Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 4

  7

  After Eddie-baby and Kadik have drunk the first bottle of biomitsin, smoked a couple of cigarettes, and started in on the second bottle, Kadik suddenly blurts out,

  “Hey, Eddie-baby, I completely forgot. Tomorrow at the Victory there’s going to be a poetry contest. Why don’t you recite your poems?”

  “Where at the Victory?” asks Eddie-baby. He doesn’t understand.

  “Well, at the Victory, in the movie theater. It’s part of the October celebrations. You can sign up for it and recite your poems on the stage. After that a jury will award prizes,” says the self-possessed Kadik, lighting up another Yava cigarette. “The poems have to be your own, and you can recite whatever you want. Of course, it’s better if you show them the poems beforehand. You’re allowed to do two or three.”

  “How do you know all this?” Eddie-baby asks suspiciously.

  “I saw it in the paper,” Kadik says, “in Socialist Kharkov. It was lying on my old lady’s table. Go ahead and do it, Eddie-baby. Show the goat herd how to write poetry. If you want, I’ll go with you.”

  “But there’ll be thousands of people there,” Eddie-baby says doubtfully.

  “Well, that’s good. You’ve never recited before such a huge crowd. They have powerful equipment there, good amplifiers and mikes,” Kadik says with a certain envy for their amplifiers and their mikes. “You can hear everything. Why don’t you go? The girls will see you. You’ll be famous. How about it, Eddie?”

  Kadik has faith in Eddie-baby. Even though he doesn’t care that much about poetry, he believes that Eddie-baby is talented. Kadik wants Eddie-baby to be famous and is always coming to him with different projects. Once he even dragged him down to the local youth newspaper, New Komsomol Guard, although nothing came of it and they didn’t publish Eddie’s poems. The paper’s offices are on Sumsky, or on “Sums,” as Kadik calls his favorite street for short. He doesn’t always use his slang with Eddie-baby, since Eddie doesn’t understand half of it and makes fun of him. He uses his slang with his dudes from the center. In their lingo, the phrase “I’m walking down Sumsky Street” comes out as “I’m cruising down Sums,” and “to eat” is “to feed.”

  “What do you say, old buddy, shall we go?” Kadik says pleadingly, but then he suddenly stops and looks over Eddie’s shoulder with annoyance.

  “What are the respected old buddies doing here at such an early hour?” a familiar voice says behind Eddie-baby’s back. Without turning around, Eddie-baby knows at once whose it is. Slavka Zablodsky, nicknamed the “Gypsy,” has managed to come down to the grocery store in person. It’s no easy matter to get rid of Slavka. He has a way of hanging around, although you wouldn’t actually call him a moocher. An unsavory character.

  Unsavory and interesting. It’s too bad Kadik doesn’t like Slavka, although he ought to, since for a very short time Slavka was also a member of the Blue Horse. There was a time when the name of the Kharkov Blue Horse resounded throughout the country. That was two years ago after the article in Komsomol Truth, when the Kharkov dudes became notorious. They wrote in the paper that the guys and girls of the Blue Horse dressed garishly, didn’t work, listened to Western music, and had orgies. Eddie-baby asked Kadik about the orgies once. The latter carelessly answered that yes, “the old buddies did swill together, listen to jazz, and hump their ladies,” but that there was no way the goat herd could understand pleasures of that kind, since the only thing the goat herd cared about was how to live life as boringly as possible and keep everybody else from having any fun.

  “The respected old buddies are of course swilling on the national holiday,” continues Slavka, emerging from behind Eddie-baby’s back. Eddie-baby doesn’t turn around to look at Slavka; he’s cultivating a manly character. In the present instance he’s imitating a fictional hero from one of the several cowboy films Khrushchev brought back from America and allowed to be shown to the public. Eddie-baby wants to be self-possessed.

  “The respected old buddies Kadik and Edik have joined with the nation’s masses and are amicably swilling biomitsin on the anniversary of the Great October Revolution,” Slavka says, and extending his hand for the bottle, he declares, “The last surviving member of the antisocial organization the Blue Horse wants to get drunk with the nation’s masses too.”

