Svetka has gone with her mother to visit relatives in Dnepropetrovsk, near Kharkov, and so Eddie-baby is free for the evening. She’ll be back tomorrow, and then they’ll go to Sashka Plotnikov’s. Svetka wants to be able to tell her friends later on that she spent the October holidays in the company of Sashka Plotnikov. For her that’s the same thing as being invited to the palace of a king. Eddie-baby knows that Svetka’s vain, but what can he do?
Eddie-baby turns in the direction of his own building. Veniamin Ivanovich is away on a business trip, and his mother is probably celebrating the holiday with their neighbors on the first floor, the ugly Auntie Marusya and the dignified, dark-haired Uncle Vanya. They invited Eddie to come along too, only what would he do there among adults who hold no interest for him? The other Auntie Marusya should be there as well, along with her husband, Uncle Sasha Chepiga. “Uncle Sasha’s a jolly fellow, but he’s still a member of the goat herd,” Eddie-baby thinks scornfully.
Eddie-baby’s mother enjoys great authority among the neighboring workers. She’s much better educated than they are, having once studied chemistry in a technical secondary school, although the only time she actually worked was during the war. Since then she has spent her life as a housewife, reading books. Both the Auntie Marusyas are always coming to her for advice about their problems – Uncle Sasha drinks, and Uncle Vanya is far too good-looking for his Auntie Marusya (Eddie-baby takes it for granted that he has had other women in his life) – so Raisa Fyodorovna plays the role of adviser all day long.
“Uncle Vanya is probably a little in love with my mother,” Eddie-baby thinks as he strides in the direction of his building along the wet asphalt path that meanders through the future forest of bushes and trees. He has noticed that his mother also behaves a little oddly whenever she’s around Uncle Vanya – as if she were embarrassed about something. According to her, Uncle Vanya has Gypsy blood. “Maybe he actually does,” Eddie-baby thinks. “He looks like one.”
Eddie-baby’s mother is for the most part bored in Saltovka; she has no real friends here now. His father would be bored too, if he didn’t spend all day at work or away on his business trips. But Eddie’s mother is a prisoner in Saltovka. She’s much higher class than her present worker and peasant girlfriends. Only a few years ago she had much more interesting neighbors, half of whom were military people: Captain Posin’s family with his son, Valerka, who was almost Eddie-baby’s age, just a year older, and the military council member Sokolovsky with his two beautiful daughters, Galina and Larisa. And there was the Shepelsky family, who lived in another part of the building – Shepelsky himself, who was a Ph.D. and a rock climber, and his wife, Aleksandra Vasilievna, and their two sons, the university students Vlad and Lyonka. True, Lyonka turned up in Saltovka a little later, when he was already quite mad. He had lost his mind in another city, in Pavlograd, apparently, and by the time he came to live with his parents, he was an extraordinarily quiet and timid blue-eyed person. Eddie-baby remembers how, during one of his attacks, he chopped off his little finger with a hatchet and tossed it out the transom window onto the street below. Eddie also has a vivid recollection of the arrival of the medical orderlies, who in a matter of minutes carried Lyonka’s bound body out of the building entrance adjacent to theirs and stuffed it into the ambulance.
All of that belongs to the already ancient history of Building No.22 on First Cross Street. Shepelsky long ago divorced his Aleksandra Vasilievna, and soon after that she died. Shepelsky, however, married a young girl, one of his students who had gone climbing with him in the Caucasus. Aleksandra Vasilievna couldn’t climb mountains with Shepelsky, since she was older than he was and had fat dropsical legs and was sick a lot. When Shepelsky buried his former wife, Eddie-baby’s mother went to the funeral, but she didn’t take Eddie-baby along with her, although he tried to go. Shepelsky was appointed deputy minister of some Ukrainian industry and went to live in Kiev, where he moved into a large apartment. His departure was like a signal, and after that Saltovka quickly emptied. The military and other educated people all moved to the center of town, which had been destroyed by the Germans but by then had been rebuilt, and noisy working-class families – the proletariat, or as Kadik contemptuously calls them, the “hegemonic element” – quickly moved into the vacuum they had left. There are good people among them, such as the Auntie Marusyas and their husbands, but Eddie-baby’s mother gets tired of them sometimes.
