Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 20

  Vitka Nemchenko’s roots – his grandfather and grandmother, that is – turned out to be very nice and still young. Vitka’s grandfather was a sort of replica of Vitka, with the same blue eyes and the same lank, bony frame, only about forty years older and even taller. It seemed to Eddie that if Vitka were to grow some more (Eddie himself plans to add some height), then he would be just like his grandfather. Vitka’s grandfather, however, was shy; it was his grandmother who was the main person in their family.

  And what a woman she was! Toward the end of the evening, excited by the folk dancing and a little drunk, even Eddie-baby danced with Vitka’s grandmother, although he had never done that kind of dancing before and had no idea how. Vitka’s little grandmother lifted Eddie up off the bench by force and dragged him into the circle, where to his own amazement he started dancing!

  At the end of the evening, however, Vitka’s grandmother disappeared into the bedroom for a while after whispering something to Vitka, who was the center of attention that evening, since he was tirelessly banging on his mother-of-pearl accordion. In Tyurenka, just as in the country, the accordion player is at the center of things. When his grandmother returned, Vitka suddenly burst forth with “Gentlewoman.” His grandmother was now dressed in a cap, a checkered shirt, and fashionably narrow Chinese pants tucked in below and stretched tight across her bottom – pants of the kind that had recently appeared in the stores and that probably belonged to Vitka. Vitka’s small, round, boisterous grandmother danced to “Gentlewoman” like a first-rate professional, cutting such capers that Uncle Volodya Zhitkov, who had jumped up to dance with her, simply threw up his hands in amazement and remained standing where he was.

  “Now, that’s a grandmother!” Eddie thought with delight and in envy of Vitka. Eddie still had a grandmother – his grandmother Vera – in the town of Liski in the Voronezh region, but he never saw her. That evening Eddie felt an urge to see his own grandmother; maybe she was like that too.

  By the end of the evening, Eddie was having fun and feeling good, and was once again kissing all the guests, including the warm Lyuda, who turned out to be a neighbor of Vitka’s grandfather and grandmother. He went out into the garden with Lyuda to kiss under the big apple tree, and either because of the home brew or because of Lyuda herself, it seemed to Eddie-baby, now wearing his bow tie, which had emerged during the second half of the evening, that the apple tree smelled wonderfully of Carmen.

  16

  After Easter, Eddie-baby started visiting Vitka in Tyurenka a lot. It turned out that his grandmother didn’t just make home brew for the holidays. The cold, brown, explosive liquid resembling harmless kvass stood in the vestibule of the Nemchenko house all year round. Eddie-baby remembers sitting with Vitka all spring and summer, singing along with his accordion. Vitka also played the guitar and was learning how to play the trumpet. He dreamed of becoming a musician in a restaurant, whereas for Eddie-baby it was enjoyment enough just to sing the Tyurenka songs he learned from Vitka. Some of the songs were at least fifty years old, and most of them were thieves’ songs – about prison, about the joy of getting out, and even about the joy of going back in. And about love, of course. Prison and love – that’s what most occupied the minds and hearts of the people of Tyurenka.

  “‘The prosecutor demanded our execution…,’” Vitka sang, and Eddie-baby’s heart sank as he applied the situation to himself. It seemed to him that it was his own and Kostya’s execution that the prosecutor was demanding, and that he and Kostya were sitting “on a bench in a hot people’s court…,” where “you could see the curtain swaying and hear the buzzing of the flies…”

  The details of the song, for all their apparent triteness, were remarkably exact. Eddie’s presence had more than once been required in a hot people’s court, which even in the summertime was always heated, so that with the abundance of grief, the multitude of relatives of those on trial, and the emotions, tears, howls, and fainting spells that were their portion, it was nearly impossible to breathe. And Eddie was acquainted too with the terrible silence that reigns when the judge finally emerges and everyone stands up and he clears his throat before pronouncing the sentence.

  And what an explosion of joy when it’s only “fifteen years!” and not the firing squad.

  I see, the defense attorney smiles at us,

  After taking a pistol from his pocket;

  I see, they’ve changed the judge for us,

  The prosecutor demands five years!

