Memoir of a Russian Punk

10

An hour after ironing his trousers and eating the potato salad, Eddie-baby is standing next to a dirty stream behind some sheds about a hundred meters from the headquarters of the Fifteenth Militia Precinct, talking about murder with Grishka Primak, who has just returned from reform school again (for the third time, in fact). Grishka doesn't have any money, and so all he can do for Eddie-baby is drink a bottle of biomitsin with him and talk.

Grishka's late grandfather was an aristocrat – a count, according to Grishka – and an old Bolshevik. On the wall of the room where Grishka lives with his deaf and dumb mother hangs a faded photograph of his grandfather embracing Lenin. If it weren't for that photograph, the desperate Grishka would long ago have been serving time not in reform school but in prison, and would very likely still be there.

Grishka is a remarkable person in his own way, although Eddie-baby condescendingly regards him as a degenerate. He's tall, angular, and dystrophically thin, and his small mug is abundantly covered with pimples. He smokes cheap White Sea Canal cigarettes and enthusiastically grabs girls by the ass. When engaged in conversation, he waves his arms, spits, and shouts, his voice passing through his large nose, which he blows into a huge handkerchief since he always has a cold.

Grishka sometimes hits his deaf and dumb mother when she starts pestering him to quit stealing and go to school. Grishka doesn't want to go to school; he already knows everything without it. Eddie-baby isn't so sure that Grishka knows everything, although he's read as many books as Eddie-baby himself has and maybe even more, only of a different kind – fiction – whereas Eddie has read specialized books.

Passing the bottle back and forth, Eddie-baby and Grishka take swigs from their fire extinguisher of biomitsin and talk about murder. Grishka has just announced to Eddie-baby that for a year now he has had the amusing desire to murder somebody. He wants to try it, see what it's like to kill somebody.

"They say, Ed, that a knife will go into the human body as easily as it will go through butter, unless you strike bone, that is," Grishka declares, and spits.

"They'll give you fifteen years if they convict you as a minor; otherwise they'll execute you," Eddie-baby observes impassively. "Either way you'll get it. They executed Shurik Bobrov, and they didn't even take into consideration the fact that he was drunk."

"Really?" Grishka asks in amazement. "He was such a quiet guy. When did that happen? Probably when I was in reform school." Grishka's face suddenly stretches in a grimace and he sneezes, although he doesn't just sneeze but deliberately draws out the first sounds – "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah…" – and then abruptly ends with the word "shit!"

Sneezing like that is Saltovka's own brand of chic. You can also end your sneeze with "bortion!" the way Red Sanya does: "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah… bortion!"

"It was last winter," Eddie-baby replies. "He stuck a sharpened file into a guy who insulted him at the dances, called him an asshole or something. He stabbed him in the washroom. Maybe they wouldn't have sentenced him to death, but the guy he killed turned out to be the secretary of the Communist Youth League at the Turbine Factory foundry. He'd been married only a little while and left two kids behind. The public demanded execution. It was bad luck for Shurik!" Eddie-baby observes, remembering Shurik's harmless little face, his little blond forelock, and the white shirt he always wore. He was a meticulous person. A metalworker.

"No," Grishka says, "I'm not such an asshole as to let myself get all worked up at those dances at the club. I'm a peaceful guy," he adds, and then grins broadly. "I slept during the day all last week and walked around the outskirts of the city at night, even in the Tractor district, trying to find an old man to kill." Grishka laughs. "A knife in the back, and your relative is gone."

"Is he telling the truth?" Eddie-baby wonders. "Who the fuck knows, maybe he really did look for an old man to kill." Grishka is crazy enough to do it. His whole family's crazy and degenerate, as everybody in the district says. His deaf and dumb mother's a speculator, and his uncle has been in an insane asylum for many years and was elected prime minister by the inmates. It's a difficult thing, probably, to be elected prime minister of famous Saburka (also known as Saburov's Dacha), an institution visited by many renowned representatives of Russian culture, including Garshin, Vrubel, and Khlebnikov – as difficult, probably, as it is in the normal world. Grishka's uncle, however, is obviously crazier than everyone else at Saburka… But that craziness is the reason why Grishka acts the way he does; it's the influence, so to speak, of his family and inheritance. In spite of himself, Eddie-baby has begun to feel respect for Grishka and for his quest for the truth, for his desire to understand himself and his world. For his restless soul.

