Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 6

  Eddie-baby laughs, and Slavka sighs again and then leans across Eddie-baby, who is sitting on the edge of the bench, and reaches for the bottle. As soon as he realizes that it’s empty, he hurls it across the path at the latticed iron fence opposite them. The bottle breaks with an unpleasant crunch.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” Eddie-baby asks. “The trashes will come running now. They’re all over the place; it’s a holiday.” “Trashes” in Saltov slang means “militia officers.” A single militia officer is a “trash,” and several of them are “trashes.”

  “Don’t tell me how to live,” Slavka retorts. “You’re still too young to start teaching me. Live as long as I have, then you can teach me. Fuck the trashes and fuck you,” he announces capriciously. He is obviously drunk.

  “What an asshole you are!” Eddie-baby says. “You’re an old guy and still an asshole.” And Eddie-baby gets up from the bench and walks away.

  Slavka doesn’t want to be left alone, so he plods along after him.

  “Wait up, Eddie old buddy,” he mutters somewhere in the rear. “Wait up, where are you going?”

  Eddie-baby quickens his pace and soon leaves Slavka behind.

  11

  The park is empty and already lightly powdered with snow. The snow has begun to fall hard, and so Eddie-baby pulls his hood over his head shorn by Waclaw. It’s a convenient thing, the yellow jacket, and the reason is because it’s copied from an Austrian alpine parka. Kadik still wears the original even now. True, he takes special care of it since it’s getting old. Kadik brought the coat back from a festival. Naturally, they couldn’t find anything in the Kharkov stores like the material used to make alpine parkas, and so they had to buy yellow upholstery fabric – the kind used on chairs and sofas. The fabric gets a little wet in the rain, but it doesn’t matter, since they chose a thick lining. Kadik even suggested putting polyethylene strips in the hood and under the shoulders so that their heads and arms wouldn’t get wet, but Eddie didn’t want to: the polyethylene would have made a rustling noise. Eddie-baby doesn’t like rustling noises.

  “Good day, M’sieur Savenko.” Eddie-baby would recognize that voice among thousands of others. It belongs to Asya. Asya Vishnevsky. She’s standing at the entrance to the park, and with her is Tomka Gurgelevich. Tomka is holding a bag of groceries in her arms.

  “Good day, Mad’moiselle Asya,” Eddie-baby says ceremoniously as he extends his hand to her. But after shaking the cold hand of this robust girl in glasses, he smiles and kisses her less formally on the cheek. He and Asya are friends.

  “Good day, Mad’moiselle Tamara,” he says to Tomka, and shakes her mittened hand. Tomka has put her bag down in the snow. “Are you awake yet, Toma?” Eddie-baby asks sarcastically.

  He’s teasing her. Everybody knows that more than anything else, she likes to sleep. She’s a pretty girl, taller than Eddie and a little large for her age (she’s sixteen, and her auburn hair is always pulled back in the kind of bun a grown woman would wear), and Eddie-baby likes her very much and wants to ruffle her, to provoke her out of her usual half-somnolent, melancholy placidity. There are a lot of different rumors about her in the district. According to some, she’s screwing a guy who calls himself the “Jerk” and is a well-known cardplayer and swindler from the center. Other versions have it that she sleeps until three in the afternoon, doesn’t go out anywhere, and continually reads books, all of which makes her parents very unhappy. Tomka’s father is a construction foreman like Vitka Golovashov’s father, and they have an apartment to themselves, so it’s impossible to find out anything reliable about Tomka’s life, given the absence of neighbors. Eddie-baby and Tolik Karpov once caught Tomka’s little brother and attempted to drag some information out of him. Tolik even started twisting the stubborn third-year pupil’s arm, trying to find out whether Tomka was screwing the Jerk, and the little kid squealed and yelled and called Tolik a fascist, a bastard, and a whore, but he wouldn’t betray his sister. They had to let him go. Eddie-baby didn’t approve of the way Tolik treated the crew-cut tadpole, but he wanted to shake the auburn-haired Tomka out of her self-possession.

