The Perevorachaevs aren't home today, except for the lonely hunchback Tolik, who at this minute is probably lying on a soldier's blanket reading a book, his ears plugged with cotton wadding. The other Perevorachaevs have all gone to the country, since many of the residents of Saltovka still have links to the villages beyond the city.
Uncle Sasha Chepiga's grandfather and grandmother live in a village called Old Saltov. It's a good distance away – several hours by truck. To get to Old Saltov, you take the Saltov Highway, or the Saltov Highroad, as it used to be called.
Eddie-baby spent a summer, the summer after his escape to Brazil, in fact, with Uncle Sasha's grandfather and grandmother. There, in a shallow, swampy creek filled with green water, he learned to swim, and there, while he was lying on a bank of that creek with geese wandering nearby, Uncle Sasha Chepiga complimented him on his nose. Eddie-baby had complained to Uncle Sasha about his pug nose. By way of answer, Uncle Sasha had said that he would with pleasure, with the very greatest of pleasure, as he reiterated, exchange noses with Eddie-baby. Eddie-baby looked carefully at Uncle Sasha's nose and was instantly ashamed. In the first place, it was of a permanently reddish color, and in the second, its shape was reminiscent of an ugly, far from purebred potato – as if nature had been intending to produce three separate potato tubers but then had changed its mind and fashioned them all into one.
Eddie-baby ran away from Old Saltov too – on a day when he, Grandfather Chepiga, and Uncle Sasha, who was then on a two-week vacation, were tending cows in the forest and had some bad luck: two cows got separated from the herd. The forest near Old Saltov is no artificial strip of woodland but a real old-growth forest, dense and large. One might ask what kind of fool pastures his cows in a forest when there's a meadow for that. But the explanation for the behavior of the strange herdsmen who had suddenly chased their cattle into the forest was simple: the cows were the private property of the collective farmers, whereas the meadow belonged to the collective farm itself. The state permitted the collective farmers to have their own cows, but they had to pasture them wherever they could, only not in the meadow. Which is why they pastured them in the forest or on the railroad verge. They took turns pasturing everyone's cows, one household doing it one week, another taking over the next. That week it was Grandfather Chepiga's turn.
After the sun had gone down, Eddie-baby overheard Uncle Sasha and Grandfather Chepiga's conversation about how, as soon as they returned to the village, they would be killed by the owners of the lost cattle, and he decided he didn't want to be killed. Even so, Eddie-baby still believes that it was not cowardice that governed his actions when he stepped away from the campfire the three of them were sitting around and disappeared into the underbrush on the pretext of having to do a big job.
Eddie-baby walked through the already dark forest and calmly sang a tune he had made up himself. He had no supplies at all with him, just a herdsman's staff and Uncle Sasha's large knife, but he was rather glad that he didn't have even so much as a piece of bread with him: it would be an excellent opportunity to test his knowledge of which wild plants might be used for food.
It was August, and Eddie-baby had no doubt that he could easily live in the fields and forests until late fall at least, all the time moving steadily south. A thrilling picture of his future life in the forest presented itself… He immediately thought of attaching his knife to the staff by means of a vine so that it could be used as a spear to throw at small game.
Eddie-baby didn't last long in the forest, however. And it was not hunger that drove him out but loneliness. Eddie-baby's book knowledge in fact proved useful after all; he calmly lived on berries and the roots of plants of the temperate zone that had been identified in his books, only occasionally discovering for himself that one or another root was impossible to chew because of its almost eau-de-cologne-like taste. Eddie-baby had not been afraid of the dark even as an infant. But he couldn't tolerate the loneliness. That summer Eddie-baby discovered for the first time that he was a social animal.
He is ashamed around Uncle Sasha and Auntie Marusya to this day about the commotion he caused in Old Saltov. Actually, thanks to him, Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga became celebrities of a kind. Pointing to them, the village residents would say, "Theirs was the hut that the city kid ran off from."
Coming out of the forest onto the highway, which he had found long before, the city kid waved down a passing car, and within half an hour or so he was at the village store two houses away from the thatched hut where Grandfather and Grandmother Chepiga lived. It turned out that the cows had been found the same evening, had come quietly out of the forest by themselves to rejoin the herd. The kid rejoined the human herd two days later.
29
Eddie casts a sidelong glance at the door of the Auntie Marusyas – apparently they're dancing – and then resolutely goes on up to the second (and top) floor and opens his own door.
It's quiet in Apartment No.6. The drunk-tank major Shepotko disappeared from the apartment a week before the holidays started, and their other neighbors, Lidka and Uncle Kolya, took their newborn baby to see relatives.
Eddie-baby goes into the kitchen and finds the food his mother has left for him under a clean towel – his favorite macaroni with meat patties already placed in the frying pan with a pat of butter. "My mother really is a decent person," Eddie suddenly decides, even though he called her a fool and a prostitute during a terrible argument that morning.
Eddie-baby puts the frying pan on the gas range – a recent innovation. The Saltov district was connected to a gas line about two years ago. Until then, part of the kitchen had been occupied by a coal-burning stove. They all used to bake pies in the stove's oven then, but with the arrival of gas, Eddie-baby's mother has been baking pies less and less often.
While eating his macaroni with meat patties, something he could eat three times a day without getting sick of it, Eddie reflects on how he and his mother never used to swear at each other. Or at least he never called his mother names the way he did today: "Fool! Prostitute!" Eddie-baby is ashamed that he didn't restrain himself. At the same time, however, he understands perfectly well that his mother is just as responsible as he is for the fact that they have such a terrible relationship. Ever since he started the eighth year, Eddie-baby has considered himself an adult and has wanted other people to treat him as one, but his mother still tries to tell him what to do.
What's unfair is that his mother basically doesn't care how Eddie-baby is – whether he's happy or sad – or what he's thinking about. His mother quarrels savagely with him over trifles, over things like whether he's going to wear pants that are twenty-two instead of eighteen centimeters wide, or the way he parts his hair, or his yellow jacket. It used to be that the only thing she got nervous about was how long his hair was. Eddie's new classroom teacher, Yakov Lvovich (Rachel finally got so decrepit she had to retire), has managed to create the firm impression in Eddie-baby's mother that nothing good will ever come of him.
"Your son will grow up to be a criminal and a parasite," Yakov Lvovich announced to Eddie's mother at their first parent-teacher conference. And his mother, rather than taking Eddie's side in the matter, took Yakov Lvovich's.
In Eddie-baby's opinion, nothing good has come of Yakov Lvovich himself. He's a swine and a bastard. Taking advantage of the fact that he's unusually big – more than 1.8 meters tall – the classroom teacher beats his pupils. He calls them into his physics office – the fascist teaches physics – and beats them there where there aren't any witnesses, and the kids come out with bruised noses and lips. The fascist thinks that by using this severe method he's teaching the punks a lesson in behavior, although what he's actually doing is beating up people who won't fight back. The majority of the punks leave school for the streets or the factories after the seventh year. There aren't any real punks left in their class. You can't actually call Sashka Tishchenko or Valka Lyashenko punks. Even though they sometimes act like it and live in Tyurenka, they're really pretty easygoing kids. In Eddie-baby's opinion, it isn't fair to beat them just because they're lazy or lack ability.