Garik likes everybody else to look bad and him and Ritka to look good. He’s a bastard and pretends he’s an aristocrat, although his mother’s only a nurse and not even a doctor. It’s in fact because his mother is a nurse that Garik became a morphine addict. His mother makes home visits to the very sick and gives them morphine injections to ease their pain. So there’s never a shortage of morphine ampuls in their house. Garik’s mother only recently discovered that her son had been stealing ampuls from her for several years and injecting himself with morphine.
It’s clear to Eddie why she never noticed it before. He knows Garik’s mother, a hysterical woman who twitches so much that she probably has to give herself morphine injections every day. So how would she know how many morphine ampuls she has? Now, however, Garik has to find other ways to get his morphine. He has to buy it. Which is why he’s always short of cash. Once Garik the Morphine Addict even took part in the burglary of a store with them – with Kostya, Eddie, and Lyonka Tarasyuk. He wasn’t much use, however.
To Eddie’s dismay, Garik sits down next to him on the bench and demands conspiratorially,
“Show me your left hand.”
“What for?” Eddie asks in annoyance.
“I can read palms now,” Garik says. And without asking Eddie’s permission, he takes his left hand and peers at his palm…
“Your hand looks just like an ape’s,” Garik observes. “Like it’s very old. An old, old hand.”
“Are you going to read my palm or criticize me?” Eddie asks. He’s very interested in his own future and always has been. The Tyurenka Gypsies tried to read his palm many times, but he refused. A Gypsy once read in Veniamin Ivanovich’s palm that he would marry Raya, and now he’s been married to her for over sixteen years. Eddie doesn’t want a Raya for a wife.
Bending so low over Eddie-baby’s hand that all his hair hangs down – his hair reaches to his shoulders – Garik examines Eddie’s palm…
“So,” Garik says, “you’ll die when you’re in your thirties.”
“Thanks!” Eddie says angrily, and pulls his hand away. “You’ve already read it.”
“What are you getting so mad about?” Garik says in a conciliatory tone. “We’re all going to die. Some sooner, some later. Your Life line breaks somewhere in your thirties. True, there’s a hint that you won’t die, that you’ll come close to death but will survive. And if you do survive, you’ll live for a long, long time.”
“Can’t you tell exactly when that will happen, so I can at least prepare myself?” Eddie asks half-mockingly, half-seriously. “So I can at least make a will?” Garik’s death sentence alarms him.
“What do you think this is, algebra?” Garik says proudly. “Palmistry is unable to give exact dates. All we can do is predict what will happen. Let me see what there is in regard to your Heart line…”
Garik examines Eddies palm, kneading it and scratching it with his fingernail.
“Oh, not too fucking bad,” he announces. “I even envy you. Everything’s just fine in the love area.” So Garik’s found somebody to envy now… Even though he’s been fucking his Ritka, and that’s a certainty.
“This really is not too fucking bad!” Garik announces, sincerely delighted. “You, old man, have a double Arc of Venus. According to all the books, that means exceptional sexual activity. A monster fucker!” Garik intones. “A single Arc of Venus is rare enough. But a double Arc is the rarest of life’s gifts. True, it’s broken in several places – the Arc of Venus, I mean. That’s your neuroses,” Garik says, speaking in a rush.
Garik doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do, so he’s studying palmistry in some old books. He quit school and now sits for days on a bench near his building, strumming his guitar. He doesn’t even get dressed and can be found wearing only his robe and slippers. Nobody else in all of Saltovka has a robe, not even Plotnikov, but Garik does. He sits scratching one leg with the other and quietly singing songs that nobody else in Saltovka knows. Garik’s favorite song is one about cocaine:
My wings are broken and clipped,
Fate smiles evilly at me,
And all the roads around are covered
With the silvery dust of cocaine…
Garik claims to have tried cocaine. “Maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t,” Eddie thinks. Eddie read in a book somewhere that during the civil war after the revolution, the White officers and even the famous Women’s Battalion snorted cocaine. Since then, however, nobody has even heard of it. Maybe it disappeared. But there’s still morphine. Garik once talked Eddie into trying an injection and inserted the syringe into Eddie’s vein himself. Eddie didn’t like it at all. After the injection, he felt weak and confused and wanted to throw up. Garik declared at the time that Eddie didn’t know shit about drugs and that he was sorry he had wasted the morphine on him.
