Eddie-baby takes Kolka Varzhainov off to the side.
"Did you get it?" he asks quietly.
"Not until Monday, Ed," Kolka says guiltily. "Everybody's celebrating," he adds by way of justification.
In appearance Kolka is a typical representative of the goat herd – a worker youth, a lathe operator. On his head he wears a silly white cap of the sort that the majority of normal people no longer wear, and his inevitable gray Muscovite jacket is belted with the same kind of silly belt. On his feet are bright ocher, almost orange shoes. Kolka has a certain passion for footware of that color. Eddie-baby remembers the no less orange handmade artificial-rubber half-galoshes, half-boots that Kolka had on when he turned up for the first time in the second-year B class at Secondary School No.8 several years ago. Kolka finished his seven years and then, like a lot of other kids, left school to work as a lathe operator at the factory. He's no Sashka Plotnikov; he doesn't need the university.
"It's unlikely, however, that Kolka will stay at his factory," Eddie-baby thinks. Behind his innocuous exterior, freckled little Russian mug, and small nose is hidden a clever and far from stupid "businessman," as Kadik calls such people – an altogether different Kolka, in other words. He deals in many things, including something very rare, very rare even here among the Saltovka punks. You can buy a pistol from him. Eddie-baby and Kostya already bought a TT from him for their work, and now Eddie-baby needs another one. Kolka probably gets them from soldiers who simply steal the weapons from the officers in their units.
Kolka Varzhainov has a lot of respect for Eddie. It began in the second-year B class. Somebody told him that Eddie-baby's father was a general, although then as now Eddie-baby's father was merely a first lieutenant. The aura of generalship eventually detached itself from Veniamin Ivanovich and from Eddie-baby, but the respect of the son of a village seasonal worker for the son of a "general" remained.
"Look here," Eddie-baby says to Kolka, "Kostya asked you to hurry. We're going to need the cannon very soon."
"I'll have it on Monday for sure. Tell Cat not to worry."
Kostya Bondarenko, or Cat (a different Cat, not Cat the weight lifter), is Eddie-baby's best friend. He and Kadik are rivals. Or rather, Kostya was Eddie-baby's friend for a long time, and then Kadik turned up. Kostya and Eddie-baby are in the same gang. Kadik guesses that they have a gang, but he doesn't know for sure. Kostya is the leader, the "hetman," and he decides who will do what and he picks the jobs. Grishka and Lyonka Tarasyuk are in their gang too, and from time to time Kostya brings in other kids, but they aren't permanent, and after helping to burgle a store, they generally disappear. Once Garik the Morphine Addict even participated in a burglary with them. The main members of the gang, however, are Kostya and Eddie-baby and Grishka.
9
Almost all the kids in the Saltov district are punks. Only a few of them are dudes like Kadik, or "intelligentsia" like Sashka Plotnikov who dream of going to the university and becoming engineers or doctors. Since his own father is an army officer, Eddie-baby really ought to belong to the latter, really ought to associate with the "intelligentsia" and Sashka Plotnikov or Alyosha Volin (Eddie-baby was in love with Alyosha's sister last spring before he met Svetka), but for some reason he doesn't care for them and prefers the company of punks.
The punks are in the majority in the district. Building No.3, for example, which is less a building than a whole block constructed in the form of a huge rectangle around a courtyard the size of a soccer field with sheds erected on it – Building No.3 is populated entirely by punks.
Only one girl from their class who lives in that building, Larka Gavrilov, doesn't belong to the punks; her father's an accountant, and her mother's a Jew. But all the other kids do. Vitka Sitenko and Vitka Karpenko and Vovka Klimchuk and the Vixen and Fatso are all punks… All the kids are, in fact. And not only them, but the older brothers of the kids in Building No.3 are punks too, and many are now serving or have already served prison terms. The fathers of the kids from Building No.3 (the ones who have fathers, that is) have also been in prison. But now that they have grown-up children, the majority of the fathers have finally "broken" with the world of crime and are employed in factories doing heavy labor of every kind – in foundries or as steel workers and fettlers or on assembly lines. The work is hard but it pays well, and the fathers all need a lot of money, since they all have a lot of children.
Eddie-baby likes the punks. But he also understands that sooner or later he'll have to part with them. Its fine to be punk as long as you're a kid, but to be a proletarian with unsavory connections as an adult is not something that Eddie-baby really wants. Like Kostya, he wants to be a famous criminal.
Eddie-baby and Kostya's friendship began with a terrible argument between their parents. Kostya had transferred to their school from another one. That was in the third year, and their classroom teacher then was a beautiful Armenian named Valentina Pavlovna Nazarian. At first Eddie-baby didn't pay any attention to Kostya, until once, when he was in a hurry to get to the library and then home to his beloved books (he had been delayed; Valentina Pavlovna had kept him, as president of the Pioneer council, after school along with the other council members in order to explain the details of a factory outing that was planned for the following Sunday), he discovered that his coat was missing from the coatrack.
Eddie-baby was even then nearsighted; who knows, maybe he was born that way. What is known is that when Eddie's mother was carrying him in her belly during her pregnancy, she came down with malaria and the doctors gave her quinine. Obviously, as his mother now believes, they gave her too much, since her baby was born nearsighted. At the time in question, however, Eddie-baby was the only one who knew he was nearsighted, and he was afraid to tell anybody else about it – it was awkward. "A traveler and brave seafarer has no business wearing glasses," Eddie-baby thought.
