"Yes," Eddie agrees, "it's better in the tropics. Somewhere in Rio or Buenos Aires. Ciudad de nuestra senora de Buenos Aires," he says thoughtfully. "Do you know what that means, Slavka?"
"I do, old buddy," the Gypsy says. 'City of our lady of favorable winds.' The locals call it 'B'aires' for short."
Slavka knows everything. It's never boring with him, and you can learn a lot. He's witty too – when he isn't too drunk. Which is why Eddie is sitting here with him on the bench. Slavka reads constantly, even in English. Sticking out of his pocket right now is some foreign newspaper. Slavka studied at the university for two years before he was expelled.
"Get the fuck out of here, Eddie-baby, before it's too late. And don't hang around with the punks. They're going in just one direction – to prison. You're completely different from them," Slavka whines again, and grabbing Eddie-baby by the collar of his jacket, he forcefully pulls him close. "Look at me!" he demands drunkenly.
"Cut it out, Gypsy…" Eddie-baby pushes him away in irritation.
"No, look me in the eyes!" the Gypsy insists. Eddie-baby looks him in the eyes.
Slavka smiles drunkenly. "In your eyes shines intelligence and a natural nobility!" he proclaims. "And it doesn't shine in all your Kadiks and Karpovs and Cats! And it never will!" Slavka yells.
"You're drunk as a pig," Eddie-baby says seriously. "You're starting to get boring."
"Maybe so," Slavka calmly agrees. "Maybe I am drunk."
"Oh," he says with a sudden sigh, "if only summer would come! I'll go to Vladivostok. I'm tired of it here with you people. Have you ever been to Vladivostok, Eddie old buddy?" he asks.
Eddie hasn't been to Vladivostok. He shakes his head no. His lips are occupied; he's sucking on the fire extinguisher.
"It's really nice in Vladivostok," Slavka says with pleasure. "The Pacific fishermen have piles of money. And so do the whalers," Slavka happily recalls. "Vladivostok is the home of the whaling fleet. When they come back to port after six months at sea, their pockets are crammed with money! Can you imagine, Eddie – their pockets! And it's no trouble at all getting between them and their money," Slavka adds slyly. "The sailor who's been starving for human contact at sea for six months really needs good conversation. That's the second thing, after sex. Come to Vladivostok with me, Eddie, all right? The two of us will make a good team. I'll pass myself off as a seaman, and you'll be my little brother."
"All right, let's go," Eddie-baby agrees, placing the empty fire extinguisher next to the bench. Eddie-baby is tidy.
"Imagine us sitting in a bar, Eddie – there's one on the hill there where the whalers go, and down below is the Golden Horn harbor, and moving over it are the lights of transoceanic liners… Can you imagine the picture, Eddie old man?" And interrupting Eddie, who is just on the point of replying, the Gypsy adds, "Did you know that the harbor in Vladivostok is named after the Golden Horn harbor in Istanbul, hm?"
Yes, Eddie-baby had heard about that. "Yes," he says, "how come?"
"Because, Eddie old buddy, it's shaped just like the harbor in Istanbul," Slavka says in the quietly didactic tones of a teacher. "In Istanbul, in Constantinople…," he bursts out singing all of a sudden, beating his palms on the bench to keep time. The Gypsy is sitting with his legs spread wide and is slapping his palms on the bench between his thighs. And then his gaze falls on one of those skinny thighs in its trouser leg, and he grabs it between his hands.
"Look how skinny I've gotten," he says, turning to Eddie. "In your fucking Kharkov, in your fucking Saltovka."
"It's yours too, isn't it, Slavka?" Eddie-baby observes. "And there's no goddamn way you've gotten skinny, since as far as I remember, you were always pretty scrawny. It's just the way you're built."
