Memoir of a Russian Punk

6

By the time he's finished with his trousers, Eddie-baby has a plan. His best bet is to borrow some money from Borka Churilov, his new friend from wrestling. The very first evening Eddie went, Arseny, their coach, paired him with the experienced Boris to be torn apart, and Borka tossed Eddie's body around to his heart's content, a body unaccustomed to physical humiliation. The kids standing around at the edge of the ring laughed, and Eddie-baby, getting up from the mat, threw himself at Boris again and again in a helpless rage while the latter easily caught him by the arm or leg, using a surprising new technique to hurl him deftly back to the mat.

Eddie never thought he would survive the humiliation. And he was enraged at the coach for having pitted him, a rank beginner who had come to practice for the first time, against Boris, who was five years older and who had a second-class rating at a time when Eddie was still a long way even from a third-class rating.

Eddie would never have returned to that world of leather mats permeated with the odor of masculine sweat, to that world of athletes in colored wrestling tights, had it not been for Boris. Coming up to Eddie at the entrance to the Construction Workers'

House of Culture after practice, the short-haired, skinny Borka spoke to him in a friendly tone that contrasted sharply with the ruthless person who had virtually broken Eddie's neck with his iron holds.

"Your name's Ed?" he asked.

"Yes," Eddie-baby morosely confirmed.

"Don't be upset, Ed," Boris said. "Our Arseny has his own methods. He always pairs beginners with experienced wrestlers, and if the beginner comes to the next practice session, that proves he's strong-willed and can be a good wrestler. The majority of kids don't turn up for the next practice. But you'll come, of course?"

Eddie-baby had already decided that he would never again go to wrestling at the Construction Workers' House of Culture, would never again permit himself to be humiliated like that, but he was ashamed to let this foundry worker down and came anyway. And he wasn't sorry he did, because at the next practice Arseny first showed the beginners several easy tricks and then divided them all up into pairs to wrestle with other beginners. It was in a skirmish with the Tyurenka hoodlum Vitka Efimenko that Eddie-baby enjoyed his first wrestling victory. Eddie proved to be very tenacious, as the coach expressed it, and he got the win.

Borka Churilov's a strange guy. There aren't any others like him in Saltovka. Or in Tyurenka either. Borka's sister lives in Zhuravlyovka, but Borka and his old mother live in Saltovka.

Why is he strange? Because you can't categorize him. Borka is certainly not a punk, and although he's already worked for several years in the foundry at the Hammer and Sickle Factory, you still wouldn't call him a normal proletarian. Would a normal proletarian spend his whole salary on books? It's going pretty far if they have a couple in their homes, whereas Borka's room, which is long and narrow like a trolley, is crammed with them. Soon it will be impossible to find the lean Borka and his mocking and no less lean old mother behind all their books.

Why else is Borka strange? Well, unlike all the other kids, he doesn't drink. Although Eddie-baby does, he respects Borka for not drinking. He doesn't want to drink, and so he doesn't, and who says he has to anyway?

Borka has no father. Eddie-baby doesn't know whether Borka's father was killed at the front or whether something else happened to him, since Borka doesn't talk about him, which is his business. The only thing Eddie does know about Borka Churilov's father is that he was a worker like his son.

Borka's mother believes in God. But she is unlike the other believers Eddie-baby has run into in his life, in that her faith is a cheerful one. She keeps a picture of God called an icon in the sunniest corner of their trolley-shaped room. Sometimes an anti-religion agitator visits Borka's mother to try to talk her into taking the icon down, but she just laughs. Borka, however, though he himself doesn't believe in God, gets very mad at the agitator for bothering his mother and has even promised to kick the agitator downstairs if he doesn't stop coming to see her while Borka is away.

Borka says he's a worker by birth and has had enough of the agitator. Borka loves his mocking old mother very much, and they get along very well, although the Saltovka gossips think that Borka and his mother aren't normal, that maybe they're sectarians. The gossips say it isn't normal for a grown-up fellow like Borka to live with an old woman like his mother and not drink, smoke, swear, go to dances, or take an interest in girls. Therefore he must be a sectarian.

"Idiots!" Eddie thinks. If somebody's different from the rest of Saltovka society, from all these Auntie Marusyas and Uncle Sashas, then he's immediately declared a madman or a sectarian. But Eddie knows that Borka's not a sectarian – he's a yogi; he has no stomach at all, and he can pull his stomach back to his spine. Borka is a yogi, and Eddie has read about yogis.