  “You’ve swilled enough already,” Kadik mutters, although he hands him the bottle. Slavka greedily sucks on it. Despite the cold and the light snow that has already begun to fall, Slavka is dressed in an almost summer-weight white raincoat and worn-out shoes of indeterminate color that merge imperceptibly with the wide cuffs of his black pants.

  Noticing Eddie-baby’s glance, Slavka finally tears himself away from the bottle, takes a breath, and says, “What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen an aristocrat down on his luck before? I just got back from Tallinn yesterday. Somebody stole my suitcase.”

  Eddie-baby is sure that Slavka is lying about somebody having stolen his suitcase. Slavka himself might casually steal somebody else’s suitcase, and had actually done so once; he took a suitcase from his friend, the trumpet player Koka. They were on their way back from Tallinn, in fact. All the dudes go there from time to time. It’s the thing to do.

  And it is in fact because of that business that Kadik doesn’t like Slavka the Gypsy – his hands aren’t clean. But the main reason for Kadik’s hostility is that Koka is one of Eugene’s friends, and Kadik always takes Eugene’s side. Stealing isn’t considered such a bad thing among the Saltovka kids, but to steal from one of your own is low. If Slavka had stolen not from the dudes but from the punks – from the kids that Eddie-baby hangs around with (Kadik is almost the only dude among his friends) – they would have “done some writing” on his face with a razor. “To do some writing” means “to cut up.” You can cut somebody up with a knife without killing him by gripping the knife so that the tip of the blade sticks out no more than the width of a couple of fingers. You can also do some writing on somebody with a razor – a safety razor, obviously. To do some writing on somebody also means to teach him a lesson, to give him something to remember – a scar – so that he’ll think about it next time. Eddie-baby has been going around with a straight razor in the pocket of his jacket ever since he was eleven. Everybody in Saltovka and Tyurenka carries something, usually a knife, although Borka Vetrov often has a TT pistol on him, and Kostya Bondarenko, besides carrying a hunting knife in a sheath sewn into the lining of his coat, is armed with a heavy little weight on a chain.

  Eddie-baby looks Slavka up and down and thinks he has a shabby look about him. Perhaps he wasn’t in Tallinn, but he’s definitely been hanging around somewhere, because he hasn’t been seen in the district since spring. Slavka has a long nose, black hair, black eyes, and very rare olive skin, which is why he’s called the Gypsy. He’s the older brother in his family. His younger brother, the spectacled Yurka, is considered an intellectual in the district, since he wears glasses and studies hard at the technical secondary school. The kids make fun of Yurka, but they don’t treat him badly; they can understand him. He works during the day at the Piston Factory and runs off to his technical school in the evening. Slavka, however, is a parasite, and by the standards of Saltovka he’s already old – twenty-four – although he’s not the only one who doesn’t work. A lot of the kids don’t – Kadik doesn’t, for example – but Slavka’s a beggar. Slavka never has any money, and he always goes out with the intention of finding an opportunity to swill at somebody else’s expense. Sometimes, he goes off somewhere for a while, as he did last summer, but then he turns up again. “He really does look more like a weasel than anything else,” Eddie-baby thinks, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye while Kadik and Slavka trade hostile remarks. “A pretty disgusting personality,” Eddie-baby thinks with revulsion, noticing a thin film of dried saliva in the corner of Slavka’s mouth, “and we’ve been drinking out of the same bottle with him.” All the same, Eddie-baby has a weakness for Slavka, since he enjoys listening to
his stories.

  “No, man,” Slavka is saying to Kadik, “your Eugene couldn’t make it as a decent saxophone player. Maybe he’s good enough for Kharkov, but there are other cities, old buddy. In the Baltic republics – and I’m not even talking about Mother Moscow – they’d kick him off the stage…”

  “Old buddy, you don’t know what you’re talking about, old buddy!” Kadik says indignantly. “I was at the festival with Eugene! Eugene played with the Americans. Bill Novak himself invited Eugene to play with the orchestra. Eugene is a first-class saxophone player, old buddy, a world-class saxophone player!”

