The watch, however, means money. Eddie-baby painfully remembers that he has to have 250 rubles by tomorrow night. If you divide a thousand by four, you get exactly 250 rubles. He won't really get that much, of course, since his part in acquiring the watch was an insignificant one. He'll do well if Sanya gives him a hundred. Maybe he should ask Sanya to lend him the rest?
"Sanya, hey, Sanya," Eddie says, "when are you going to sell the watch? Can you do it tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow. The market will be closed tomorrow. It's a holiday, or did you forget?" Sanya says in surprise. "What's the matter, do you need cash or something? You had some. When did I give it to you last time? It was less than a week ago."
He's talking about the ring he and Sanya acquired together. Sanya, as if merely playing with the hand of a girl they met, had taken the ring off while Eddie distracted her. He played the part of Sanya's little brother. They were on a trolley. Not on their own No.24, but on No.3 – in the city, in other words, and not in their own neighborhood. The dumb girl was so pleased that the stylish Sanya (who called himself Richard) had made a date with her that she never suspected he'd repeated the same line dozens of times and had made dozens of such dates. Unfortunately the line doesn't always work, but Sanya uses it over and over again. His fingers are thick and pink but very nimble.
"I spent it," Eddie justifies himself. "I thought my mother and father would give me some money for the holiday, but they haven't given me a fucking thing!"
"You should have saved some cash for the holiday," Sanya says, shaking his head. "Any other time I'd give you something, but I haven't got anything now either. I'm squeezed dry. I gave everything I earned last week to my mother to buy a coat for Svetka. The little twat has grown, and now she needs a new coat."
Eddie-baby's heart sinks. Sanya was his last hope. The butcher often has money, although unlike the other butchers, Sanya doesn't hold on to it, he immediately squanders it. He dresses expensively and wears skull rings on his pink fingers, and all that costs money. "Where can I get some money?" Eddie wonders. "Where?"
"Why don't you ask Cat," Sanya says, seeing how crestfallen Eddie is, and without waiting for an answer, he asks Cat himself.
"Cat, hey, Cat, have you got any cash you can loan Eddie?"
"How much does he need?" Cat asks from the other side of the bench, and reaches into his pocket.
"How much?" Sanya asks Eddie.
"Two-fifty or three hundred…," Eddie says uncertainly.
"O-o-oh," Cat drawls, and takes his hand out of his pocket. "I don't have that kind of money on me right now. I thought you maybe wanted thirty or fifty rubles. For two-fifty you'll have to wait until I get paid."
"I need it by tomorrow," Eddie says in a hopeless voice.
"Eddie, you jerk, how many times have I told you, if you want money, go to the track," Slavka Bokarev observes pompously.
The kids all laugh.
Eddie-baby waves Bokarev away. "You go there every day, so where's your money?" he asks him in an irritated voice.
"I'm just now finishing going over the data, and pretty soon I'll have a system that will bring me in a million in no time," Bokarev answers with conviction.
26
Eddie thinks there's no goddamn way you'll ever get that million out of Bokarev's head.
Bokarev used to have a completely different idea for getting rich. He dreamed of organizing a vast network for the production and sale of exam cribs, each no bigger than a small photograph. The cribs were supposed to earn Bokarev a million rubles.
Cribs of that kind had existed long before Bokarev ever thought of them. Eddie-baby himself had seen photographic cribs for math with the tiny symbols of the basic mathematical formulas thickly covering their whole surface. You could buy cribs like that for whatever subject you wanted.
Bokarev, however, intended to carry out the manufacture and sale of cribs on an industrial scale. He dreamed of a huge staff of photographers who would flood the entire country with millions of photocribs, from Liepaja in the west to Vladivostok in the east, from the Arctic Circle in the north to the city of Kushka in the south. Inspiration shone in Bokarev's eyes whenever he spoke of his idea. Thousands of minors organized in disciplined commercial teams would sell his photocribs in the vicinity of every school, university, and technical institute in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That ethnically diverse horde of photographers and minors would in the course of a year fill Bokarev's pockets with millions of rubles.
The plan turned out to be less simple in practice than in Bokarev's inspired calculations. Having barely begun to organize his empire, Bokarev ran up against a number of insoluble difficulties, of which the main one was that the projected number of students and schoolchildren weren't interested in buying his cribs. Some of them didn't believe in cribs at all, while others were inclined to make their own – not photographic, of course, but cribs nonetheless. Everything was as smooth as could be on paper – expenditures, the number of students and schoolchildren in the USSR, income, a price per crib of ten rubles, which would obtain you all the knowledge in a given subject area. The problem was that only a few wanted to obtain it.
Now Bokarev has a new idea. He's already been working on his "system" for six months. He goes to the track every day and writes down his data – which horse comes in first in which race. He then diligently organizes the data, furrows appearing on his Socratic brow. Bokarev really does have an unusually impressive forehead, and it really does remind you of the forehead of Socrates. The only thing Eddie-baby isn't so sure of is that such capacious crania and superbly protuberant thinker's foreheads invariably contain all they're supposed to.
Bokarev works tirelessly on his system and maintains that it will soon be perfected. Then he will make his million. Why exactly a million Bokarev himself has no idea. Obviously he's impressed by the six whole zeroes that follow the one.
Until that day comes, however, Bokarev continues to attend his polytechnical institute as a fourth-year student and to go around in terribly worn-out shoes, saving all his money – his miserable stipend – to cover his track expenses and buy racing forms and even trolley tickets, since the track is a good distance away.
The gang on the benches under the lindens accepts Bokarev out of the purest kind of provincial snobbery – whatever he is, however ragged he is, he's still a student. Both Cat and Lyova, not to mention Sanya, make about ten times as much money at their factories as Bokarev gets on his stipend, and they steal as well.
Another reason why the kids permit Bokarev to spend whole evenings with them is that he likes to shoot the breeze and knows how to do it. He can talk about anything, an art in which he has only one rival – Slavka the Gypsy. The Gypsy's chatter, however, is adorned with a kind of dreamy romanticism that always has a geographical flavor to it, whereas Bokarev's talk gives off a mathematically romantic aura. Bokarev's hobby is organization, calculations, estimates, and drafts, and his talk is more contemporary than that of the other Slavka – or so it seems to Eddie-baby. And although Eddie, like the other kids, doesn't believe that Bokarev will ever make a million rubles and laughs at his idiotic ideas, he still has his doubts sometimes – what if he does?
It's also indisputable that even though Bokarev is now glad of every scrap he can manage to eat for free, and lives with his grandfather and grandmother in a twelve-meter room, in a little more than a year he will already be an engineer. And the other kids won't.
Eddie-baby, like the other kids, doesn't want to be an engineer, although, as his mother and father and his neighbors and everybody else who knows him admit, he has a good mind. He doesn't want to be an engineer, and he has no desire whatever to undertake the boring study of mathematics, physics, the tensile strength of materials, and other "hard" sciences for five years. Eddie-baby hates mathematics. What he likes are dates.