Memoir of a Russian Punk

29

Eddie casts a sidelong glance at the door of the Auntie Marusyas – apparently they're dancing – and then resolutely goes on up to the second (and top) floor and opens his own door.

It's quiet in Apartment No.6. The drunk-tank major Shepotko disappeared from the apartment a week before the holidays started, and their other neighbors, Lidka and Uncle Kolya, took their newborn baby to see relatives.

Eddie-baby goes into the kitchen and finds the food his mother has left for him under a clean towel – his favorite macaroni with meat patties already placed in the frying pan with a pat of butter. "My mother really is a decent person," Eddie suddenly decides, even though he called her a fool and a prostitute during a terrible argument that morning.

Eddie-baby puts the frying pan on the gas range – a recent innovation. The Saltov district was connected to a gas line about two years ago. Until then, part of the kitchen had been occupied by a coal-burning stove. They all used to bake pies in the stove's oven then, but with the arrival of gas, Eddie-baby's mother has been baking pies less and less often.

While eating his macaroni with meat patties, something he could eat three times a day without getting sick of it, Eddie reflects on how he and his mother never used to swear at each other. Or at least he never called his mother names the way he did today: "Fool! Prostitute!" Eddie-baby is ashamed that he didn't restrain himself. At the same time, however, he understands perfectly well that his mother is just as responsible as he is for the fact that they have such a terrible relationship. Ever since he started the eighth year, Eddie-baby has considered himself an adult and has wanted other people to treat him as one, but his mother still tries to tell him what to do.

What's unfair is that his mother basically doesn't care how Eddie-baby is – whether he's happy or sad – or what he's thinking about. His mother quarrels savagely with him over trifles, over things like whether he's going to wear pants that are twenty-two instead of eighteen centimeters wide, or the way he parts his hair, or his yellow jacket. It used to be that the only thing she got nervous about was how long his hair was. Eddie's new classroom teacher, Yakov Lvovich (Rachel finally got so decrepit she had to retire), has managed to create the firm impression in Eddie-baby's mother that nothing good will ever come of him.

"Your son will grow up to be a criminal and a parasite," Yakov Lvovich announced to Eddie's mother at their first parent-teacher conference. And his mother, rather than taking Eddie's side in the matter, took Yakov Lvovich's.

In Eddie-baby's opinion, nothing good has come of Yakov Lvovich himself. He's a swine and a bastard. Taking advantage of the fact that he's unusually big – more than 1.8 meters tall – the classroom teacher beats his pupils. He calls them into his physics office – the fascist teaches physics – and beats them there where there aren't any witnesses, and the kids come out with bruised noses and lips. The fascist thinks that by using this severe method he's teaching the punks a lesson in behavior, although what he's actually doing is beating up people who won't fight back. The majority of the punks leave school for the streets or the factories after the seventh year. There aren't any real punks left in their class. You can't actually call Sashka Tishchenko or Valka Lyashenko punks. Even though they sometimes act like it and live in Tyurenka, they're really pretty easygoing kids. In Eddie-baby's opinion, it isn't fair to beat them just because they're lazy or lack ability.

But Yakov Lvovich has never once laid a finger on Eddie. He knows which ones he can beat and which ones he can't. He doesn't hit Sashka Lyakhovich either. Or Vitka Proutorov, although that's because Vitka has a weak heart.

The first reason why Yakov Lvovich doesn't hit Eddie is because of his father. The quiet Veniamin Ivanovich is still in harness with the MVD, and even though Eddie is sure that it would be hard to find a more innocuous person than his father, the magical letters MVD have their effect on the physics teacher Yakov Lvovich Kaprov.

The second reason is because of Eddie himself. The first time the new classroom teacher beat up one of the kids – Vitka Vodolazhsky, a harmless village fellow who is impatiently sitting through the eighth year with his twin sister so he can transfer to a technical high school – Eddie-baby swore to a group standing around in the toilet while Vitka wiped the blood from his face that if "Yasha" ever touched him, he'd cut the physics teacher with his razor. You can't let other people insult you, not even once – so he had been taught by Sanya, and all the punks in Saltovka live by that unwritten law. And Eddie-baby tries to live by it too.

