Memoir of a Russian Punk

21

The humpbacked Tolik Perevorachaev is standing by the door to Eddie's entrance, and there's no way of getting around him. He and Eddie used to be friends. Now Eddie has grown up, has become an adult, or nearly one, whereas Tolik has remained small because of his awful hump, even though he's a year older than Eddie.

"Hey, Tolik! How's life?" Eddie asks a bit more casually than necessary, while also aware that he's being hypocritical. What kind of life can a person have if he's sixteen and humpbacked and only one meter fifty-one centimeters tall? The only kind of life Tolik can have is a pisspoor one, and even Eddie is offended by the cheerful asshole voice he's using with Tolik.

"Not bad," Tolik answers, embarrassed. "There's a new picture I drew. Chapaev drowning in the Ural River. Do you want to see it?"

Eddie really doesn't. Chapaev is about the only thing Tolik ever draws. Sometimes he does a scene from the last war – the Germans and our side – but basically it's Chapaev, and Eddie's already seen hundreds of Tolik's pictures in watercolor or colored pencil with Chapaev in a moustache and a black Cossack felt coat. The colors in his pictures are very bright, even garish. Eddies mother says that Tolik is mentally retarded because of his hump, and psychologically a child, whereas his sexual development is normal since he wants a woman, but how can he get one if he's a hunchback? As a result, Tolik is slowly turning from a gentle, humpbacked boy into a bitter, grumbling hunchback, and as Eddie's mother has learned in the strictest confidence from the Perevorachaevs' neighbor, Auntie Marusya Chepiga, he's even attracted to his own sisters, Lyubka and Baby Nadka.

Tolik's bitterness, however, has not extended to Eddie-baby. When they were still children, they built a lot of homemade machines together, including several scooters using roller-skate wheels. And when Eddie got sick with pneumonia and was in bed with a fever of thirty-nine, it was none other than the humpbacked Tolik who sat with him and patiently read him a travel book to take his mind off his fever.

Eddie-baby has no wish to offend Tolik, but he doesn't feel like going into the Perevorachaevs' room with its repulsively hot, almost humid atmosphere, saying hello to the dour stovemaker and Tolik's mother, Blackie, and sitting down on Tolik's smelly flannel blanket to look at yet another Chapaev with his hand thrust up out of the water.

"I'd like to, Tol," Eddie says, "but a friend of mine's waiting for me at home. Let's do it tomorrow, all right?" he promises, full of self-loathing.

"All right, tomorrow," answers the sallow if not greenish Tolik, probably aware, or at least sensing, that his former friend won't have any time tomorrow either.

Eddie runs past the hunchback, who has stepped aside for him, and sighs with relief as soon as he reaches his own floor. He got by.

His mother isn't home. And there isn't even a note on the kitchen table. Eddie and Raisa Fyodorovna usually leave notes for each other. The absence of a note is always an unmistakable sign that his mother is upset with Eddie about something. "What is it this time?" Eddie asks himself, trying to understand. But he is unable to reach any immediate conclusions about what it is that he's done – or not done – to earn her displeasure.

Kadik arrives precisely at six, just as he promised yesterday. He's in a very good mood, although he's rarely in a bad one. Kadik is a life-loving individual.

"Hey, old buddy, you should have seen what happened yesterday!" he announces while still in the doorway. "You'll never guess!"

"Can you guess?" and "You'll never guess!" are Kadik's favorite expressions.

"Lyudka Shepelenko was screwing George! You remember George, Eddie? Lyudka was screwing him right on the table!" Kadik blurts out enthusiastically. "What an amazing girl she is!"

Eddie brings Kadik's enthusiasm up short: "I didn't get the money," he gloomily informs him. "I don't know what to do…"

The expression on Kadik's face changes. Eddie knows he would be glad to help him, but there's no way he can. How could he? He doesn't have any money either. Sometimes Kadik earns good bread selling records, but it's been a month since he's had any platters from the Baltic republics.

"Shit, old buddy," Kadik says carefully.

"Let's have a drink," Eddie suggests in a preoccupied tone, and brings in a bottle of port from the cold balcony. Usually there isn't anything to drink in the house, since Eddie's father avoids alcohol – it makes him sick to his stomach. And they don't keep any wine around for guests either, since they don't want to tempt Eddie. Whenever company comes, his mother runs down to the store for wine. Today is a holiday, however.

"Haven't you got anything to munch on?" Kadik asks. "I came straight from Eugene's. I haven't been home yet."

Eddie brings several cold meat patties from the kitchen, some bread, a couple of boiled eggs, and a dish of cold, stuck-together meatballs wrapped in dough, puts the food down on the desk, pulls up a chair for Kadik, and sits himself down on the edge of the desk.

"Happy holiday!" he says to Kadik, and they clink glasses.

The dark red beverage unaccountably burns Eddie's throat like boiling water.

"Now, that's port!" Kadik says with a shudder, and stabs a cutlet with his fork. "Mmm!" he moans with pleasure after swallowing the first bite. "Your old lady really knows how to cook. She's much better at it than my idiot!"

"The fool Kadik doesn't realize what a good mother he has," Eddie thinks. And it's true, whenever her little Kolka needs money, the postal worker disappears and gets it for him. Maybe the reason Kadik doesn't appreciate her is because she's always there to help him. But all Eddie says out loud is,

"That's bullshit. Your old lady's an excellent cook."