"I was born in Moscow, Eddie old buddy," Slavka says. "Remember that, in Moscow, and not in your lousy city. My father was a Polish aristocrat, the jasnowielmozny pan Zablodski," he says pompously. "True, my mother let me down; she's a Russian whore. Even her name is cheap: Ekaterina, Katerina… Katya…," Slavka says, emphasizing each stressed syllable. "Yurka takes after her, takes after her completely, whereas I take after my father…"
Eddie-baby laughs, and Slavka sighs again and then leans across Eddie-baby, who is sitting on the edge of the bench, and reaches for the bottle. As soon as he realizes that it's empty, he hurls it across the path at the latticed iron fence opposite them. The bottle breaks with an unpleasant crunch.
"What the fuck did you do that for?" Eddie-baby asks. "The trashes will come running now. They're all over the place; it's a holiday." "Trashes" in Saltov slang means "militia officers." A single militia officer is a "trash," and several of them are "trashes."
"Don't tell me how to live," Slavka retorts. "You're still too young to start teaching me. Live as long as I have, then you can teach me. Fuck the trashes and fuck you," he announces capriciously. He is obviously drunk.
"What an asshole you are!" Eddie-baby says. "You're an old guy and still an asshole." And Eddie-baby gets up from the bench and walks away.
Slavka doesn't want to be left alone, so he plods along after him.
"Wait up, Eddie old buddy," he mutters somewhere in the rear. "Wait up, where are you going?"
Eddie-baby quickens his pace and soon leaves Slavka behind.
11
The park is empty and already lightly powdered with snow. The snow has begun to fall hard, and so Eddie-baby pulls his hood over his head shorn by Waclaw. It's a convenient thing, the yellow jacket, and the reason is because it's copied from an Austrian alpine parka. Kadik still wears the original even now. True, he takes special care of it since it's getting old. Kadik brought the coat back from a festival. Naturally, they couldn't find anything in the Kharkov stores like the material used to make alpine parkas, and so they had to buy yellow upholstery fabric – the kind used on chairs and sofas. The fabric gets a little wet in the rain, but it doesn't matter, since they chose a thick lining. Kadik even suggested putting polyethylene strips in the hood and under the shoulders so that their heads and arms wouldn't get wet, but Eddie didn't want to: the polyethylene would have made a rustling noise. Eddie-baby doesn't like rustling noises.
"Good day, M'sieur Savenko." Eddie-baby would recognize that voice among thousands of others. It belongs to Asya. Asya Vishnevsky. She's standing at the entrance to the park, and with her is Tomka Gurgelevich. Tomka is holding a bag of groceries in her arms.
"Good day, Mad'moiselle Asya," Eddie-baby says ceremoniously as he extends his hand to her. But after shaking the cold hand of this robust girl in glasses, he smiles and kisses her less formally on the cheek. He and Asya are friends.
"Good day, Mad'moiselle Tamara," he says to Tomka, and shakes her mittened hand. Tomka has put her bag down in the snow. "Are you awake yet, Toma?" Eddie-baby asks sarcastically.
He's teasing her. Everybody knows that more than anything else, she likes to sleep. She's a pretty girl, taller than Eddie and a little large for her age (she's sixteen, and her auburn hair is always pulled back in the kind of bun a grown woman would wear), and Eddie-baby likes her very much and wants to ruffle her, to provoke her out of her usual half-somnolent, melancholy placidity. There are a lot of different rumors about her in the district. According to some, she's screwing a guy who calls himself the "Jerk" and is a well-known cardplayer and swindler from the center. Other versions have it that she sleeps until three in the afternoon, doesn't go out anywhere, and continually reads books, all of which makes her parents very unhappy. Tomka's father is a construction foreman like Vitka Golovashov's father, and they have an apartment to themselves, so it's impossible to find out anything reliable about Tomka's life, given the absence of neighbors. Eddie-baby and Tolik Karpov once caught Tomka's little brother and attempted to drag some information out of him. Tolik even started twisting the stubborn third-year pupil's arm, trying to find out whether Tomka was screwing the Jerk, and the little kid squealed and yelled and called Tolik a fascist, a bastard, and a whore, but he wouldn't betray his sister. They had to let him go. Eddie-baby didn't approve of the way Tolik treated the crew-cut tadpole, but he wanted to shake the auburn-haired Tomka out of her self-possession.