Eddie decides to go past Borka Churilov's windows again; maybe they're lit. Maybe Borka is back from Zhuravlyovka. Wrapped up in their coats, domino players are sitting under an awning at a wooden table in Borka's yard, by lamplight.
"It doesn't make any difference to those assholes whether it's raining or snowing," Eddie thinks scornfully, "as long as they can mindlessly slap their dominoes around. They come home from the factory, gobble something down, and then it's outside to play dominoes." The domino players play by lamplight until late at night. In Saltovka they can be found in all the yards, or at least wherever there are streetlights. Borka laughs at the domino players, and Eddie-baby holds them in contempt. He's in fact contemptuous of all workers, except for Borka. He knows that workers are the most uninteresting and backward people. Repatriated people are interesting. Asya is interesting. So is her family. Their neighbor Viktor Apollonovich, who was also repatriated, is interesting too, although he's probably crazy. Even in winter the bearded Viktor Apollonovich goes around the snowy streets of Saltovka wearing a frock coat, a bow tie, a bowler, and no overcoat – a specter from the tales of the brothers Grimm… "Even Katya Muravyov's interesting," Eddie thinks. According to Asya, Katya shot herself – she wanted to kill herself. True, she somehow shot herself in the leg, so that she's lame now, but at least she tried. Not the proletarians, though; people like that don't shoot themselves.
For some strange reason, Eddie's contempt does not extend to the occasionally employed punks. The punks find work for themselves only when they are pressured to by the militia, and then they only remain on the job for a little while, always looking for a way to get out of it. As a rule, the punks are more likely to work in the winter than in the summer. The hearts of the punks grow restless with the first rays of spring sunshine. "The weather says it's time to settle up!" as a Saltovka saying has it, and the punks all quit their factories in April.
"I'll never work!" the angry Eddie-baby whispers as he walks past the domino players. Turning the corner, he notes in desperation that Borka's windows are dark.
There's nothing for Eddie to do but go home and somehow try to squeeze the money out of his mother. Kadik is supposed to drop by at six. Maybe Kadik, who knows how to talk to Raisa Fyodorovna, can help Eddie induce her to give him something. However feebly, hope springs up in Eddie, and starting to shiver from a sudden sensation of dampness, he turns toward Saltov Road in the direction of his own building.
20
"The dictatorship of the adults," Eddie thinks as he strides along the dark streets of Saltovka, each stone and tree of which he knows by heart. "The dictatorship of the adults and the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Eddie believes that the things the adults spend most of their time on are chickenshit, that the adults put on a self-important air to do what maybe doesn't need to be done at all. For example, they use work to cover up their own personal weaknesses. Eddie-baby knows that their neighbors in Building No.22 on First Cross Street do not in fact like working. Uncle Sasha Chepiga really likes to be sick and is very happy if he doesn't have to go to work. When that happens he plays soccer around the building with his son Vitka and the humpbacked Tolik, and he could play all day long, even giving up vodka for the sake of dribbling a soccer ball.
Looking around early in the morning, when the sleepy residents of Saltovka are already on their way to work by 7:00 A. M. in a sad and bitter file, it's impossible to draw any other conclusion than that they detest their plants and factories. They're happy only twice a month – when they can draw their advances and on payday.
Eddie-baby started studying a new subject this year: "The Constitution of the USSR." Studying the constitution is boring and unpleasant. Eddie-baby has no interest at all in memorizing the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Soviet state, the greatest in the world. Yet as a boy with a good mind, he thinks about the constitution from time to time. He was particularly astonished, for example, to learn that the eight-hour workday is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the October Revolution. Before the revolution, it turns out, workers worked for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours a day. "That's really fucked up!" Eddie thinks. "What kind of slave would you have to be to agree to work twelve hours a day?"
The well-read Eddie happens to know that the primitive tribes of Australia, Africa, and Oceania, and also of New Guinea, where the explorer Miklukho-Maklay spent so many years, work on average only three hours a day hunting and gathering fruits and roots! "What the hell's going on here?" Eddie wonders. "It's a fraud." Eddie would prefer to live in primitive conditions, if only to work five hours a day less than he would otherwise have to do, since you can't avoid work altogether.
Eddie-baby's father doesn't care for military service either. And his mother doesn't care for her husband's work. Sometimes when she loses her temper, she maintains that their family life has been ruined by Eddie's father's work, that Eddie-baby and his mother never see their father and husband. On the other hand, Eddie's father, angered by his mother's complaints, very reasonably observes that if his military job that Eddie's mother hates so much were suddenly to disappear, there would be no way for them to live – they wouldn't have anything to eat or wear.
Sometimes Eddie dreams that his family lives differently – in the country, where his father plows the earth dressed in a white peasant blouse. Eddie saw a father like that in a Hungarian film once. In his dreams Eddie-baby and his mother and father have a house like the one Vitka's grandfather and grandmother have, only bigger. In Eddie's dreams, however, the family is also bigger: besides Eddie, there are Asya and Kadik and Vitka – his sister and brothers. And in Eddie's dreams Vitka's grandfather and grandmother are his grandfather and grandmother too. And they all have lots of flowering apple trees around, and horses, and rifles to defend themselves with. Eddie doesn't want the militia to protect him; he wants to protect himself.
And Eddie-baby's family is almost always dressed in white. No member of the family wants to wear dark rags. And each one of the children has his own separate room. And Eddie-baby at last has a place to put away all of his notes, notebooks, and books, and to put up all of his geographical maps. All that stuff is now lying in a pile in the out-of-order bathroom, but since the builders have promised to have the hot water running soon, it may be necessary for Eddie to move his belongings down to the basement of Building No.22, where his family keeps sacks of potatoes, like all the other families who live there, and where they used to store firewood and coal before they had gas.
The adults play very seriously at a game that half and maybe even all of them have no faith in – Eddie-baby is certain of that. He knows very well what kind of person his father is, and he knows how weak he is, but just take a sort of sidelong glance at his father when he's dressed up in his military tunic, with his service ribbons representing different honors and decorations, and he's walking down the street in his military cap, boots, and riding breeches – oh, then he's the very incarnation of strength and power! Even if he can't even wrest an apartment for himself from his superiors!
Listening to the leaders of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union on television and looking at their faces, Eddie-baby is astonished by how backward they are and how provincial their accents are. Until 1953, when they got their television set, one of the first in Kharkov, Eddie had never seen the leaders of his country in action or heard them speak. Now that he has seen them, he's amazed. "Why is Khrushchev such a clod, why does he look like a fat Ukrainian pig?" Eddie wonders. "Is there really nobody else in the country who's better-looking and more distinguished?" The local leaders Eddie has run into in the course of his life – the school principal, the militia precinct chief – have all seemed like dreadful, boorish, provincial fascists given to sneering at children and adolescents. Eddie isn't very clear about who he'd like to see take their places, just somebody of better quality. Eddie's mother and father are proud of their pure Russian accents, so how can Eddie, in whose consciousness pure Russian has also taken root, respect that fat, badly dressed man on television with his terrible mumbling accent and his note-assisted speech?