  Our mothers weep for joy,

  The escort even smiles at us.

  Why didn’t you come, blue-eyed one,

  To say farewell to me?…

  “The blue-eyed bitch,” Eddie-baby thinks angrily. “She’s betrayed me. Well, it doesn’t matter,” Eddie persuades himself. “I’ll get out of Kolyma and take my revenge. I’ll get my revenge! After all, Tolik Vetrov escaped from Kolyma. That means it’s possible. I’ll come and stand threateningly in her doorway. ‘Well, then, Svetka?’ I’ll say to her.”

  17

  The wine of love burns

  Like a fire in the blood!

  Vovka ends his song and puts the guitar down on his automated bed.

  “Great fucking job, Vovets! Really terrific!” Grishka says, coaxing a cigarette from his box of White Sea Canals with yellow fingers. Even a meter away you can smell the cheap tobacco; Grishka’s as permeated with tobacco smoke as an old grandfather.

  Vovka pours some more vodka with a bored look. If you didn’t know him, you might think he’s really sick of his guests and wants them to leave. In fact, however, he can’t go more than half an hour without company. He gets bored by himself.

  “Cheers!” Vovka says, but then he puts his glass back down on the table. He forgot about music. He goes to the tape deck and turns it on. It’s Glenn Miller. No, he’s taking Miller off – Miller doesn’t suit him this time. He rewinds the tape – you can hear the reels spinning – and puts on another one. It’s Bobby Darin. The song about Mack the Knife. Eddie-baby likes that one, maybe because Mack the Knife is a punk too. That’s probably the reason. “Mack the Knife is an unforgiving person,” Eddie thinks as he listens to the music. “The kind of person a man should be. Tough.” Which is exactly the reason why Eddie-baby carries a straight razor around with him.

  “Cheers!” Vovka exclaims again. They clink glasses and drink up. Eddie-baby nudges Grishka under the table with his foot. It’s nice being at Vovka’s, but Eddie came for money. The little hand of Vovka’s clock, which as in all self-respecting model 1958 Saltovka homes is on top of the television set, is pointing uneasily toward the southeast – it’s three-thirty.

  Grishka clears his throat and begins: “Vovets! We have a small problem here. Have you got any money you could lend for…” He looks at Eddie-baby.

  “For a week,” Eddie says. Either Sanya will sell the watch, or Eddie will reborrow the money from somebody else, maybe from Borka Churilov, but he’ll pay Vovka back in a week.

  “How much?” Vovka asks. The terribly laconic Vovka. The Spartan.

  “Two hundred,” Eddie answers. He’s laconic too.

  “No, I haven’t got that kind of money,” Vovka says, shaking his head. “After all, I don’t print money here. All I have is my advance, and I’ll be lucky if it gets me through the holidays. But when I get my salary – be my guest,” Vovka adds.

  The kids say nothing.

  “Ri-ight!” Grishka finally sighs in disappointment. “That’s too bad.”

  “You know I’m not cheap, Grigory,” Vovka says in a dignified voice. “If I had the money, I’d lend it to you.”

  Eddie doesn’t think Vovka is cheap either. He always treats the kids to vodka and doesn’t scrimp on the snacks, and if they decide to go somewhere together for whatever reason, Vovka buys both the champagne and the chocolate, knowing that unless they steal, schoolboys don’t have that much money. Where would they get it?

  Reality begins to seem rather dark to Eddie, like eternal night. He has
absolutely no idea what to do. Ask his mother again? Tell her that their fucking system for training their son to be sparing about his needs (Eddie-baby doesn’t even have a wristwatch) is pushing him into crime and in point of fact not training him to be sparing at all?

  There was once another episode like the present one that grew out of Eddie’s resentment of his parents’ stinginess. He successfully counterfeited several dozen cash receipts for the grocery store on Stalin Avenue and two days later turned them in with the kids from his class for liqueur, cake, cognac, and chocolate.

  Using a knife, the talented Eddie-baby cut out a stamp for the receipts from a rubber sole. In just a couple of days. The cash value and serial number of the receipt were filled in later. The receipt paper itself was given to him in a roll by Yashka Slavutsky, a Jew in their class whose mother works as a cashier in a store in town.

