Memoir of a Russian Punk

2

Eddie-baby was lucky with poetry. The first poems he read in his life (Victoria Samoilovna having managed at last to stick a book into his hands) were The Youthful Verses of Alexander Blok, with a picture of a lilac branch on the cover. Eddie-baby discovered Blok's poems in May, in Vitka Fomenko's garden just when the lilacs were in bloom. Eddie-baby had gone with the whole class to Vitka's mother's funeral. The funeral was delayed, first by a May shower, and then by the old women. Vitka's grandmother had insisted that a priest come to perform the funeral rites for her daughter, and in the meantime Eddie, breathless with awe and astonishment, sat reading on a woodpile in a corner of the garden, where he was hiding out from his schoolmates:

"I dream that I am once again a boy and a lover,

And there is a ravine, and in the ravine a thorny dogrose…

The old house peers into my heart,

And turns pink from edge to edge,

And your tiny window…

That voice, it is yours,

And I shall give my life and my sorrow to its incomprehensible sound…,"

Eddie read as the mournful singing of the old women came from Vitka Fomenko's old house.

"And though in a dream pressing to my lips

Your once gentle hand,"

– the words made Eddie want to die, to die of love for Svetka, whom he had just met at the May Day celebrations.

A lot got its start with Vitka Fomenko. Including the career of Eddie the criminal. Vitka's actually a coward – you can tell that just by looking at him. He's round, fat, and short. But Vitka has his own home, an old wooden frame house located by the Turbine Factory. On the other side of Vitka's house – not the side facing the street but the one in back – are cornfields, a ravine, then more fields, and then the outskirts of a real village.

The Saltov district used to be a village too, but ten years ago they started putting up two- and three-story buildings with two or four entrances, until they gradually built up the district. Eddie-baby will never forget how in 1951 the soldiers brought them – brought his father and mother and him – to Saltovka. Their building was still locked up, and Sergeant Makhitarian took a thick iron rod, hammered it flat on a rock, and then used it to break open the lock so they could move in. Two months later, Major Pechkurov, the man they were to share their apartment with, joined them, and six months after that he was dead. He had checked out.

Eddie-baby's father is a first lieutenant who will soon be up for captain. "He'll never make captain, never," Eddie-baby thinks, "because he's as timid as a woman." Eddie's mother says his father will be a captain, but Eddie-baby knows his father doesn't look after his own affairs. His mother says the same thing, but she doesn't always remember everything she says. Eddie-baby's father should never have joined the army; he should have been a musician, as everyone says. He's very talented. He plays the guitar, the piano, and many other instruments, and he even writes music, but for some reason he's a first lieutenant.

Vitka Fomenko's father is a foreman at the Turbine Factory. He earns less than Eddie-baby's father does, but his family is much better off and much happier. And they have a house. Eddie-baby lives with his father and mother in a single room, although it's a large one and has a balcony.

Vitka Fomenko came to their class from another school less than a year ago. Even though it was immediately clear that he was a coward, it was also clear that he was a cheerful one, and when Vitka invited Eddie over for New Year's along with several other boys and girls from their class, Eddie went. At Vitka Fomenko's he also met Vovka the Boxer, a handsome boy from the Tyurenka district. It was with Vovka that Eddie-baby burgled a store for the first time in his life.

Tyurenka occupies an important place in the lives of Eddie-baby and the other kids from Saltovka. Tyurenka starts on the other side of the cemeteries. If you go past the overgrown but still used Russian cemetery, and through the no longer used Jewish one with its gravestones and obelisks, following the path worn there by the residents of Saltovka on their way to Tyurenka Pond with its medicinal waters that have flowed from an old iron pipe since time immemorial (people from Saltovka go to the pond in droves to swim in the summer), then on the other side of the Jewish cemetery you'll come to Tyurenka.

The kids from Tyurenka are all children of kurkuli, as they're called in Saltovka – children of Ukrainian peasants, in other words. They live in old private houses, and their parents are traders and craftsmen. The parents of the kids from Tyurenka usually get work in the factories in the late fall and then are laid off as soon as the snow melts. The residents of Tyurenka make a lot more money in the summer selling their cherries and apples and strawberries in the Kharkov farmers' markets than they do in the winter at the factories. Some of them have small potato fields or raise tomatoes and cucumbers on their own plots. Tyurenka is also called Tyur's Dacha. They say that a long time ago, before the revolution, there was an estate belonging to somebody named Tyur located near the pond. Or at least that's what Vitka Nemchenko's grandmother says.