Maybe the kids didn't believe his oath, but Yasha did – there are informers everywhere, and somebody reported it to him. He believed it because there had been cases like that in the past, especially in recent years, both at their school and at the neighboring ones. In 1956 somebody stabbed the bald gym teacher Lyova in the side during the school New Year's party.

Still another reason why Yasha is afraid to touch Eddie is Red Sanya. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Sanya looks out for Eddie-baby, and that Sanya can count on the weight lifters and on all of Tyurenka, and when necessary, on the savage blackasses from the Horse Market. Anybody who touches Eddie-baby is in trouble. Which is why nightmares like Eddie-baby's fight with Yurka Obeyuk don't happen anymore. For a while they continued to torment Eddie-baby in his sleep, but they don't now. Yurka himself went back to Krasnoyarsk with his family, and Eddie-baby never got to take the revenge he used to dream about. Actually, Eddie-baby didn't dream about it for very long – just for the first six months after the fight. The fight was his own fault, after all, since in poring over his books he had forgotten that he was a man and that a man has to be able to take care of himself. And what did that have to do with Yurka Obeyuk?

Eddie finishes up the macaroni and in his thoughts returns once again to the argument with his mother. Eddie-baby wonders why she's always on the side of his enemies. She always is. Other mothers stand up for their children. But not Raisa Fyodorovna. As far as she's concerned, it's always Eddie-baby's fault. Clearly taking revenge on Eddie-baby for his promise to cut him, Yasha always gives him a C in physics, although Eddie, realizing that Yasha finds fault with everything he does, learns his physics lessons by heart, despite the fact that it isn't his favorite subject. Another student would receive an A or maybe a B for the same answer, but Yasha gives Eddie a C. His mother doesn't understand; she thinks it's because Eddie isn't studying physics the right way.

"Injustice!" Eddie-baby once wrote on the classroom blackboard. This was meant as a comprehensive explanation of the way the world is. Raisa Fyodorovna wants to raise her son to be a "good person," as she puts it, and so, although by no means stingy, she thinks that it's harmful to give a fifteen-year-old child money to cover his out-of-pocket expenses. As a result, that fifteen-year-old is always going around the district looking for money and is forced to steal. "What a fool she is!" Eddie-baby thinks bitterly. His mother believes that if she doesn't give him any money to buy a bottle of biomitsin to drink with his friends, he'll settle down and obediently go without both the biomitsin and the friends. She doesn't know her son and that his character is too strong for that. She has no idea that Eddie has been stealing for a long time now, and that he and Kostya have started breaking into stores and even private apartments.

And his mother makes fun of his poems too. Asya doesn't make fun of them, Kadik doesn't make fun of them, and Captain Zilberman doesn't make fun of them! Zilberman even says that Eddie is talented, that if he were smart, he would stop hanging around with the punks, finish school with top marks, and go to the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. Raisa Fyodorovna, however, maintains that Eddie-baby's poems are gibberish and sound just like the poets he's been reading. He read Blok and they sounded like Blok; he read Bryusov and immediately started writing poems that sounded like Bryusov; he read Esenin and he wrote poems like Esenin's…

Eddie thinks that if his mother and father had given him just a little money, he wouldn't have started stealing. Or would he have started anyway? He isn't sure. He really doesn't know. Probably he would have anyway, since, like Kostya, he steals not so much for the money as because he wants to become a real criminal. Although he needs the money too.

Kostya claims that in the USSR only the pickpockets have kept themselves together as a more or less organized force. Several times he has pointed out to Eddie the leaders of the pickpockets on Plekhanov Street and at the Horse Market – the so-called pakhany. But real organized crime has been completely stamped out, according to Kostya. Kostya dreams of a revival of organized crime. Their gang is just a first small step on the road to the network of armed gangs that Kostya, and Eddie-baby along with him, will create in the future.

Eddie-baby is sick of his parents and sick of Apartment No.6 and of the fat-assed, fat-bellied Major Shepotko, who always stinks the place up with his foul cigarettes and his sitting on the toilet by the hour. Eddie wants to leave his parents as soon as he can. Not the way he ran away last time, but quietly. He has four months left before he turns sixteen and gets his own internal passport. Then it's goodbye to Apartment No.6. "Grown-up children should live separately from their parents," Asya once told him. And she's absolutely right. She too dreams of living by herself, even though she has her own room and completely different parents. Eddie-baby would trade parents with her any day.