Memoir of a Russian Punk

5

On the other hand, Kadik can't drink as much vodka as Eddie-baby can. Eddie-baby sometimes uses his extraordinary talent by drinking vodka on bets at the Horse Market. He doesn't do it very often anymore, since almost all the butchers and rich Azerbaijanis know him there by now, but he used to drink on bets once a week.

Red Sanya was working as a butcher at the Horse Market then. Usually he had money, but one evening they badly wanted to get drunk and he was broke. That's when they thought up the idea of taking bets. They went to the cafe-bar, to the snack bar where the Azerbaijanis who sell fruit at the Horse Market usually gather, and there, after buying himself and Eddie-baby a mug of beer each, Red Sanya began carefully sticking it to a group of Azerbaijanis at a neighboring table, telling them that they didn't know how to drink.

Little by little Sanya managed to provoke the Azerbaijanis to the point where when he offered to bet them to see who could drink the most, their leader, a local Azerbaijani named Shamil, who lives next door to the Horse Market, said,

"All right, let's drink, then. Although you, Red, are such a big fellow that it wouldn't be very fair to drink against you, even though we Azerbaijanis drink more for our size than you Russians do."

Sanya really is about one meter eighty centimeters tall, and although he's only twenty-two, he's broad and strong and weighs a hundred kilograms. As a matter of fact, Sanya isn't Russian at all; he's German. His mother's name is Elsa. Nobody has ever seen his father, but as a friend of Sanya's, Eddie-baby knows that his father's name is Walther, just like the pistol. And he's German too. Sanya's sister, Svetka, has a different father, who's Russian. Sanya's mother works as a ticket collector at the Stakhanovite Club. Sanya is called "Red" Sanya because his skin's all pink – he was born that way. His face is pink too. Sanya looks like Goering, which Eddie-baby likes – he saw a picture of Goering once in a book on the Nuremberg trials, and he saw him again in a color film about the Great Patriotic War. Goering's pink too, like Sanya. Or was.

"Don't give me that crap, Shamil," Sanya answered him. "Not just me, but even my little brother here" – and he pointed to Eddie-baby – "can outdrink any one of you. Right, Ed?" he asked Eddie-baby, calling him "Ed" so it would sound more impressive. They had in fact agreed earlier how they would act. Sanya himself couldn't drink as much as the seemingly innocent Eddie-baby could.

"You mean him?" Shamil asked with a smirk, and looked Eddie up and down. "Why, he's only got two days left even without vodka!"

The Azerbaijanis, or "blackasses," as Sanya calls them behind their backs, roared with laughter.

"This guy can drink a whole liter," Sanya said. And he said it very coolly.

"Don't bullshit me, Red," Shamil said, beginning to lose his temper. "A whole liter of vodka would kill him."

Eddie-baby was thinking to himself how insolent these blackasses really are. Insolent, cocky little pricks. Although they do have a lot of money. They bring their fruit to Kharkov and sell it for three times as much. Vitka Cross-Eyes, when he was on leave not long ago from Moscow, where he's stationed now (he was lucky), once blabbed during a binge about how, just when he was about to be drafted (and he didn't really have anything to lose, since he would have to go anyway, whether into the army or to prison, where he would get seven years instead of three in the army and then have his sentence reduced by half in view of its being a first offense), he and two other guys robbed some Azerbaijanis who were sitting next to them on the train to Baku. They grabbed their suitcase full of cash. Cross-Eyes laughed and said that it wasn't really a very risky thing to do, since the Azerbaijanis wouldn't go to the militia anyway. The tangerines they were selling as produce from a collective farm were in fact from their own private plots, and anyway private Soviet citizens aren't allowed to have the kind of cash they were carrying with them. The main problem was that the bastards are always armed whenever they're carrying money. They could kill you.

Eddie-baby's exterior remained very calm; he was training himself. He was thinking, "Fucking Azerbaijanis!" but out loud he said, "Four two-hundred-fifty-gram glasses in the space of an hour at fifteen-minute intervals."

The Azerbaijanis grew quiet. None of them could drink that much vodka. As Eddie-baby was well aware. It is a very rare person who can. He himself was taught to drink by Uncle Zhora from their building, although from another entrance – Vanka's father. Uncle Zhora was a POW in Germany and went to France with the German who was in charge of him.

At first they made Uncle Zhora work in a mine in the Ruhr – in the Ruhr coal basin, which is like our own Donbass – and he stayed there for a while. To Uncle Zhora's way of thinking, the Germans weren't so bad; it was the Russians who were the worst, their own foremen and overseers – since the Germans themselves didn't really like to go down into the mine, being of the opinion that there were enough foreign workers for that. Uncle Zhora was noticed by a German engineer named Stefan, who realized that Uncle Zhora drank but never got drunk. And the German came up with an idea. He started taking Uncle Zhora out of the mine, at first for just a couple of days at a time, and driving him around the city. Eddie-baby doesn't remember which German city the mine was closest to, but in the evenings Uncle Zhora would drink vodka in its taverns and astound the German public. Stefan set the stage for that astonishment very dramatically – with a preparatory drumroll and a line of large, faceted Russian glasses arranged on the table next to Uncle Zhora. Uncle Zhora would be dressed as if in Russian national costume, in clothing that Stefan had bought for him at a theater, although the costume was in fact Hungarian.

