Memoir of a Russian Punk

4

Today Eddie-baby gets up from his cot and stealthily opens the door to the other room. Despite his best efforts, the door creaks. With an annoyed expression on his face, Eddie enters the room, trying to walk sideways. His mother isn't there, thank God. The alarm clock standing on the white lace cloth on top of the television shows eleven, which is hardly surprising, since Eddie-baby slept pretty soundly after dragging himself through the mud of Saltovka in order to cover his tracks. In all probability, his mother is either in the kitchen or has gone to get something from the Auntie Marusyas, inasmuch as the three women are continually scurrying back and forth between the first and second floors. Although she doesn't work, Raisa Fyodorovna still gets up early.

Eddie-baby carefully goes out of the room into the hallway and listens. No, it's quiet in the kitchen, not a sound. No longer cautious now, he goes to the toilet, pees, and only then goes into the kitchen and washes himself over the sink. Right there in the kitchen, he takes off his pants and washes out the stain, which is already beginning to dry. If he doesn't wash it out, as Eddie knows from experience, a white spot will remain on the black velveteen Polish trousers. The Polish trousers have been torn here and there and sewn back together by Eddie-baby himself, but he stubbornly continues to wear them, since Asya once told him that when he has his black Polish trousers and a white shirt on, he looks a lot like the recently deceased American actor James Dean, whose picture she showed him in a book of photographs. And there really is a lot of resemblance between them, although the actor was older. Eddie-baby's hair is a little shorter than James's was, but otherwise the similarity is striking. James Dean was a great guy; it's too bad he was killed. He smashed himself up in a sports car. Eddie-baby asked Asya what movies James was in, but she regretfully told him that his movies aren't shown in the Soviet Union – Khrushchev didn't buy any. Although he did buy a lot of American movies, he didn't buy any with James Dean.

Eddie-baby cleans his trousers and thinks that while it may be true that Khrushchev looks like a pig, life is still more fun with him around. At least with Khrushchev the country isn't so bored. As far as the Saltovka kids are concerned, one of Nikitka's more important services isn't the corn he introduced but the fact that he bought foreign films that are entertaining and out of the ordinary. The Saltovka punks don't care about Soviet films. "Which is understandable," Eddie thinks. "Nobody shows them films about real voyages and adventures." All the Soviet films, if they show young people at all, show the kind you see in posters – fucked-up types cheerfully working in plants and factories fulfilling and overfulfilling the five-year plan. The Saltovka and Tyurenka and even Zhuravlyovka kids know from their own lives that working in plants and factories is boring, that the only reason anybody works in them is to make money, and that any normal person, if he could, either wouldn't work at all or would steal or like Red Sanya would get a job as a butcher where he could earn even more money and always bring home the best meat.

"And it's even better," Eddie thinks, "to be an Azerbaijani or a Georgian. They have plenty of money. And why is that?" Eddie goes on. "What's the reason? Russians and Ukrainians don't have any money, whereas Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and Armenians do. The reason is that their land is richer, and if they come to Kharkov with a boxcar full of tangerines, which grow where they live, they always return from Kharkov with several suitcases of money."

Eddie-baby remembers the words of Slavka the Gypsy: "…Our ancestors had the souls of slaves, so instead of bravely conquering warm lands for themselves around the Mediterranean where lemons grow, they fled like cowards to this fucking snow!"

"That's bullshit," Eddie thinks. "Slavka's wrong." He, Eddie, has an excellent knowledge of history – it's no coincidence that the Mop likes him – and the Georgians and the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, who are the same as Turks, were never braver than the Russians. "After all, we're the ones who conquered them," Eddie-baby thinks, "and not the other way around. But why has it turned out that they, the conquered ones, live a lot better than we do, the ones who conquered them? Maybe the Georgians live as well as they do because Stalin was a Georgian," Eddie thinks. "But how come the Azerbaijanis and Armenians are better off than the Russians and a hundred times better off than the kids from Saltovka? It doesn't make any sense…"