Memoir of a Russian Punk

20

"The dictatorship of the adults," Eddie thinks as he strides along the dark streets of Saltovka, each stone and tree of which he knows by heart. "The dictatorship of the adults and the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Eddie believes that the things the adults spend most of their time on are chickenshit, that the adults put on a self-important air to do what maybe doesn't need to be done at all. For example, they use work to cover up their own personal weaknesses. Eddie-baby knows that their neighbors in Building No.22 on First Cross Street do not in fact like working. Uncle Sasha Chepiga really likes to be sick and is very happy if he doesn't have to go to work. When that happens he plays soccer around the building with his son Vitka and the humpbacked Tolik, and he could play all day long, even giving up vodka for the sake of dribbling a soccer ball.

Looking around early in the morning, when the sleepy residents of Saltovka are already on their way to work by 7:00 A. M. in a sad and bitter file, it's impossible to draw any other conclusion than that they detest their plants and factories. They're happy only twice a month – when they can draw their advances and on payday.

Eddie-baby started studying a new subject this year: "The Constitution of the USSR." Studying the constitution is boring and unpleasant. Eddie-baby has no interest at all in memorizing the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Soviet state, the greatest in the world. Yet as a boy with a good mind, he thinks about the constitution from time to time. He was particularly astonished, for example, to learn that the eight-hour workday is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the October Revolution. Before the revolution, it turns out, workers worked for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours a day. "That's really fucked up!" Eddie thinks. "What kind of slave would you have to be to agree to work twelve hours a day?"

The well-read Eddie happens to know that the primitive tribes of Australia, Africa, and Oceania, and also of New Guinea, where the explorer Miklukho-Maklay spent so many years, work on average only three hours a day hunting and gathering fruits and roots! "What the hell's going on here?" Eddie wonders. "It's a fraud." Eddie would prefer to live in primitive conditions, if only to work five hours a day less than he would otherwise have to do, since you can't avoid work altogether.

Eddie-baby's father doesn't care for military service either. And his mother doesn't care for her husband's work. Sometimes when she loses her temper, she maintains that their family life has been ruined by Eddie's father's work, that Eddie-baby and his mother never see their father and husband. On the other hand, Eddie's father, angered by his mother's complaints, very reasonably observes that if his military job that Eddie's mother hates so much were suddenly to disappear, there would be no way for them to live – they wouldn't have anything to eat or wear.

Sometimes Eddie dreams that his family lives differently – in the country, where his father plows the earth dressed in a white peasant blouse. Eddie saw a father like that in a Hungarian film once. In his dreams Eddie-baby and his mother and father have a house like the one Vitka's grandfather and grandmother have, only bigger. In Eddie's dreams, however, the family is also bigger: besides Eddie, there are Asya and Kadik and Vitka – his sister and brothers. And in Eddie's dreams Vitka's grandfather and grandmother are his grandfather and grandmother too. And they all have lots of flowering apple trees around, and horses, and rifles to defend themselves with. Eddie doesn't want the militia to protect him; he wants to protect himself.

And Eddie-baby's family is almost always dressed in white. No member of the family wants to wear dark rags. And each one of the children has his own separate room. And Eddie-baby at last has a place to put away all of his notes, notebooks, and books, and to put up all of his geographical maps. All that stuff is now lying in a pile in the out-of-order bathroom, but since the builders have promised to have the hot water running soon, it may be necessary for Eddie to move his belongings down to the basement of Building No.22, where his family keeps sacks of potatoes, like all the other families who live there, and where they used to store firewood and coal before they had gas.

The adults play very seriously at a game that half and maybe even all of them have no faith in – Eddie-baby is certain of that. He knows very well what kind of person his father is, and he knows how weak he is, but just take a sort of sidelong glance at his father when he's dressed up in his military tunic, with his service ribbons representing different honors and decorations, and he's walking down the street in his military cap, boots, and riding breeches – oh, then he's the very incarnation of strength and power! Even if he can't even wrest an apartment for himself from his superiors!

Listening to the leaders of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union on television and looking at their faces, Eddie-baby is astonished by how backward they are and how provincial their accents are. Until 1953, when they got their television set, one of the first in Kharkov, Eddie had never seen the leaders of his country in action or heard them speak. Now that he has seen them, he's amazed. "Why is Khrushchev such a clod, why does he look like a fat Ukrainian pig?" Eddie wonders. "Is there really nobody else in the country who's better-looking and more distinguished?" The local leaders Eddie has run into in the course of his life – the school principal, the militia precinct chief – have all seemed like dreadful, boorish, provincial fascists given to sneering at children and adolescents. Eddie isn't very clear about who he'd like to see take their places, just somebody of better quality. Eddie's mother and father are proud of their pure Russian accents, so how can Eddie, in whose consciousness pure Russian has also taken root, respect that fat, badly dressed man on television with his terrible mumbling accent and his note-assisted speech?

Eddie has a notebook in which he has written down names and offices. Nobody has seen the notebook, since Eddie keeps it hidden in a wooden box under the potatoes in the basement along with the novel he has just started writing. If anyone should see the notebook, it would be the end of Eddie-baby, who would perhaps be executed or taken away to Kolyma by his father. The reason is that the notebook contains the names and offices of the members of the Politburo and of all the generals and ministers and secretaries of the regional committees who need to be eliminated. Who need to be liquidated. Eddie-baby believes that the power of the state should be in the hands of the punks. There should be a dictatorship of the punks in the Soviet Union instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, the punks are much more developed, much cleverer, and much more intelligent than the proletariat. A proletarian will always back down before the knife of a punk. The punk always overcomes the proletarian.

Eddie-baby wants to talk over his idea with Red Sanya. He wants to, but he's been putting it off. He plans to do it after the gang robs rich Uncle Lyova, so that Sanya will take them more seriously and not regard them just as minors.

Eddie-baby is convinced that if the leading people in the state are liquidated, there will be chaos in the country and a well-organized gang can seize power. Maybe Kostya's gang. Not now, of course, but in twenty years or so. And they – the leaders, that is – will all have to be liquidated in a single day.

Eddie-baby doesn't see anything impossible about his idea. Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had a very small gang in 1917, but they still managed to seize power. Kostya, the only person Eddie has told about his red list ("red" because Eddie wrote it out in red ink), says he's crazy. Even so, Eddie is counting on eventually bringing Kostya around, maybe when they're adults. "Why do you say I'm crazy?" Eddie asked. "After all, what about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Napoleon? And just recently Hitler and Goering, who looks like Red Sanya? There wasn't always nothing but thousands of boring Uncle Vasyas who look just like each other, and Uncle Tolyas and Uncle Sashas and Uncle Ivans, was there? After all, Kostya, even though Hitler was our enemy, he was a great man, don't you agree?" Eddie said.

Kostya said that, yes, Hitler was a great man, and that he, Kostya, personally likes the SS, especially their black uniforms, but that you have to be crazy to plan such things in Saltovka. And as Eddie's hetman, he also ordered him to say no more about his red list and to get rid of it as soon as possible, before somebody put him away.

Eddie didn't get rid of the list, because he had spent a lot of time taking down the names from the newspapers and then classifying them as he was accustomed to doing with all his knowledge. He felt bad about wasting the work he had already done, so he merely transferred the list to the basement from its original hiding place on the balcony.