  The mechanics of that little swindle were simple enough and were based on the fact that the customer first has to pay at the cashier’s booth for whatever it is he wants. If, say, he wants five bottles of vodka at 28 rubles 70 kopecks apiece, then he goes to the cashier and pays 143 rubles and 50 kopecks, in exchange obtaining a receipt with the sum R143.50 printed on it. He then takes the receipt to the wine department and says, “Five bottles of vodka, please,” and turns over the receipt in exchange for the vodka. The grocery store Eddie had picked out was a large one, where there was always a crowd of people and always a line in the wine department.

  Usually one of the kids went to the cashier and got a small receipt for about a hundred grams of cheap candy – 1 ruble 2 kopecks, say. Then he quickly brought the receipt outside to the yard behind the grocery store, where Eddie-baby, dipping his rubber numbers into a special ink and using several of his own receipts with the amounts already calculated and filled in (always more than a 150 rubles, since he wasn’t fooling around), would add the necessary serial numbers, beginning with the next one after the candy receipt number and proceeding from there, depending on how many kids had come to the grocery store with him to turn in receipts for goods.

  The last time they tried it, it was cold outside, and Eddie-baby was in a hurry. His hands were freezing, and he probably (if not certainly) stamped the numbers upside down on one of the receipts, something that a cash register wouldn’t do, the typeface being so firmly fixed in it that there’s no goddamn way you could turn it upside down…

  The clerk, a fat old woman in glasses, had already stuck the receipt on a special steel spindle behind the counter when – Eddie-baby sensed this more than saw it – her gaze suddenly fell on the receipt and she said in an unusually tender voice,

  “Oops, I’m all out of liqueur. Sorry, lad. I’ll get some more from the storeroom.” She then set off in the direction of the cash register, which was about twenty-five meters away. As she left, she removed the receipt from the spindle with an almost imperceptible gesture, but Eddie, whose nerves were naturally already tense, noticed the light, almost flylike motion of her hand, and after waiting several seconds until the clerk was momentarily concealed behind a column (the store resembled a many-columned palace), he dashed for the door, knocking people and boxes over along the way. The other kids ran out with him.

  They all got away and joined up in a square located half a kilometer from the scene of the crime. It turned out that all of them had kept the bottles they had acquired, and everybody except Eddie-baby had acquired something, so that everything ended happily. They even had two large cakes, although the cakes had gotten a bit squashed during their flight.

  It was clear, however, that they had to put an end to the swindle with the receipts. And Eddie-baby didn’t try it at other stores as he had been planning to do. In the first place, the counterfeiting of receipts didn’t bring in any money – just groceries and drinks – and in the second, the kids had told him that the now alerted trashes would probably start keeping track of cash receipt transactions, so that it would be dangerous to go on with it…

  “Even if it wasn’t dangerous, an operation like that would still take several days,” Eddie thinks bitterly. In any event, Plotnikov and his crowd had asked for money, so it would be silly to turn up there in a bow tie with Svetka decked out in her crinolines on one arm and string bags loaded down with bottles on the other. “There isn’t even any point in considering it;” Eddie thinks, “since it’s impossible to get the bottles anyway.”

  18

  Eddie wants to leave, but according to the petit bourgeois rules of proletarian Saltovka, he has to stay at Vovka’s for at least another half-hour “for the sake of decency.” So Vovka won’t be offended.

  It seems to Eddie that Vovka wouldn’t be offended, that it’s a matter of complete indifference to him. But maybe Eddie’s wrong about that. At least Vovka’s face looks languidly indifferent. And gray. His soft, thin auburn hair falls from either side of his useless part. Not the kind of part that Eddie-baby has, but a careless one that has formed of its own accord. Vovka’s lips are pinkish and chapped – unpleasant lips. It’s no coincidence that Borka Churilov can’t stand him. Borka says Vovka is a bad influence on the kids, that he’s a sluggard and a shit and will someday find himself in prison for sleeping with underaged girls and being a lecher. According to Borka, Vovka gets the girls drunk and then rapes them, and if they don’t submit to him, he punches them in the liver so they lose their strength for a few minutes, during which Vovka manages to take his victims’ pants off and start fucking them.

