"It really is," Eddie-baby answers unequivocally.
"Well, I've got to be going," Eddie-baby announces. It seems to him that the girls would rather be alone. "Don't forget you promised me a Romain Rolland book… The Soul?" Eddie-baby says uncertainly.
"The Soul Enchanted," Asya answers. "Well, of course, take it, only it's about a woman. It's really more of a woman's book. Are you sure you want it?"
"Give it to me," Eddie-baby decides. He enjoyed Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, and this book is probably a good one too.
15
It's already dark outside and no longer snowing, and the snow that has fallen is melting on the ground. Here and there out of the Saltovka darkness – it's always dark in Saltovka, since breaking streetlights is a peculiar sport of minors; Eddie-baby remembers with a grin the slingshot Kostya once gave him – slowly walking couples emerge, or whole groups of people loaded down with satchels containing whatever they're drinking and snacking on, people who have come to visit and celebrate the October holidays.
Svetka has gone with her mother to visit relatives in Dnepropetrovsk, near Kharkov, and so Eddie-baby is free for the evening. She'll be back tomorrow, and then they'll go to Sashka Plotnikov's. Svetka wants to be able to tell her friends later on that she spent the October holidays in the company of Sashka Plotnikov. For her that's the same thing as being invited to the palace of a king. Eddie-baby knows that Svetka's vain, but what can he do?
Eddie-baby turns in the direction of his own building. Veniamin Ivanovich is away on a business trip, and his mother is probably celebrating the holiday with their neighbors on the first floor, the ugly Auntie Marusya and the dignified, dark-haired Uncle Vanya. They invited Eddie to come along too, only what would he do there among adults who hold no interest for him? The other Auntie Marusya should be there as well, along with her husband, Uncle Sasha Chepiga. "Uncle Sasha's a jolly fellow, but he's still a member of the goat herd," Eddie-baby thinks scornfully.
Eddie-baby's mother enjoys great authority among the neighboring workers. She's much better educated than they are, having once studied chemistry in a technical secondary school, although the only time she actually worked was during the war. Since then she has spent her life as a housewife, reading books. Both the Auntie Marusyas are always coming to her for advice about their problems – Uncle Sasha drinks, and Uncle Vanya is far too good-looking for his Auntie Marusya (Eddie-baby takes it for granted that he has had other women in his life) – so Raisa Fyodorovna plays the role of adviser all day long.
"Uncle Vanya is probably a little in love with my mother," Eddie-baby thinks as he strides in the direction of his building along the wet asphalt path that meanders through the future forest of bushes and trees. He has noticed that his mother also behaves a little oddly whenever she's around Uncle Vanya – as if she were embarrassed about something. According to her, Uncle Vanya has Gypsy blood. "Maybe he actually does," Eddie-baby thinks. "He looks like one."
Eddie-baby's mother is for the most part bored in Saltovka; she has no real friends here now. His father would be bored too, if he didn't spend all day at work or away on his business trips. But Eddie's mother is a prisoner in Saltovka. She's much higher class than her present worker and peasant girlfriends. Only a few years ago she had much more interesting neighbors, half of whom were military people: Captain Posin's family with his son, Valerka, who was almost Eddie-baby's age, just a year older, and the military council member Sokolovsky with his two beautiful daughters, Galina and Larisa. And there was the Shepelsky family, who lived in another part of the building – Shepelsky himself, who was a Ph.D. and a rock climber, and his wife, Aleksandra Vasilievna, and their two sons, the university students Vlad and Lyonka. True, Lyonka turned up in Saltovka a little later, when he was already quite mad. He had lost his mind in another city, in Pavlograd, apparently, and by the time he came to live with his parents, he was an extraordinarily quiet and timid blue-eyed person. Eddie-baby remembers how, during one of his attacks, he chopped off his little finger with a hatchet and tossed it out the transom window onto the street below. Eddie also has a vivid recollection of the arrival of the medical orderlies, who in a matter of minutes carried Lyonka's bound body out of the building entrance adjacent to theirs and stuffed it into the ambulance.
All of that belongs to the already ancient history of Building No.22 on First Cross Street. Shepelsky long ago divorced his Aleksandra Vasilievna, and soon after that she died. Shepelsky, however, married a young girl, one of his students who had gone climbing with him in the Caucasus. Aleksandra Vasilievna couldn't climb mountains with Shepelsky, since she was older than he was and had fat dropsical legs and was sick a lot. When Shepelsky buried his former wife, Eddie-baby's mother went to the funeral, but she didn't take Eddie-baby along with her, although he tried to go. Shepelsky was appointed deputy minister of some Ukrainian industry and went to live in Kiev, where he moved into a large apartment. His departure was like a signal, and after that Saltovka quickly emptied. The military and other educated people all moved to the center of town, which had been destroyed by the Germans but by then had been rebuilt, and noisy working-class families – the proletariat, or as Kadik contemptuously calls them, the "hegemonic element" – quickly moved into the vacuum they had left. There are good people among them, such as the Auntie Marusyas and their husbands, but Eddie-baby's mother gets tired of them sometimes.
Eddie-baby's mother was particularly despondent when the last of her close friends, the Jew Beba, moved away from Saltovka with her husband, Dodik, and their two sons, Mishka and Lyonka. Dodik was an engineer. Eddie-baby's mother wept when Beba, Dodik, Mishka, and Lyonka left. They were very lively people, and the two families used to spend their holidays together. Dodik was an amateur photographer, and Eddie-baby's mother has a large number of snapshots in which Eddie-baby and Mishka and Lyonka are standing in their little holiday, suits holding balloons, or lying on the May grass with their faces turned toward the photographer, the playful Lyonka making faces or sticking his tongue out,
After her friend Beba left, Eddie-baby's mother started to pine. A few days later she got very mad at Veniamin Ivanovich, maintaining that his helplessness and lack of character were destroying her life and that of her child – meaning Eddie-baby, of course, since there wasn't any other child in the family. By "helplessness" and "lack of character" she had in mind First Lieutenant Savenko's inability to obtain from his commanding officers a new apartment in the center of town instead of here in Saltovka, a place that civilization had left behind, and one whose streets were sunk in mud after every rain, not to mention the fact that they were living in a single room at a time when even some of First Lieutenant's Savenko's subordinates had been given their own apartments, "so that we are still stuck in this awful neighborhood where our son is compelled to sit at home digging in books and making himself nearsighted, since he can't associate with the hoodlums and rural children who populate Saltovka," as Eddie-baby's mother expressed it in a torrent.
She was undoubtedly correct, although at the time there wasn't any indication of the troubles that lay in store for the Savenko family and for Eddie-baby's upbringing thanks to the Saltovka and Tyurenka punks whose company he would be forced to keep.
Eddie-baby's father disconcertedly answered his mother that he was an honest person and that he therefore refused to use his position at work for his own personal gain, and that, yes, some of his subordinates did on occasion obtain separate apartments, but only those who had large families. "There's a waiting list for apartments in our unit, and there are people ahead of me who need apartments much more than we do," his father had said. And in response to the accusation that he lacked character and was helpless, Eddie-baby's father suggested that his mother consider the fate of those women whose husbands are confirmed drunkards or, even worse, womanizers. Eddie-baby's father is neither a drunkard nor a womanizer, although he is good-looking, much better-looking in fact than Eddie-baby is, as his mother sometimes tells Eddie-baby when she wants to annoy him. His father has a straight nose, whereas Eddie-baby is snub-nosed like his mother. And his father has large, beautiful eyes.