Eddie-baby’s mother was particularly despondent when the last of her close friends, the Jew Beba, moved away from Saltovka with her husband, Dodik, and their two sons, Mishka and Lyonka. Dodik was an engineer. Eddie-baby’s mother wept when Beba, Dodik, Mishka, and Lyonka left. They were very lively people, and the two families used to spend their holidays together. Dodik was an amateur photographer, and Eddie-baby’s mother has a large number of snapshots in which Eddie-baby and Mishka and Lyonka are standing in their little holiday, suits holding balloons, or lying on the May grass with their faces turned toward the photographer, the playful Lyonka making faces or sticking his tongue out,
After her friend Beba left, Eddie-baby’s mother started to pine. A few days later she got very mad at Veniamin Ivanovich, maintaining that his helplessness and lack of character were destroying her life and that of her child – meaning Eddie-baby, of course, since there wasn’t any other child in the family. By “helplessness” and “lack of character” she had in mind First Lieutenant Savenko’s inability to obtain from his commanding officers a new apartment in the center of town instead of here in Saltovka, a place that civilization had left behind, and one whose streets were sunk in mud after every rain, not to mention the fact that they were living in a single room at a time when even some of First Lieutenant’s Savenko’s subordinates had been given their own apartments, “so that we are still stuck in this awful neighborhood where our son is compelled to sit at home digging in books and making himself nearsighted, since he can’t associate with the hoodlums and rural children who populate Saltovka,” as Eddie-baby’s mother expressed it in a torrent.
She was undoubtedly correct, although at the time there wasn’t any indication of the troubles that lay in store for the Savenko family and for Eddie-baby’s upbringing thanks to the Saltovka and Tyurenka punks whose company he would be forced to keep.
Eddie-baby’s father disconcertedly answered his mother that he was an honest person and that he therefore refused to use his position at work for his own personal gain, and that, yes, some of his subordinates did on occasion obtain separate apartments, but only those who had large families. “There’s a waiting list for apartments in our unit, and there are people ahead of me who need apartments much more than we do,” his father had said. And in response to the accusation that he lacked character and was helpless, Eddie-baby’s father suggested that his mother consider the fate of those women whose husbands are confirmed drunkards or, even worse, womanizers. Eddie-baby’s father is neither a drunkard nor a womanizer, although he is good-looking, much better-looking in fact than Eddie-baby is, as his mother sometimes tells Eddie-baby when she wants to annoy him. His father has a straight nose, whereas Eddie-baby is snub-nosed like his mother. And his father has large, beautiful eyes.
Eddie-baby grew up with the conviction inspired in him by his mother that “our father is a good man, an exceptional man.” Sometimes she tells Eddie-baby that his father is too decent for his own good. Even during the period when Eddie-baby was immersed in his books, he had already decided that he did not want to be good like his father. Eddie-baby wanted to have his own room, or at least his own small room, where he could put up his geography maps and spread out his books and his notes and hang up his drawings of plants and animals and three-masted and two-masted ships with different sailing rigs. But Eddie-baby’s father was good, and so all of Eddie’s property was kept in the corner of the bathroom along with the other old things that were stored there. Slowly but surely his father had begun to irritate him with his goodness.
16
They quarreled. Eddie-baby had drawn a completely harmless caricature of Yurka, a picture of him asleep during class. And it was true that this healthy lad was always falling asleep in the hot classroom. After Eddie-baby and another artist, Vitka Proutorov, put up the class wall newspaper, Yurka pushed his way up to Eddie and said he wanted to have it out with him. “Let’s have it out, Savekha,” he said. “Savekha” was a name derived from Savenko, Eddie’s last name. It was the fashion at the time among the pupils of Secondary School No.8 to refer to each other using the suffix “-kha.” Sitenko was called “Sitekha,” Karpenko was known as “Karpekha,” and so on. As has already been mentioned, Eddie-baby had managed quite well without a nickname during his childhood; it was Kadik who started calling him Eddie-baby, which was hardly a true nickname, since it actually wasn’t very different from his real one.