"Huh?" Kadik replies, waving his hand, since his mouth is full of cutlet. "My old lady cooks like a peasant. She mixes everything together, the way they prepare slop for pigs in the country."

It's clear to Eddie that the only reason Kadik is ashamed of his postal worker mother is because that's what she is, and the only reason he gets along with Eddie's mother so well, the reason why they like each other so much, is that he dreams about having respectable parents. The officer Veniamin Ivanovich and the widely read Raisa Fyodorovna would suit Kadik very well.

"Let's trade parents," Eddie suggests to him, pouring some more port into their empty glasses. "If I had a mother like yours, I'd have two hundred and fifty rubles in my pocket right now. But I don't, so what am I supposed to do?" he bitterly concludes.

"Well, old buddy," Kadik announces, perhaps a little exasperated, "all you have to do is tell Svetka you didn't get the money. Take her to the movies instead, and then you can come to my place afterward and listen to music. I'll send my old lady over to the neighbors, or else we can go to Vovka Zolotarev's and dance and drink there. I don't know why you put up with that stuff from her anyway. A really good girl will understand when her old buddy doesn't have any money, that he's broke for the time being, and she'll wait. She realizes they can have their holiday some other time, since there will always be another chance," Kadik says quite reasonably.

Eddie says nothing. How could Kadik know how afraid he is of losing Svetka? A true Saltovka adolescent, Eddie can't tell him that he's terribly in love with Svetka, that he's never humped her even once, and that he's afraid that if he doesn't take Svetka to Sashka Plotnikov's and in general keep her entertained, she'll start going with Shurik. Even though Svetka has tried to convince Eddie that she and Shurik are just friends, in the same way, for instance, that Asya and Eddie are friends, Eddie does not, to be perfectly honest, believe her. He sees how Shurik sometimes looks at her. How could Kadik know how hard it is when somebody like Shurik is hanging around Svetka all the time? Especially since he's older than Eddie, works, and has his own money. But the main thing in this shameful secret, the most important thing, is that Eddie isn't humping Svetka, which means that they aren't really bound to one another and she doesn't actually owe Eddie anything. If they were humping, Eddie could forbid her to see Shurik just because he, Eddie, didn't want her to. Eddie can't explain all this to Kadik for the simple reason that Eddie grew up in Saltovka, where an adolescent must be a man. But the fact is that Eddie has secretly cried several times after fighting with Svetka. Nobody knows about it, of course.

"Well, what are we going to do?"

"How the fuck should I know?" Eddie answers despondently.

"Why don't we just go to Victory," Kadik says. "You can recite your poems, old buddy. I'm sure you'll win a prize, eh?"

"What about Svetka?" Eddie asks uncertainly.

"We'll take her with us," Kadik decides. "She'll enjoy seeing her old buddy win the prize for the best poems in front of an audience of thousands of people. Girls like that," Kadik says enthusiastically. "Lights, a microphone, and her old buddy on the stage! O-o-oh!" Kadik drawls. "She'll really be impressed!"

"Why not?" Eddie thinks. "Maybe Kadik's right." That Svetka is vain he has no doubt. Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. He'll tell her he didn't get the money, and that's all there is to it. It happens.

"All right," he says. "Let's go to Victory. What time is it?" he asks Kadik. "Our fucking alarm clock doesn't work."

"Six-thirty. It's only six-thirty, and the poetry contest is scheduled for eight." Kadik goes to the balcony door, opens it, and peers out into the darkness. "And the weather's calmed down," he says with satisfaction. "It's dry, no rain or snow, which means that the contest will definitely take place. There's lots of time to pick up Svetka. Get dressed," Kadik says.

Eddie-baby doesn't dress as he would if he were going to Sashka Plotnikov's, but all the same he puts on his best shoes, first wrapping his bare feet in newspaper as a precaution and then putting on his socks. The newspaper is a tried and true method. Slavka the Gypsy taught him to wrap his feet in newspaper last winter during the bad freeze when they went to the dances in light leather shoes.

Eddie puts on a pair of very narrow dress pants, a white shirt, and over that his yellow hooded jacket, and he sticks his bow tie in his pocket just in case. Maybe he'll put the bow tie on before reciting. If he recites, that is. To be honest, Eddie is a little intimidated by the prospect. He's never recited in front of thousands of people before, and without exaggeration there will be thousands and even tens of thousands of young and not so young people at the Victory for the People's Festival, as it's officially called. He'll think about it on the way, since when you come right down to it, it's one thing to recite at the beach, where there are maybe a hundred listeners who as a rule are supportive of their own, and another when your poems are judged and you're given a place in the rankings. "And what if they don't give me first place?" Eddie thinks fearfully. "What will Svetka say then? And what will Kadik say?"

"The poems, the poems – don't forget your notebook," Kadik reminds him. "It's better to recite without the notebook, of course, but what if you forget all of a sudden?"

Folding it in half, Eddie puts the velveteen-covered notebook in his pocket. He pasted the velveteen on himself, so that the notebook would look special.

"Let's go," he says to Kadik. "We drop by Svetka's first. It's even better that there are two of us – it will make it easier to explain the situation. With you around, she won't bitch so much."