Garik is mumbling something else about Eddie’s Heart line, but Eddie hears the words as if they’re coming from far away. He thinks that palmistry is medieval fanaticism and a complete fraud. There’s only one thing that’s real as far as he’s concerned: in spite of his double Arc of Venus, Svetka has obviously dumped him and chosen Shurik. If she had wanted to conceal the fact that she didn’t go to Dnepropetrovsk but stayed behind in Saltovka, she wouldn’t have shown herself on the street, and certainly not with Shurik.
“I’m going,” Eddie announces, and stands up.
“What about the dominoes?” Garik asks. “You forgot your dominoes.”
“You keep them!” Eddie tosses back, without turning around. He strides over to Svetka’s entrance. Only now does he realize that he has been putting off for half an hour going up to Svetka’s and asking her to explain it all. He has been putting it off out of fear of the unpleasant.
29
Svetka lives in Apartment No.14. Exactly the same as her age. Eddie goes up to the door and raises his hand to knock, but after standing there for a moment with his hand in the air, he suddenly puts his ear to the door and listens… It seems to him that he can hear music softly playing on the other side. But it’s also possible that it’s just his imagination. “If you closed the door to Svetka’s room, then with both doors closed, you wouldn’t be able to hear anything,” Eddie thinks. “Let alone quiet music.”
Eddie knocks anyway. And waits.
There’s no answer. Eddie’s partly glad that no one answers – maybe Svetka’s out. But he can’t go away having knocked just once, and not very loudly at that. It’s nighttime and everybody’s asleep, and maybe in a deep sleep, since they’re worn out from the holidays, so that if he’s actually going to wake Svetka up, he has to knock louder. He knocks again, loudly and insistently and continuously. He knocks and then puts his ear to the door.
This time Eddie clearly hears footsteps, a banging noise – a door perhaps – and maybe even subdued whispering. And so, like an excited animal sensing some misfortune, he stops knocking on Svetka’s door with its number 14 and pounds on it instead, raining blows down with his fists.
“Who’s there?” Svetka’s frightened voice is at last heard on the other side of the door.
“Open up! It’s me, Eddie,” he forces himself to say, and pounds again, renewing his attack on the door.
“Don’t completely lose your mind!” Svetka says angrily from the other side. “I’ll open it in a second. I just have to put something on.” And the sound of her footsteps moves away into the depths of the apartment; she’s obviously barefoot.
Eddie leans his forehead against the door and is suddenly aware that he’s almost crying. “Fucking Svetka!” he thinks. “The whore! It’s her fault Shurik’s here, and everything else is her fault too!” It’s her meanness that’s forcing Eddie to stand outside her door sick and crazy. Eddie feels the same way he did after Garik’s morphine – weak and weepy, disgusting and helpless…
The door swings open. Svetka is standing in the doorway as furious as she can be, wearing her mother’s robe.
“You should be ashamed!” she hisses. “Wha
t’s the matter with you – couldn’t you pick another time? It’s after three o’clock in the morning!”
Roughly pushing Svetka aside without listening to her, Eddie walks past her into the apartment and looks into her bedroom. The daybed is open, and there are pink sheets on the mattress. “They’re her mother’s,” Eddie thinks.
“What are you doing?” Svetka demands, running after him. “This isn’t your home! Don’t you dare go into my mother’s room!” she cries, seeing that Eddie’s heading in that direction. “She’s asleep!” Svetka yells, and grabs Eddie by the arm.
“Oh, you!” Eddie exclaims in contempt. “Oh, you!” he repeats. And tearing his arm away, he pushes hard at the door to Auntie Klava’s room. He doesn’t care what he’s doing anymore, since he’s one hundred percent sure that Shurik’s in there.
