From the apartment of the Auntie Marusyas down below comes another burst of music and laughter – they're still at it. Eddie-baby has no idea where the hell his father is celebrating the forty-first anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Maybe in a train traveling through the already snow-covered Siberian taiga. His father's business trips can last as long as a month, since he now works as chief of escort. For a long time Eddie-baby was unable to imagine what that was, until he happened to See his father in the performance of his military duty. That was about two years ago last spring.
Eddie-baby couldn't wait for his father to come back then, although now he doesn't care; he even feels freer when his father isn't around. Then, however, he still missed his father for some reason and was counting the days till his return from Siberia.
Eddie-baby knew when his father's train would arrive, and so he decided to surprise him – to meet the weary Siberian traveler at the railroad station. After a bumpy two-trolley ride, Eddie got to the Kharkov station, where he waited for the train to come in.
The train from Siberia – the Kiev-Soviet Harbor – whose arrival time corresponded to that of Eddie's father's train wasn't scheduled to reach Kharkov for another two hours, but the patient Eddie waited on the platform the whole time just to make sure he wouldn't miss his father, in case the train came in early.
Bringing with it the icy breath of the Siberian expanses, with Siberian dust covering its roof and steps, the train rolled up to the platform, and soon afterward the Kharkov passengers started to get off. There were a lot of them, including a great many in uniform, but Eddie-baby didn't see his father anywhere.
After waiting until the very last passenger had disappeared, Eddie-baby once again visited the information desk in the station and asked if there would be another train from Siberia. They said that there wouldn't, that there was only one train from Siberia that day.
Eddie-baby was sure he hadn't missed his father. Was it possible that his mother had given him the wrong time for the train? But Raisa Fyodorovna was such an incredibly meticulous woman that Eddie-baby simply could not believe it was possible that she had been wrong about the time of her beloved husband's return from his business trip…
The Kharkov railroad station is immense, one of the biggest in the USSR, since Kharkov is an important industrial city with a population of a million, and the gateway to the south and the rest of the Ukraine. It is in fact just beyond Kharkov that the warm, fertile land of the Ukraine really begins, and beyond it the Crimea and the hot, exotic Caucasus, so that the principal railroad lines to and from those regions all pass through Kharkov. Which is why in the last war the German troops and "ours" took Kharkov from each other several times.
The trains hissed as they vented unneeded steam, and everywhere it smelled of coal, fireboxes, chlorine disinfectant, springtime, and toilets. Racing about were whole trains of baggage carts loaded down with suitcases and luggage belonging to the residents of the different lands that make up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As he looked for his father, Eddie-baby walked among the crowds of passengers who were about to take their seats before departing, or who were getting off the trains after their arrival in Kharkov, or who were in transit and had therefore hurried out onto the platforms to fill their stomachs in the nearby cafeterias and restaurants during the one- or two-hour interval their trains would be halted in one of the country's biggest railroad stations. He walked among Uzbeks dressed in caftans and embroidered skullcaps, well-scrubbed Georgians wearing large visored caps, and old women from Kharkov, of indeterminate age and nationality, who were wrapped up in scarves and shod in rubber-soled felt boots despite the fact that it was April. The old women had brought out pickled cucumbers and tomatoes in tubs, hot fried potatoes seasoned with dill, and other traditional railroad station fare to sell on the platforms. Hands with rubles were extended to them directly from the windows of the train cars. Without exception, all the old women hawked their wares with raucous cries.
"Pickled cucumbers here!" shouted one.
"Fried potatoes! Who wants fried potatoes!" yelled another.
"Meat pies! Who wants red-hot meat pies!" hollered a third over the voices of the other two.
Standardized and worked out right down to the pauses and bursts of sound, their hawking cries were as ancient as the world of Russia itself. All those "red-hot meat pies" came out of the immemorial depths of the Russian language from as long ago as the time of Batu Khan.
Eddie-baby didn't know why he had made the foolish decision to plunge into those crowds. Finding anybody in them would have been as hard as finding a needle in a haystack, but rational arguments had often abandoned Eddie-baby in his life, just as they did then and just as they had always done whenever his powerful intuition took over. By some strange reckoning, Eddie-baby still thought he would be able to find his father in the crowds, and so he continued to wander from one platform to another.
And find Veniamin Ivanovich he did. On the verge of complete despair, Eddie-baby had decided to leave the commotion of the railroad station and set off for home. He wanted to take a shortcut to the clearly visible pedestrian bridge that extended over the station and out to his trolley stop, but as soon as he jumped down from the platform to cross over the tracks, he realized he was going in the wrong direction and got lost in the labyrinth of freight trains and sidings. Emerging from behind one freight car and crawling out from under another, Eddie-baby unexpectedly saw his father.
The scene that presented itself to him was utterly mute and austere. From under his freight car Eddie-baby saw a ring of soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets. The soldiers held their rifles with the bayonets forward and slightly toward the ground while people of some kind came single file down planks that extended from a boxcar with gratings on its windows. The file flowed into a Black Maria – a black van. The ring of soldiers, still wearing greatcoats since it was only April after all, broke off in just one place – where the officer was standing. He held a piece of paper in one hand, and his other hand lay on his open holster. The officer was Veniamin Ivanovich.
Eddie-baby hadn't realized that his father transported convicts. Although he knew theoretically that the MVD to which his father's unit was attached was made up of both trashes and prisoner escorts, he somehow never connected that circumstance with his father. True, his father went on business trips to Siberia, but how and in what capacity, Eddie had no idea. Now he saw that his father was a real trash, even though he wore a different kind of uniform. And even worse than a trash, since he transported the punks to labor camps and prisons. "Maybe he even took Gorkun to Kolyma," Eddie-baby thought. At the time Eddie-baby didn't identify himself with the punks, but he already felt something like solidarity with them, inasmuch as the world of Saltovka basically consists of the punks and their opposite, the trashes. Eddie-baby doesn't pay any attention to the great sea of workers in between, since their role is a passive one.
Eddie-baby didn't go up to Veniamin Ivanovich, who was checking and counting off the convicts, since he didn't want to distract him from his work. He slipped out from under the freight car unnoticed, left the remote dead-end siding, and took the trolley back home. He didn't tell anybody about what had happened, neither Raisa Fyodorovna nor his father when he returned home several hours later. The fact that his father was a trash became Eddie-baby's private secret, one that he carried within himself, since his position in the world of the Saltov district and in the cosmos would have changed abruptly if his friends had ever found out that he was the son of a trash.