Memoir of a Russian Punk Read online

  “I’ll have it on Monday for sure. Tell Cat not to worry.”

  Kostya Bondarenko, or Cat (a different Cat, not Cat the weight lifter), is Eddie-baby’s best friend. He and Kadik are rivals. Or rather, Kostya was Eddie-baby’s friend for a long time, and then Kadik turned up. Kostya and Eddie-baby are in the same gang. Kadik guesses that they have a gang, but he doesn’t know for sure. Kostya is the leader, the “hetman,” and he decides who will do what and he picks the jobs. Grishka and Lyonka Tarasyuk are in their gang too, and from time to time Kostya brings in other kids, but they aren’t permanent, and after helping to burgle a store, they generally disappear. Once Garik the Morphine Addict even participated in a burglary with them. The main members of the gang, however, are Kostya and Eddie-baby and Grishka.

  9

  Almost all the kids in the Saltov district are punks. Only a few of them are dudes like Kadik, or “intelligentsia” like Sashka Plotnikov who dream of going to the university and becoming engineers or doctors. Since his own father is an army officer, Eddie-baby really ought to belong to the latter, really ought to associate with the “intelligentsia” and Sashka Plotnikov or Alyosha Volin (Eddie-baby was in love with Alyosha’s sister last spring before he met Svetka), but for some reason he doesn’t care for them and prefers the company of punks.

  The punks are in the majority in the district. Building No.3, for example, which is less a building than a whole block constructed in the form of a huge rectangle around a courtyard the size of a soccer field with sheds erected on it – Building No.3 is populated entirely by punks.

  Only one girl from their class who lives in that building, Larka Gavrilov, doesn’t belong to the punks; her father’s an accountant, and her mother’s a Jew. But all the other kids do. Vitka Sitenko and Vitka Karpenko and Vovka Klimchuk and the Vixen and Fatso are all punks… All the kids are, in fact. And not only them, but the older brothers of the kids in Building No.3 are punks too, and many are now serving or have already served prison terms. The fathers of the kids from Building No.3 (the ones who have fathers, that is) have also been in prison. But now that they have grown-up children, the majority of the fathers have finally “broken” with the world of crime and are employed in factories doing heavy labor of every kind – in foundries or as steel workers and fettlers or on assembly lines. The work is hard but it pays well, and the fathers all need a lot of money, since they all have a lot of children.

  Eddie-baby likes the punks. But he also understands that sooner or later he’ll have to part with them. Its fine to be punk as long as you’re a kid, but to be a proletarian with unsavory connections as an adult is not something that Eddie-baby really wants. Like Kostya, he wants to be a famous criminal.

  Eddie-baby and Kostya’s friendship began with a terrible argument between their parents. Kostya had transferred to their school from another one. That was in the third year, and their classroom teacher then was a beautiful Armenian named Valentina Pavlovna Nazarian. At first Eddie-baby didn’t pay any attention to Kostya, until once, when he was in a hurry to get to the library and then home to his beloved books (he had been delayed; Valentina Pavlovna had kept him, as president of the Pioneer council, after school along with the other council members in order to explain the details of a factory outing that was planned for the following Sunday), he discovered that his coat was missing from the coatrack.

  Eddie-baby was even then nearsighted; who knows, maybe he was born that way. What is known is that when Eddie’s mother was carrying him in her belly during her pregnancy, she came down with malaria and the doctors gave her quinine. Obviously, as his mother now believes, they gave her too much, since her baby was born nearsighted. At the time in question, however, Eddie-baby was the only one who knew he was nearsighted, and he was afraid to tell anybody else about it – it was awkward. “A traveler and brave seafarer has no business wearing glasses,” Eddie-baby thought.

  Be that as it may, even the nearsighted Eddie realized that the coat hanging on the rack wasn’t his, although it too was dark in color and looked like his. Eddie’s coat was new; his parents had just bought it for him. The coat on the rack, however, was old and badly frayed at the cuffs, the elbows, and the collar.

  Nobody worked in the cloakroom in Secondary School No.8. Everybody hung his own coat on the coatrack on the way into class, and then picked it up again on the way out. Eddie-baby timidly tried to clarify the fate of his coat with the school’s custodial personnel, but neither Uncle Vasya, the hall porter, nor his wife, known as Vasilievna, could tell him what had happened to it. And so Eddie-baby, not wishing to be a bother, put on the strange coat, went to his beloved library, checked out several geography books, and then went home.