After a while, inasmuch as Uncle Zhora's public drinking of vodka had become very popular, Stefan left the mine and took Uncle Zhora with him as though he were putting him into his personal service. In fact, however, the two of them were very quietly mining cash for themselves, and in the end they even got as far as Paris.

"In Paris," Uncle Zhora said with satisfaction, remembering his glorious past, "I performed at the famous Folies Bergeres. There were posters all over the city: Tonight The Russian Bear Drinks Vodka!'"

Uncle Zhora said it's impossible to learn how to drink. You have to be born with a cast-iron throat and stomach. "Even a good tippler must know when and how much he can drink," he said. "There were periods when I refused to perform because I sensed that my stomach was unable to handle as much vodka as it usually could. However much Stefan swore at me, accusing me of ruining an excellent engagement and telling me that we were losing money, I would never give in. And that's why I'm still alive today," Uncle Zhora observed sententiously.

Eddie-baby suspects that Uncle Zhora was embroidering just a little. For example, could he really have "performed" at the Folies Bergeres? And did he ever really go to Paris at all?

Whatever the case, Eddie-baby had recently discovered that he too was born with a cast-iron stomach. And then Red Sanya discovered it as well. A certain part of Uncle Zhora's advice, however, has proved useful to Eddie-baby in his life. "Before a big drinking bout take a glass of vegetable oil to lubricate your stomach if you don't want to get drunk," Uncle Zhora had taught him. "And after the performance, even if you aren't drunk, set yourself the rule of going to the toilet, placing two fingers in your mouth, and vomiting, and don't be shy about it. True, do it so that nobody sees or hears you – protect the honor of the ring. And don't eat any snacks, except maybe to chew on a pickled tomato or cucumber or to sip a little pickle juice, but that's all. Snacks don't go with drinking bouts. The snack will make you even drunker."

Armed with this knowledge and his own cast-iron stomach, the pale Eddie-baby, weighing fifty-seven kilograms and standing one meter seventy-four centimeters tall, sat across from the horde of sun-darkened blackasses. They buzzed among themselves in Azerbaijani. Eddie-baby knew that Azerbaijanis are the same thing as Turks. Eddie-baby is part Tatar himself. His mother's a Tatar – you only have to look at her cheekbones – and what's more, she's from Kazan. Eddie-baby's father jestingly calls her his "Mongol Tatar yoke." When they're serious, however, his Ukrainian father and Russian Tatar mother consider themselves Russians. Which is in fact what they are. What else could they be? In their social class, even real Ukrainians are embarrassed to speak Ukrainian; it's regarded as backward. All the kids call themselves Russians. Even the Jews Yashka Slavutsky, Sashka Lyakovich, and Lyudka Rochmann…

Eddie-baby was sitting across from the blackasses and waiting to see what they would decide.

"I'll bet five hundred rubles he can do it," said Red Sanya, downing his beer.

Eddie-baby knew that at best Sanya had two rubles in change in his pocket. But the Horse Market was his territory, and even if he were to lose the bet, he could still wriggle out of it somehow. There was no question of losing, though, since Eddie-baby had drunk an entire liter before.

"All right!" Shamil said at last, no longer speaking his barbarian tongue. "The Azerbaijani people are not fond of vodka. We drink wine and chacha. But I will bet five hundred rubles and will give them to him if this boy here actually drinks the four glasses and survives."

"What a bastard!" Eddie thought. "He's decided to humiliate me. Well, fuck them!" Five hundred rubles is half a month's labor for the workers of Saltovka. Here, however, it would take only an evening to earn that much. Sanya would have to have a cut, of course, but without Sanya the Azerbaijanis would never have bothered to talk to Eddie. Everybody knew Sanya, and they would give Sanya the money. If Eddie-baby had been alone, there's no goddamn way they would have given it to him…

Red haggled a little more with the Azerbaijanis to get them to pay for the liter of vodka and half a kilo of pickled tomatoes. Officially it was against the rules to drink vodka in the cafe, but that hardly mattered. The vodka and tomatoes appeared a couple of minutes later. And a 250-gram glass. One.

Remembering Uncle Zhora's instructions, Eddie-baby asked for three more glasses. To make it more dramatic. Opening the two half-liter bottles, Red Sanya poured them out to the last drop into the four faceted vessels arranged in a line. A crowd started to gather around the little table. Red Sanya took off his gold watch and placed it on the table. "Shall we begin?" he asked uneasily, looking inquiringly at Eddie-baby. This was the first time money was at stake, and he was nervous about it. Eddie-baby nodded and reached out his hand for the first glass…