Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 3

  The dudes may in fact be dudes, but they’re Saltovka’s own. They’re well known to the grocery store all-stars and to the salesgirl Marusya and the other salesgirl, Auntie Shura. Seeing Kadik in line, Auntie Shura calls out to him without taking her eyes off the money and the bottles.

  “How’s your mother, Kolka? I hear she’s not feeling well?”

  “Oh no, Auntie Shura. She has a little cold, but she still goes to work,” Kadik shyly answers her.

  The fact is, only Eddie-baby knows that Kadik is ashamed of his postal worker mother. Kadik has never seen his father, and the only time he even mentioned him was to tell Eddie-baby that he was a famous scientist, although Eddie-baby hardly believed that. Would a famous scientist be interested in Kadik’s insignificant and wrinkled little postal worker of a mother? Even if you took into account the fact that fifteen years ago she would have been much younger and more attractive? Actually, Eddie-baby doesn’t care what kind of mother Kadik has. It’s Kadik he likes.

  Kadik takes two bottles of biomitsin, and they force their way back outside, shaking dozens of hands as they go. The faces of two of Eddie-baby’s schoolmates flash by, Vitka Golovashov and Lyonka Korovin, who have just taken their places at the end of the line. Although Vitka and Lyonka aren’t dudes, they are interesting kids who go everywhere together. It was Vitka who took Eddie-baby to the wrestling club for the first time. Vitka has been doing freestyle wrestling for a year now, whereas Eddie-baby has only just started. Vitka and Lyonka are up-to-date guys, unlike the majority of the Saltov kids, who are mostly either punks or proletarians. Parents like Eddie-baby’s or Vitka’s (whose father is a construction boss), or like Vika Kozyrev’s (whose mother and father are both doctors), are a rarity in Saltovka or Tyurenka or Ivanovka. Most of the people who live here are workers. There are at least three big factories in the area: the Hammer and Sickle, the Turbine, and the Piston. It’s a half-hour trolley ride from Saltovka to the largest factory in Kharkov, the Tractor Factory, where more than a hundred thousand workers are employed, most of whom live around the factory itself in the Tractor district.

  After pushing their way out of the store, Kadik and Eddie-baby find an unoccupied area a little off to the side from the rest of the crowd. The unoccupied area is located between one of the walls of the three-story apartment building whose ground floor is completely taken up by Grocery Store No.7, and a small wooden stall where you can usually buy candy, sugar, cookies, and gingersnaps. Because of the holiday, the little wooden structure is covered with huge padlocks; the stall is closed.

  Kadik opens one of the bottles – which presents no problem, since biomitsin bottles don’t have corks but metal caps like those on vodka bottles, which are easy to tear off – and offers it to Eddie-baby. Both of them, both Eddie-baby and Kadik, prefer to drink from the bottle, and both are very good at it. Eddie-baby can throw back his head, open his mouth, and with hardly a swallow pour the whole bottle down his throat as if into a barrel.

  The one thing Eddie-baby can’t do is drink vodka through his nose. Kadik, however, is able to drink a whole 150-gram glass of vodka that way. True, he doesn’t do it every day. It burns his nose. But he does it for girls or when there’s money at stake. Even the moochers – the grocery store all-stars – who have seen a few things in their day, respect Kadik for this ability and forgive him his yellow jacket and his narrow pants and his hair slicked down with brilliantine.

  5

  On the other hand, Kadik can’t drink as much vodka as Eddie-baby can. Eddie-baby sometimes uses his extraordinary talent by drinking vodka on bets at the Horse Market. He doesn’t do it very often anymore, since almost all the butchers and rich Azerbaijanis know him there by now, but he used to drink on bets once a week.

  Red Sanya was working as a butcher at the Horse Market then. Usually he had money, but one evening they badly wanted to get drunk and he was broke. That’s when they thought up the idea of taking bets. They went to the cafe-bar, to the snack bar where the Azerbaijanis who sell fruit at the Horse Market usually gather, and there, after buying himself and Eddie-baby a mug of beer each, Red Sanya began carefully sticking it to a group of Azerbaijanis at a neighboring table, telling them that they didn’t know how to drink.

  Little by little Sanya managed to provoke the Azerbaijanis to the point where when he offered to bet them to see who could drink the most, their leader, a local Azerbaijani named Shamil, who lives next door to the Horse Market, said,

  “All right, let’s drink, then. Although you, Red, are such a big fellow that it wouldn’t be very fair to drink against you, even though we Azerbaijanis drink more for our size than you Russians do.”

