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"Haven't you got anything to munch on?" Kadik asks. "I came straight from Eugene's. I haven't been home yet."

Eddie brings several cold meat patties from the kitchen, some bread, a couple of boiled eggs, and a dish of cold, stuck-together meatballs wrapped in dough, puts the food down on the desk, pulls up a chair for Kadik, and sits himself down on the edge of the desk.

"Happy holiday!" he says to Kadik, and they clink glasses.

The dark red beverage unaccountably burns Eddie's throat like boiling water.

"Now, that's port!" Kadik says with a shudder, and stabs a cutlet with his fork. "Mmm!" he moans with pleasure after swallowing the first bite. "Your old lady really knows how to cook. She's much better at it than my idiot!"

"The fool Kadik doesn't realize what a good mother he has," Eddie thinks. And it's true, whenever her little Kolka needs money, the postal worker disappears and gets it for him. Maybe the reason Kadik doesn't appreciate her is because she's always there to help him. But all Eddie says out loud is,

"That's bullshit. Your old lady's an excellent cook."

"Huh?" Kadik replies, waving his hand, since his mouth is full of cutlet. "My old lady cooks like a peasant. She mixes everything together, the way they prepare slop for pigs in the country."

It's clear to Eddie that the only reason Kadik is ashamed of his postal worker mother is because that's what she is, and the only reason he gets along with Eddie's mother so well, the reason why they like each other so much, is that he dreams about having respectable parents. The officer Veniamin Ivanovich and the widely read Raisa Fyodorovna would suit Kadik very well.

"Let's trade parents," Eddie suggests to him, pouring some more port into their empty glasses. "If I had a mother like yours, I'd have two hundred and fifty rubles in my pocket right now. But I don't, so what am I supposed to do?" he bitterly concludes.

"Well, old buddy," Kadik announces, perhaps a little exasperated, "all you have to do is tell Svetka you didn't get the money. Take her to the movies instead, and then you can come to my place afterward and listen to music. I'll send my old lady over to the neighbors, or else we can go to Vovka Zolotarev's and dance and drink there. I don't know why you put up with that stuff from her anyway. A really good girl will understand when her old buddy doesn't have any money, that he's broke for the time being, and she'll wait. She realizes they can have their holiday some other time, since there will always be another chance," Kadik says quite reasonably.

Eddie says nothing. How could Kadik know how afraid he is of losing Svetka? A true Saltovka adolescent, Eddie can't tell him that he's terribly in love with Svetka, that he's never humped her even once, and that he's afraid that if he doesn't take Svetka to Sashka Plotnikov's and in general keep her entertained, she'll start going with Shurik. Even though Svetka has tried to convince Eddie that she and Shurik are just friends, in the same way, for instance, that Asya and Eddie are friends, Eddie does not, to be perfectly honest, believe her. He sees how Shurik sometimes looks at her. How could Kadik know how hard it is when somebody like Shurik is hanging around Svetka all the time? Especially since he's older than Eddie, works, and has his own money. But the main thing in this shameful secret, the most important thing, is that Eddie isn't humping Svetka, which means that they aren't really bound to one another and she doesn't actually owe Eddie anything. If they were humping, Eddie could forbid her to see Shurik just because he, Eddie, didn't want her to. Eddie can't explain all this to Kadik for the simple reason that Eddie grew up in Saltovka, where an adolescent must be a man. But the fact is that Eddie has secretly cried several times after fighting with Svetka. Nobody knows about it, of course.

"Well, what are we going to do?"

"How the fuck should I know?" Eddie answers despondently.

"Why don't we just go to Victory," Kadik says. "You can recite your poems, old buddy. I'm sure you'll win a prize, eh?"

"What about Svetka?" Eddie asks uncertainly.

"We'll take her with us," Kadik decides. "She'll enjoy seeing her old buddy win the prize for the best poems in front of an audience of thousands of people. Girls like that," Kadik says enthusiastically. "Lights, a microphone, and her old buddy on the stage! O-o-oh!" Kadik drawls. "She'll really be impressed!"

"Why not?" Eddie thinks. "Maybe Kadik's right." That Svetka is vain he has no doubt. Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. He'll tell her he didn't get the money, and that's all there is to it. It happens.

"All right," he says. "Let's go to Victory. What time is it?" he asks Kadik. "Our fucking alarm clock doesn't work."

"Six-thirty. It's only six-thirty, and the poetry contest is scheduled for eight." Kadik goes to the balcony door, opens it, and peers out into the darkness. "And the weather's calmed down," he says with satisfaction. "It's dry, no rain or snow, which means that the contest will definitely take place. There's lots of time to pick up Svetka. Get dressed," Kadik says.

Eddie-baby doesn't dress as he would if he were going to Sashka Plotnikov's, but all the same he puts on his best shoes, first wrapping his bare feet in newspaper as a precaution and then putting on his socks. The newspaper is a tried and true method. Slavka the Gypsy taught him to wrap his feet in newspaper last winter during the bad freeze when they went to the dances in light leather shoes.

Eddie puts on a pair of very narrow dress pants, a white shirt, and over that his yellow hooded jacket, and he sticks his bow tie in his pocket just in case. Maybe he'll put the bow tie on before reciting. If he recites, that is. To be honest, Eddie is a little intimidated by the prospect. He's never recited in front of thousands of people before, and without exaggeration there will be thousands and even tens of thousands of young and not so young people at the Victory for the People's Festival, as it's officially called. He'll think about it on the way, since when you come right down to it, it's one thing to recite at the beach, where there are maybe a hundred listeners who as a rule are supportive of their own, and another when your poems are judged and you're given a place in the rankings. "And what if they don't give me first place?" Eddie thinks fearfully. "What will Svetka say then? And what will Kadik say?"

"The poems, the poems – don't forget your notebook," Kadik reminds him. "It's better to recite without the notebook, of course, but what if you forget all of a sudden?"

Folding it in half, Eddie puts the velveteen-covered notebook in his pocket. He pasted the velveteen on himself, so that the notebook would look special.

"Let's go," he says to Kadik. "We drop by Svetka's first. It's even better that there are two of us – it will make it easier to explain the situation. With you around, she won't bitch so much."

22

What happened next was something that Eddie didn't expect at all, and even though it made him partly glad, it also put him on his guard. It turned out Svetka wasn't home. Nobody was.

Eddie-baby and Kadik sat for a while outside Svetka's building and waited for her with some of the neighborhood boys, who all knew Eddie well. She and Eddie had after all agreed that he would drop by around eight. But when the hands of Kadik's watch pointed to seven-thirty, they decided to go anyway in order to get to the Victory in time to sign up for the contest.

Leaving the bench in Svetka's yard, Eddie realized that he was alarmed but also relieved that he wouldn't have to disgrace himself in front of her, that he wouldn't have to explain that he hadn't gotten the money and thereby humiliate himself. Eddie-baby asked the kids from Svetka's building to tell her that he'd dropped by and that if she wanted to, she should come to Victory, since that's where he'd be. He didn't leave any explanation as to why he was going to Victory instead of to Sashka Plotnikov's. For some reason he was sure Svetka wouldn't be back by eight, as they had agreed, since it was already past seven-thirty. At the same time, however, he wasn't concerned about her. He knew she'd gone to Dnepropetrovsk with her mother and therefore nothing in particular could have happened to her. Their train was probably just running late because of the holiday. "If the train's more than an hour or an hour and a half late, that will work out pretty well," Eddie reasoned as he and Kadik took the crowded trolley to Victory.