"Bold Khaz-Bulat! Your saklya is poor,
Let me shower you with golden coins!
I'll give you my steed, my dagger, and my rifle,
And all I ask in return is your wife!
You're already old and already gray
And there's no life for her with you,
She's at the dawn of her years, you'll ruin her!…"
Eddie-baby sang away in all seriousness, holding the songbook in front of him like an operatic recitalist. His mother and father would fall over from laughing. Veniamin Ivanovich told Eddie that he had an excellent bleat. Not a bass, not a baritone, but a bleat. Eddie, however, like a true artist, was for some reason unabashed by their laughter. He felt the main song in his repertoire with all his heart, and therefore, whenever he performed it, he derived pure aesthetic satisfaction from it. In the end Khaz-Bulat murders his beautiful wife and contemptuously sends her body to the prince, and Eddie-baby, whose whole life still lay ahead of him, dreamed of being both the young Georgian prince who falls in love with the wife of Khaz-Bulat, and then years later the bold life-scarred Khaz-Bulat himself, who proudly murders the beauty, thereby preserving his honor.
Somewhere among the old photos kept by his mother is one of Eddie-baby dressed in a pair of knickers and standing with his mouth open wide – singing. In his hand is a plump, pocket-size songbook.
The knickers were connected with Eddie-baby's family's desire – his mother and father's desire, that is, since there wasn't anybody else – to be an intellectual family. The first knickers with cinch straps were obviously purchased from somebody, somebody who had been to Germany and had brought them back as a kind of trophy. All the subsequent pairs, which got bigger and bigger as Eddie-baby grew, his mother made herself. It was only in his fifth year of school that Eddie finally got rid of the knickers and his family was finally and decisively defeated by Saltovka. All that remained was their love of books and their bookshelf crammed to bursting.
13
"Why don't you play something, Vovets!" Grishka asks after the fifth round of vodka. "Make my heart gay!"
Eddie-baby thinks that Grishka's behavior with Vovka isn't natural, that he's trying to act like some old muzhik and strike a pose of hearty peasant simplicity, although there's really much more to him than that. "And what's 'Make my heart gay' supposed to mean, anyway?" Eddie wonders. If it had occurred to Grishka to ask Eddie for something, he would never have used that expression. "Make my heart gay!" That's the way merchants talk in old books or in those awful Ostrovsky plays they've started to study at school.
Vovka picks up his instrument and, like every other guitarist, starts plucking at the strings in order to tune it. Eddie-baby's father plays the guitar better and tunes faster than anybody else.
After tuning the guitar, Vovka asks what he should sing.
"Vovets, why don't you do 'The days and years are passing…!'" Grishka exclaims. "That is, The Wine of Love,'" he adds by way of clarification.
Vovka nods, makes himself more comfortable in his chair, and strumming the guitar, he begins to sing.
The days and years are passing,
And how fleeting are the centuries;
Peoples go, taking with them
Their customs and their fashions,
But the wine of love is the only
Truly unchanging thing in the world…!
Then, glancing at Grishka and Eddie and nodding to them to sing along, he shifts to the chorus:
The wine of enchanting love
Is given to people to make them happy,
The wine of love burns
Like a fire in the blood!
Eddie-baby and Grishka join in the chorus, and Eddie thinks that it's a strange thing how this song with its (as the poet Eddie knows) rather trite words always manages to affect him, making him at once happy and sad that the days and years and even the centuries are passing, though love remains to intoxicate the residents of Saltovka and Tyurenka and Kharkov just as it always has. Eddie-baby thinks tenderly about Svetka, about her little doll's face and her vanity. "Dear Svetka!" he thinks. "I love her."
14
The main singer, guitarist, and accordion player in Eddie-baby's life was the blond, blue-eyed, curly-haired Vitka Nemchenko. But in September Vitka's father came to Tyurenka, where Vitka was living with his grandfather and grandmother, and took him back to the Urals. It was very hard on Eddie-baby when Vitka left. He had lived in Tyurenka only two years, and he and Eddie had been friends less time than that, but he brought something into Eddie-baby's life that neither Kostya nor Kadik nor Red Sanya had given him – nature, song, the village, the peasant house, and his grandfather and grandmother.
One day last spring they were assigned a desk together, and after school they discovered that they lived in the same direction. Usually Vitka took the trolley to the Electrosteel stop and then walked the rest of the way with Vika Kozyrev, Vitka Proutorov, Sashka Tishchenko, and the other kids from Tyurenka. On the day in question, however, after a stop at Eddie's building, Vitka came with Eddie-baby past Asya's building and then to the vehicle maintenance lot and from there across the Russian cemetery to Tyurenka. When they reached Eddie's building, Eddie-baby tossed the field bag he used as a briefcase and the bag with his slippers in it up onto the balcony. As in all the other schools in Kharkov, it is the custom in Secondary School No.8 to take off your footwear and put on slippers as soon as you enter. They won't let you past the first floor in muddy boots or shoes. It may in fact be necessary to do that, since in the spring and summer the area around Secondary School No.8 is inundated with immense quantities of mud, but Eddie regards it as degrading for a man to walk around in light slippers. Deprived of your heeled shoes or your heavy boots, of that necessary weight on your feet, you are in a sense deprived of your manhood.
Once rid of the hated slippers, Eddie-baby walked Vitka home.
The apple trees were already blooming in the cemetery, so that it resembled a half-wild orchard. The kids walked along exchanging remarks, and the sunshine was so warm that the flies, bumblebees, butterflies, and wild bees were all out. Eddie even took off his black velveteen jacket with the white collar sewn on in keeping with the strict rules of the school, and went on with his shirt unbuttoned at the chest…
It was quiet and very bright in Tyurenka, and it smelled of fresh new growth and old wooden houses with chimneys billowing varicolored smoke for some reason. In faded pastels like the Impressionist landscapes Eddie-baby had seen in large books belonging to Borka Churilov, Tyurenka lay peacefully upon the afternoon hills.
"It will be Easter in a few days," Vitka said. "You see the different-colored smoke? It means our people are making home brew. See that pinkish smoke?" Vitka asked. "That's home brew from pears. Auntie Galya always makes it from pears." Vitka grinned.
Eddie couldn't really imagine what Easter was. He knew that they colored eggs at Easter, that eggs were essential, and that the kids fought each other with colored eggs at school. Each clutched an egg in his hand and tried to break his opponent's egg without breaking his own. The winner got the loser's egg to eat.
Eddie-baby's mother has recently started coloring eggs too, yellow with pieces of onion, and purple with a manganese solution, even though she doesn't actually believe in God. As Eddie's class-room teacher, the bastard Yakov Lvovich, once told him, their family is a synthetic one; it has no roots. Yakov Lvovich doesn't believe in God either, unless he does so secretly, and then in a Jewish God, although that's quite unlikely, since he's too big and too tall to believe in God. What he said about Eddie's synthetic family, however, he said as a condemnation. But is it really Eddie's fault that they only stopped transferring his military father from city to city seven years ago, and that he has hardly any relatives since they were all killed or died young?