  Sanya really is about one meter eighty centimeters tall, and although he’s only twenty-two, he’s broad and strong and weighs a hundred kilograms. As a matter of fact, Sanya isn’t Russian at all; he’s German. His mother’s name is Elsa. Nobody has ever seen his father, but as a friend of Sanya’s, Eddie-baby knows that his father’s name is Walther, just like the pistol. And he’s German too. Sanya’s sister, Svetka, has a different father, who’s Russian. Sanya’s mother works as a ticket collector at the Stakhanovite Club. Sanya is called “Red” Sanya because his skin’s all pink – he was born that way. His face is pink too. Sanya looks like Goering, which Eddie-baby likes – he saw a picture of Goering once in a book on the Nuremberg trials, and he saw him again in a color film about the Great Patriotic War. Goering’s pink too, like Sanya. Or was.

  “Don’t give me that crap, Shamil,” Sanya answered him. “Not just me, but even my little brother here” – and he pointed to Eddie-baby – “can outdrink any one of you. Right, Ed?” he asked Eddie-baby, calling him “Ed” so it would sound more impressive. They had in fact agreed earlier how they would act. Sanya himself couldn’t drink as much as the seemingly innocent Eddie-baby could.

  “You mean him?” Shamil asked with a smirk, and looked Eddie up and down. “Why, he’s only got two days left even without vodka!”

  The Azerbaijanis, or “blackasses,” as Sanya calls them behind their backs, roared with laughter.

  “This guy can drink a whole liter,” Sanya said. And he said it very coolly.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Red,” Shamil said, beginning to lose his temper. “A whole liter of vodka would kill him.”

  Eddie-baby was thinking to himself how insolent these blackasses really are. Insolent, cocky little pricks. Although they do have a lot of money. They bring their fruit to Kharkov and sell it for three times as much. Vitka Cross-Eyes, when he was on leave not long ago from Moscow, where he’s stationed now (he was lucky), once blabbed during a binge about how, just when he was about to be drafted (and he didn’t really have anything to lose, since he would have to go anyway, whether into the army or to prison, where he would get seven years instead of three in the army and then have his sentence reduced by half in view of its being a first offense), he and two other guys robbed some Azerbaijanis who were sitting next to them on the train to Baku. They grabbed their suitcase full of cash. Cross-Eyes laughed and said that it wasn’t really a very risky thing to do, since the Azerbaijanis wouldn’t go to the militia anyway. The tangerines they were selling as produce from a collective farm were in fact from their own private plots, and anyway private Soviet citizens aren’t allowed to have the kind of cash they were carrying with them. The main problem was that the bastards are always armed whenever they’re carrying money. They could kill you.

  Eddie-baby’s exterior remained very calm; he was training himself. He was thinking, “Fucking Azerbaijanis!” but out loud he said, “Four two-hundred-fifty-gram glasses in the space of an hour at fifteen-minute intervals.”

  The Azerbaijanis grew quiet. None of them could drink that much vodka. As Eddie-baby was well aware. It is a very rare person who can. He himself was taught to drink by Uncle Zhora from their building, although from another entrance – Vanka’s father. Uncle Zhora was a POW in Germany and went to France with the German who was in charge of him.
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br />   At first they made Uncle Zhora work in a mine in the Ruhr – in the Ruhr coal basin, which is like our own Donbass – and he stayed there for a while. To Uncle Zhora’s way of thinking, the Germans weren’t so bad; it was the Russians who were the worst, their own foremen and overseers – since the Germans themselves didn’t really like to go down into the mine, being of the opinion that there were enough foreign workers for that. Uncle Zhora was noticed by a German engineer named Stefan, who realized that Uncle Zhora drank but never got drunk. And the German came up with an idea. He started taking Uncle Zhora out of the mine, at first for just a couple of days at a time, and driving him around the city. Eddie-baby doesn’t remember which German city the mine was closest to, but in the evenings Uncle Zhora would drink vodka in its taverns and astound the German public. Stefan set the stage for that astonishment very dramatically – with a preparatory drumroll and a line of large, faceted Russian glasses arranged on the table next to Uncle Zhora. Uncle Zhora would be dressed as if in Russian national costume, in clothing that Stefan had bought for him at a theater, although the costume was in fact Hungarian.