But Shurik isn’t in Svetka’s mother’s room. And neither is Svetka’s mother. Eddie suspiciously checks the corners, goes to the wardrobe, and flings it open, since like all the other wardrobes in Saltovka, it’s huge – easily big enough to hold Shurik. He tears it open with a jerk. And then he rummages among Svetka’s mother’s perfumed dresses…
“Are you out of your mind!” Svetka screams behind him. “I’ve always told my mother you’re crazy! She’s the one who made me go out with you – she said you were a good boy. I never liked you! Get out of here! Get out of here at once! Get out of my house!” she screams. “Get out, or I’ll call the militia!” she shrieks.
To his own amazement, Svetka’s shrieking puts Eddie in a savage rage. It seems to him that she’s squealing just like a pig. He grabs Svetka by the shoulders and shakes her, shakes her with all his might, so that her doll-like head shakes as well. “You whore!” he shouts. “I thought you were supposed to go to Dnepropetrovsk, right? Everybody in Saltkovka saw you with Shurik yesterday, everybody saw you. Everybody!” And he shakes Svetka again with all his strength.
Svetka’s robe falls off, exposing her naked body, naked except for a pair of pink silk panties. The pink panties hang loosely on Svetka’s body; obviously they belong to her mother, just like the robe.
“Prostitute!” Eddie yells. “Just like your mother. A prostitute!” And he suddenly lunges for the sobbing Svetka’s stomach, grabbing her by her mother’s slippery silk panties. “Take those prostitute rags off!” he yells. “So you want to be a prostitute just like your mother? So you’re learning how to do it? You’re in training, right?!” Eddie yells, hating Svetka at that moment with his whole being. Sobbing, Svetka resists.
Entwined like two desperate enemies, they fall to the floor. Eddie finally tears her mother’s panties off Svetka, and Svetka is now lying underneath him on the floor completely naked, covering her cunt with her palm. She has closed her eyes and turned her head away, no longer crying, and she’s breathing heavily…
Eddie feels such intense anger at Svetka that he wants to cause her pain. He grabs her breast in one hand and pinches her small pink nipple.
“Ow!” Svetka breathes.
Eddie torments Svetka’s little breasts, the whitest in the world, with both hands, and then says, surprising himself:
“Well, is this how Shurik squeezed you, huh? This way?”
For some reason Svetka makes no move to tear herself away from Eddie’s hands but merely lies there, breathing heavily. And hardly believing it, Eddie understands: “Svetka’s waiting for me to fuck her.” This discovery astonishes Eddie. He clearly sees that Svetka, breathing heavily, no longer a doll but a living girl flushed from the fight between them, is waiting for his penis.
“He fucked you, didn’t he?” Eddie says maliciously, feeling his penis grow erect as it fills with vital blood, fills just because he is saying that word to Svetka for the first time. “He fucked you in the cunt,” Eddie says. “I know, he fucked you in the cunt,” he feverishly repeats as he unbuttons his pants and takes out his penis…
Svetka shudders when Eddie touches his penis to her mound covered with blond hair. She shudders again when Eddie’s penis bumps into her bone. The third time, however, Eddie stops bumping into Svetka’s bone and freely enters into her somewhere. Freely, because it’s wet and slippery inside her. “Ah!” Svetka moans.
“Did he fuck you like this?” Eddie asks, guiding his penis into Svetka. “Like this, huh?” Eddie sees Svetka licking her lips, but she says nothing, as if listening not to Eddie’s words but to something else. “She’s listening to my penis,” Eddie thinks with horror. “Who taught her to do that?” he wonders. “Or maybe she was born with it.” He too falls silent as he fucks Svetka, moving his penis in and out of her. Each time, as Eddie moves his penis into her, Svetka moves forward a little in response, and when he moves back out, Svetka moves as if to follow his penis.
He suddenly realizes that his penis and Svetka’s cunt are making a smacking sound. The same way that the blonde girl’s cunt smacked when the Tyurenka punks gang-raped her. Remembering that girl and comparing her to Svetka, Eddie mentally changes their places and suddenly thrusts several times in Svetka, thrusts faster and faster in her and to his own surprise suddenly comes in her. At the same time, he feels bad, as if ashamed of something, and even vile. Coming in Svetka is entirely different from coming when you’re masturbating, and for some reason Eddie feels humiliated, as if he has revealed an awful weakness unworthy of a man…
He lies on Svetka for a while without saying anything, unconsciously kissing her on the neck. When he finally lifts his head from her neck, he sees that Svetka is looking at him in a mockingly pensive way, or even in a slightly contemptuous way, through her dried tears.