  “Stop it, stop overpraising your friends, Kadillak,” Slavka squeaks. “The only reason you do it is to make yourself seem bigger in your own eyes. Don’t talk that stuff to me, old buddy Kadik, I’ve studied existentialism, I’ve read the works of Sartre. You’re all so superficial, old buddies…,” he says, catching Eddie-baby’s eye to enlist his support.

  Eddie-baby doesn’t want to get involved in their argument – let them work it out by themselves. He doesn’t know whether Eugene’s a good saxophone player or not. Eddie-baby’s father discovered a long time ago that Eddie-baby has no ear for music and no voice either. Eddie-baby thus has no problem with the fact that when it comes to music he’s an ignoramus, and that all the musical ability in his family went to his father. As his mother says, there just wasn’t anything left over for him.

  As Slavka and Kadik argue, the crowd around the grocery store changes its form: certain groups break up, people leave, and their ranks are replenished by other workers returning from the parade. Eddie-baby knows that it will be like this till very late in the evening, when the store finally closes. It’s as if there were a club here, and even at seven o’clock, the time when the Soviet people and the people of Saltovka along with them will officially sit down to supper to celebrate the forty-first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, these men and kids will still be standing here and arguing till they’re hoarse, and yelling, and embracing each other, and drinking their biomitsin or their port. They’ve gotten used to it, and there’s no longer anything to be done about it. And not only that, but later on, sometime after ten o’clock, the men who have already left will find some pretext to tear themselves away from their supper tables and their families and come back here.

  There is a real club right around the corner next door, the one in the Stakhanovite Movie Theater with its plush curtains, its marble foyer, its large hall, and its red plush chairs and easy chairs, but the men and kids don’t go there. In the first place, they don’t sell biomitsin and vodka there, and you can’t get cucumbers or processed cheese, and old lady Lusha and the moochers don’t go around with their glasses there, and there’s no fresh air and windy snowstorm flying in your face as there is now, and no light rain and sunshine as there is in the summer. In the second place, even if they did suddenly start selling biomitsin and vodka at the club, the men and kids still wouldn’t go there. They’re intimidated by the club and its impressive portraits of old men in ties, and its cherry red plush, and its tidy smoking room. Furthermore, you get drunk a lot quicker in its stuffy, centrally heated premises. Eddie-baby knows the club director’s son, Yurka Panchenko, and sometimes he uses that acquaintance to get invited to dances at the club, but only rarely. The kids don’t like the Stakhanovite Club either; they prefer the much cozier little Bombay, and for more serious entertainment they take the trolley to the already mentioned Victory.

  The huge building that houses the Victory Club and Movie Theater is a product of the first period of Soviet constructivist thought – a concrete cube that towers in the center of the square where tens of thousands of people gather not only on holidays but on Saturdays as well. Despite its constructivist style, the Victory looks something like an exaggerated version of the Greek Parthenon. In the community center located in the Victory there are hundreds of rooms, and behind the building extends a broad park whose left side is occupied by a huge summertime dancing area big enough for a thousand dancers. The Saltovka and Tyurenka kids go to the Victory for serious entertainment and for great battles that take place there several times a year, usually in the summer.

  The territory of the Victory community center belongs to Plekhanovka. Plekhanovka is a city all by itself. A vast number of kids live in the neighborhood of Plekhanov Street, which is very long – probably as many kids as live in Saltovka and Tyurenka combined. Usually the kids from Plekhanovka maintain their neutrality and allow the kids from Saltovka and Tyurenka, on the one hand, and from Zhuravlyovka, on the other, to come “to Victory,” as all the kids say. Sometimes, however, the kids from Plekhanovka cunningly join forces with one enemy faction or the other, and then true guerrilla warfare breaks out, with ambushes, attacks, and knife stabs in the back. From time to time somebody even gets killed.

  8

  Kadik has to go. Although Eddie-baby thinks it’s still too early for him to leave, that Slavka the Gypsy is getting on his nerves.

  “So long, Eddie-baby,” Kadik says. “Be sure to go to Victory tomorrow and recite, all right? If you want, I’ll drop by for you around six?”