  And so that same night, he, Karpov, Kadik, and Karpov’s dog set out for the Russian cemetery, brought back a fresh wreath taken from a fresh grave, put the wreath on Tomka’s door, rang the doorbell, and ran away…

  Another time, when they were coming back drunk from somewhere (Tolik lives next door to Tomka’s building, and Eddie-baby is only a few buildings away), they decided to play another dirty trick on her to take revenge for her haughtiness. Tolik caught her cat in the entrance to her building, bashed its head against the wall, and tied its carcass to Tomka’s doorknob. Blood revenge. They knew very well how much Tomka loved her cat.

  The point of this was that a few days before the murder of her cat, Eddie-baby had accidentally met Tomka on the trolley when she was on her way to school (she goes to another school, the same one that Tolik goes to), and after mustering his courage, he had asked her to go out with him the next day for a walk in the Jewish cemetery. Tomka, smiling and indolently sighing, had told him that although the next day was Sunday, she would be busy. She would be sleeping, and she preferred a good sleep to a walk in the cemetery.

  “Of course,” Eddie-baby had answered, “you need to get some rest. You’re all tired out. You don’t get enough sleep with the Jerk. He doesn’t let you.”

  “You’re a jerk yourself!” Tomka had said angrily, starting to make her way to the trolley exit.

  Lazily squinting and gazing over the top of his head, Tomka now says to Eddie-baby,

  “You and Karpov are the ones who need sleep. Have you managed to kill all the cats in the district? Barbarians!”

  “It affected her after all,” Eddie-baby thinks. “It got to her.”

  “Where are our girls going?” Eddie-baby asks.

  “Our girls are going home,” Asya says. “We came out for a walk and went to the store on the way. Tomka’s mother asked her to buy some groceries.”

  “I’m going home too,” Eddie-baby says. “Shall we go together?”

  Eddie-baby hesitates for a second. He doesn’t know whether to take Tomka’s bag from her or not. At that moment, Slavka the Gypsy comes reeling up to them. He has finally managed to make his way out of the park.

  “O-o-oh!” the Gypsy howls delightedly. “Eddie-baby has already lined up some honeys and is going home with them now to get laid. Today all of Saltovka and Tyurenka and all of Kharkov and the whole vast country of triumphant socialism will be noisily getting laid after turning out the lights. Many, many buckets of proletarian sperm, and the sperm of office workers, and of the Soviet intelligentsia, and of soldiers, sailors, sergeants, and petty officers, and of officers and generals as well, will be poured into the precious vessels located between the thighs of female Soviet citizens. Eddie-baby, what do you need two vessels for? Give me one!”

  Eddie-baby, dumbstruck by Slavka’s incredible insolence, has barely managed to answer him before Slavka walks over to Tomka with her shopping bag, lifts her up off the ground, and says to her with a drunken leer, “Senora! Open your bag for me, please, and I’ll spit into it!” And then he spits… The greasy yellow spittle drips from Tomka’s jars and bottles into the bag.

  “That symbolizes my orgasm,” Slavka smirks.

  Slavka is unable to say anything more, because Eddie-baby has grabbed him by the arm and flipped him over onto his back with a jerk, just as his wrestling coach, Arseny, taught him to do. In an instant Slavka is rolling in the freezing mud, hard as ice cream, and blood is flowing from his mouth onto the delicate white snow.

  “Let’s go!” Eddie-baby commands, and taking Tomka’s bag, he crosses the trolley tracks. The girls stride mutely after him.

  “What did you do that for?” Asya says, breaking their silence at last. “He’s really harmless.”

  Asya is a humanitarian; her family was repatriated from France only three years ago.

  “I’m harmless
too,” Eddie-baby says bitterly. He’s starting to feel sorry himself for punishing the goddamn fool. “The asshole!” Eddie-baby swears. “Riffraff! Scum!”

  “They say he sleeps with his mother,” Tamara calmly observes. “I heard that’s why his little brother beat him up.”

  Having turned off Saltov Road, they are now walking down a cross street. The builders of Saltovka obviously didn’t have much imagination, since the street on which Eddie and Tomka live is called First Cross Street, and there’s also a Second, a Third, and a Fourth. The basement cafeteria on First Cross Street is open, as it turns out, and from it comes the sound of music and the clatter of beer mugs. Eddie-baby tosses an indifferent glance in the direction of the cafeteria, and then suddenly thinks, “What if…?”

  Tamara’s house is nearby. She stops. They have arrived.

  “What are you doing for the October holidays?” Eddie-baby asks Tomka.

