"Now, that's a grandmother!" Eddie thought with delight and in envy of Vitka. Eddie still had a grandmother – his grandmother Vera – in the town of Liski in the Voronezh region, but he never saw her. That evening Eddie felt an urge to see his own grandmother; maybe she was like that too.
By the end of the evening, Eddie was having fun and feeling good, and was once again kissing all the guests, including the warm Lyuda, who turned out to be a neighbor of Vitka's grandfather and grandmother. He went out into the garden with Lyuda to kiss under the big apple tree, and either because of the home brew or because of Lyuda herself, it seemed to Eddie-baby, now wearing his bow tie, which had emerged during the second half of the evening, that the apple tree smelled wonderfully of Carmen.
16
After Easter, Eddie-baby started visiting Vitka in Tyurenka a lot. It turned out that his grandmother didn't just make home brew for the holidays. The cold, brown, explosive liquid resembling harmless kvass stood in the vestibule of the Nemchenko house all year round. Eddie-baby remembers sitting with Vitka all spring and summer, singing along with his accordion. Vitka also played the guitar and was learning how to play the trumpet. He dreamed of becoming a musician in a restaurant, whereas for Eddie-baby it was enjoyment enough just to sing the Tyurenka songs he learned from Vitka. Some of the songs were at least fifty years old, and most of them were thieves' songs – about prison, about the joy of getting out, and even about the joy of going back in. And about love, of course. Prison and love – that's what most occupied the minds and hearts of the people of Tyurenka.
"'The prosecutor demanded our execution…,'" Vitka sang, and Eddie-baby's heart sank as he applied the situation to himself. It seemed to him that it was his own and Kostya's execution that the prosecutor was demanding, and that he and Kostya were sitting "on a bench in a hot people's court…," where "you could see the curtain swaying and hear the buzzing of the flies…"
The details of the song, for all their apparent triteness, were remarkably exact. Eddie's presence had more than once been required in a hot people's court, which even in the summertime was always heated, so that with the abundance of grief, the multitude of relatives of those on trial, and the emotions, tears, howls, and fainting spells that were their portion, it was nearly impossible to breathe. And Eddie was acquainted too with the terrible silence that reigns when the judge finally emerges and everyone stands up and he clears his throat before pronouncing the sentence.
And what an explosion of joy when it's only "fifteen years!" and not the firing squad.
I see, the defense attorney smiles at us,
After taking a pistol from his pocket;
I see, they've changed the judge for us,
The prosecutor demands five years!
Our mothers weep for joy,
The escort even smiles at us.
Why didn't you come, blue-eyed one,
To say farewell to me?…
"The blue-eyed bitch," Eddie-baby thinks angrily. "She's betrayed me. Well, it doesn't matter," Eddie persuades himself. "I'll get out of Kolyma and take my revenge. I'll get my revenge! After all, Tolik Vetrov escaped from Kolyma. That means it's possible. I'll come and stand threateningly in her doorway. 'Well, then, Svetka?' I'll say to her."
17
The wine of love burns
Like a fire in the blood!
Vovka ends his song and puts the guitar down on his automated bed.
"Great fucking job, Vovets! Really terrific!" Grishka says, coaxing a cigarette from his box of White Sea Canals with yellow fingers. Even a meter away you can smell the cheap tobacco; Grishka's as permeated with tobacco smoke as an old grandfather.
Vovka pours some more vodka with a bored look. If you didn't know him, you might think he's really sick of his guests and wants them to leave. In fact, however, he can't go more than half an hour without company. He gets bored by himself.
"Cheers!" Vovka says, but then he puts his glass back down on the table. He forgot about music. He goes to the tape deck and turns it on. It's Glenn Miller. No, he's taking Miller off – Miller doesn't suit him this time. He rewinds the tape – you can hear the reels spinning – and puts on another one. It's Bobby Darin. The song about Mack the Knife. Eddie-baby likes that one, maybe because Mack the Knife is a punk too. That's probably the reason. "Mack the Knife is an unforgiving person," Eddie thinks as he listens to the music. "The kind of person a man should be. Tough." Which is exactly the reason why Eddie-baby carries a straight razor around with him.
"Cheers!" Vovka exclaims again. They clink glasses and drink up. Eddie-baby nudges Grishka under the table with his foot. It's nice being at Vovka's, but Eddie came for money. The little hand of Vovka's clock, which as in all self-respecting model 1958 Saltovka homes is on top of the television set, is pointing uneasily toward the southeast – it's three-thirty.
Grishka clears his throat and begins: "Vovets! We have a small problem here. Have you got any money you could lend for…" He looks at Eddie-baby.
"For a week," Eddie says. Either Sanya will sell the watch, or Eddie will reborrow the money from somebody else, maybe from Borka Churilov, but he'll pay Vovka back in a week.
"How much?" Vovka asks. The terribly laconic Vovka. The Spartan.
"Two hundred," Eddie answers. He's laconic too.
"No, I haven't got that kind of money," Vovka says, shaking his head. "After all, I don't print money here. All I have is my advance, and I'll be lucky if it gets me through the holidays. But when I get my salary – be my guest," Vovka adds.
The kids say nothing.
"Ri-ight!" Grishka finally sighs in disappointment. "That's too bad."
"You know I'm not cheap, Grigory," Vovka says in a dignified voice. "If I had the money, I'd lend it to you."
Eddie doesn't think Vovka is cheap either. He always treats the kids to vodka and doesn't scrimp on the snacks, and if they decide to go somewhere together for whatever reason, Vovka buys both the champagne and the chocolate, knowing that unless they steal, schoolboys don't have that much money. Where would they get it?
Reality begins to seem rather dark to Eddie, like eternal night. He has absolutely no idea what to do. Ask his mother again? Tell her that their fucking system for training their son to be sparing about his needs (Eddie-baby doesn't even have a wristwatch) is pushing him into crime and in point of fact not training him to be sparing at all?
There was once another episode like the present one that grew out of Eddie's resentment of his parents' stinginess. He successfully counterfeited several dozen cash receipts for the grocery store on Stalin Avenue and two days later turned them in with the kids from his class for liqueur, cake, cognac, and chocolate.
Using a knife, the talented Eddie-baby cut out a stamp for the receipts from a rubber sole. In just a couple of days. The cash value and serial number of the receipt were filled in later. The receipt paper itself was given to him in a roll by Yashka Slavutsky, a Jew in their class whose mother works as a cashier in a store in town.
The mechanics of that little swindle were simple enough and were based on the fact that the customer first has to pay at the cashier's booth for whatever it is he wants. If, say, he wants five bottles of vodka at 28 rubles 70 kopecks apiece, then he goes to the cashier and pays 143 rubles and 50 kopecks, in exchange obtaining a receipt with the sum R143.50 printed on it. He then takes the receipt to the wine department and says, "Five bottles of vodka, please," and turns over the receipt in exchange for the vodka. The grocery store Eddie had picked out was a large one, where there was always a crowd of people and always a line in the wine department.
Usually one of the kids went to the cashier and got a small receipt for about a hundred grams of cheap candy – 1 ruble 2 kopecks, say. Then he quickly brought the receipt outside to the yard behind the grocery store, where Eddie-baby, dipping his rubber numbers into a special ink and using several of his own receipts with the amounts already calculated and filled in (always more than a 150 rubles, since he wasn't fooling around), would add the necessary serial numbers, beginning with the next one after the candy receipt number and proceeding from there, depending on how many kids had come to the grocery store with him to turn in receipts for goods.