Eddie-baby said, “All right, let’s have it out.” According to an unwritten law of Secondary School No.8, refusing the challenge would have meant cowardice and disgrace. They agreed to have it out in the empty classroom during the long recess.
The Siberian Yurka beat Eddie-baby till he was unconscious. And in the course of that beating he abruptly changed Eddie’s life – in the same way that the appearance of the angel Gabriel changed the life of Muhammad and turned him into a prophet, or the falling apple turned Newton into Newton.
When Eddie-baby regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor in the empty classroom. Several of his fellow students were standing around him with frightened expressions on their faces, and Yurka Obeyuk was calmly sitting a little farther away at one of the desks.
“Did you get the point?” Yurka said as soon as he saw that Eddie-baby had opened his eyes.
“I got it,” Eddie-baby agreed. Whether he had gotten it or not, he did at least have a good grasp of objective reality. Accompanied by those who sympathized with him, he proceeded to the boys’ lavatory, where they washed off the chalk and dust on his trousers and his black velveteen jacket. Five-kopeck pieces warmly offered by his compassionate classmates were placed over the black-and-blue marks that completely covered his face. And with that the incident was closed.
On his way home that day after school, Eddie-baby analyzed his life, looking at it from various points of view. The whole eleven years of it. When he got home he was somewhat distracted from this process by the terrified cries of his mother and by the need to parry her questions about “Who?” “Where?” and “When?”
Eddie-baby said only that he had been in a fight. “Who” had beaten him up he didn’t say, justifiably regarding that as his own affair. The questions as to “when” and “where” were irrelevant, as far as he was concerned.
That day he didn’t touch his French kings or his Roman emperors, nor did he open up any of his notebooks or immerse himself in any of his volumes. He lay on the couch with his face turned toward its soft back and thought. He heard his father come in, and he even stood up obediently so that his father could examine the black-and-blue marks and welts that covered his face, but almost immediately he lay down again in the same position with his face toward the wall. When he finally got tired of his father and mother’s buzzing behind his back, he pulled one of the cushions out and covered his head with it. Just as his father did when he lay down on Sunday after dinner to take a nap. Eddie-baby, however, didn’t sleep. He thought.
He didn’t sleep all night. But when he got up the next morning, dressed, washed, and proceeded to the kitchen like an automaton to eat his usual breakfast of fried eggs and sausage, and then took his father’s old field bag, which he used for a briefcase, and set off for school, he was already a different person. A completely different person.
Eddie-baby even now vividly remembers that morning down to the smallest details: the bright springtime sunshine and how he walked along the path behind his building, his usual route, in order to come out onto his own First Cross Street, which would take him to school. That day, however, Eddie-baby stopped for a while behind the building under the windows of Vladka and Lyonka Shepelsky, put his field bag down on the ground, untied and removed his Young Pioneer kerchief, and stuck it in his pocket. This gesture had nothing to do with rejection of the Pioneer organization; rather, the removal of the kerchief was for Eddie-baby a symbol of the start of his new life. Eddie-baby had decided to leave his books behind and enter the real world, and in that world to become the strongest and the boldest.
He had decided to become a different person and to do so that very day. Although he had always been quiet and self-absorbed for the most part, that day Eddie-baby made jokes and insolently biting remarks about the teachers, which so astonished the French teacher that she threw him out of class, and he spent the rest of the lesson hanging around the hallway catching flies and sunning himself on the windowsill in the first spring sunshine with the big second-year student Prikhodko. It was with Prikhodko that he committed the first sex crime of his life. They burst into the girls’ lavatory on the fourth floor, where several girls from the fifth-year A class were hiding out from gym, and started “feeling them up.” Eddie-baby had seen other students doing the same thing, but until then he had never felt any desire to “feel up” girls himself.
