Memoir of a Russian Punk

1

Eddie-baby is sitting without any clothes on in the huge, white, naked lap of crazy Tonka, feeling her powerful thighs pressing up against his buttocks. One of Tonka's hands is holding Eddie-baby's stomach (he feels an embarrassed burning in it), and her other hand, which is not so much white as bluish (even when it's very cold Tonka goes around the district without any gloves on), is slowly moving in the direction of Eddie-baby's penis. Eddie-baby remains motionless, anticipating what will happen next, and his penis, engorged and erect, trembling and shy, waits for the touch of Tonka's hand.

At the very instant when crazy Tonka's rough palm at last takes hold of him and hot white fluid spurts out of his penis in a high arc in response to the warmth of her hand, Eddie-baby wakes up.

He lies still for a moment, trying to separate reality from what he has just dreamed, and then he realizes that he is lying in his sleeping bag on his own balcony, now bathed in dull November sunlight, and sighs in relief. He puts his hand under the blanket, rummages there, touches a wet spot with his palm, and satisfied with that, takes his hand away. He was quite startled the first time he came in his sleep, but now he's used to it.

He started dreaming about Tonka last summer, and whenever he meets her on the streets of the district or at home – his mother is well disposed toward her and feeds her – Eddie-baby is quite abashed by the fifty-year-old, gray-haired crazy woman. Antonina Sergeevna Chernov, a former lieutenant colonel in the tank forces, sustained a severe concussion at the very end of the war, and ever since she has been notorious for her extraordinarily eccentric behavior verging on insanity. She tells people the truth to their faces regardless of who they are, and she drinks, an exclusively male activity according to the code observed in Saltovka. You often see her at the beer stand, where needless to say she gets her beer without waiting in line, brazenly pushing the men aside and paying no attention at all to their indignant shouts. What is still more shocking to the residents of Saltovka, however, is the fact that Tonka never stands in line for butter* the food item that is for some reason in shortest supply. She walks in with all her medals and decorations pinned to her blouse, including two Red Stars and two Red Banners (since Antonina Sergeevna served with valor), or if it's winter pinned to her coat, and takes whatever quantity of butter she needs. And she needs a lot, since she buys not only for herself but naturally also for Raisa Fyodorovna, who hates to stand in line, and for several other friends as well. When the militia officer watching the line tries to stop her, Tonka, her hair flying out from under her kerchief, screams in his face that it was in fact for the sake of dogs like him that she lost her health at the front during the Great Patriotic War while he sat it out in the rear, and that if he doesn't instantly let go of her sleeve, she'll complain to General of the Army Yepishev, commandant of the Central Political Administration of the Soviet Army and her best friend. If the situation gets serious, however, crazy Tonka doesn't wait for the help of the General of the Army but happily resorts to her own large tank commander's fists and to the exceptional strength of her robust Russian womanhood.

The men of Saltovka have beaten up crazy Tonka several times, once for the fact that she pinched somebody's baby too hard. Tonka, for reasons nobody understands, doesn't like babies. Eddie-baby happened to witness the final scene of one of these skirmishes, when the bloodied but still unvanquished Tonka, her blouse torn at her breast, threw stones at a scattered group of men standing not far away from her. "You whores, you filthy buggers!" Tonka snarled. "You deserters! If I had run into you at the front, I would have put all of you up against a wall!" As he watched her, the melancholy thought occurred to Eddie-baby that if Tonka had known anything about the Furies, she would have been amazed at how closely she resembled them. Out of Tonka's torn blouse had tumbled a large white breast with a big rubbery nipple.

Eddie-baby has never forgotten that mighty breast, and it may be that the memory of it is what lies behind all the terrible dreams Eddie-baby's had in which he and Tonka do disgusting things to each other, and after their often gymnastically complicated frolicking, usually end up fucking. Tonka pursues Eddie-baby in the daytime too: all he has to do is close his eyes somewhere in the sunshine – at the beach, say, where he goes starting in early spring and ending in late fall – and at once the tormentor Tonka appears before him, naked and shaking her gray mane of hair, in order to torture him.

Eddie-baby is embarrassed now even to look Tonka in the face when she comes to visit them. In real life Tonka and Raisa Fyodorovna have become something like friends, although Eddie's mother maintains that Tonka is secretly infatuated with Veniamin Ivanovich. And really, in spite of her normally coarse and insolent way with men, Tonka is quite shy and timid whenever she catches Eddie's father's eye. It's funny to see how Tonka, that big battle-ax, suddenly becomes very polite, stammers, drops her gaze, and picks at the fringe of their green silk tablecloth with her huge hands. Tonka is a lot taller than Veniamin Ivanovich, who looks like an elegant boy dressed up in a military uniform next to her – especially since he's also about ten years younger than she is.

Eddie's mother says that most likely Veniamin Ivanovich reminds Tonka of her fiance, who died a long time ago during the Spanish civil war. His mother also maintains that Tonka isn't as crazy as the Saltovka residents think – that even though her concussion was certainly a serious one and she is sometimes ravaged by headaches she takes special injections to relieve, it's also to Tonka's advantage to seem crazy, since it makes life easier for her.

"Antonina Sergeevna is an intelligent woman," Eddie's mother's declares, "and a real combat officer, unlike a lot of these other invalid-clowns, such as Efim from Tyurenka, who had his leg cut off by a trolley before the war when he was drunk and now drives around in his own specially adapted car all decked out in secondhand medals he bought somewhere, pretending to be a hero." Antonina Sergeevna just isn't like anyone else, which is why everybody in Saltovka thinks she's crazy. Who else in their right mind would abuse Khrushchev in the presence of a militia officer? Antonina Sergeevna and Eddie's father, like many other military people, dislike Khrushchev for cutting their pensions. She lives alone on what she receives as a retired lieutenant colonel, since all her relatives perished in the war, which may in fact be the reason why she fought so valiantly – she was taking revenge on the Germans for her own family.