  After a while, inasmuch as Uncle Zhora’s public drinking of vodka had become very popular, Stefan left the mine and took Uncle Zhora with him as though he were putting him into his personal service. In fact, however, the two of them were very quietly mining cash for themselves, and in the end they even got as far as Paris.

  “In Paris,” Uncle Zhora said with satisfaction, remembering his glorious past, “I performed at the famous Folies Bergeres. There were posters all over the city: Tonight The Russian Bear Drinks Vodka!’”

  Uncle Zhora said it’s impossible to learn how to drink. You have to be born with a cast-iron throat and stomach. “Even a good tippler must know when and how much he can drink,” he said. “There were periods when I refused to perform because I sensed that my stomach was unable to handle as much vodka as it usually could. However much Stefan swore at me, accusing me of ruining an excellent engagement and telling me that we were losing money, I would never give in. And that’s why I’m still alive today,” Uncle Zhora observed sententiously.

  Eddie-baby suspects that Uncle Zhora was embroidering just a little. For example, could he really have “performed” at the Folies Bergeres? And did he ever really go to Paris at all?

  Whatever the case, Eddie-baby had recently discovered that he too was born with a cast-iron stomach. And then Red Sanya discovered it as well. A certain part of Uncle Zhora’s advice, however, has proved useful to Eddie-baby in his life. “Before a big drinking bout take a glass of vegetable oil to lubricate your stomach if you don’t want to get drunk,” Uncle Zhora had taught him. “And after the performance, even if you aren’t drunk, set yourself the rule of going to the toilet, placing two fingers in your mouth, and vomiting, and don’t be shy about it. True, do it so that nobody sees or hears you – protect the honor of the ring. And don’t eat any snacks, except maybe to chew on a pickled tomato or cucumber or to sip a little pickle juice, but that’s all. Snacks don’t go with drinking bouts. The snack will make you even drunker.”

  Armed with this knowledge and his own cast-iron stomach, the pale Eddie-baby, weighing fifty-seven kilograms and standing one meter seventy-four centimeters tall, sat across from the horde of sun-darkened blackasses. They buzzed among themselves in Azerbaijani. Eddie-baby knew that Azerbaijanis are the same thing as Turks. Eddie-baby is part Tatar himself. His mother’s a Tatar – you only have to look at her cheekbones – and what’s more, she’s from Kazan. Eddie-baby’s father jestingly calls her his “Mongol Tatar yoke.” When they’re serious, however, his Ukrainian father and Russian Tatar mother consider themselves Russians. Which is in fact what they are. What else could they be? In their social class, even real Ukrainians are embarrassed to speak Ukrainian; it’s regarded as backward. All the kids call themselves Russians. Even the Jews Yashka Slavutsky, Sashka Lyakovich, and Lyudka Rochmann…

  Eddie-baby was sitting across from the blackasses and waiting to see what they would decide.

  “I’ll bet five hundred rubles he can do it,” said Red Sanya, downing his beer.

  Eddie-baby knew that at best Sanya had two rubles in change in his pocket. But the Horse Market was his territory, and even if he were to lose the bet, he could still wriggle out of it somehow. There was no question of losing, though, since Eddie-baby had drunk an entire liter before.

  “All right!” Shamil said at last, no longer speaking his barbarian tongue. “The Azerbaijani people are not fond of vodka. We drink wine and chacha. But I will bet five hundred rubles and will give them to him if this boy here actually drinks the four glasses and survives.”

  “What a bastard!” Eddie thought. “He’s decided to humiliate me. Well, fuck them!” Five hundred rubles is half a month’s labor for the workers of Saltovka. Here, however, it would take only an evening to earn that much. Sanya would have to have a cut, of course, but without Sanya the Azerbaijanis would never have bothered to talk to Eddie. Everybody knew Sanya, and they would give Sanya the money. If Eddie-baby had been alone, there’s no goddamn way they would have given it to him…

  Red haggled a little more with the Azerbaijanis to get them to pay for the liter of vodka and half a kilo of pickled tomatoes. Officially it was against the rules to drink vodka in the cafe, but that hardly mattered. The vodka and tomatoes appeared a couple of minutes later. And a 250-gram glass. One.