  At home his mother started yelling at him, which was unfair, and so Eddie got up from the kitchen stool without finishing the borsch he had been eating, even though it was his favorite, and went out onto the balcony in protest. The balcony was traditionally his territory. So he went out, wrapped himself in a blanket, and immersed himself in his research.

  His father came home from work in the evening, took off his boots, and their single room at once began to reek of leather and foot rags, whereupon Eddie-baby’s mother carried the boots and foot rags out onto the balcony.

  “Go into the kitchen. Your father wants to speak to you,” she said.

  His father started yelling at him. And then they both started yelling at him. His father was sitting on the stool between the two kitchen chairs, between their own chair and the one belonging to their neighbors, the Pechkurov children – sitting on the same stool Eddie had been sitting on, and eating borsch just as Eddie had been doing.

  “What were you looking at, you fool?” Veniamin Ivanovich said, turning away from his borsch. “Did you actually not realize that it was somebody else’s old coat, and not even beaver?”

  “And not even navy blue, but black?” said Raisa Fyodorovna, throwing up her hands. “We’ve got to buy him glasses at once.”

  “But Dad,” Eddie-baby said, “it was the only coat on the rack. All the other students had already left a long time ago. Valentina Pavlovna kept the Pioneer council after school. There wasn’t any other coat.”

  “He’s right,” his father said. “Go with him to school tomorrow, Raya, and find out what happened. It’s clear the coat wasn’t stolen; if it had been, they wouldn’t have left this trash behind,” his father said, nodding toward the strange coat hanging on the kitchen doorknob.

  “As if it were infected,” Eddie thought.

  Raisa Fyodorovna went to school with Eddie-baby, and during the lesson Eddie-baby sat in class, and then, together with Valentina Pavlovna, they found Eddie-baby’s coat, the new navy blue beaver one. Only on the inside of it somebody had sewn a piece of white cloth with the inscription “Kostya Bondarenko, 3-B” printed in indelible ink.

  A battle ensued. Kostya’s parents came, and his father turned out to be in the army too, and not only in the army but two ranks higher than Eddie-baby’s father – a major, in fact, and moreover the commandant of the military registration and enlistment center in their district. Their parents quarreled, and Raisa Fyodorovna got very upset, since she doesn’t know how to argue with strangers. Veniamin Ivanovich was away, having left that morning on one of his long business trips to Siberia – although it’s true that he doesn’t know how to argue with strangers either – and therefore Eddie’s poor mother had to deal with Kostya’s two insolent parents all by herself. If it hadn’t been for Valentina Pavlovna, who was fond both of the quiet and diligent Eddie-baby with his notebooks and of his mother, Raisa Fyodorovna, it’s not at all clear how the whole affair would have ended. But Valentina Pavlovna confirmed that, yes, she had seen Eddie wearing the coat, and that before that he had had another coat, an old one, and that there could be no doubt that the new coat belonged to him. And that Citizen Major Bondarenko and his wife were, unfortunately, mistaken.

  They tore off the white piece of cloth and gave the coat back to Eddie. It wa
s so embarrassing for Eddie-baby to be present during all the shouting (he and Kostya had been brought along for corroboration) that he would gladly have given away his new beaver coat, if only not to witness the mutual recriminations coming shrilly from both sides. He would have kept Kostya’s coat, worn as it was at the elbows, if only to be spared the disgrace. The affair took place in the biology office, through which the other teachers and the older students kept passing in one direction or another, each time stopping to listen. Kostya apparently wasn’t enjoying the affair either; he gloomily peered from under his brow and winced every time his mother said the words “my boy…”

  Their parents became lasting enemies. But the boys, oddly enough, did not. They didn’t immediately become friends, but the humiliation they had both been subjected to somehow brought them closer together. A couple of weeks later, during recess, Kostya came over to Eddie and said he was sorry. It had evidently taken him two weeks to think it over.

  The very next day Kostya gave Eddie his slingshot. Although it was quite useless to him, Eddie-baby turned the beautiful and carefully made object in his hands, and after thanking Kostya, stuck it in his pocket. Eddie-baby wasn’t a hunter; he was an explorer.