Eddie-baby realizes that Grishka's search for an old man on a dark street at night is to be explained not by considerations of a petty mercenary nature – to rob and kill his victim, say, and then use the money to buy vodka – but by reasons that are lofty and philosophical.

"Well, did you find one, then?" Eddie-baby asks Grishka in as indifferent a tone as possible, as if he didn't care one way or another whether Grishka found an old man and killed him.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha!" Grishka laughs. "What can I say, Ed? Do people really tell something like that to somebody else, even a friend?"

Eddie-baby shrugs his shoulders. Obviously people don't, but Grishka's the one who started bullshitting about wanting to see what it would be like to kill somebody, and now he's backing off. "I wonder," Eddie thinks, "what you actually would feel. Maybe nothing. Shurik Bobrov went home to bed afterward. But they say he was so drunk he didn't even know what he was doing."

Eddie-baby takes a swig of biomitsin and looks at Grishka out of the corner of his eye. Actually, he probably never stabbed anybody, and maybe he never even planned to and never went to the Tractor district and is merely showing off.

Grishka, however, just gazes at Eddie and smiles enigmatically.

Eddie-baby senses that Grishka has an undoubted psychological advantage over him at the moment, and so in order to compensate for Grishka's advantage in the realm of the transcendental, in order to keep Grishka from being too proud of the fact that "dark forces incomprehensible even to him" (his own expression) are pushing him toward murder, Eddie-baby recites a poem he has just written about a militia car that is taking Eddie to prison to be executed:

And in the morning the chief shyly said

They'd given me the "tower" for it,

And that in an hour they'd take me

To the hall and there execute a poet,

That if I wanted cigarettes and wine,

They'd bring them to me without complaint,

And that "she" had sent a letter to me,

But I interrupted him, "The bitch! -"

But before Eddie-baby can go on, Grishka stops him with another of his typically idiotic questions.

"Who's a bitch, the chief or Svetka?" he says maliciously.

"What has Svetka got to do with it?" Eddie replies. "It's just a poem."

"You need to express yourself more clearly," Grishka mutters didactically. His attitude toward Eddie-baby's poems is skeptical: since Eddie-baby won't improve on Yesenin, there's no point in his wasting time on such silliness. Not that Grishka isn't aware of the existence of other poets besides Yesenin, but for the Saltovka kids in their Saltovka environment, Yesenin is much closer to them, much closer than all the others.

"Go on!" Grishka says.

"Forget it!" Eddie snaps. "You can go screw yourself, since you obviously don't have any idea what poetry is and what it isn't." And he angrily hands Grishka back his bottle.

"You're not going to be offended, are you?" Grishka asks, and touches Eddie-baby on the shoulder. "Don't be," he says apologetically. "It's just that I don't think it's one of your best. Personally I'm fond of the other one," Grishka says, flattering him. "You remember, the one about Natasha. How does it go? Why don't you recite that one, Ed?"

"Why the fuck should I recite anything to you?" Eddie says sullenly. "I have to go. I need to get some money for tonight, and there isn't much time left," he adds a little less severely.

"I've got a terrific idea!" Grishka exclaims, slapping himself on the forehead. "You know Vovka Zolotarev from my building, right? He'll lend you the money. He always has funds. After all, he's got a good job as a foreman at the radio plant. Let's go visit him!"

Eddie-baby realizes that Grishka feels in the wrong and is trying to do something to make up for it. "Grishka really isn't a bad guy," Eddie thinks, "only he does bullshit a lot, and he can be pretty mean."

"All right, then, let's," Eddie reluctantly agrees. "Only I don't know Vovka that well. Borrow money from somebody you've only seen a couple of times in your life?" he adds doubtfully.

"It doesn't matter. I'll vouch for you, since Vovka and I are neighbors. Only don't let on immediately what we've come for, or else he'll think the only reason all the kids make friends with him is to borrow money. We'll stay half an hour, and then I'll ask him."

"All right," Eddie says. What else can he do? He has already dropped by Borka Churilov's, and there wasn't anybody home there, since Borka and his mother have gone to see Borka's sister in Zhuravlyovka. For the holiday.