"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…
10
Eddie-baby and an already pretty sloshed Slavka the Gypsy are sitting in the little garden next to the Stakhanovite Club, smoking and talking and drinking a 0.8-liter "fire extinguisher" of the usual biomitsin, one left behind by Red Sanya, who was drinking with them but had to run off to see his woman, the hairdresser Dora.
"Hey, Eddie-baby," Slavka says, "you're a good guy, Eddie-baby. So tell me, what are you doing here?"
"Living," Eddie-baby answers. "The same as you, Slavka," he adds with a smirk.
"You're a fool, Eddie old buddy!" Slavka exclaims indignantly. "A fool!"
"Why am I supposed to be a fool?" Eddie-baby asks, unperturbed. If anybody else – somebody his own age, say – had called him a fool, he would have cut him with the bottle he's holding in his hand, but Slavka's an old guy and a hopeless case. The kids say he's even attracted to his own brother Yurka and that's why Yurka, a harmless technoid in glasses, recently beat up the drunken Slavka. He punched him. And the Gypsy does in fact have a dried-out little scab on his left cheek.
"What the fuck are you doing here in Saltovka with the punks? You're done for if you stay here!" the Gypsy continues in a distressed tone. "Listen to me, they'll send you off to prison, and they'll do it soon too. You're finished if you don't get out of here. And if you get sent away once, then with your character you'll get sent away again. You're reckless, like me -"
"What are you doing here yourself, Gypsy?" Eddie interrupts as he passes the bottle.
The Gypsy guzzles the wine, finally frees himself from the bottle, and says while quietly hiccupping,
"What are you looking at me for, Eddie old buddy? I'm already an old man. I'm a hopeless case, if you want to know. Everything's over for me, everything's behind me. I'm an alcoholic; all I have left is my dick. I sleep until three o'clock, and I have no desire to get up, because I'm afraid of going out; it's so cold here. Yurka and my mother go to the factory, and I get up with them and pretend that I'm planning to go out and look for a job, but when they leave after giving me a couple of rubles for the trolley, I go back to bed. I hate work. I hate iron and the people who bang it around. My hearing is delicate. I'm different; I'm not the same as these proletarian slaves. Look at my hands…"
Eddie-baby is silent and doesn't look at the Gypsy's hands. He knows what kind of hands Slavka has, since the latter has already shown them to him many times.
The Gypsy goes on: "Fucking winter! Where we live, Eddie-baby – you understand that it's the worst goddamn climate, the most fucked-up, shitty climate in the world. And why is that? Do you know why, Eddie old buddy?"
"Why?" Eddie asks.
"Because our Slav ancestors were fucking cowards, that's why. Did you know that in English 'Slav' and 'slave' are the same word, Eddie?"
"Really?" Eddie says, sincerely astonished. "It's true, it's true," the Gypsy insists. "Our ancestors had the souls of slaves, so instead of bravely conquering warm lands for themselves around the Mediterranean where lemons grow – did you realize, Eddie, that lemons grow there?" Slavka drawls, and suddenly switching to a sarcastic whisper, he continues – "they refused to fight and fled like cowards to this fucking snow, and now you and I are sitting on this fucking green Soviet bench, and it's snowing and it's cold, and all I have is this fucking raincoat. And it's Yurka's," he adds with a drunken chuckle. "Do you call that living?"