In some strange way Eddie-baby doesn't blame his father for being a trash. It's his, Veniamin Ivanovich's, business whether or not he wants to be one, although "military man" sounds a lot nobler, especially if you're a military man in a victorious country right after a great war. Eddie-baby simply regards himself as very unlucky in respect to his father. After all, he could have been born into the family of a famous explorer and traveler, or at least into the family of a general, a general decorated with medals – but into the family of a trash? Eddie-baby suffers in silence.
There is another thing about Veniamin Ivanovich that bothers Eddie-baby, and that is the fact that his father never served at the front. Eddie-baby is also careful to hide this detail of his father's biography. All of Eddie-baby's male relatives perished in the last war, including his father's brother, Uncle Yura, nineteen years old, whom Eddie-baby, as his father says, very much resembles in both character and physique. Eddie-baby understands that if his father had been at the front, he too would have been killed like Uncle Yura and Grandfather Fyodor Nikitovich, the gallant captain of a penal battalion, and he, Eddie-baby, would perhaps never have had to make his appearance in this world, even though he sometimes feels ashamed around the kids whose fathers were killed in the war. Eddie-baby knows that his father didn't evade the front, that it just turned out that way against his will, since he was sent to a military academy at the very beginning of the war, and after that to hunt for deserters in the taiga of the Mari Autonomous Republic on a special commission signed by Lavrenty Beria.
The commission signed by Lavrenty Pavlovich, who was executed after the death of Stalin, has also disappeared from the official oral biographies that Veniamin Ivanovich furnishes his friends and acquaintances. But Eddie-baby knows that such a commission existed. The Mari taiga part of his father's biography doesn't upset Eddie-baby the way the trash part does, although it intrigues and disturbs him. In spite of herself, his mother sometimes lets details of one kind or another about his father's life slip out, but they still haven't taken shape along the orderly lines of a canonical biography. Sometimes when she's irritated, his mother recalls a certain girl from the city of Glazov in the Mari Autonomous Republic with whom his father obviously lived when he served in the taiga with his terrible commission. Occasionally his mother drops subtle hints to the effect that it's possible that Eddie-baby has a brother or a sister there in the Mari taiga. The brother and sister leave Eddie-baby cold, but the commission has never ceased to trouble his imagination. "Why doesn't my father have a commission like that now?" Eddie-baby wonders. His own life would be entirely different if his father did.
Eddie-baby, copying one of his father's gestures, covers his head with a couch pillow, catching himself in the act as he does so. The main things he has inherited from his handsome father are his gestures and his rolling gait. Eddie's dark complexion and his prominent cheekbones and pug nose come from his half-Tatar mother.
Eddie-baby is of the opinion that his mother has made a prisoner of his father. In the first years of their marriage, Veniamin Ivanovich still ran around some and tried to slip out from under the stubborn authority of his wife (as Eddie-baby's mother has told him). He even had lovers then, although he gradually got used to the yoke of family life and learned to bear it patiently. That yoke may have been made somewhat lighter by the fact that Veniamin Ivanovich, after disappearing at sunrise, doesn't turn up again in the Saltov district until late in the evening. His life is largely spent on business trips and at his military unit. What he actually does there Eddie-baby has no idea. He works.
After witnessing the scene at the railroad station, Eddie-baby started trying to stay awake in order to listen to the nighttime conversations of his father and mother. It turned out that they had the custom, while lying in bed just two steps away from his couch, of talking over in a whisper whatever had happened that day. Once, after his father had come back from one of his business trips, Eddie overheard the following conversation while pretending to be asleep on his couch:
"An amazingly strong person," his father said. "You know, I've seen a lot of them, Raya. Some of them weep like little children, others hide in a corner of the boxcar with their eyes blazing like a wolfs, but this one talks to you calmly and politely, gets up early, does calisthenics, and reads. A person of great dignity."
"What did they sentence him for, Venya?" Eddie's mother whispered.
"There wasn't any file on him. That means even we aren't supposed to know who he is. A 'double zero' is a particularly dangerous individual. He did that the whole trip – read and did calisthenics. He wasn't supposed to read, but I let him."
"Why did they drag the poor fellow all the way from Siberia to be executed?" Eddie's mother whispered.
"Because this year they've been carrying out all the death sentences at Krivoy Rog. A couple of years ago they executed them at our prison in Kholodnaya Gora. They introduced this annual system for the sake of maintaining morale among the prison guards. One year they execute everybody sentenced to death on the territory of the USSR in one prison, the next year in another…" Eddie's father paused for a moment and then continued.
"A courageous man… Still young, no more than thirty-five. Redheaded. Tall. The officer who turned him over to me hinted that there had been something like an attempt on Nikitka himself…"
Eddie's father fell silent again. He spoke the word "Nikitka" with obvious contempt. Like many other military people, his father doesn't care for Khrushchev. Khrushchev cut the military pension and is trying in every way possible to "disarm the army," as Eddie's father puts it.
"Do you think, Veniamin, that he…?" whispered Eddie's mother, and frightened by her own thought, didn't finish her sentence.
"What do you think? Of course!" Eddie's father confirmed, and then finished his mother's sentence for her. "He tried to kill him. And they say it isn't the first time…"
Eddie's parents didn't say anything more after that; obviously they'd fallen asleep. And Eddie-baby fell asleep as well.
And on this day too, in the year 1958, Eddie-baby is falling asleep on his couch, and without even taking off his jacket.
31
Naturally just as Eddie is about to fall asleep his mother comes in and wakes him up.
"You're home?" she says in amazement. "You made a mistake not going with me to Auntie Marusya's, you fool. We all danced; it was lots of fun. Uncle Vanya even tap-danced."
"Uh-huh," Eddie sleepily mumbles, "lots of fun."
"A lot more fun than with your hoodlums, anyway," his mother counters, and then takes the offensive. "Why don't you take off your awful shoes? I always have to clean up the couch after you. There are spots all over it. And what kind of person sleeps in his jacket?! You're not a son, you're a barbarian!"
Eddie-baby no longer feels like sleeping. And he also realizes that contrary to his expectations, his mother has come back from Auntie Marusya's in a brisk and energetic mood, so that he is assured of at least an hour of nagging. He therefore gets up, takes down the suitcase standing in the doorway recess behind the portiere, removes the sleeping bag given to him for his birthday by the Shepelskys, and goes out onto the balcony.
"What are you doing? Are you out of your mind!" his mother exclaims. "It's November outside! Do you want to catch pneumonia? You're tetched!" And his mother rotates her index finger next to her temple to indicate just how tetched Eddie-baby is.
It's Eddie-baby's view that his mother likes to brag about the purity of her Russian, as if it were unspoiled by the local Ukrainianized pronunciation and Ukrainian usage, but she still uses slang words like "tetched," and she still pronounces them the same way everybody else does.