Of the kids in their class from Tyurenka, there is, besides Vitka Nemchenko, also Sashka Tishchenko. Vitka Proutorov and Vika Kozyrev, the doctor's daughter, live near the entrance to the Jewish cemetery. That's not in Tyurenka yet; it's still the very end of Voroshilov Avenue. Vitka Proutorov and Vika go to a completely different trolley stop.
Since some of the Tyurenka kids go to school in Saltovka, the relations between Tyurenka and Saltovka are almost always good. Sometimes there are skirmishes, especially with the Tyurenka Gypsies – there's a whole crowd of them there – but basically the kids from Tyurenka and Saltovka are allies. A certain superiority felt by the kids from Saltovka, who are primarily the children of factory and office workers, to the children of the rural kurkuli is made up for by the fact that the kids from Tyurenka have a source of mineral water on their territory, a pond, and a part of the only river you can swim in in that city of over a million people – or, to be more precise, one of its banks, since the other side is occupied by Zhuravlyovka.
The Zhuravlyovka punks are the enemies of both the kids from Saltovka, whose territory doesn't border on theirs, and those from Tyurenka, whose territory does and with whom they're always fighting. The big battles take place in the summer. The two armies usually meet on the two-square-kilometer artificial island in the middle of the river. On the island are beaches and a large, ridiculous, supposedly modern restaurant made of concrete, although it in fact looks more like a World War II German coastal bunker than a place of recreation for the citizens of Kharkov.
Last summer, in August, Eddie-baby took part in one of those battles. His arm was cut, and he broke a finger from carelessness. One of the kids from Zhuravlyovka later died in the hospital. Zilberman told him that four hundred people took part in that battle. Eddie pretended to be an innocent minor who hadn't taken part in anything.
Kadik, who for some reason is always trying to push Eddie-baby's other friends out of his life, told Eddie-baby not to go to the gang war. Kadik can no more stand his "own kind" – the kids from Saltovka – than he can the kids from Tyurenka or Zhuravlyovka. He hangs out in the "center," on Sumsky Street where his friends live – jazz musicians and fancy dudes, all of them much older than Kadik is. "Eddie, what do you want with all those jerks?" Kadik says. It's his customary tune. "What do you want with all those jerks, Eddie?" That tune is the reason why Kadik is the only one of Eddie's friends his mother likes – it's her tune too.
Eddie-baby considers Kadik a "rotten intellectual." Eddie heard that expression for the first time from the militia officer, Major Shepotko. Shepotko recently moved into their apartment when Vovka Pechkurov, the last son of the prematurely deceased Major Pechkurov, moved away to Ivano-Frankovsk after graduating from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. Shepotko stubbornly calls Eddie-baby's mother "Larisa" Fyodorovna instead of "Raisa" Fyodorovna, although he, that enormous potbelly in navy blue riding breeches, is just the head of a militia drunk tank, and not even one in their district. So that Eddie-baby now shares an apartment with trash.
Kadik's a rotten intellectual. Eddie even thinks he's afraid of the punks, but he finds him interesting anyway. When Kadik's postal worker mother isn't at home, Eddie-baby goes over to his nine-square-meter room to listen to music. Kadik has a Mag record player. Very few kids in Saltovka have Mags. Sashka Plotnikov, whose house Eddie-baby promised to take Svetka to tomorrow, also has one. Kadik knows all about musicians like the black Duke Ellington, or Glenn Miller, or Elvis Presley "himself." Kadik made a laughingstock of Eddie-baby once when he found out that he had no idea who Elvis was or that Elvis had just been drafted (or had just gotten out of the American army, Eddie-baby can't remember which).
If Eddie-baby considered Kadik a coward, he wouldn't have anything to do with him. But Kadik is different; he obviously isn't a coward. Eddie-baby saw the way he punched Mishka Shevchenko in the mouth after Mishka started making fun of him. The kids were all sitting on the green benches under the lindens on Saltov Road. Usually it's the older kids who congregate under the lindens – Red Sanya, who is Eddie-baby's friend and protector, Slavka the Gypsy, Bokarev, Tolik the Worrier, Fima Meshkov, Vitka Cross-Eyes, although he's in the army now, and the weight lifters Cat and Lyova, who have just come back from prison, where they were sent for beating up a militia officer. Those kids are all over twenty; they're not minors.
3
Aha, here comes Kadik. Wearing a yellow hooded jacket just like Eddie-baby's and hopping and making faces, Kadik runs out from behind the gray corner of the building and waves. The yellow jackets are something they dreamed up themselves. Kadik's neighbor, Auntie Motya, did the sewing for them. Kadik has a hundred neighbors, if not more, since he doesn't live in an apartment but in a room off a hallway. A room left over from a dormitory. The kids took the pattern for their yellow jackets from an Austrian alpine parka Kadik brought back from an international youth festival. Kadik went to the festival along with some older kids who belonged to the Blue Horse. That was a year ago, and Kadik has been hanging out with bandmen ever since he was twelve. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Kadik is the guy who was in the BLUE HORSE and who went to a FESTIVAL.
"Sorry, old pal," Kadik says. "My dumb old lady lost the platter I was supposed to take back to Eugene today. I went through everything and I still couldn't find it. That platter's valuable. What a bitch she is! What an old whore!"
Unlike all the other kids in Saltovka, Kadik and Eddie don't swear that much. After every "normal" word, the other kids say "cocksucker" or "whore" or "cunt," or they use less common personal curse words. Eddie-baby, however, only swears occasionally. He himself has no idea why it turned out that way.
Until he was eleven years old Eddie-baby was an unbelievably exemplary boy. Every year he got letters of commendation, and for several years running he was chairman of the Young Pioneer council. Eddie-baby remembers himself as he was then, with a red neckerchief and the little forelock of an idiot, standing with his right hand raised in a Pioneer salute in front of the chairman of the troop council or the senior Young Pioneer leader and reporting, "Comrade Senior Pioneer Leader!" followed by a porridge of words he can't remember anymore. Raisa Fyodorovna recalls that time as if it were a lost paradise.
In his time off from school Eddie-baby read everything he could get his hands on. And he didn't just read; he copied out whatever information interested him in special little notebooks that were carefully classified by theme. At that time Eddie-baby was friends only with Grishka Gurevich; they sometimes played cards together (Grishka cheated and always won) or explored the surrounding fields and ravines. Grishka looked a lot like a frog, but he was an exceptionally intelligent boy and was just as curious about things as Eddie-baby was…
You could say that Eddie-baby dreamed his way through the first four years of school before his fateful eleventh year. He read, wrote down what he read, and dreamed. He wrote down a lot. From the several volumes of Dr. Livingstone's account of his travels through Africa, for example, Eddie copied out in his small hand eight (!) forty-eight-page notebooks. An impressive callus appeared on the middle finger of his right hand, and the finger itself became twisted, so that although the callus gradually diminished in size, the finger remains crooked and callused even now. At night on his couch, Eddie-baby would dream he was observing a solar eclipse in Africa while around him in a grass hut lay nickel-plated seafaring instruments – a sextant, an astrolabe, and other things that he had used to determine his location, both longitude and latitude – and a drum pounded, and naked aborigines in grass skirts circled a fence with severed human heads stuck on the palings, their eyes calmly winking.