But Yakov Lvovich has never once laid a finger on Eddie. He knows which ones he can beat and which ones he can't. He doesn't hit Sashka Lyakhovich either. Or Vitka Proutorov, although that's because Vitka has a weak heart.
The first reason why Yakov Lvovich doesn't hit Eddie is because of his father. The quiet Veniamin Ivanovich is still in harness with the MVD, and even though Eddie is sure that it would be hard to find a more innocuous person than his father, the magical letters MVD have their effect on the physics teacher Yakov Lvovich Kaprov.
The second reason is because of Eddie himself. The first time the new classroom teacher beat up one of the kids – Vitka Vodolazhsky, a harmless village fellow who is impatiently sitting through the eighth year with his twin sister so he can transfer to a technical high school – Eddie-baby swore to a group standing around in the toilet while Vitka wiped the blood from his face that if "Yasha" ever touched him, he'd cut the physics teacher with his razor. You can't let other people insult you, not even once – so he had been taught by Sanya, and all the punks in Saltovka live by that unwritten law. And Eddie-baby tries to live by it too.
Maybe the kids didn't believe his oath, but Yasha did – there are informers everywhere, and somebody reported it to him. He believed it because there had been cases like that in the past, especially in recent years, both at their school and at the neighboring ones. In 1956 somebody stabbed the bald gym teacher Lyova in the side during the school New Year's party.
Still another reason why Yasha is afraid to touch Eddie is Red Sanya. Everybody in Saltovka knows that Sanya looks out for Eddie-baby, and that Sanya can count on the weight lifters and on all of Tyurenka, and when necessary, on the savage blackasses from the Horse Market. Anybody who touches Eddie-baby is in trouble. Which is why nightmares like Eddie-baby's fight with Yurka Obeyuk don't happen anymore. For a while they continued to torment Eddie-baby in his sleep, but they don't now. Yurka himself went back to Krasnoyarsk with his family, and Eddie-baby never got to take the revenge he used to dream about. Actually, Eddie-baby didn't dream about it for very long – just for the first six months after the fight. The fight was his own fault, after all, since in poring over his books he had forgotten that he was a man and that a man has to be able to take care of himself. And what did that have to do with Yurka Obeyuk?
Eddie finishes up the macaroni and in his thoughts returns once again to the argument with his mother. Eddie-baby wonders why she's always on the side of his enemies. She always is. Other mothers stand up for their children. But not Raisa Fyodorovna. As far as she's concerned, it's always Eddie-baby's fault. Clearly taking revenge on Eddie-baby for his promise to cut him, Yasha always gives him a C in physics, although Eddie, realizing that Yasha finds fault with everything he does, learns his physics lessons by heart, despite the fact that it isn't his favorite subject. Another student would receive an A or maybe a B for the same answer, but Yasha gives Eddie a C. His mother doesn't understand; she thinks it's because Eddie isn't studying physics the right way.
"Injustice!" Eddie-baby once wrote on the classroom blackboard. This was meant as a comprehensive explanation of the way the world is. Raisa Fyodorovna wants to raise her son to be a "good person," as she puts it, and so, although by no means stingy, she thinks that it's harmful to give a fifteen-year-old child money to cover his out-of-pocket expenses. As a result, that fifteen-year-old is always going around the district looking for money and is forced to steal. "What a fool she is!" Eddie-baby thinks bitterly. His mother believes that if she doesn't give him any money to buy a bottle of biomitsin to drink with his friends, he'll settle down and obediently go without both the biomitsin and the friends. She doesn't know her son and that his character is too strong for that. She has no idea that Eddie has been stealing for a long time now, and that he and Kostya have started breaking into stores and even private apartments.
And his mother makes fun of his poems too. Asya doesn't make fun of them, Kadik doesn't make fun of them, and Captain Zilberman doesn't make fun of them! Zilberman even says that Eddie is talented, that if he were smart, he would stop hanging around with the punks, finish school with top marks, and go to the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. Raisa Fyodorovna, however, maintains that Eddie-baby's poems are gibberish and sound just like the poets he's been reading. He read Blok and they sounded like Blok; he read Bryusov and immediately started writing poems that sounded like Bryusov; he read Esenin and he wrote poems like Esenin's…
Eddie thinks that if his mother and father had given him just a little money, he wouldn't have started stealing. Or would he have started anyway? He isn't sure. He really doesn't know. Probably he would have anyway, since, like Kostya, he steals not so much for the money as because he wants to become a real criminal. Although he needs the money too.
Kostya claims that in the USSR only the pickpockets have kept themselves together as a more or less organized force. Several times he has pointed out to Eddie the leaders of the pickpockets on Plekhanov Street and at the Horse Market – the so-called pakhany. But real organized crime has been completely stamped out, according to Kostya. Kostya dreams of a revival of organized crime. Their gang is just a first small step on the road to the network of armed gangs that Kostya, and Eddie-baby along with him, will create in the future.
Eddie-baby is sick of his parents and sick of Apartment No.6 and of the fat-assed, fat-bellied Major Shepotko, who always stinks the place up with his foul cigarettes and his sitting on the toilet by the hour. Eddie wants to leave his parents as soon as he can. Not the way he ran away last time, but quietly. He has four months left before he turns sixteen and gets his own internal passport. Then it's goodbye to Apartment No.6. "Grown-up children should live separately from their parents," Asya once told him. And she's absolutely right. She too dreams of living by herself, even though she has her own room and completely different parents. Eddie-baby would trade parents with her any day.
30
After making short work of the frying pan, Eddie-baby goes to the other room and without undressing lies down on his couch, one side of which rests against his parents' large iron bed. The head of that bed is nickle-plated and tall and consists of a whole set of balls and stalks. When he was little, Eddie-baby didn't care where he slept. Now he's bothered by the proximity of his parents. His friends have laughingly told him about catching their own parents "in the act of fucking," as they put it, although Eddie-baby has never caught his own. Sometimes at night when he was still a little boy he would hear sighs and moans coming from their bed, but he attributed them to bad dreams his parents were having.
Eddie-baby has no idea when his parents fuck each other. If his father isn't on one of his long business trips, he usually leaves for work at the crack of dawn, since his military unit is located far away, on the other side of the city, and he has to take two different trolleys to get there. He returns home late, sometimes as late as nine o'clock at night, eats his supper, and goes to bed, or watches television for a while and then goes to bed. "It's not at all clear when they fuck," Eddie-baby thinks indifferently. He isn't very interested in his parents' sexual life, but he still wonders when they do it.