Of the kids in their class from Tyurenka, there is, besides Vitka Nemchenko, also Sashka Tishchenko. Vitka Proutorov and Vika Kozyrev, the doctor's daughter, live near the entrance to the Jewish cemetery. That's not in Tyurenka yet; it's still the very end of Voroshilov Avenue. Vitka Proutorov and Vika go to a completely different trolley stop.

Since some of the Tyurenka kids go to school in Saltovka, the relations between Tyurenka and Saltovka are almost always good. Sometimes there are skirmishes, especially with the Tyurenka Gypsies – there's a whole crowd of them there – but basically the kids from Tyurenka and Saltovka are allies. A certain superiority felt by the kids from Saltovka, who are primarily the children of factory and office workers, to the children of the rural kurkuli is made up for by the fact that the kids from Tyurenka have a source of mineral water on their territory, a pond, and a part of the only river you can swim in in that city of over a million people – or, to be more precise, one of its banks, since the other side is occupied by Zhuravlyovka.

The Zhuravlyovka punks are the enemies of both the kids from Saltovka, whose territory doesn't border on theirs, and those from Tyurenka, whose territory does and with whom they're always fighting. The big battles take place in the summer. The two armies usually meet on the two-square-kilometer artificial island in the middle of the river. On the island are beaches and a large, ridiculous, supposedly modern restaurant made of concrete, although it in fact looks more like a World War II German coastal bunker than a place of recreation for the citizens of Kharkov.

Last summer, in August, Eddie-baby took part in one of those battles. His arm was cut, and he broke a finger from carelessness. One of the kids from Zhuravlyovka later died in the hospital. Zilberman told him that four hundred people took part in that battle. Eddie pretended to be an innocent minor who hadn't taken part in anything.

Kadik, who for some reason is always trying to push Eddie-baby's other friends out of his life, told Eddie-baby not to go to the gang war. Kadik can no more stand his "own kind" – the kids from Saltovka – than he can the kids from Tyurenka or Zhuravlyovka. He hangs out in the "center," on Sumsky Street where his friends live – jazz musicians and fancy dudes, all of them much older than Kadik is. "Eddie, what do you want with all those jerks?" Kadik says. It's his customary tune. "What do you want with all those jerks, Eddie?" That tune is the reason why Kadik is the only one of Eddie's friends his mother likes – it's her tune too.

Eddie-baby considers Kadik a "rotten intellectual." Eddie heard that expression for the first time from the militia officer, Major Shepotko. Shepotko recently moved into their apartment when Vovka Pechkurov, the last son of the prematurely deceased Major Pechkurov, moved away to Ivano-Frankovsk after graduating from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. Shepotko stubbornly calls Eddie-baby's mother "Larisa" Fyodorovna instead of "Raisa" Fyodorovna, although he, that enormous potbelly in navy blue riding breeches, is just the head of a militia drunk tank, and not even one in their district. So that Eddie-baby now shares an apartment with trash.

Kadik's a rotten intellectual. Eddie even thinks he's afraid of the punks, but he finds him interesting anyway. When Kadik's postal worker mother isn't at home, Eddie-baby goes over to his nine-square-meter room to listen to music. Kadik has a Mag record player. Very few kids in Saltovka have Mags. Sashka Plotnikov, whose house Eddie-baby promised to take Svetka to tomorrow, also has one. Kadik knows all about musicians like the black Duke Ellington, or Glenn Miller, or Elvis Presley "himself." Kadik made a laughingstock of Eddie-baby once when he found out that he had no idea who Elvis was or that Elvis had just been drafted (or had just gotten out of the American army, Eddie-baby can't remember which).

If Eddie-baby considered Kadik a coward, he wouldn't have anything to do with him. But Kadik is different; he obviously isn't a coward. Eddie-baby saw the way he punched Mishka Shevchenko in the mouth after Mishka started making fun of him. The kids were all sitting on the green benches under the lindens on Saltov Road. Usually it's the older kids who congregate under the lindens – Red Sanya, who is Eddie-baby's friend and protector, Slavka the Gypsy, Bokarev, Tolik the Worrier, Fima Meshkov, Vitka Cross-Eyes, although he's in the army now, and the weight lifters Cat and Lyova, who have just come back from prison, where they were sent for beating up a militia officer. Those kids are all over twenty; they're not minors.