Memoir of a Russian Punk

23

All that happened quite recently. Last summer, in fact. Eddie-baby had been invited to a birthday party at Slavka Panov's. Slavka, whom Eddie-baby doesn't like for some reason, isn't much: a short, stocky, bullet-headed kid with a little forelock – a cheat and a pickpocket. But Slavka knows how to make himself useful to everybody, and so everybody knows him. It's on a tip from Slavka that Kostya Bondarenko and Eddie are planning to rob the house of the rich Uncle Lyova. It's on account of Uncle Lyova's fortresslike home in Ivanovka that they're buying the TT from Kolka Varzhainov. Vovka Dneprovsky brought Eddie-baby along to Slavka's birthday party, since he and Vovka had become friends that summer. Or more accurately, they had made each other's acquaintance the day before.

Vovka Dneprovsky had just returned from reform school. Vovka was fourteen, but at the time he was half a head taller than Eddie-baby and as skinny as a rail. Like Eddie-baby and Kostya, Vovka is the son of an army officer, although Vovka's father, Lieutenant Colonel Dneprovsky, doesn't live with his family; he left Vovka and his older brother, Tolya, and Vovka's mother several years ago. Vovka is a friend of Grishka Primak's – they were in reform school together – and it was Grishka who introduced Eddie-baby and Vovka.

Vovka and Eddie-baby got drunk in honor of their new friendship. As a result, they came to an understanding and decided to rob the grocery store next to Soviet Hospital No.2. Which is in fact what they did, although Vovka stopped by his house for a knapsack first. Eddie-baby is ashamed of that "burglary," and Kostya was terribly ashamed of it when he heard about it. "The clumsy work of snot-nosed village kids who smashed a window with a shaft," he said. "Assholes! Idiots! Two alcoholics!" Kostya said. "Who does things like that! Who does it that way!"

Both of them drunk, Vovka and Eddie-baby had actually thrown a cobblestone at the grocery store window. But the window didn't break, since they had thrown the cobblestone at its center and the large piece of glass had flexed and repelled the stone. It's embarrassing for Eddie-baby to remember just how much noise they made before finally managing to break the window.

Eddie-baby and Vovka had not even tried to look for money in the store after filling their knapsack with vodka. Without a thought they set off directly for Vovka's building (Eddie-baby completely forgot at the time all of Kostya's instructions for throwing the militia dogs off the scent, forgot, that is, all about water, tobacco, and naphthalene), hid the knapsack in the basement, and went up to Vovka's apartment with two of the bottles. Paying no attention whatever to the hysterical screaming of Vovka's mother, the two friends finished off one of the bottles and lay down on Vovka's bed. Vovka's only comment to his mother was, "Shut up, you old bitch, or Ed will fuck you!" and then he and Eddie-baby fell asleep embracing each other. The next day was Slavka's birthday party.

It was terribly hot that July day, perhaps the hottest day of the year. Slavka lives in a ten-square-meter room in a barrack, a single-story wooden building off the beaten track behind Grishka's and Vovka's buildings and right next to the river. Or rather, right next to the creek that separates Ivanovka and Saltovka and has long since been reduced to a trickle, so that only rushes and swampy pools with clouds of mosquitoes flying over them mark the place where the creek used to be. Eddie-baby knows why Slavka lives in a barrack – his mother and father were convicted of economic crimes and sent away, and so he has to live with his grandfather. Usually old people or people unable to fend for themselves live in barracks. The young people, one after another, obtain apartments or rooms in the new buildings. There are very few barracks, and their number is growing steadily smaller. Until he met Slavka, Eddie had never been in one.

Maybe if it hadn't been for Gorkun, they wouldn't have gotten so drunk, even considering the heat and the ten bottles of stolen vodka that Vovka and Eddie-baby brought with them to Slavka's birthday party. Gorkun is an old guy – he's already over thirty, with half that time spent in Kolyma. Gorkun got three sentences of five years each, and he served them all in Kolyma. Three sentences is like being a Hero of the Soviet Union three times over, and all the kids and the grown-up thieves too had a lot of respect for Gorkun, who had just been released from his last sentence. Yet after Slavka's birthday party in the barrack and the events that followed it, Eddie-baby came to realize that although he isn't a bad sort, Gorkun is done for, destroyed, and that neither Eddie nor Kostya, both of whom dream of becoming criminal heroes, would ever want to lead the kind of life that Viktor Gorkun has led. Although it may well be that Gorkun did save Eddie-baby's life, just as he claims.