  “Why do you ask,” Tomka smiles, “do you want to invite me out? Has Svetka dropped you already?”

  “Why should she drop me?” Eddie-baby asks irritably. “That’s silly, Tamara.”

  “Well, excuse me, then,” Tomka says. “That means she hasn’t dropped you.”

  Tomka’s mother’s head emerges from one of the building’s second-story windows.

  “Tomochka, child! We’re waiting for you!” she yells. “Hello, kids!”

  Asya waves to Tomka’s mother. Eddie-baby doesn’t.

  “I’ve got to go,” Tamara says, and extends her mittened hand to Eddie-baby. “Thank you, brave sir, for defending my honor. I wish you a pleasant holiday! Bye, Lizok,” she says to Asya. “I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

  “How affected!” Eddie-baby blurts out, gazing after Tomka.

  “She’s a good girl and she thinks very highly of you,” Asya observes, “but you’re still a boy, as far as she’s concerned – don’t you realize that?”

  “She’s only a year older than I am,” Eddie-baby persists.

  “A woman is always older than a man,” the intelligent Asya calmly replies. “Tamara likes students. The fellow she’s seeing now is twenty-three.”

  “Asya says ‘seeing’ instead of ‘going with,’” Eddie-baby thinks, “so why did they settle their family in Saltovka; they don’t belong here.” But out loud he says, “Then she ought to be ‘seeing’ Slavka the Gypsy – he’s twenty-four.”

  “Why not?” Asya grins. “He’s not so bad. There’s something in his eyes, something…” Asya thinks for a moment. “Something vulgar, something that women like. Yearning for a woman.”

  “Ha-ha,” Eddie-baby snorts. “That long-nosed alcoholic who can’t keep his hands to himself?… So then, there’s nothing in me that women like?” he continues half-questioningly, looking sideways at Asya. “The art teacher Elena Sergeevna, by the way, used my face as an example of the best-looking man’s face in the class…”

  Asya laughs…

  “Man’s face…,” she repeats, “man’s face…”

  Eddie-baby is offended. “What are you laughing at?” he says, scowling. He and Asya are great friends; he wouldn’t tell anybody else what the art teacher said, so why is she laughing?

  “I’m sorry, Eddie,” Asya says, no longer laughing, but serious now. “You will be a splendid man, I’m sure, but you’re still a boy. You’ll be a man,” she says. “Just be patient. It will happen in about ten years… Or maybe fifteen,” she says uncertainly.

  “When I’m thirty!” Eddie-baby exclaims in horror. “But I’ll already be an old man by then!”

  “But you look twelve now,” Asya laughs.

  Seeing Asya home, Eddie-baby has passed his own building. Now they’re standing next to her entrance. “Do you want to come up?” Asya asks.

  “But your rodichi are probably all at home,” Eddie-baby vacillates. Eddie-baby’s language is almost completely free of Ukrainianisms, thanks to his pure-Russian-speaking mother and father, but sometimes words like rodichi slip out.

  “You know how they are. Just come directly to my room; nobody will bother us there.”

  “All right,” Eddie-baby agrees, and they go into the entrance.

  12

  The Vishnevsky family has a whole three-room apartment to itself. Asya’s older brother, Arseny, is a Communist, and they say that he was persecuted in France, so the whole family returned to the Soviet Union because of him. If they hadn’t been repatriated, they wouldn’t have gotten a three-room apartment, despite the fact that their family is large: father, mother, two older sisters, Marina and Olga, Arseny, Asya, and Asya’s little brother, Vanka, who’s also known as Jean.

  Asya didn’t always have her own room, but both her sisters got married and moved to the center with their husbands, so now Asya has her own room with a window that looks out onto the cobblestone road and the high stone wall of the vehicle maintenance lot, the same one where Waclaw works as a barber. Every time Eddie-baby visits Asya and looks out her window, he thinks of Waclaw. The road in front of Asya’s window turns into an impassable sea of mud in the fall, as do almost all the roads in Saltovka. But the road is frozen now, and people are briskly walking along it on their way to Tyurenka or back.

  “Would you care for some wine?” Asya asks, returning from the interior of the apartment, where she has been talking to one of her parents in French. The Vishnevskys speak French at home. Eddie-baby has been studying French at school since the second year, but of course he can’t make out what they’re talking about, especially at that tempo.

