Memoir of a Russian Punk

13

"Why don't you play something, Vovets!" Grishka asks after the fifth round of vodka. "Make my heart gay!"

Eddie-baby thinks that Grishka's behavior with Vovka isn't natural, that he's trying to act like some old muzhik and strike a pose of hearty peasant simplicity, although there's really much more to him than that. "And what's 'Make my heart gay' supposed to mean, anyway?" Eddie wonders. If it had occurred to Grishka to ask Eddie for something, he would never have used that expression. "Make my heart gay!" That's the way merchants talk in old books or in those awful Ostrovsky plays they've started to study at school.

Vovka picks up his instrument and, like every other guitarist, starts plucking at the strings in order to tune it. Eddie-baby's father plays the guitar better and tunes faster than anybody else.

After tuning the guitar, Vovka asks what he should sing.

"Vovets, why don't you do 'The days and years are passing…!'" Grishka exclaims. "That is, The Wine of Love,'" he adds by way of clarification.

Vovka nods, makes himself more comfortable in his chair, and strumming the guitar, he begins to sing.

The days and years are passing,

And how fleeting are the centuries;

Peoples go, taking with them

Their customs and their fashions,

But the wine of love is the only

Truly unchanging thing in the world…!

Then, glancing at Grishka and Eddie and nodding to them to sing along, he shifts to the chorus:

The wine of enchanting love

Is given to people to make them happy,

The wine of love burns

Like a fire in the blood!

Eddie-baby and Grishka join in the chorus, and Eddie thinks that it's a strange thing how this song with its (as the poet Eddie knows) rather trite words always manages to affect him, making him at once happy and sad that the days and years and even the centuries are passing, though love remains to intoxicate the residents of Saltovka and Tyurenka and Kharkov just as it always has. Eddie-baby thinks tenderly about Svetka, about her little doll's face and her vanity. "Dear Svetka!" he thinks. "I love her."