Memoir of a Russian Punk

26

Eddie thinks there's no goddamn way you'll ever get that million out of Bokarev's head.

Bokarev used to have a completely different idea for getting rich. He dreamed of organizing a vast network for the production and sale of exam cribs, each no bigger than a small photograph. The cribs were supposed to earn Bokarev a million rubles.

Cribs of that kind had existed long before Bokarev ever thought of them. Eddie-baby himself had seen photographic cribs for math with the tiny symbols of the basic mathematical formulas thickly covering their whole surface. You could buy cribs like that for whatever subject you wanted.

Bokarev, however, intended to carry out the manufacture and sale of cribs on an industrial scale. He dreamed of a huge staff of photographers who would flood the entire country with millions of photocribs, from Liepaja in the west to Vladivostok in the east, from the Arctic Circle in the north to the city of Kushka in the south. Inspiration shone in Bokarev's eyes whenever he spoke of his idea. Thousands of minors organized in disciplined commercial teams would sell his photocribs in the vicinity of every school, university, and technical institute in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That ethnically diverse horde of photographers and minors would in the course of a year fill Bokarev's pockets with millions of rubles.

The plan turned out to be less simple in practice than in Bokarev's inspired calculations. Having barely begun to organize his empire, Bokarev ran up against a number of insoluble difficulties, of which the main one was that the projected number of students and schoolchildren weren't interested in buying his cribs. Some of them didn't believe in cribs at all, while others were inclined to make their own – not photographic, of course, but cribs nonetheless. Everything was as smooth as could be on paper – expenditures, the number of students and schoolchildren in the USSR, income, a price per crib of ten rubles, which would obtain you all the knowledge in a given subject area. The problem was that only a few wanted to obtain it.

Now Bokarev has a new idea. He's already been working on his "system" for six months. He goes to the track every day and writes down his data – which horse comes in first in which race. He then diligently organizes the data, furrows appearing on his Socratic brow. Bokarev really does have an unusually impressive forehead, and it really does remind you of the forehead of Socrates. The only thing Eddie-baby isn't so sure of is that such capacious crania and superbly protuberant thinker's foreheads invariably contain all they're supposed to.

Bokarev works tirelessly on his system and maintains that it will soon be perfected. Then he will make his million. Why exactly a million Bokarev himself has no idea. Obviously he's impressed by the six whole zeroes that follow the one.

Until that day comes, however, Bokarev continues to attend his polytechnical institute as a fourth-year student and to go around in terribly worn-out shoes, saving all his money – his miserable stipend – to cover his track expenses and buy racing forms and even trolley tickets, since the track is a good distance away.

The gang on the benches under the lindens accepts Bokarev out of the purest kind of provincial snobbery – whatever he is, however ragged he is, he's still a student. Both Cat and Lyova, not to mention Sanya, make about ten times as much money at their factories as Bokarev gets on his stipend, and they steal as well.

Another reason why the kids permit Bokarev to spend whole evenings with them is that he likes to shoot the breeze and knows how to do it. He can talk about anything, an art in which he has only one rival – Slavka the Gypsy. The Gypsy's chatter, however, is adorned with a kind of dreamy romanticism that always has a geographical flavor to it, whereas Bokarev's talk gives off a mathematically romantic aura. Bokarev's hobby is organization, calculations, estimates, and drafts, and his talk is more contemporary than that of the other Slavka – or so it seems to Eddie-baby. And although Eddie, like the other kids, doesn't believe that Bokarev will ever make a million rubles and laughs at his idiotic ideas, he still has his doubts sometimes – what if he does?

It's also indisputable that even though Bokarev is now glad of every scrap he can manage to eat for free, and lives with his grandfather and grandmother in a twelve-meter room, in a little more than a year he will already be an engineer. And the other kids won't.

Eddie-baby, like the other kids, doesn't want to be an engineer, although, as his mother and father and his neighbors and everybody else who knows him admit, he has a good mind. He doesn't want to be an engineer, and he has no desire whatever to undertake the boring study of mathematics, physics, the tensile strength of materials, and other "hard" sciences for five years. Eddie-baby hates mathematics. What he likes are dates.

Although Eddie no longer writes anything down in his notebooks, he still has an enthusiastic affection for history, and whenever the history teacher, a large redheaded woman whose nickname is the "Mop," wants to unburden her soul of the bleating and braying of the normal pupils, she turns to Eddie, and without even asking him to come to the board, simply starts a discussion with him, say about the eleventh century in Europe.

"What happened in the eleventh century, Savenko?" the Mop asks, bearing down on the e in Eddie's last name, and the whole class sighs in relief.

It's clear to them now that nobody will be called to the board, since the Mop and Eddie, each hastening to interrupt the other, will be delightedly shouting till the end of the period about European events in the obscure eleventh century, which not even university students in history are expected to know very much about. The only A in Eddie's record is in history, although the Mop never formally calls him to the board – in the same way, probably, that mathematics prodigies aren't bothered with ordinary arithmetic problems. Eddie-baby is a history prodigy. "He could easily teach history in school right now," the Mop says.