The men of Saltovka have beaten up crazy Tonka several times, once for the fact that she pinched somebody's baby too hard. Tonka, for reasons nobody understands, doesn't like babies. Eddie-baby happened to witness the final scene of one of these skirmishes, when the bloodied but still unvanquished Tonka, her blouse torn at her breast, threw stones at a scattered group of men standing not far away from her. "You whores, you filthy buggers!" Tonka snarled. "You deserters! If I had run into you at the front, I would have put all of you up against a wall!" As he watched her, the melancholy thought occurred to Eddie-baby that if Tonka had known anything about the Furies, she would have been amazed at how closely she resembled them. Out of Tonka's torn blouse had tumbled a large white breast with a big rubbery nipple.
Eddie-baby has never forgotten that mighty breast, and it may be that the memory of it is what lies behind all the terrible dreams Eddie-baby's had in which he and Tonka do disgusting things to each other, and after their often gymnastically complicated frolicking, usually end up fucking. Tonka pursues Eddie-baby in the daytime too: all he has to do is close his eyes somewhere in the sunshine – at the beach, say, where he goes starting in early spring and ending in late fall – and at once the tormentor Tonka appears before him, naked and shaking her gray mane of hair, in order to torture him.
Eddie-baby is embarrassed now even to look Tonka in the face when she comes to visit them. In real life Tonka and Raisa Fyodorovna have become something like friends, although Eddie's mother maintains that Tonka is secretly infatuated with Veniamin Ivanovich. And really, in spite of her normally coarse and insolent way with men, Tonka is quite shy and timid whenever she catches Eddie's father's eye. It's funny to see how Tonka, that big battle-ax, suddenly becomes very polite, stammers, drops her gaze, and picks at the fringe of their green silk tablecloth with her huge hands. Tonka is a lot taller than Veniamin Ivanovich, who looks like an elegant boy dressed up in a military uniform next to her – especially since he's also about ten years younger than she is.
Eddie's mother says that most likely Veniamin Ivanovich reminds Tonka of her fiance, who died a long time ago during the Spanish civil war. His mother also maintains that Tonka isn't as crazy as the Saltovka residents think – that even though her concussion was certainly a serious one and she is sometimes ravaged by headaches she takes special injections to relieve, it's also to Tonka's advantage to seem crazy, since it makes life easier for her.
"Antonina Sergeevna is an intelligent woman," Eddie's mother's declares, "and a real combat officer, unlike a lot of these other invalid-clowns, such as Efim from Tyurenka, who had his leg cut off by a trolley before the war when he was drunk and now drives around in his own specially adapted car all decked out in secondhand medals he bought somewhere, pretending to be a hero." Antonina Sergeevna just isn't like anyone else, which is why everybody in Saltovka thinks she's crazy. Who else in their right mind would abuse Khrushchev in the presence of a militia officer? Antonina Sergeevna and Eddie's father, like many other military people, dislike Khrushchev for cutting their pensions. She lives alone on what she receives as a retired lieutenant colonel, since all her relatives perished in the war, which may in fact be the reason why she fought so valiantly – she was taking revenge on the Germans for her own family.
2
Eddie-baby can't get back to sleep again and is now thinking about how to sneak past his mother to the toilet so she won't notice the spot on his pants. Eddie-baby is very ashamed of this secret side of his life. His mother will think he masturbated and will maybe say something to him about it. As soon as he started masturbating (Tonka was mixed up in that business too, since Eddie-baby copied his dreams in his thoughts), his mother knew about it. And Eddie-baby knows how she found out.
Very simple. He used to wipe his penis with sheets from a tear-off day calendar. Sometimes he would throw the sheets in the toilet, although sometimes he forgot to. His mother obviously found the sheets, stuck together with a dry yellow substance very much resembling glue, and obviously guessed at once that that substance was none other than semen produced by her son, who had finally reached the age of sexual maturity.
As gently as she could, Eddie's mother gave her son a lecture. Raisa Fyodorovna is a well-read woman – the bookcase in their room is packed with books – and since it was clear to her that Eddie-baby understood very little about his own behavior, she decided to warn him about it.
During the lecture Eddie-baby blushed and then turned pale and denied it all. The most he would concede was that, yes, the calendar sheets were his work, but he had only blown his nose on them. Eddie-baby knew his mother didn't believe that the substance on the sheets was dried snot, but what else could he say? Admit that he abused himself several times a day, panting and moaning with his eyes closed while reviewing in his mind his latest dream about the huge, insolently smirking Tonka sitting with her legs spread wide apart?
Despite his mother's warnings that masturbation is a dangerous disease, that it dries out the brain and sucks the strength from a boy's body, Eddie-baby failed even to reduce the frequency of his masturbation. The fact is, he gets tremendous pleasure when he comes, and he hasn't the strength to deny himself that pleasure. Although he does hide the calendar sheets in his pocket now, throwing them away outside.
3
Eddie-baby tries to recall when he first discovered masturbation. He remembers unconsciously examining his penis, turning it in his hand… Yes, he suddenly recalls, it was after a bath, when he used to go to the baths once a week with his father. His father had pointed Eddie's penis out to him and told him not to forget to wash it.
Surrounded by clouds of steam and naked men, Eddie watched his father rub and scrape his penis, and for the first time he realized that the tip of his father's penis was red. Looking at his own sprout, Eddie at once noticed a difference: its tip wasn't red, it was the same brown color as the rest of his skin, although it was wrinkled and had a little bluish-red skin inside, but only a little, and only around the opening through which his urine passed. After eluding his father, who was trying to catch him in the steam in order to wash his penis for him (Eddie wouldn't even let his mother touch him), he decided on the way home to examine his penis more closely as soon as he was alone.
It was not until the next day that he managed to do so, since the previous one had been his father's day off – it was in fact on his day off that he and Eddie took the trolley to the baths. Eddie's mother used to go to the baths with Auntie Beba, but now she's going more and more with the Auntie Marusyas.