Eddie-baby takes a much milder view of his other physical confrontation with the militia, one in which two of his ribs were broken, since he himself was at fault and the beating was justified. The fact that they used their boots wasn't justified, nor was the fact that enraged men were beating up a minor, but they did have a reason, in Eddie-baby's opinion, and a sufficiently good one. Eddie-baby had after all cut one of their auxiliaries with a knife. Eddie-baby was drunk, one of those rare instances when he was drunk to the point of no longer being aware of what he was doing, but that could hardly be considered a mitigating circumstance. Eddie-baby is strict with himself, and if he's at fault, he admits it.
Eddie-baby was exceptionally lucky that time. He could be in reform school or in prison right now if Veniamin Ivanovich hadn't in his days as a young cadet gone to military school with another cadet by the name of Ivan Sakharov and even shared a room with him.
Fate. Eddie-baby knows he's a lucky person.
23
All that happened quite recently. Last summer, in fact. Eddie-baby had been invited to a birthday party at Slavka Panov's. Slavka, whom Eddie-baby doesn't like for some reason, isn't much: a short, stocky, bullet-headed kid with a little forelock – a cheat and a pickpocket. But Slavka knows how to make himself useful to everybody, and so everybody knows him. It's on a tip from Slavka that Kostya Bondarenko and Eddie are planning to rob the house of the rich Uncle Lyova. It's on account of Uncle Lyova's fortresslike home in Ivanovka that they're buying the TT from Kolka Varzhainov. Vovka Dneprovsky brought Eddie-baby along to Slavka's birthday party, since he and Vovka had become friends that summer. Or more accurately, they had made each other's acquaintance the day before.
Vovka Dneprovsky had just returned from reform school. Vovka was fourteen, but at the time he was half a head taller than Eddie-baby and as skinny as a rail. Like Eddie-baby and Kostya, Vovka is the son of an army officer, although Vovka's father, Lieutenant Colonel Dneprovsky, doesn't live with his family; he left Vovka and his older brother, Tolya, and Vovka's mother several years ago. Vovka is a friend of Grishka Primak's – they were in reform school together – and it was Grishka who introduced Eddie-baby and Vovka.
Vovka and Eddie-baby got drunk in honor of their new friendship. As a result, they came to an understanding and decided to rob the grocery store next to Soviet Hospital No.2. Which is in fact what they did, although Vovka stopped by his house for a knapsack first. Eddie-baby is ashamed of that "burglary," and Kostya was terribly ashamed of it when he heard about it. "The clumsy work of snot-nosed village kids who smashed a window with a shaft," he said. "Assholes! Idiots! Two alcoholics!" Kostya said. "Who does things like that! Who does it that way!"
Both of them drunk, Vovka and Eddie-baby had actually thrown a cobblestone at the grocery store window. But the window didn't break, since they had thrown the cobblestone at its center and the large piece of glass had flexed and repelled the stone. It's embarrassing for Eddie-baby to remember just how much noise they made before finally managing to break the window.
Eddie-baby and Vovka had not even tried to look for money in the store after filling their knapsack with vodka. Without a thought they set off directly for Vovka's building (Eddie-baby completely forgot at the time all of Kostya's instructions for throwing the militia dogs off the scent, forgot, that is, all about water, tobacco, and naphthalene), hid the knapsack in the basement, and went up to Vovka's apartment with two of the bottles. Paying no attention whatever to the hysterical screaming of Vovka's mother, the two friends finished off one of the bottles and lay down on Vovka's bed. Vovka's only comment to his mother was, "Shut up, you old bitch, or Ed will fuck you!" and then he and Eddie-baby fell asleep embracing each other. The next day was Slavka's birthday party.
It was terribly hot that July day, perhaps the hottest day of the year. Slavka lives in a ten-square-meter room in a barrack, a single-story wooden building off the beaten track behind Grishka's and Vovka's buildings and right next to the river. Or rather, right next to the creek that separates Ivanovka and Saltovka and has long since been reduced to a trickle, so that only rushes and swampy pools with clouds of mosquitoes flying over them mark the place where the creek used to be. Eddie-baby knows why Slavka lives in a barrack – his mother and father were convicted of economic crimes and sent away, and so he has to live with his grandfather. Usually old people or people unable to fend for themselves live in barracks. The young people, one after another, obtain apartments or rooms in the new buildings. There are very few barracks, and their number is growing steadily smaller. Until he met Slavka, Eddie had never been in one.
Maybe if it hadn't been for Gorkun, they wouldn't have gotten so drunk, even considering the heat and the ten bottles of stolen vodka that Vovka and Eddie-baby brought with them to Slavka's birthday party. Gorkun is an old guy – he's already over thirty, with half that time spent in Kolyma. Gorkun got three sentences of five years each, and he served them all in Kolyma. Three sentences is like being a Hero of the Soviet Union three times over, and all the kids and the grown-up thieves too had a lot of respect for Gorkun, who had just been released from his last sentence. Yet after Slavka's birthday party in the barrack and the events that followed it, Eddie-baby came to realize that although he isn't a bad sort, Gorkun is done for, destroyed, and that neither Eddie nor Kostya, both of whom dream of becoming criminal heroes, would ever want to lead the kind of life that Viktor Gorkun has led. Although it may well be that Gorkun did save Eddie-baby's life, just as he claims.
It may also be that they got drunk because there were so many snacks. Actually, Eddie-baby doesn't remember very well now whether there were a lot of snacks or not. All he remembers is that it was as hot as a steam bath in the hut, since neither the erratically operating fan nor the transom windows helped. The boys and girls drank warm vodka and followed it with food that was no less disgustingly warm. Slavka's guests sat on two beds, Slavka's and his grandfather's, with a table in between them. When it started to get dark, Gorkun suggested going over to his place for a drink.
It turned out that Gorkun's mother lived in the same building as Tomka Gurgelevich. To say that Gorkun himself lived in the same building as Tomka would be wrong, since Gorkun had for all practical purposes lived in Kolyma and had never been free for more than a few months at a time. They brought the remaining vodka to Gorkun's, and the five of them – Gorkun, Eddie, Vovka Dneprovsky, Slavka, and another of Vovka's friends, Ivan, whose father works as a digger at the cemetery – drank several more bottles and snacked on suet. Gorkun used an old hunting knife with a bronze guard and a colored plastic decorative handle to cut the suet. It was with that knife that the drunken Eddie stabbed a member of the militia auxiliary several hours later.
After drinking the vodka, they decided as a group to have some fun together by going to the dances at Krasnozavodsk Park. Krasnozavodsk Park isn't their territory; it belongs to distant Plekhanovka, and you can "find yourself up to your ass in adventures" there, as the stern Kostya Bondarenko expresses it – you can, in other words, easily get into a fight. It would be going too far, however, to say that they all set off for Krasnozavodsk Park with the clear intention of getting into a fight; no, it was more that they wanted to have some fun after all they'd had to drink, and that they were excited as well by the presence of the hardened professional criminal and gangster Gorkun.
The hardened criminal was much drunker than the rest of them – in addition to a wide assortment of other diseases contracted in Kolyma, Gorkun had a stomach ulcer – and so he didn't even notice when Eddie-baby put his hunting knife in his own back pocket in order to compensate for the absence of his usual straight razor. Eddie-baby never went beyond the territory of the Saltov district without a weapon, and there wasn't time to stop by home, although his building was fifty meters from Gorkun's apartment and could even be seen from his window. That's how Gorkun's knife rather than Eddie-baby's own razor happened to get mixed up in the business.