to wait in line and the workers are trying to stock up on as many bottles as they can.

  “The dudes have arrived!” shouts an already drunk customer, a cocky little twerp wearing a white cap pulled down to his ears.

  Kadik and Eddie naturally look a bit strange in their bright yellow jackets, something like tropical birds in this crowd of big black or dark brown coats with padded shoulders and choice short gray winter jackets with quilted linings and fur – or rather, artificial fur – collars in the proletarian fashion. Kadik calls the short jackets “half-farters,” but the proletarians themselves call them “Muscovites.” Just a year ago the proletarians wore their half-farters with jackboots. Now that fashion has almost completely disappeared, and only a few of those in line are still wearing boots.