It may also be that they got drunk because there were so many snacks. Actually, Eddie-baby doesn't remember very well now whether there were a lot of snacks or not. All he remembers is that it was as hot as a steam bath in the hut, since neither the erratically operating fan nor the transom windows helped. The boys and girls drank warm vodka and followed it with food that was no less disgustingly warm. Slavka's guests sat on two beds, Slavka's and his grandfather's, with a table in between them. When it started to get dark, Gorkun suggested going over to his place for a drink.

It turned out that Gorkun's mother lived in the same building as Tomka Gurgelevich. To say that Gorkun himself lived in the same building as Tomka would be wrong, since Gorkun had for all practical purposes lived in Kolyma and had never been free for more than a few months at a time. They brought the remaining vodka to Gorkun's, and the five of them – Gorkun, Eddie, Vovka Dneprovsky, Slavka, and another of Vovka's friends, Ivan, whose father works as a digger at the cemetery – drank several more bottles and snacked on suet. Gorkun used an old hunting knife with a bronze guard and a colored plastic decorative handle to cut the suet. It was with that knife that the drunken Eddie stabbed a member of the militia auxiliary several hours later.

After drinking the vodka, they decided as a group to have some fun together by going to the dances at Krasnozavodsk Park. Krasnozavodsk Park isn't their territory; it belongs to distant Plekhanovka, and you can "find yourself up to your ass in adventures" there, as the stern Kostya Bondarenko expresses it – you can, in other words, easily get into a fight. It would be going too far, however, to say that they all set off for Krasnozavodsk Park with the clear intention of getting into a fight; no, it was more that they wanted to have some fun after all they'd had to drink, and that they were excited as well by the presence of the hardened professional criminal and gangster Gorkun.

The hardened criminal was much drunker than the rest of them – in addition to a wide assortment of other diseases contracted in Kolyma, Gorkun had a stomach ulcer – and so he didn't even notice when Eddie-baby put his hunting knife in his own back pocket in order to compensate for the absence of his usual straight razor. Eddie-baby never went beyond the territory of the Saltov district without a weapon, and there wasn't time to stop by home, although his building was fifty meters from Gorkun's apartment and could even be seen from his window. That's how Gorkun's knife rather than Eddie-baby's own razor happened to get mixed up in the business.

It was a simple story, as simple as life itself in Saltovka, Tyurenka, or Plekhanovka. Such stories usually landed the kids from Saltovka, Tyurenka, Plekhanovka, or Zhuravlyovka in jail or reform school or a prison camp. Gorkun liked the big redhead standing with her girlfriends and some guys in a secluded corner of the dancing area. To his indescribable astonishment, however, she boldly and provocatively refused to dance with him, and the kids around her even permitted themselves to smile as they gazed at the very drunk and nearly bald Gorkun. Gorkun had brought the baldness back from Kolyma along with his stomach ulcer.

It was then that Eddie-baby appeared on the scene, dressed in a white shirt unbuttoned over his chest and armed with Gorkun's hunting knife. It is no easy matter now to establish the details of what took place, but in all probability Eddie-baby was offended on behalf of his older comrade, who was not good enough for the redheaded girl and her friends. Most likely, Eddie-baby also took the redheaded girl's refusal to dance with Gorkun as a personal insult.

Not wasting any time, Eddie-baby walked up to the girl with the mechanical stride of a maniac and took the knife out of his pocket. According to evidence later provided by Slavka, who was the least drunk of them, Eddie-baby didn't seem drunk; on the contrary, he was very calm and precise in his movements. Pulling out the hunting knife, he stuck it against one of the redheaded girl's breasts and pressed lightly. The redheaded girl was standing by the railing of the dance area, and she moved back against it, trying to avoid the knife point, but the implacable Eddie followed her to the railing, grabbed her by the belt of her dress – the redheaded girl was wearing a plastic belt – once more placed the point of the knife under her left breast (which was opposite his right hand), and pressed. The girls who go to the dances at Krasnozavodsk Park all have big breasts. Looking the girl in the eye, Eddie-baby said, "I'll count to three. If by three you don't start dancing with my friend…"

Looking back into the dull green and absolutely wild eyes of the minor, the grown-up girl (she was twenty-five) realized it would be best not to wait until three.

