Memoir of a Russian Punk

3

Aha, here comes Kadik. Wearing a yellow hooded jacket just like Eddie-baby's and hopping and making faces, Kadik runs out from behind the gray corner of the building and waves. The yellow jackets are something they dreamed up themselves. Kadik's neighbor, Auntie Motya, did the sewing for them. Kadik has a hundred neighbors, if not more, since he doesn't live in an apartment but in a room off a hallway. A room left over from a dormitory. The kids took the pattern for their yellow jackets from an Austrian alpine parka Kadik brought back from an international youth festival. Kadik went to the festival along with some older kids who belonged to the Blue Horse. That was a year ago, and Kadik has been hanging out with bandmen ever since he was twelve. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Kadik is the guy who was in the BLUE HORSE and who went to a FESTIVAL.

"Sorry, old pal," Kadik says. "My dumb old lady lost the platter I was supposed to take back to Eugene today. I went through everything and I still couldn't find it. That platter's valuable. What a bitch she is! What an old whore!"

Unlike all the other kids in Saltovka, Kadik and Eddie don't swear that much. After every "normal" word, the other kids say "cocksucker" or "whore" or "cunt," or they use less common personal curse words. Eddie-baby, however, only swears occasionally. He himself has no idea why it turned out that way.

Until he was eleven years old Eddie-baby was an unbelievably exemplary boy. Every year he got letters of commendation, and for several years running he was chairman of the Young Pioneer council. Eddie-baby remembers himself as he was then, with a red neckerchief and the little forelock of an idiot, standing with his right hand raised in a Pioneer salute in front of the chairman of the troop council or the senior Young Pioneer leader and reporting, "Comrade Senior Pioneer Leader!" followed by a porridge of words he can't remember anymore. Raisa Fyodorovna recalls that time as if it were a lost paradise.

In his time off from school Eddie-baby read everything he could get his hands on. And he didn't just read; he copied out whatever information interested him in special little notebooks that were carefully classified by theme. At that time Eddie-baby was friends only with Grishka Gurevich; they sometimes played cards together (Grishka cheated and always won) or explored the surrounding fields and ravines. Grishka looked a lot like a frog, but he was an exceptionally intelligent boy and was just as curious about things as Eddie-baby was…

You could say that Eddie-baby dreamed his way through the first four years of school before his fateful eleventh year. He read, wrote down what he read, and dreamed. He wrote down a lot. From the several volumes of Dr. Livingstone's account of his travels through Africa, for example, Eddie copied out in his small hand eight (!) forty-eight-page notebooks. An impressive callus appeared on the middle finger of his right hand, and the finger itself became twisted, so that although the callus gradually diminished in size, the finger remains crooked and callused even now. At night on his couch, Eddie-baby would dream he was observing a solar eclipse in Africa while around him in a grass hut lay nickel-plated seafaring instruments – a sextant, an astrolabe, and other things that he had used to determine his location, both longitude and latitude – and a drum pounded, and naked aborigines in grass skirts circled a fence with severed human heads stuck on the palings, their eyes calmly winking.

Most likely Eddie-baby was in those days a practical romantic. Having only just learned to read, he quickly devoured a vast quantity of the usual books – like the ones about the children of Captain Grant or about fifteen-year-old captains who get involved with treasure islands – in the process going through the whole contents of his parents' bookshelf, a rather large one that included several odd volumes of Maupassant and Stendhal, although the latter left him pretty indifferent at the time.

As a practical romantic, Eddie-baby was obviously not satisfied with the unsystematic delights of Jules Verne, Stevenson, and the other authors, and he decided to proceed further, to prepare himself firmly and solidly for the life of a romantic traveler. And so for the next several years, twisting his backbone and writhing studiously at his parents' round table that stood in the center of the room (they later bought him a small desk of his own when they saw how studious he was), or kneeling in front of a stool on which he had placed his book and notebook, he copied out the Latin terms for different plants and animals, patiently studied methods for obtaining water in the Sahara, or listed the names of cactuses you could eat if you ever found yourself without food in the Sonoran desert.

