Memoir of a Russian Punk

12

Vovka really is lying in bed in his room with his clothes on. On the wall at the head of the bed is a panel with numerous indicator needles, buttons, knobs, and lights, which Vovka himself installed in a very professional manner. That's his Control Panel. It's a rare thing in Saltovka for anyone to have a phone, but installed in Vovka's panel is a telephone receiver that he uses to speak to visitors on the other side of his door. Vovka threatens to "cop" himself a real telephone someday. He says the militia promised to let him tie into their line. "It's very possible," Eddie thinks. Vovka is the kind of guy who goes after things, and now that he's gotten acquainted with the militia through Mashka, he works for them as an electrician – for free, obviously – and has been helping them set up their communications room. He realized that he needed to make friends with them.

Vovka's face is almost invariably stern. People who don't know him might think he's a boring or somber person, or that he just woke up and is still vividly experiencing a bad dream. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vovka is simply a businesslike person, and everything he does – every one of his movements – is calculated.

"Greetings!" Grishka says, and puts his fire extinguisher down on the table. Like all the other tables in Saltovka, Vovka's is in the middle of the room.

Vovka gets up from the bed without answering, shakes Grishka's hand and then Eddie's. His hand is extremely limp. There is a vast gulf between Vovka's overflowing energy and his external appearance.

Once again without speaking, Vovka goes over to the sideboard, opens it, and takes out a few small glasses. After that, he goes into the kitchen and comes back with a large plate of pickled cucumbers, a hunk of bologna already carefully sliced, and some pieces of black bread. Putting the plate on the table, he looks thoughtfully at Grishka's fire extinguisher and then goes back into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of vodka and three forks. After placing the bottle on the table, he goes over to his panel and moves one of its levers. Western music flows into the room from invisible speakers. Vovka is no less a specialist in Western music than Kadik is, although he doesn't play the saxophone, merely the guitar.

As they are sitting down at the table, Grishka asks,

"Where's Mashka, Vovets?"

Grishka wants to be polite and start a conversation.

It's apparent that he has hit the nail on the head. Vovka's face, in any case, becomes noticeably livelier.

"She hauled her ass off to visit her little kurkul brother in the country," Vovka says, pouring vodka into the faceted glasses. All his movements are amazingly precise and professional. He pours out the vodka remarkably evenly, although he hardly looks at the glasses. It's clear that Zolotarev has been doing this all his life.

Looking at Vovka, Eddie-baby is reminded of a machine designed to pour mineral water into bottles, a machine of the kind he recently saw in a documentary film on television. "Clack – pour…, clack… clack… clack… next… clack!"

"May she be bull-fucked while she's there," Vovka says.

Eddie-baby saw Mashka the last time he visited Vovka. Nothing special – a woman like any other. Large, a bit of a bumpkin, a fool probably, but the sort you'd wish a bull on? That's just talk on Vovka's part. Eddie-baby imagines Mashka with a bull and surprises himself by snorting.

"What is it?" Grishka asks.

"I was just imagining Mashka with a bull," Eddie answers, smiling.

Grishka neighs loudly, holding his abundantly pimpled neck in the vicinity of his ear. Grishka likes to laugh emphatically and at length; it's a way he has. Maybe he wants to seem relaxed or grown-up – Eddie-baby has no idea. Grishka, laughs now for a particularly long time, and Eddie-baby feels awkward with Vovka around.

Grishka stops laughing and they lapse into silence again, although it is eased by the music – saxophones droning and trumpets blaring in a boogie-woogie. It occurs to Eddie that if Kadik were here, he would know at once what the piece is and who's playing it.

Several minutes pass while Vovka and the kids chew, snap cucumbers, squeak their chairs, and slap their hands on the table in time to the music, but are otherwise silent. It's always like that with Vovka – you don't know what to say until you get drunk, and then it's a lot more fun. After that Vovka is just another member of the group – they're all hosts – and it gets noisy and smoky, and the kids laugh and tell jokes. If any of the kids bring girls to Vovka's, they get up and dance. It turns into something like a club, with Vovka as the director.

"Well, let's get on with it and have another one," Vovka suggests, and without waiting for their consent, he again fills up their faceted little glasses. And again just as precisely as a machine.

"You, Vovets, could get a job at the philharmonic with that number," Grishka says in a nasal twang, snickering and pointing to the glasses.

Vovka doesn't reply but takes his glass and lifts it into the air. "Cheers!" Vovka toasts, and then empties the glass into his large, toothy mouth. Besides his ugly mouth, Vovka has another defect – he stoops and is shorter than Eddie, although the girls still like Vovka, probably because he plays the guitar and sings. In fact, Eddie's father once tried to teach him how to play, encouraging him with the promise that the girls would like him better if he could play the guitar and sing. It turned out, however, that Eddie had no ear or voice for music.

Still, he does like to sing. When he was little and had a good relationship with his mother and father, he would sometimes sing for them. His mother and father would sit on the couch, and Eddie would stand next to the table with a songbook in his hands and sing. Eddie-baby's preference was for folk songs. His favorite song was the old ballad about Khaz-Bulat.

The ballad's story is a bit unusual and is constructed in the form of a conversation between an old warrior from the mountains and a young, obviously Georgian prince. The prince is trying to persuade the old man to give him his wife:

"Bold Khaz-Bulat! Your saklya is poor,

Let me shower you with golden coins!

I'll give you my steed, my dagger, and my rifle,

And all I ask in return is your wife!

You're already old and already gray

And there's no life for her with you,

She's at the dawn of her years, you'll ruin her!…"

Eddie-baby sang away in all seriousness, holding the songbook in front of him like an operatic recitalist. His mother and father would fall over from laughing. Veniamin Ivanovich told Eddie that he had an excellent bleat. Not a bass, not a baritone, but a bleat. Eddie, however, like a true artist, was for some reason unabashed by their laughter. He felt the main song in his repertoire with all his heart, and therefore, whenever he performed it, he derived pure aesthetic satisfaction from it. In the end Khaz-Bulat murders his beautiful wife and contemptuously sends her body to the prince, and Eddie-baby, whose whole life still lay ahead of him, dreamed of being both the young Georgian prince who falls in love with the wife of Khaz-Bulat, and then years later the bold life-scarred Khaz-Bulat himself, who proudly murders the beauty, thereby preserving his honor.

Somewhere among the old photos kept by his mother is one of Eddie-baby dressed in a pair of knickers and standing with his mouth open wide – singing. In his hand is a plump, pocket-size songbook.

The knickers were connected with Eddie-baby's family's desire – his mother and father's desire, that is, since there wasn't anybody else – to be an intellectual family. The first knickers with cinch straps were obviously purchased from somebody, somebody who had been to Germany and had brought them back as a kind of trophy. All the subsequent pairs, which got bigger and bigger as Eddie-baby grew, his mother made herself. It was only in his fifth year of school that Eddie finally got rid of the knickers and his family was finally and decisively defeated by Saltovka. All that remained was their love of books and their bookshelf crammed to bursting.