  “Why don’t you,” Eddie agrees. “I’m not sure I’ll read my poems for the goat herd, but at least we can get drunk. And my mother will shut up after she talks to you. She likes you.”

  Kadik leaves, striking his metal-tipped shoes hard on the asphalt. He has the same kind of shoes that Eddie-baby has, or rather, the same kind of huge, almost horseshoelike strips are screwed into his soles. It’s their own invention. The strips are made out of an especially hard steel. Poor Edka Dodonov broke several tungsten carbide drill bits putting three holes in each strip for screws. But it was worth it. Kadik and Eddie-baby get to flaunt their metal strips, and thanks to them are able to recognize each other in the dark, since if you lightly drag your heels on the asphalt as you walk, you can produce an arc of reddish yellow sparks in your wake. You look, and if you see sparks on the other side of dark Saltov Road, then it means that Kadik’s coming and nobody else.

  Slavka the Gypsy and Eddie-baby smoke for a while, looking around. Noticing that Kolka Varzhainov has joined Vitka Golovashov and Lyonka Korovin, Eddie-baby goes over to them, since he needs to say a few words to Kolka. The Gypsy trails after him. Eddie-baby, of course, could tell the Gypsy to fuck off, but it’s hard for him to do that. Even though the Gypsy is as much of a pest as any moocher, he’s an old guy and there’s not too goddamn much you can do with him.

  The kids all greet each other, and Kolka Varzhainov takes off his glove.

  “Have a swig, Ed,” Lyonka says to him. Lyonka was the smallest in their class until last summer, when he suddenly turned into a giant. Since he’s still not used to his height and doesn’t know what to do with his body, he stoops a little. Lyonka holds out a bottle of biomitsin to Eddie. Eddie-baby takes a swig and senses nearby the intense energy of the Gypsy, who is ready to take the bottle the very instant Eddie removes it from his lips.

  So be it, there’s enough. Another time they would have calmly told him to fuck off, but today’s a holiday, everybody has money, and everybody’s generous.

  “Oh, that’s good!” says the Gypsy, half emptying the bottle. “Thank you, old buddies, for humoring an old man down on his luck. Next time the bottle’s on me.”

  Everybody knows that Slavka will never have any money, so how could there be a next time?

  Eddie-baby takes Kolka Varzhainov off to the side.

  “Did you get it?” he asks quietly.

  “Not until Monday, Ed,” Kolka says guiltily. “Everybody’s celebrating,” he adds by way of justification.

  In appearance Kolka is a typical representative of the goat herd – a worker youth, a lathe operator. On his head he wears a silly white cap of the sort that the majority of normal people no longer wear, and his inevitable gray Muscovite jacket is belted with the same kind of silly belt. On his feet are bright ocher, almost orange shoes. Kolka has a certain passion for footware
of that color. Eddie-baby remembers the no less orange handmade artificial-rubber half-galoshes, half-boots that Kolka had on when he turned up for the first time in the second-year B class at Secondary School No.8 several years ago. Kolka finished his seven years and then, like a lot of other kids, left school to work as a lathe operator at the factory. He’s no Sashka Plotnikov; he doesn’t need the university.

  “It’s unlikely, however, that Kolka will stay at his factory,” Eddie-baby thinks. Behind his innocuous exterior, freckled little Russian mug, and small nose is hidden a clever and far from stupid “businessman,” as Kadik calls such people – an altogether different Kolka, in other words. He deals in many things, including something very rare, very rare even here among the Saltovka punks. You can buy a pistol from him. Eddie-baby and Kostya already bought a TT from him for their work, and now Eddie-baby needs another one. Kolka probably gets them from soldiers who simply steal the weapons from the officers in their units.

  Kolka Varzhainov has a lot of respect for Eddie. It began in the second-year B class. Somebody told him that Eddie-baby’s father was a general, although then as now Eddie-baby’s father was merely a first lieutenant. The aura of generalship eventually detached itself from Veniamin Ivanovich and from Eddie-baby, but the respect of the son of a village seasonal worker for the son of a “general” remained.

  “Look here,” Eddie-baby says to Kolka, “Kostya asked you to hurry. We’re going to need the cannon very soon.”