Eddie has a notebook in which he has written down names and offices. Nobody has seen the notebook, since Eddie keeps it hidden in a wooden box under the potatoes in the basement along with the novel he has just started writing. If anyone should see the notebook, it would be the end of Eddie-baby, who would perhaps be executed or taken away to Kolyma by his father. The reason is that the notebook contains the names and offices of the members of the Politburo and of all the generals and ministers and secretaries of the regional committees who need to be eliminated. Who need to be liquidated. Eddie-baby believes that the power of the state should be in the hands of the punks. There should be a dictatorship of the punks in the Soviet Union instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, the punks are much more developed, much cleverer, and much more intelligent than the proletariat. A proletarian will always back down before the knife of a punk. The punk always overcomes the proletarian.
Eddie-baby wants to talk over his idea with Red Sanya. He wants to, but he's been putting it off. He plans to do it after the gang robs rich Uncle Lyova, so that Sanya will take them more seriously and not regard them just as minors.
Eddie-baby is convinced that if the leading people in the state are liquidated, there will be chaos in the country and a well-organized gang can seize power. Maybe Kostya's gang. Not now, of course, but in twenty years or so. And they – the leaders, that is – will all have to be liquidated in a single day.
Eddie-baby doesn't see anything impossible about his idea. Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had a very small gang in 1917, but they still managed to seize power. Kostya, the only person Eddie has told about his red list ("red" because Eddie wrote it out in red ink), says he's crazy. Even so, Eddie is counting on eventually bringing Kostya around, maybe when they're adults. "Why do you say I'm crazy?" Eddie asked. "After all, what about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Napoleon? And just recently Hitler and Goering, who looks like Red Sanya? There wasn't always nothing but thousands of boring Uncle Vasyas who look just like each other, and Uncle Tolyas and Uncle Sashas and Uncle Ivans, was there? After all, Kostya, even though Hitler was our enemy, he was a great man, don't you agree?" Eddie said.
Kostya said that, yes, Hitler was a great man, and that he, Kostya, personally likes the SS, especially their black uniforms, but that you have to be crazy to plan such things in Saltovka. And as Eddie's hetman, he also ordered him to say no more about his red list and to get rid of it as soon as possible, before somebody put him away.
Eddie didn't get rid of the list, because he had spent a lot of time taking down the names from the newspapers and then classifying them as he was accustomed to doing with all his knowledge. He felt bad about wasting the work he had already done, so he merely transferred the list to the basement from its original hiding place on the balcony.
21
The humpbacked Tolik Perevorachaev is standing by the door to Eddie's entrance, and there's no way of getting around him. He and Eddie used to be friends. Now Eddie has grown up, has become an adult, or nearly one, whereas Tolik has remained small because of his awful hump, even though he's a year older than Eddie.
"Hey, Tolik! How's life?" Eddie asks a bit more casually than necessary, while also aware that he's being hypocritical. What kind of life can a person have if he's sixteen and humpbacked and only one meter fifty-one centimeters tall? The only kind of life Tolik can have is a pisspoor one, and even Eddie is offended by the cheerful asshole voice he's using with Tolik.
"Not bad," Tolik answers, embarrassed. "There's a new picture I drew. Chapaev drowning in the Ural River. Do you want to see it?"
Eddie really doesn't. Chapaev is about the only thing Tolik ever draws. Sometimes he does a scene from the last war – the Germans and our side – but basically it's Chapaev, and Eddie's already seen hundreds of Tolik's pictures in watercolor or colored pencil with Chapaev in a moustache and a black Cossack felt coat. The colors in his pictures are very bright, even garish. Eddies mother says that Tolik is mentally retarded because of his hump, and psychologically a child, whereas his sexual development is normal since he wants a woman, but how can he get one if he's a hunchback? As a result, Tolik is slowly turning from a gentle, humpbacked boy into a bitter, grumbling hunchback, and as Eddie's mother has learned in the strictest confidence from the Perevorachaevs' neighbor, Auntie Marusya Chepiga, he's even attracted to his own sisters, Lyubka and Baby Nadka.
Tolik's bitterness, however, has not extended to Eddie-baby. When they were still children, they built a lot of homemade machines together, including several scooters using roller-skate wheels. And when Eddie got sick with pneumonia and was in bed with a fever of thirty-nine, it was none other than the humpbacked Tolik who sat with him and patiently read him a travel book to take his mind off his fever.
Eddie-baby has no wish to offend Tolik, but he doesn't feel like going into the Perevorachaevs' room with its repulsively hot, almost humid atmosphere, saying hello to the dour stovemaker and Tolik's mother, Blackie, and sitting down on Tolik's smelly flannel blanket to look at yet another Chapaev with his hand thrust up out of the water.
"I'd like to, Tol," Eddie says, "but a friend of mine's waiting for me at home. Let's do it tomorrow, all right?" he promises, full of self-loathing.
"All right, tomorrow," answers the sallow if not greenish Tolik, probably aware, or at least sensing, that his former friend won't have any time tomorrow either.
Eddie runs past the hunchback, who has stepped aside for him, and sighs with relief as soon as he reaches his own floor. He got by.
His mother isn't home. And there isn't even a note on the kitchen table. Eddie and Raisa Fyodorovna usually leave notes for each other. The absence of a note is always an unmistakable sign that his mother is upset with Eddie about something. "What is it this time?" Eddie asks himself, trying to understand. But he is unable to reach any immediate conclusions about what it is that he's done – or not done – to earn her displeasure.
Kadik arrives precisely at six, just as he promised yesterday. He's in a very good mood, although he's rarely in a bad one. Kadik is a life-loving individual.
"Hey, old buddy, you should have seen what happened yesterday!" he announces while still in the doorway. "You'll never guess!"
"Can you guess?" and "You'll never guess!" are Kadik's favorite expressions.
"Lyudka Shepelenko was screwing George! You remember George, Eddie? Lyudka was screwing him right on the table!" Kadik blurts out enthusiastically. "What an amazing girl she is!"
Eddie brings Kadik's enthusiasm up short: "I didn't get the money," he gloomily informs him. "I don't know what to do…"
The expression on Kadik's face changes. Eddie knows he would be glad to help him, but there's no way he can. How could he? He doesn't have any money either. Sometimes Kadik earns good bread selling records, but it's been a month since he's had any platters from the Baltic republics.
"Shit, old buddy," Kadik says carefully.
"Let's have a drink," Eddie suggests in a preoccupied tone, and brings in a bottle of port from the cold balcony. Usually there isn't anything to drink in the house, since Eddie's father avoids alcohol – it makes him sick to his stomach. And they don't keep any wine around for guests either, since they don't want to tempt Eddie. Whenever company comes, his mother runs down to the store for wine. Today is a holiday, however.