During the raid on the girls’ lavatory, Eddie-baby, imitating Prikhodko, fell on his victim from behind, a plump girl named Nastya whose last name he didn’t know, grabbing her by what might very approximately be termed her breasts. The girl tried to break loose, but she didn’t want to yell too loudly, lest they hear her in the classrooms and punish her for cutting gym, so she scratched at him and squealed quietly. Irritated by her resistance and once more following the example of Prikhodko, who by then had managed to pin the truly ample-breasted Olya Olyanich (she was already fourteen) to the washstand and had stuck his hands under her skirt, the green Eddie-baby also thrust both his hands under Nastya’s school uniform skirt and grabbed her where girls have their “twats.” Eddie-baby had known the word “twat” ever since the second year, and he knew where the thing was supposed to be.
Two of Eddie-baby’s second-year classmates had once tried to rape Larka Gavrilov – Tolka Zakharov and the Kolka who went by the nickname “Backstreet Scraps” (his other nickname was less complicated and more humiliating: the “Pisser,” in honor of the fact that, as the kids said, he still pissed himself, that is, still wet his bed). They had attempted the rape during the long recess, on the pile of overcoats that lay on the rear desks in the classroom, since at the time they didn’t hang their coats in the cloakroom. Even though he’s fifteen now, Eddie-baby still has no idea how eight-year-old boys could “attempt to rape” an eight-year-old girl. “What with?” Eddie-baby grins. What sort of penis could an eight-year-old have, even if he was a punk like Tolka Zakharov or Kolka the Pisser? Kolka and Tolka were both expelled from school, but they returned two weeks later.
Eddie-baby seized Nastya by her “twat” under her skirt. There where Nastya had her twat it was very warm. He seized her by that warm area and squeezed. Nastya started bellowing the instant he did so. It seemed to Eddie-baby that Nastya was not merely warm there but also moist. “She probably just peed,” he surmised.
In response to the girls’ cries, though they hadn’t been very loud, the custodian Vasilievna came running in (she and her husband, the hall porter Uncle Vasya, lived in a small house in the schoolyard) and started lashing at the kids with a wet rag, shouting that they were mad dogs and that the proper place for them was in jail. “Run for it!” yelled Prikhodko, and letting go of the girls and
shielding themselves from the rag, they burst into the hallway and raced off.
17
After the incident in the girls’ lavatory, Eddie-baby earned Prikhodko’s patronizing approval along with his unconcealed admiration. It was then too that Eddie-baby began his friendship with the Plague – Vovka Chumakov – and in March ran off with him to Brazil.
Thanks to a combination of circumstances, the escape to Brazil became widely known throughout Secondary School No.8. Before running off, Eddie-baby and the Plague had hidden their bookbags under some pieces of rusty iron in the basement of the Plague’s building – since what need would a person have for a bookbag in Brazil? It’s unclear why they took the trouble to hide the bookbags instead of simply throwing them away. They had no intention of ever coming back to Kharkov from Brazil.
Whatever the reason, the bookbags were found by some electricians who had gone down to the basement to repair the building’s electrical system. The electricians solemnly brought the bookbags to the school, where they were turned over to Rachel, the boys’ classroom teacher. By then a search was already under way for Eddie-baby and the Plague.
Remembering his escape to Brazil, today’s Eddie-baby smiles condescendingly. The first naive attempts. Even Eddie doesn’t understand anymore what it was that possessed them to try to go to Brazil on foot and by compass. Whatever it was, he and the Plague went south. Naturally, it didn’t take them very long to get lost, and instead of finding Brazil, they found themselves ten kilometers out of town in the city dump, where bums and cripples robbed them of the whole sum – 135 rubles and 90 kopecks – they had saved for their escape, leaving them with nothing but a couple of geography books that Eddie-baby had brought along to bolster his own and the Plague’s resolve through examination of the photographs and drawings of tropical animals and birds and the sultry landscapes of Amazonia that the books contained. One of the books was called A Journey Through South America.
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 8