  Once Borka even threatened to punch Zolotarev’s face in if he didn’t stop corrupting Vitka Golovashov, who could become a very good wrestler if he didn’t drink. Vitka often drops in on Vovka and gets drunk with him.

  Vovka, for his part, hates Borka and calls him a jerkoff, and he means it literally: he suspects Borka of onanism. He calls him a sectarian too. Obviously, he doesn’t call him that to his face, since Borka’s iron physique leaves no doubt about his ability to make Zolotarev a cripple for the rest of his life, even though Borka Churilov’s basically a peaceful individual.

  The doorbell announces the arrival of a guest or guests.

  “Who’s there?” Vovka asks into the phone after flopping down on his bed.

  “It’s Olga!” the phone crackles. “And Mushka’s with me.”

  Vovka doesn’t ask Olga and Mushka about a bottle. “Press the button,” he says. A few moments later the two girls tumble in through the door. Eddie has seen Mushka more than once and has heard about her even more, although they’ve never actually met. And who hasn’t heard about her! Mushka’s the whore of the Saltovkan chronicles. All the Ivanovka kids, including fat Vitka Fomenko – yes, even Vitka – have gang-fucked her several times, that is, fucked her by turns after waiting in line. All you have to do to achieve that right, the kids say, is pour a half-liter of vodka into Mushka, and then she’ll happily take her clothes off and spread her legs all by herself. Her companion, Olga, is a big girl, taller than Eddie, and from his school, although she’s a year ahead of him. Olga has a sad white face, and the kids think she’s beautiful, but Eddie doesn’t.

  Mushka’s wearing a man’s cap, and her hair, bleached with peroxide to a sandy yellow color, sticks out from underneath it. She’s also wearing a woolen overcoat that nearly reaches the floor, probably a man’s too. On her feet are “spikes” with metal heels. Mushka’s high heels are worn over white socks that cover her ankles. Otherwise her legs are bare, in spite of the fact that it’s November. Mushka has a rather sweet little mug, in Eddie’s view, although sweet as it is, it’s still the face of a whore. Under her coat, Mushka has on a strapless black velvet dress. The dress is girded at the waist with a white plastic belt, and around her neck Mushka is wearing white beads. “She obviously dressed in the black-and-white style on purpose,” Eddie thinks, “only it looks ridiculous.”

  “Hey, old buddies!” exclaims the free and easy Mushka.

  The gallant Grishka has long since risen to his feet and is hovering around the girls.

  “You k
now perfectly well, Mushka, that I’ve been an admirer of yours for a long time!” says the gallant Grishka in the hoarse voice of a degenerate, using the formal pronoun. Probably the same way his uncle, the ex-prime minister of Saburka, addresses women. It’s clear that Grishka is taken with Mushka.

  Eddie suddenly realizes that he has been giving all his attention to the whore Mushka and has hardly noticed the sullen and beautiful Olga, who is draped in a dark green woolen dress. “Probably because Mushka’s cheerful,” Eddie thinks.

  Mushka finally takes off her man’s cap, and her bleach-blond bangs fall down over her forehead. Vovka, who has disappeared into the kitchen, reappears with a fresh bottle of vodka, and instead of a plate, a whole plastic tray covered with snacks.

  “It’s pretty certain Vovka ripped that tray off from the militia cafeteria,” Eddie notes in passing. He also manages to observe that Vovka has changed his footwear, replacing his slippers with heeled black shoes.

  “I just mobilized my mother; she’ll make us some hot snacks. In the meantime we’ll start out with what’s on hand,” announces the visibly more animated Vovka. Very much more animated. What’s happened to his drowsiness and lethargy? Vovka once again fills up the glasses with vodka, this time not with his previous shocking indifference but with the smile of a generous host taking pleasure in his guests.

  Grishka jumps up from his chair, assumes the posture of a hussar lieutenant, even to the point of clicking his heels, and opens his mouth:

  “Permit me to toast our beautiful ladies!” he exclaims in an astonishingly resonant voice.