Be that as it may, even the nearsighted Eddie realized that the coat hanging on the rack wasn't his, although it too was dark in color and looked like his. Eddie's coat was new; his parents had just bought it for him. The coat on the rack, however, was old and badly frayed at the cuffs, the elbows, and the collar.
Nobody worked in the cloakroom in Secondary School No.8. Everybody hung his own coat on the coatrack on the way into class, and then picked it up again on the way out. Eddie-baby timidly tried to clarify the fate of his coat with the school's custodial personnel, but neither Uncle Vasya, the hall porter, nor his wife, known as Vasilievna, could tell him what had happened to it. And so Eddie-baby, not wishing to be a bother, put on the strange coat, went to his beloved library, checked out several geography books, and then went home.
At home his mother started yelling at him, which was unfair, and so Eddie got up from the kitchen stool without finishing the borsch he had been eating, even though it was his favorite, and went out onto the balcony in protest. The balcony was traditionally his territory. So he went out, wrapped himself in a blanket, and immersed himself in his research.
His father came home from work in the evening, took off his boots, and their single room at once began to reek of leather and foot rags, whereupon Eddie-baby's mother carried the boots and foot rags out onto the balcony.
"Go into the kitchen. Your father wants to speak to you," she said.
His father started yelling at him. And then they both started yelling at him. His father was sitting on the stool between the two kitchen chairs, between their own chair and the one belonging to their neighbors, the Pechkurov children – sitting on the same stool Eddie had been sitting on, and eating borsch just as Eddie had been doing.
"What were you looking at, you fool?" Veniamin Ivanovich said, turning away from his borsch. "Did you actually not realize that it was somebody else's old coat, and not even beaver?"
"And not even navy blue, but black?" said Raisa Fyodorovna, throwing up her hands. "We've got to buy him glasses at once."
"But Dad," Eddie-baby said, "it was the only coat on the rack. All the other students had already left a long time ago. Valentina Pavlovna kept the Pioneer council after school. There wasn't any other coat."
"He's right," his father said. "Go with him to school tomorrow, Raya, and find out what happened. It's clear the coat wasn't stolen; if it had been, they wouldn't have left this trash behind," his father said, nodding toward the strange coat hanging on the kitchen doorknob.
"As if it were infected," Eddie thought.
Raisa Fyodorovna went to school with Eddie-baby, and during the lesson Eddie-baby sat in class, and then, together with Valentina Pavlovna, they found Eddie-baby's coat, the new navy blue beaver one. Only on the inside of it somebody had sewn a piece of white cloth with the inscription "Kostya Bondarenko, 3-B" printed in indelible ink.
A battle ensued. Kostya's parents came, and his father turned out to be in the army too, and not only in the army but two ranks higher than Eddie-baby's father – a major, in fact, and moreover the commandant of the military registration and enlistment center in their district. Their parents quarreled, and Raisa Fyodorovna got very upset, since she doesn't know how to argue with strangers. Veniamin Ivanovich was away, having left that morning on one of his long business trips to Siberia – although it's true that he doesn't know how to argue with strangers either – and therefore Eddie's poor mother had to deal with Kostya's two insolent parents all by herself. If it hadn't been for Valentina Pavlovna, who was fond both of the quiet and diligent Eddie-baby with his notebooks and of his mother, Raisa Fyodorovna, it's not at all clear how the whole affair would have ended. But Valentina Pavlovna confirmed that, yes, she had seen Eddie wearing the coat, and that before that he had had another coat, an old one, and that there could be no doubt that the new coat belonged to him. And that Citizen Major Bondarenko and his wife were, unfortunately, mistaken.
They tore off the white piece of cloth and gave the coat back to Eddie. It was so embarrassing for Eddie-baby to be present during all the shouting (he and Kostya had been brought along for corroboration) that he would gladly have given away his new beaver coat, if only not to witness the mutual recriminations coming shrilly from both sides. He would have kept Kostya's coat, worn as it was at the elbows, if only to be spared the disgrace. The affair took place in the biology office, through which the other teachers and the older students kept passing in one direction or another, each time stopping to listen. Kostya apparently wasn't enjoying the affair either; he gloomily peered from under his brow and winced every time his mother said the words "my boy…"
Their parents became lasting enemies. But the boys, oddly enough, did not. They didn't immediately become friends, but the humiliation they had both been subjected to somehow brought them closer together. A couple of weeks later, during recess, Kostya came over to Eddie and said he was sorry. It had evidently taken him two weeks to think it over.
The very next day Kostya gave Eddie his slingshot. Although it was quite useless to him, Eddie-baby turned the beautiful and carefully made object in his hands, and after thanking Kostya, stuck it in his pocket. Eddie-baby wasn't a hunter; he was an explorer.
The next summer Kostya didn't go to Pioneer camp but remained in the district, where he took Grishka Gurevich's place on Eddie-baby's long walks through the surrounding fields and ravines. He even significantly enlarged Eddie-baby's knowledge of the geography of the territory. Kostya lived at the opposite end of the district and so had an excellent acquaintance with the nearby sand pits, and once, after a whole day of wandering in the vicinity of the pig farm and the waving fields of wheat, he and Eddie-baby even got as far as the artificial lake.
The next year, however, Kostya wasn't in their class. For some reason known only to them, his parents again transferred him to another school on a different trolley line, one five stops away from the line that Secondary School No.8 towers over. Eddie-baby and Kostya didn't see each other for several years, meeting again only after they were both fourteen and had both changed a lot…