His passion for systemization extended so far that Eddie-baby even established a special catalog for himself in which he divided up the plants and animals by family and genus on separate sheets of paper and added meticulously transcribed information about each variety. Included for each plant were its dimensions, what kind of leaves it had, the size of its fruit, its method of cultivation, what parts of it could be used as food, where Eddie-baby might expect to encounter it on his subsequent wanderings, and a picture of it. In a normal country Eddie Baby would have spent most of his time in front of a copy machine. In the city of Kharkov, he used tracing paper to transfer the drawings of the plants and animals, and then pasted the drawings onto the appropriate pages. Strict order prevailed in the world of the future traveler and explorer. It is an interesting fact, however, that Eddie-baby gave pride of place to the exotic plants and animals, and that among the exotic kinds he clearly preferred the species and genera of the tropical regions. Maybe because the cold part of the year in Kharkov lasts much longer than the warm one does?

It is not difficult to guess that in the realm of seafaring, Eddies preference as a true romantic was for sailing ships. If there had been anyone to talk to (Grishka Gurevich's parents soon took him away to another apartment), he could have talked for hours about Bermuda and Roman sailing rigs, about rigging in standing and running configurations, about the different kinds of anchors, about tacking and knots, and about how to make a turn to the south-southwest if the winds are unfavorable.

The librarian Victoria Samoilovna at first did not believe that Eddie-baby had read all those books with complicated titles like The Fauna of Patagonia or The Annals of the Russian Geographic Society, or the works of Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, or books about the endless world travels of biologists and zoologists – all those Zagoskins and Zenkeviches unknown to everybody except Eddie-baby. Yet once she started talking to the pale lad who had just brushed the snow from his felt boots with his cap, she suddenly realized that this still green creature knew everything, and if that wasn't enough, that this creature, who as a general matter had no great liking for the library reading room, had from time to time even been compelled during his investigations to seek the help of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and as a result had spent hours nearsightedly digging (the creature was embarrassed about wearing glasses) in its immense volumes in order to supplement his knowledge.

This small creature was the only one of its kind in the whole district, and although Russian children did traditionally read a good deal in those years and there was always a line at the library, Eddie-baby soon acquired the exceptional privilege of going behind the checkout desk where Victoria Samoilovna was ensconced in order to root around in the books as much as he liked, even all day long. Eddie-baby was very happy to root there, and soon afterward, with the tacit consent of those who shared his apartment, he added a geological catalog to the other extensive catalogs that he kept in the nonfunctioning bathroom (or effectively nonfunctioning, since it didn't have any hot water). Research was research!

The fanatical pedantry of their child in the accumulation of knowledge must have seemed quite strange to those outside his world – to his parents, Veniamin Ivanovich and Raisa Fyodorovna – since Eddie-baby never boasted to anybody about his knowledge and never revealed it at school, which hardly made any sense.

But when, to augment the schists, sandstones, limestones, and basalts of the world, Eddie-baby suddenly made an abrupt turn and began to study and classify the French and English kings, the Roman emperors, and even the emperors of the utterly worthless Austro-Hungarian Empire, his parents became seriously alarmed.

"Edinka, why don't you go outside and play?" Mama Raya would say to him. "Why stay locked up inside all the time? Look how pale you are. Genna is always outside; that's why he has rosy cheeks and a healthy appearance. Go on outside and ski or something." (Eddie-baby's first-lieutenant father had just bought his son some skis, which the latter ignored.)

Eddie-baby couldn't stand Genna from the apartment unit next door, a boy who was always being held up to him as a model, since he knew that Genna was in fact a complete idiot. Even if Eddie-baby held himself aloof at school until he was eleven, he was still respected (although it wasn't at all clear why – maybe precisely because he did hold himself aloof), and respected to the point of being elected chairman of the Pioneer council by unanimous vote three years running, although that wasn't something Eddie-baby was particularly interested in. After sitting through the great torment of six hours of classes every day, Eddie-baby would run off to the library at the other end of the trolley line, going there directly after school, and then home to his notebooks and catalogs. Genna, however, was respected by no one; the kids made fun of him and frequently beat him up. Eddie-baby was beaten up only once, and that one time was inscribed in his psyche forever and even formed his character. But about that later. For now, Eddie-baby and Kadik have set off to the grocery store.