It was Eddie-baby's father who named him Eduard. When his mother called his father at his unit from the maternity ward and asked what name she ought to give their son ("You have a son, Veniamin Ivanovich!"), his father, who was twenty-five at the time, was sitting in his office reading the poems of Eduard Bagritsky, and he told her to write down "Eduard." Eddie-baby's father liked Bagritsky's poems very much. And so it happened that Eddie-baby was named after the Jewish poet.
Not long ago – last spring, in fact – Eddie-baby for the first time read some of Bagritsky's poems collected in a little book with a dark blue cover, and he liked them very much too, just as his father had fifteen years before. He particularly liked the poem called "The Smugglers," which begins,
Following the fish and the stars,
Three Greeks hauling contraband…
To his amazement he found some indecent lines in the middle of the poem:
Piles of easy money fell from the stars:
Cognac, silk stockings, and condoms…
Eddie-baby showed Kadik the lines – the ones about condoms. Kadik liked them too, although he doesn't care that much about poetry. He likes jazz and rock 'n' roll. He's learning how to play the saxophone.
Eddie-baby himself didn't like poetry for a long time. Whenever it happened at the library that Victoria Samoilovna, wrapped in a shawl and coughing because of her weak lungs, suggested some poetry to him, he would refuse with an ironical smirk. Kid stuff!
Victoria Samoilovna has known Eddie-baby ever since he was nine. He may be the "oldest" reader in the library. True, Eddie-baby goes to the library less and less often now. He doesn't have time for libraries. Eddie-baby has become a man, and he has his own concerns. The last time he saw Victoria Samoilovna was in July. It's already November, and the books are long overdue. Two volumes of Valery Bryusov and some verse by Polonsky. Eddie-baby doesn't want to return them; he wants to keep them for himself. He'll say he lost them. But Eddie-baby feels bad about deceiving Victoria Samoilovna and keeps putting off his visit to her. "Tomorrow… next week," he tells himself, and every day it gets harder and harder to go to the neighborhood library. He hasn't gone to the school library for a long time either. In the first place, he can't stand Lora Yakovlevna – she has a disgusting urine smell – and in the second place, there isn't anything there for him to read; he hates schoolbooks.
2
Eddie-baby was lucky with poetry. The first poems he read in his life (Victoria Samoilovna having managed at last to stick a book into his hands) were The Youthful Verses of Alexander Blok, with a picture of a lilac branch on the cover. Eddie-baby discovered Blok's poems in May, in Vitka Fomenko's garden just when the lilacs were in bloom. Eddie-baby had gone with the whole class to Vitka's mother's funeral. The funeral was delayed, first by a May shower, and then by the old women. Vitka's grandmother had insisted that a priest come to perform the funeral rites for her daughter, and in the meantime Eddie, breathless with awe and astonishment, sat reading on a woodpile in a corner of the garden, where he was hiding out from his schoolmates:
"I dream that I am once again a boy and a lover,
And there is a ravine, and in the ravine a thorny dogrose…
The old house peers into my heart,
And turns pink from edge to edge,
And your tiny window…
That voice, it is yours,
And I shall give my life and my sorrow to its incomprehensible sound…,"
Eddie read as the mournful singing of the old women came from Vitka Fomenko's old house.
"And though in a dream pressing to my lips
Your once gentle hand,"
– the words made Eddie want to die, to die of love for Svetka, whom he had just met at the May Day celebrations.
A lot got its start with Vitka Fomenko. Including the career of Eddie the criminal. Vitka's actually a coward – you can tell that just by looking at him. He's round, fat, and short. But Vitka has his own home, an old wooden frame house located by the Turbine Factory. On the other side of Vitka's house – not the side facing the street but the one in back – are cornfields, a ravine, then more fields, and then the outskirts of a real village.
The Saltov district used to be a village too, but ten years ago they started putting up two- and three-story buildings with two or four entrances, until they gradually built up the district. Eddie-baby will never forget how in 1951 the soldiers brought them – brought his father and mother and him – to Saltovka. Their building was still locked up, and Sergeant Makhitarian took a thick iron rod, hammered it flat on a rock, and then used it to break open the lock so they could move in. Two months later, Major Pechkurov, the man they were to share their apartment with, joined them, and six months after that he was dead. He had checked out.
Eddie-baby's father is a first lieutenant who will soon be up for captain. "He'll never make captain, never," Eddie-baby thinks, "because he's as timid as a woman." Eddie's mother says his father will be a captain, but Eddie-baby knows his father doesn't look after his own affairs. His mother says the same thing, but she doesn't always remember everything she says. Eddie-baby's father should never have joined the army; he should have been a musician, as everyone says. He's very talented. He plays the guitar, the piano, and many other instruments, and he even writes music, but for some reason he's a first lieutenant.
Vitka Fomenko's father is a foreman at the Turbine Factory. He earns less than Eddie-baby's father does, but his family is much better off and much happier. And they have a house. Eddie-baby lives with his father and mother in a single room, although it's a large one and has a balcony.
Vitka Fomenko came to their class from another school less than a year ago. Even though it was immediately clear that he was a coward, it was also clear that he was a cheerful one, and when Vitka invited Eddie over for New Year's along with several other boys and girls from their class, Eddie went. At Vitka Fomenko's he also met Vovka the Boxer, a handsome boy from the Tyurenka district. It was with Vovka that Eddie-baby burgled a store for the first time in his life.
Tyurenka occupies an important place in the lives of Eddie-baby and the other kids from Saltovka. Tyurenka starts on the other side of the cemeteries. If you go past the overgrown but still used Russian cemetery, and through the no longer used Jewish one with its gravestones and obelisks, following the path worn there by the residents of Saltovka on their way to Tyurenka Pond with its medicinal waters that have flowed from an old iron pipe since time immemorial (people from Saltovka go to the pond in droves to swim in the summer), then on the other side of the Jewish cemetery you'll come to Tyurenka.
The kids from Tyurenka are all children of kurkuli, as they're called in Saltovka – children of Ukrainian peasants, in other words. They live in old private houses, and their parents are traders and craftsmen. The parents of the kids from Tyurenka usually get work in the factories in the late fall and then are laid off as soon as the snow melts. The residents of Tyurenka make a lot more money in the summer selling their cherries and apples and strawberries in the Kharkov farmers' markets than they do in the winter at the factories. Some of them have small potato fields or raise tomatoes and cucumbers on their own plots. Tyurenka is also called Tyur's Dacha. They say that a long time ago, before the revolution, there was an estate belonging to somebody named Tyur located near the pond. Or at least that's what Vitka Nemchenko's grandmother says.