“Well, what of it?” Svetka asks quietly. “As you see, you’re too late.”
Eddie at first doesn’t understand what Svetka means by “late.” He looks suspiciously at her.
“As you see,” she says, “I’m no longer cherry.” She says it calmly and cynically, as if a completely different woman and not the Svetka he has known up to then were talking to Eddie-baby. “Cherry” sounds disgusting on her lips, as if Vovka Zolotarev or Slavka the Gypsy were saying it. It sounds dirty somehow. “So that’s what she’s really like,” Eddie thinks.
“Shurik?” he asks.
“What’s Shurik got to do with it?” she asks contemptuously. “One of my father’s friends humped me two years ago; he was drunk. My father had just died of alcohol poisoning, and his friends were still coming to see us. ‘Concern about the single widow and her child,’” Svetka says sarcastically, mimicking someone.
“But what about Shurik?” Eddie asks.
“You’ve got Shurik on the brain,” Svetka says in an almost friendly tone. “Well, I did it with him too,” she adds in a bold voice, and grins. “But don’t worry,” she says, “I don’t love him. I don’t love anybody.”
“Not even me?” Eddie asks maliciously. He lifts himself up onto his elbows and looks Svetka in the eye. He still can’t believe this is the same Svetka he parted with before the holidays just three days ago. Just three days ago.
“You’re a boy,” Svetka announces pensively. “And I’m a woman. A man should be a lot older than a woman, since women mature much faster. So for them to be equal’s in bed, the man should be a lot older. At least ten years,” Svetka concludes.
Eddie-baby shyly pulls up his pants, stands, and buttons his fly while Svetka continues to lie on the floor. From below, from down there on the floor, she suddenly says to Eddie,
“I was really afraid of you – I’m sorry. I actually had been planning to tell you everything, but I kept putting it off – I was afraid… My mother says that you’re so touchy you have to be approached in a special way. Besides, you’re always carrying that awful razor around…” Svetka falls silent.
“Have I ever hurt you?” Eddie asks.
“Once you waved your knife at me…” Svetka says.
Eddie-baby picks up his notebook of poems from the floor. It fell out of the pocket of his jacket during their scuffle.
Svetka gets up and puts
her mother’s robe back on. “Are you leaving?” she asks sadly.
“Answer one question for me,” Eddie says to her thoughtfully. “Were you just screwing around with all that? You know… the kisses, the wine, and me, like an asshole, reciting my poems to you… If you didn’t love me, what was the point?”
Svetka is silent, and then, picking her words with difficulty, she says,
“You see, you can’t understand… The fact is that in a certain sense I loved you then, and I love you now…”
Eddie mockingly and maliciously shakes his head. “I see,” he says. “You love me…”
“Yes, I do,” Svetka says, “but not as a man. I always liked talking to you, and there wasn’t anybody else I felt as comfortable with. The time we spent together was very interesting… You’re an exceptional guy -”
“Stop it.” Eddie frowns. “We can do without that.”
Svetka falls silent.
“Well, I’m on my way,” Eddie says. “Farewell.”
“Never say, Farewell! It’s too sad,” Svetka answers, frowning. “Say, ‘See you!’ Can you come over, tomorrow for dinner? My mother will be back in the morning, and she’s going to make a holiday dinner. She asked me to be sure to invite you. She likes you a lot,” Svetka adds.
“Well, see you!” Eddie says, and followed by Svetka’s pensive gaze, he walks out of the apartment. He knows that it’s not “see you” but “farewell.” He’ll never go back to Apartment No.14 again. Never.
When Eddie turns around on the landing, he finds himself face to face with Svetka, who is still standing in the doorway. Uncertainly she asks him, “Do you want to stay with me? All night?” But Eddie doesn’t answer her.
Outside it seems to have gotten even colder, and Eddie shiveringly pulls his jacket tighter around him. “People deserve to be killed. When I’m completely grown, I’ll definitely kill people,” he thinks.
The dominoes are still lying on the table as he walks past it. All Garik did was to arrange them in a large, closed circle.
Memoir of a Russian Punk Page 27