Memoir of a Russian Punk

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 communal 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.