  “I would,” Eddie-baby answers. But not because he really wants any. The wine at Asya’s is always grape wine, unfortified and dry, and it doesn’t affect Eddie-baby the way biomitsin does, for example. Eddie-baby knows the wine in Asya’s home is always of very good quality, since her father was a wine taster in France, but Eddie-baby doesn’t like good wine. What Eddie-baby likes are the goblets that Asya serves the wine in, and the olives she serves it with, and the napkins. He’s never admitted to Asya that he doesn’t particularly like the wine itself, that he prefers biomitsin.

  Eddie-baby likes being at Asya’s. He likes the great number of books in their home. And not merely that the books (mainly in French, but also in Russian and English) cover all the walls of the main room, but that they also cover an entire wall of Asya’s room. Asya has her own books, as do all the members of her family. There are even books arranged on a small shelf over Asya’s bed so she can reach them easily. No one else in the Saltov district has such a quantity of books, unless it’s Borka Churilov, and if he does, then it’s just boring sets of collected works in gloomy bindings, like the ones Sashka Plotnikov’s parents have. Asya has unusual books; half of them were published abroad, even the ones in Russian. Asya lends her books to Eddie-baby – she’s not a stingy person. Eddie-baby has several of her books at home right now: Remarque’s novel Three Comrades and several issues of the journal Contemporary Annals containing a novel called The Gift by the very strange writer V.Sirin.

  Eddie-baby likes the way the Vishnevskys live. He even likes their wooden daybeds, which they made themselves. The majority of Saltovka residents use iron bedsteads with iron mattress supports. In the summertime, you can see them pouring boiling water over their bedsteads or dousing them with kerosene after dragging them outside. A lot of the apartments have bedbugs, which are extremely hard to get rid of. There are no bedbugs in Eddie-baby’s room, since his mother is just as neat as Red Sanya’s mother. She’s like a German, in fact.

  Asya’s bed is covered with a flowered comforter and an animal skin. A fox skin. Eddie-baby is sitting on the skin.

  Eddie-baby also likes the light fixtures in the Vishnevsky household. Everywhere there are small table lamps with shades made out of old maps, all arranged very comfortably. In other Saltovka homes, the lighting comes from above, from fixtures hanging from the ceiling, or from naked light bulbs, or from bulbs covered with orange or red textile shades with long silk tassels, which make the Saltovka rooms look either like commun
al toilets or like seraglios of the kind that Eddie-baby once saw illustrated in an old geography book on Turkey.

  The Vishnevskys’ apartment is uncluttered too. There aren’t any monstrous sideboards or superfluous chiffoniers taking up somebody’s living space – just necessary furniture.

  Asya brings him wine and olives on a tray(!). The wine is Hungarian and is called Bull’s Blood. “Pardon us, m’sieur, for having to serve you Hungarian wine instead of French,” she says apologetically. “The indigenes unfortunately failed to deliver French wine to the neighborhood grocery this time.” After putting the tray down on a little table next to Eddie-baby, Asya curtseys humorously the way young ladies do in films about prerevolutionary life, and then she sits down next to him.

  When Asya says “indigenes,” Eddie-baby can’t help replying, “In de jeans!” Or if he doesn’t actually say it out loud, he at least repeats the almost perfect pun to himself. Asya also uses the word “locals” a lot. She doesn’t care for the local indigenes, and when she tells Eddie about Paris, her eyes on occasion shine with something very like tears.

  When Eddie-baby first made Asya’s acquaintance, he was in the sixth year, and she still spoke Russian with an accent, having recently moved to Kharkov from France. Eddie-baby met Asya under highly romantic circumstances. In a theater.

  13

  The students at Secondary School No.8 in the city of Kharkov are hardly ever left in peace. Even during vacations the school tries to organize and rally them, to give them direction and teach them how to behave. It’s no easy thing to teach the Saltovka kids, including the girls. A lot of the kids start smoking almost from their very first year in school – Tolka Zakharov, for example. They start drinking at a very early age too. Usually two-thirds of the Saltovka kids drop out of school in the sixth or seventh year, and some of them don’t go to work at the factory but hang out on the streets. But of course the more difficult the material, the more zealous the educators.