"I'm going, I'm going," she said. And she went. And soon afterward she was dancing with Gorkun.

Eddie-baby stood contentedly by and watched his handiwork. Maybe he was thinking that Gorkun and the girl would make a nice couple. Who knows? Nobody asked him what he was thinking. The kids who had been with the girl up to that point disappeared somewhere, and everybody who witnessed the scene decided for one reason or another not to interfere. Experienced people know that there's nothing worse than a drunken minor with a hunting knife who's no longer conscious of what he's doing. There's no worse adversary.

It was only at the exit, after everybody in the dancing area had left (it closed at twelve), that Eddie-baby and his friends ran into the friends of the redheaded girl and a force of militia auxiliaries. Eddie was the only one of their drunken company who had a weapon. Or maybe the others did have weapons, but Eddie didn't know about it. And so he pulled out the knife and rushed forward. His four companions ran after him with a loud cry – nobody wanted to spend the night in a cell at the local militia station.

Krasnozavodsk Park is a real park, thickly overgrown with bushes and trees and intersected here and there by small ravines and gullies, so that Eddie-baby and his friends managed to get away without too much difficulty. It seemed to Eddie that he had caught one of the militia auxiliaries with the knife – he had heard a cry of pain, and he remembered lunging – but it no longer made any difference since they had escaped.

Or they would have, if it hadn't been for that asshole Slavka. Ivan and Vovka Dneprovsky parted with the others at the park fence and took off on their own, while Eddie, Gorkun, and Slavka, still drunk, climbed over the fence, intending to go off in another direction. Just beyond the fence, however, the fool Slavka for some reason struck his heavily booted foot against one of the struts holding up a wooden signboard with the painted entreaty "Let's Make Our Park the Greenest in the City! Don't Litter!" As a result, the signboard fell over with a crack, whereupon two previously invisible figures in militia uniforms stepped away from the fence and arrested Eddie-baby and Gorkun. The incredibly unfair part was that the culprit – Slavka – got away by climbing back over the fence into the park and running for it.

When they had been brought to the Krasnozavodsk district militia substation and were being taken out of the car, Eddie-baby at once realized, drunk as he was, how extremely unlucky he had been. They were met by the very same faces of the very same militia auxiliaries they had succeeded in getting past only half an hour before. Except that one of the auxiliaries was missing.

Eddie-baby broke free and ran for it. Both the militia and the auxiliaries took off after him. Eddie-baby didn't get very far – an unfortunate consequence of being very drunk. They knocked him down without too much trouble, kicked him several times with their boots, picked him up, dragged him back to the substation, and then realized that he was the same minor who had stuck a hunting knife into their comrade, their comrade who had been taken away in an ambulance and about whom the doctors had said that the wound wasn't dangerous, that he "would live," even though his lung was punctured. When they realized who Eddie was, they started to beat him in earnest, seriously and methodically, obviously intent on beating him to death. Just as they had done to other people on other occasions. It was Eddie-baby's very bad luck to fall into their clutches only half an hour after the business with the knife.

After several good blows, Eddie-baby fell down on the flagstone substation floor, where the only thing he could do was to cover his head with his arms to protect it and hope for the best. If Eddie-baby had believed in God, he probably would have prayed, but the only place God could be found in Saltovka, in Tyurenka, or in Krasnozavodsk Park and its environs was in the heads of addle-brained old women. Neither the militia nor Eddie-baby and his friends needed God in their lives or in the exercise of their uncomplicated mutual hostilities. "The main thing is to keep them from hitting my head," Eddie-baby thought while lying on the stone floor and taking the blows from the heavy militia boots. With that thought about his precious head he lost consciousness.