  The next summer Kostya didn’t go to Pioneer camp but remained in the district, where he took Grishka Gurevich’s place on Eddie-baby’s long walks through the surrounding fields and ravines. He even significantly enlarged Eddie-baby’s knowledge of the geography of the territory. Kostya lived at the opposite end of the district and so had an excellent acquaintance with the nearby sand pits, and once, after a whole day of wandering in the vicinity of the pig farm and the waving fields of wheat, he and Eddie-baby even got as far as the artificial lake.

  The next year, however, Kostya wasn’t in their class. For some reason known only to them, his parents again transferred him to another school on a different trolley line, one five stops away from the line that Secondary School No.8 towers over. Eddie-baby and Kostya didn’t see each other for several years, meeting again only after they were both fourteen and had both changed a lot…

  10

  Eddie-baby and an already pretty sloshed Slavka the Gypsy are sitting in the little garden next to the Stakhanovite Club, smoking and talking and drinking a 0.8-liter “fire extinguisher” of the usual biomitsin, one left behind by Red Sanya, who was drinking with them but had to run off to see his woman, the hairdresser Dora.

  “Hey, Eddie-baby,” Slavka says, “you’re a good guy, Eddie-baby. So tell me, what are you doing here?”

  “Living,” Eddie-baby answers. “The same as you, Slavka,” he adds with a smirk.

  “You’re a fool, Eddie old buddy!” Slavka exclaims indignantly. “A fool!”

  “Why am I supposed to be a fool?” Eddie-baby asks, unperturbed. If anybody else – somebody his own age, say – had called him a fool, he would have cut him with the bottle he’s holding in his hand, but Slavka’s an old guy and a hopeless case. The kids say he’s even attracted to his own brother Yurka and that’s why Yurka, a harmless technoid in glasses, recently beat up the drunken Slavka. He punched him. And the Gypsy does in fact have a dried-out little scab on his left cheek.

  “What the fuck are you doing here in Saltovka with the punks? You’re done for if you stay here!” the Gypsy continues in a distressed tone. “Listen to me, they’ll send you off to prison, and they’ll do it soon too. You’re finished if you don’t get out of here. And if you get sent away once, then with your character you’ll get sent away again. You’re reckless, like me -”

  “What are you doing here yourself, Gypsy?” Eddie interrupts as he passes the bottle.

  The Gypsy guzzles the wine, finally frees himself from the bottle, and says while quietly hiccupping,

  “What are you looking at me for, Eddie old buddy? I’m already an old man. I’m a hopeless case, if you want to know. Everything’s over for me, everything’s behind me. I’m an alcoholic; all I have left is my dick. I sleep until three o’clock, and I have no desire to get up, because I’m afraid of going out; it’s so cold here. Yurka and my mother go to the factory, and I get up with them and pretend that I’m planning to go out and look for a job, but when they leave after giving me a couple of rubles for the trolley, I go back to bed. I hate work. I hate iron and the people who bang it around. My hearing is delicate. I’m different; I’m not the same as these proletarian slaves. Look at my hands…”

  Eddie-baby is silent and doesn’t look at the Gypsy’s hands. He knows what kind of hands Slavka has, since the latter has already shown them to him many times.

  The Gypsy goes on: “Fucking winter! Where we live, Eddie-baby – you understand that it’s the worst goddamn climate, the most fucked-up, shitty climate in the world. And why is that? Do you know why, Eddie old buddy?”

  “Why?” Eddie asks.

  “Because our Slav ancestors were fucking cowards, that’s why. Did you know that in English ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ are the same word, Eddie?”

  “Really?” Eddie says, sincerely astonished. “It’s true, it’s true,” the Gypsy insists. “Our ancestors had the souls of slaves, so instead of bravely conquering warm lands for themselves around the Mediterranean where lemons grow – did you realize, Eddie, that lemons grow there?” Slavka drawls, and suddenly switching to a sarcastic whisper, he continues – “they refused to fight and fled like cowards to this fucking snow, and now you and I are sitting on this fucking green Soviet bench, and it’s snowing and it’s cold, and all I have is this fucking raincoat. And it’s Yurka’s,” he adds with a drunken chuckle. “Do you call that living?”

