After cleaning up the floor, Eddie turned out the light again and tried to hump Svetka. Maybe he would have humped her if it hadn't been for her panties. Svetka had on black panties that fit her doll-like ass very tightly – everything about Svetka is doll-like, her little mug and her cheeks and her long doll's eyelashes. Sometimes even she makes fun of the fact that she looks like a doll, and falling over backward, automatically closes her eyes and says in a mechanical voice, "Ma-ma!" or "Na-na!"
Eddie was trying with all his strength to pull Svetka's panties off, but they wouldn't come off, and when Eddie finally tried to rip them off, he couldn't do that either, since they were made out of thick black cloth that shone like silk in the light coming through the window from the Tyurenka streetlamp outside. Only after fooling around with the panties for half an hour did Eddie finally figure out how to take them off. All you had to do was unbutton two buttons on the side. The nearsighted Eddie hadn't noticed that the panties had buttons.
It's terrible that Eddie is nearsighted, although there are many things in life that he would prefer not to see. For example, until the fourth year, when his parents were finally forced to buy him glasses, he thought his mother was very beautiful. But after he put on his glasses, he not only looked through the window into their snowy yard and saw a group of kids hitting the humpbacked Tolik Perevorachaev, a friend of his at the time, but he also noted with horror that there were wrinkles on his mother's face and large pores in her skin, a fact that made him very, very sad, and he took off his glasses and decided to use them only to read and write, and then only at home, not at school.
Eddie-baby did, however, finally manage to get Svetka's panties off. Svetka drunkenly tried to resist, but there wasn't much she could do since she didn't have any strength. She only said, "No! No! Oh, no!" several times in a drowsy drunken voice, and then lay still after her panties were off. Eddie pulled Svetka's taffeta dress up, but all she did was mechanically put her hand over the place where she had the orifice into which Eddie-baby was supposed to insert his penis.
Eddie-baby pushed Svetka's hand away and touched that place with his hand. The place was hot and lightly covered with dark red hair. Taking his hand away, Eddie-baby touched his penis. His penis was cold.
9
He just couldn't get it up. Nothing Eddie-baby did to his penis, pulling it and stretching it, trying to make it hard and strong, had any effect; it still remained a soft, rubbery tube. Eddie-baby even left the bedroom to talk things over with Sashka Tishchenko, but only for a moment, only for a little while, since he was afraid that one of the kids might come into the dark room with the doll-like body of Svetka gleaming white on the bed, and who knows, maybe that kid's penis would stand up for her.
Sashka Tishchenko advised Eddie to "beat off." But Eddie himself already knew that he needed to move his penis with his hand, which was in fact what he had been doing for the last half-hour in Sashka's parents' bedroom, turned away from Svetka and her hips and stomach.
Then Svetka regained consciousness, and Eddie-baby started thinking about the best way to kill himself. Because he simply could not endure the disgrace, the terrible blow to his masculine pride.
As he was thinking about how to kill himself while writhing in a corner of the bed at Svetka's feet, Svetka got up, shook herself off, and fiddling around somewhere behind Eddie, put her panties back on, straightened her dress, and then sat down next to him. He had the feeling that she had not been as totally unconscious as he had thought, and from even greater shame he hid his face completely, covering it with his hand.
"Cut it out," said Svetka. "So it didn't work out today. It will some other time. Big deal!"
"I don't want to live anymore!" Eddie-baby said dully.
"You jerk!" Svetka said. "I love you. You're better than all the other kids." And Svetka kissed Eddie's ear, although a bit clumsily, since she wanted to kiss him on the cheek but he moved and she had to kiss him on the ear.
It's not clear what would have happened next had they been alone in the apartment. It's even possible Eddie would have humped Svetka; after all, he didn't really believe that he was impotent, that he was someone who couldn't have an erection. Every morning when Eddie woke up he discovered that his penis was erect, even when he hadn't dreamed of the madwoman Tonka the night before. But they weren't alone in the apartment, and at that instant both Katka, who for some reason is called Kitty, although she doesn't look at all like a cat, and Ritka, who goes with Garik the Morphine Addict, came into the room and asked Svetka and him to dance. They had to go, especially since the kids had several times attempted to smoke them out of the bedroom – the apartment didn't have that many beds, and everybody wanted to try to hump his girl.
When Sashka Tishchenko asked Eddie if he had humped Svetka, Eddie tersely answered, "Yes," although a real man should tell the truth.
10
An hour after ironing his trousers and eating the potato salad, Eddie-baby is standing next to a dirty stream behind some sheds about a hundred meters from the headquarters of the Fifteenth Militia Precinct, talking about murder with Grishka Primak, who has just returned from reform school again (for the third time, in fact). Grishka doesn't have any money, and so all he can do for Eddie-baby is drink a bottle of biomitsin with him and talk.
Grishka's late grandfather was an aristocrat – a count, according to Grishka – and an old Bolshevik. On the wall of the room where Grishka lives with his deaf and dumb mother hangs a faded photograph of his grandfather embracing Lenin. If it weren't for that photograph, the desperate Grishka would long ago have been serving time not in reform school but in prison, and would very likely still be there.
Grishka is a remarkable person in his own way, although Eddie-baby condescendingly regards him as a degenerate. He's tall, angular, and dystrophically thin, and his small mug is abundantly covered with pimples. He smokes cheap White Sea Canal cigarettes and enthusiastically grabs girls by the ass. When engaged in conversation, he waves his arms, spits, and shouts, his voice passing through his large nose, which he blows into a huge handkerchief since he always has a cold.
Grishka sometimes hits his deaf and dumb mother when she starts pestering him to quit stealing and go to school. Grishka doesn't want to go to school; he already knows everything without it. Eddie-baby isn't so sure that Grishka knows everything, although he's read as many books as Eddie-baby himself has and maybe even more, only of a different kind – fiction – whereas Eddie has read specialized books.
Passing the bottle back and forth, Eddie-baby and Grishka take swigs from their fire extinguisher of biomitsin and talk about murder. Grishka has just announced to Eddie-baby that for a year now he has had the amusing desire to murder somebody. He wants to try it, see what it's like to kill somebody.
"They say, Ed, that a knife will go into the human body as easily as it will go through butter, unless you strike bone, that is," Grishka declares, and spits.
"They'll give you fifteen years if they convict you as a minor; otherwise they'll execute you," Eddie-baby observes impassively. "Either way you'll get it. They executed Shurik Bobrov, and they didn't even take into consideration the fact that he was drunk."