Two of Eddie-baby's second-year classmates had once tried to rape Larka Gavrilov – Tolka Zakharov and the Kolka who went by the nickname "Backstreet Scraps" (his other nickname was less complicated and more humiliating: the "Pisser," in honor of the fact that, as the kids said, he still pissed himself, that is, still wet his bed). They had attempted the rape during the long recess, on the pile of overcoats that lay on the rear desks in the classroom, since at the time they didn't hang their coats in the cloakroom. Even though he's fifteen now, Eddie-baby still has no idea how eight-year-old boys could "attempt to rape" an eight-year-old girl. "What with?" Eddie-baby grins. What sort of penis could an eight-year-old have, even if he was a punk like Tolka Zakharov or Kolka the Pisser? Kolka and Tolka were both expelled from school, but they returned two weeks later.
Eddie-baby seized Nastya by her "twat" under her skirt. There where Nastya had her twat it was very warm. He seized her by that warm area and squeezed. Nastya started bellowing the instant he did so. It seemed to Eddie-baby that Nastya was not merely warm there but also moist. "She probably just peed," he surmised.
In response to the girls' cries, though they hadn't been very loud, the custodian Vasilievna came running in (she and her husband, the hall porter Uncle Vasya, lived in a small house in the schoolyard) and started lashing at the kids with a wet rag, shouting that they were mad dogs and that the proper place for them was in jail. "Run for it!" yelled Prikhodko, and letting go of the girls and shielding themselves from the rag, they burst into the hallway and raced off.
17
After the incident in the girls' lavatory, Eddie-baby earned Prikhodko's patronizing approval along with his unconcealed admiration. It was then too that Eddie-baby began his friendship with the Plague – Vovka Chumakov – and in March ran off with him to Brazil.
Thanks to a combination of circumstances, the escape to Brazil became widely known throughout Secondary School No.8. Before running off, Eddie-baby and the Plague had hidden their bookbags under some pieces of rusty iron in the basement of the Plague's building – since what need would a person have for a bookbag in Brazil? It's unclear why they took the trouble to hide the bookbags instead of simply throwing them away. They had no intention of ever coming back to Kharkov from Brazil.
Whatever the reason, the bookbags were found by some electricians who had gone down to the basement to repair the building's electrical system. The electricians solemnly brought the bookbags to the school, where they were turned over to Rachel, the boys' classroom teacher. By then a search was already under way for Eddie-baby and the Plague.
Remembering his escape to Brazil, today's Eddie-baby smiles condescendingly. The first naive attempts. Even Eddie doesn't understand anymore what it was that possessed them to try to go to Brazil on foot and by compass. Whatever it was, he and the Plague went south. Naturally, it didn't take them very long to get lost, and instead of finding Brazil, they found themselves ten kilometers out of town in the city dump, where bums and cripples robbed them of the whole sum – 135 rubles and 90 kopecks – they had saved for their escape, leaving them with nothing but a couple of geography books that Eddie-baby had brought along to bolster his own and the Plague's resolve through examination of the photographs and drawings of tropical animals and birds and the sultry landscapes of Amazonia that the books contained. One of the books was called A Journey Through South America.
It was the end of March and still very cold, even though all the snow had melted during the February thaw. Without money they'd never reach Brazil, as the Plague, the son of a laundrywoman and the more practical of the two, quite sensibly explained to the stubbornly romantic Eddie-baby as they sat next to a fire burning in an old steel barrel. They wouldn't even get as far as the Crimea, where Eddie-baby had proposed waiting until it got really warm before moving westward by compass in the direction of Odessa, where they would stow away on a ship going to Brazil. "Let's go home," the Plague had said.
Eddie-baby didn't want to go home; he was ashamed to. Eddie-baby was a lot more stubborn than the Plague. The Plague set off without compass in search of a bus stop, while Eddie-baby stayed behind and spent the night stripped down to his undershirt beside a steaming boiler in the boiler room of a large apartment building. Mice or rats were rustling in the corners, and Eddie-baby stayed up all night. The next morning, as he was trying to steal a loaf of bread from a bakery, he was apprehended by the salesgirls and turned over to the militia.
18
Today's Eddie-baby is standing in front of his building, No.22 First Cross Street, but he has no desire whatever to go home or to go to Auntie Marusya's. And so, after gazing pensively for a while at Auntie Marusya's lighted windows on the first floor, he decides to visit the benches under the lindens. Maybe some of the kids will be there, and maybe they can all have a drink and shoot the breeze. Therefore, zipping up his yellow jacket all the way to his throat and sticking his hands in his pockets and pressing The Soul Enchanted lent to him by Asya ever more tightly under his arm, Eddie-baby cheerfully sets off in the direction of Saltov Road, taking the asphalt path that leads past Kadik's building. Not far from that building is a large, noxious public toilet, which Eddie-baby needs to visit. If all he had to do was "take a leak," he would stand next to any wall (manners being unpretentious in Saltovka), but unfortunately he has to do a "big job," as his parents would say, or "dump a load," as Kadik might put it, or "take a shit," as the crudest inhabitants of Saltovka would say. Because of its crudeness Eddie-baby is embarrassed even to say this last denomination of the daily physiological process out loud.
The toilet is a stone hut with two entrances, the men's and the women's, and it's almost the only public toilet on this, "their" side of Saltov Road. Eddie-baby can't stand going inside it, but since he now spends the better part of his time on the street (his father and mother recall with nostalgic longing, as for some lost paradise, the time when it was impossible to get him to go outside), it is an establishment that he is sometimes obliged to visit.
Pushing open the wooden door, Eddie-baby notes with horror that the whole toilet is flooded with a nasty mixture of water and urine, although across that liquid expanse some anonymous folk craftsmen have laid a makeshift bridge constructed of bricks brought from somewhere outside the building and leading to a raised wooden platform with three holes cut into it. Trying not to breathe the foul air, Eddie-baby balances his way along the bricks over the murky swill and, dropping his trousers, squats over one of the holes. Since he has to breathe from time to time, he becomes aware against his will that the toilet smells not only of urine and excrement but also of vomit. The corner of the wooden platform opposite him is in fact thickly covered with it. The vomit is an artificial red color; obviously the victim who left the contents of his stomach behind there had been celebrating the forty-first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution by drinking nothing but cahors, or fortified red. Specialists and professionals (Eddie-baby is a professional) are of the opinion that up to fifty percent of Soviet fortified red wine actually consists of dye, and that it will eat away the stomach of any idiot foolish enough to drink it.
From a rusty nail on the toilet wall Eddie-baby tears a scrap of newspaper left by some decent soul of the kind that will always be with us, and… wipes himself with it, remembering with a grin the theory advanced by Slavka the Gypsy that the ink in newsprint is harmful to the asshole, and that continual wiping with newspapers can give you cancer of the rectum.