  “Yes,” Eddie agrees, “it’s better in the tropics. Somewhere in Rio or Buenos Aires. Ciudad de nuestra senora de Buenos Aires,” he says thoughtfully. “Do you know what that means, Slavka?”

  “I do, old buddy,” the Gypsy says. ‘City of our lady of favorable winds.’ The locals call it ‘B’aires’ for short.”

  Slavka knows everything. It’s never boring with him, and you can learn a lot. He’s witty too – when he isn’t too drunk. Which is why Eddie is sitting here with him on the bench. Slavka reads constantly, even in English. Sticking out of his pocket right now is some foreign newspaper. Slavka studied at the university for two years before he was expelled.

  “Get the fuck out of here, Eddie-baby, before it’s too late. And don’t hang around with the punks. They’re going in just one direction – to prison. You’re completely different from them,” Slavka whines again, and grabbing Eddie-baby by the collar of his jacket, he forcefully pulls him close. “Look at me!” he demands drunkenly.

  “Cut it out, Gypsy…” Eddie-baby pushes him away in irritation.

  “No, look me in the eyes!” the Gypsy insists. Eddie-baby looks him in the eyes.

  Slavka smiles drunkenly. “In your eyes shines intelligence and a natural nobility!” he proclaims. “And it doesn’t shine in all your Kadiks and Karpovs and Cats! And it never will!” Slavka yells.

  “You’re drunk as a pig,” Eddie-baby says seriously. “You’re starting to get boring.”

  “Maybe so,” Slavka calmly agrees. “Maybe I am drunk.”

  “Oh,” he says with a sudden sigh, “if only summer would come! I’ll go to Vladivostok. I’m tired of it here with you people. Have you ever been to Vladivostok, Eddie old buddy?” he asks.

  Eddie hasn’t been to Vladivostok. He shakes his head no. His lips are occupied; he’s sucking on the fire extinguisher.

  “It’s really nice in Vladivostok,” Slavka says with pleasure. “The Pacific fishermen have piles of money. And so do the whalers,” Slavka happily recalls. “Vladivostok is the home of the whaling fleet. When they come back to port after six months at sea, their pockets are crammed with money! Can you imagine, Eddie – their pockets! And it’s no trouble at all getting between them and their money,” Slavka adds slyly. “The sailor who’s been starving for human contact at sea for six months really needs good conversation. That’s the second thing, after sex. Come to Vladivost
ok with me, Eddie, all right? The two of us will make a good team. I’ll pass myself off as a seaman, and you’ll be my little brother.”

  “All right, let’s go,” Eddie-baby agrees, placing the empty fire extinguisher next to the bench. Eddie-baby is tidy.

  “Imagine us sitting in a bar, Eddie – there’s one on the hill there where the whalers go, and down below is the Golden Horn harbor, and moving over it are the lights of transoceanic liners… Can you imagine the picture, Eddie old man?” And interrupting Eddie, who is just on the point of replying, the Gypsy adds, “Did you know that the harbor in Vladivostok is named after the Golden Horn harbor in Istanbul, hm?”

  Yes, Eddie-baby had heard about that. “Yes,” he says, “how come?”

  “Because, Eddie old buddy, it’s shaped just like the harbor in Istanbul,” Slavka says in the quietly didactic tones of a teacher. “In Istanbul, in Constantinople…,” he bursts out singing all of a sudden, beating his palms on the bench to keep time. The Gypsy is sitting with his legs spread wide and is slapping his palms on the bench between his thighs. And then his gaze falls on one of those skinny thighs in its trouser leg, and he grabs it between his hands.

  “Look how skinny I’ve gotten,” he says, turning to Eddie. “In your fucking Kharkov, in your fucking Saltovka.”

  “It’s yours too, isn’t it, Slavka?” Eddie-baby observes. “And there’s no goddamn way you’ve gotten skinny, since as far as I remember, you were always pretty scrawny. It’s just the way you’re built.”

  “I was born in Moscow, Eddie old buddy,” Slavka says. “Remember that, in Moscow, and not in your lousy city. My father was a Polish aristocrat, the jasnowielmozny pan Zablodski,” he says pompously. “True, my mother let me down; she’s a Russian whore. Even her name is cheap: Ekaterina, Katerina… Katya…,” Slavka says, emphasizing each stressed syllable. “Yurka takes after her, takes after her completely, whereas I take after my father…”