Memoir of a Russian Punk

28

Eddie-baby enters his building. Coming from the doorway of the apartment of the Auntie Marusyas are laughter and music. Obviously his mother is still there. There are three rooms in the apartment, with a different family in each one. In one of the rooms live Auntie Marusya Chepiga, her husband, the electrician Uncle Sasha, who has lately been drinking more and more, and their son, Vitka. In another, somewhat larger room live Auntie Marusya Vulokh, her husband, Uncle Vanya, very good-looking and a womanizer, their son, Valerka, and their daughter, Raya, who was named after Eddie-baby's mother. Living in the apartment's third room, which is directly below the room where Eddie and his family live, are the Perevorachaevs, including old Perevorachaev himself, an unsociable and taciturn man who is a stovemaker by trade and slow-witted even by the standards of Saltovka, his wife, a cleaning woman nicknamed "Blackie," whose real name Eddie-baby doesn't know, even though the Perevorachaevs have been living in their building ever since it was first built, and their three children, the grown-up whore Lyubka, the humpbacked Tolik, and "Baby" Nadka. Nadka is ten years old now and already has quite noticeable breasts, but her family still calls her Baby Nadka just as they did five years ago. When the dim Nadka was a toddler, she served Eddie-baby as a model for the study of female anatomy. The lesson took place in the basement of their building, to which Eddie-baby lured her with the aid of some chocolate candy.

The Perevorachaevs aren't home today, except for the lonely hunchback Tolik, who at this minute is probably lying on a soldier's blanket reading a book, his ears plugged with cotton wadding. The other Perevorachaevs have all gone to the country, since many of the residents of Saltovka still have links to the villages beyond the city.

Uncle Sasha Chepiga's grandfather and grandmother live in a village called Old Saltov. It's a good distance away – several hours by truck. To get to Old Saltov, you take the Saltov Highway, or the Saltov Highroad, as it used to be called.

Eddie-baby spent a summer, the summer after his escape to Brazil, in fact, with Uncle Sasha's grandfather and grandmother. There, in a shallow, swampy creek filled with green water, he learned to swim, and there, while he was lying on a bank of that creek with geese wandering nearby, Uncle Sasha Chepiga complimented him on his nose. Eddie-baby had complained to Uncle Sasha about his pug nose. By way of answer, Uncle Sasha had said that he would with pleasure, with the very greatest of pleasure, as he reiterated, exchange noses with Eddie-baby. Eddie-baby looked carefully at Uncle Sasha's nose and was instantly ashamed. In the first place, it was of a permanently reddish color, and in the second, its shape was reminiscent of an ugly, far from purebred potato – as if nature had been intending to produce three separate potato tubers but then had changed its mind and fashioned them all into one.

Eddie-baby ran away from Old Saltov too – on a day when he, Grandfather Chepiga, and Uncle Sasha, who was then on a two-week vacation, were tending cows in the forest and had some bad luck: two cows got separated from the herd. The forest near Old Saltov is no artificial strip of woodland but a real old-growth forest, dense and large. One might ask what kind of fool pastures his cows in a forest when there's a meadow for that. But the explanation for the behavior of the strange herdsmen who had suddenly chased their cattle into the forest was simple: the cows were the private property of the collective farmers, whereas the meadow belonged to the collective farm itself. The state permitted the collective farmers to have their own cows, but they had to pasture them wherever they could, only not in the meadow. Which is why they pastured them in the forest or on the railroad verge. They took turns pasturing everyone's cows, one household doing it one week, another taking over the next. That week it was Grandfather Chepiga's turn.

After the sun had gone down, Eddie-baby overheard Uncle Sasha and Grandfather Chepiga's conversation about how, as soon as they returned to the village, they would be killed by the owners of the lost cattle, and he decided he didn't want to be killed. Even so, Eddie-baby still believes that it was not cowardice that governed his actions when he stepped away from the campfire the three of them were sitting around and disappeared into the underbrush on the pretext of having to do a big job.

Eddie-baby walked through the already dark forest and calmly sang a tune he had made up himself. He had no supplies at all with him, just a herdsman's staff and Uncle Sasha's large knife, but he was rather glad that he didn't have even so much as a piece of bread with him: it would be an excellent opportunity to test his knowledge of which wild plants might be used for food.

It was August, and Eddie-baby had no doubt that he could easily live in the fields and forests until late fall at least, all the time moving steadily south. A thrilling picture of his future life in the forest presented itself… He immediately thought of attaching his knife to the staff by means of a vine so that it could be used as a spear to throw at small game.

Eddie-baby didn't last long in the forest, however. And it was not hunger that drove him out but loneliness. Eddie-baby's book knowledge in fact proved useful after all; he calmly lived on berries and the roots of plants of the temperate zone that had been identified in his books, only occasionally discovering for himself that one or another root was impossible to chew because of its almost eau-de-cologne-like taste. Eddie-baby had not been afraid of the dark even as an infant. But he couldn't tolerate the loneliness. That summer Eddie-baby discovered for the first time that he was a social animal.

He is ashamed around Uncle Sasha and Auntie Marusya to this day about the commotion he caused in Old Saltov. Actually, thanks to him, Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga became celebrities of a kind. Pointing to them, the village residents would say, "Theirs was the hut that the city kid ran off from."

Coming out of the forest onto the highway, which he had found long before, the city kid waved down a passing car, and within half an hour or so he was at the village store two houses away from the thatched hut where Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga lived. It turned out that the cows had been found the same evening, had come quietly out of the forest by themselves to rejoin the herd. The kid rejoined the human herd two days later.