  Remembering Uncle Zhora’s instructions, Eddie-baby asked for three more glasses. To make it more dramatic. Opening the two half-liter bottles, Red Sanya poured them out to the last drop into the four faceted vessels arranged in a line. A crowd started to gather around the little table. Red Sanya took off his gold watch and placed it on the table. “Shall we begin?” he asked uneasily, looking inquiringly at Eddie-baby. This was the first time money was at stake, and he was nervous about it. Eddie-baby nodded and reached out his hand for the first glass…

  6

  Of course they won the bet. Eddie-baby was drunk, but not to the point of unconsciousness. He therefore remembers the drunken market moochers coming up to kiss him and saying he had done a great job and had stood up for Russian honor the way he should have and had shown the blackasses just what a Russian is. Later on some fat uncle with a briefcase who identified himself as the Satanist writer Mamleev from Moscow shook Eddie’s hand for a long time, thanking him for proving “that even our children know how to fly,” a phrase that made no sense whatever to Eddie-baby.

  Wishing to cheer up the defeated Azerbaijanis, Eddie-baby informed them that his mother was a Tatar, as a result of which the Azerbaijanis politely warmed up and just as politely asked Eddie to visit them in Azerbaijan, where they would find him a good wife.

  Sanya for his part kept slapping Eddie on the back and delightedly repeated, “You’re all right, Ed, goddamn it! Even if you don’t have an ass, you’re still a great kid!”

  The business about Eddie-baby’s ass is one of Sanya’s favorite jokes. All the older kids who gather under the lindens on Saltov Road next to the trolley stop have asses, but the skinny Eddie-baby doesn’t. Sanya’s joke is crude and already a little old, but it’s meant in a friendly way. The fact is that the Saltovka kids “work out” pretty intensely, a fad that got started God knows how a few years back along with a wave of enthusiasm for sports in general. Some say it came from Polish magazines containing photographs of bodybuilders. Usually the kids work out with dumbbells and expanders, although the most zealous among them use weights. The majority of the Saltovka kids on “our” side of the Zhuravlyovka beach strut around in the summer like Ajaxes and Achilleses or like Greek athletes, trying to catch the interested glances of the city’s beauties – the girls from the center. As a general matter, Saltovka, mighty and free Saltovka, even though it holds the city’s weak and dissipated center in contempt and regards itself as separate from it, in essence bows down before the city and never takes its eyes off it. The Saltovka kids work out continually, for a certain
number of hours each day, bringing their weights and other gymnastic gear out of the tiny little rooms where they live crowded together with their parents, bringing everything out into the unconfined air and even into the snow, and all of it to but one purpose – to show off their hard, muscular bodies to the girls from the center. And to the weak, round-shouldered youths and students from the center. Mighty Saltovka!

  Eddie-baby tried working out too. But he still doesn’t have any ass. His body is elastic and strong and well proportioned, but Eddie-baby’s muscles haven’t increased in size. Cat and Lyova have told Eddie not to give up, that the same thing happened to Cat until he stopped growing, and that Eddie will perhaps grow some more too. After he’s fully grown, he can start to work on his muscles. “It’s even dangerous to lift weights at your age, Ed.”

  Vitka Kosyrev, nicknamed “Cat,” is a nice guy, and even intellectual, although he works as a gauger in a metal shop. Cat lives with his mother in a clean little room in Building No.5. Everybody in Saltovka talks about everybody else in terms of house numbers: “The bald guy from Building No.3,” “Genka from Building No.11,” and so on. Building No.5 is located right next to the trolley stop. It’s only twenty-five paces from Building No.5 to the benches under the lindens.

  Cat’s sister married a Hungarian and now lives in Hungary. She sends packages to Kharkov and brings back beautiful Hungarian clothing for Cat and his mother whenever she comes to visit on vacation. Cat is no dude, but he wears brightly colored Hungarian pants and Hungarian jackets and sweaters. He gives half his things to his friend Lyova, but on Lyova the same clothes look very different. Unlike Cat’s, Lyova’s body is that of a weight lifter, heavy and shapeless, whereas Cat is tall and broad-shouldered. Lyova is like a very strong sack. The Hungarian pants fit Lyova even worse than Russian ones do. Cat and Lyova are great friends, and together they beat up a militia officer and threw away his pistol. For which they got three years each. They would have gotten more, but the militia officer was drunk. Cat and Lyova are heroes…