"My father's an army officer, and my mother's a housewife," Eddie succinctly answers. Despite the compliment the master of ceremonies has bestowed on his poems, Eddie doesn't care for him. There's something unpleasant about him. "A cultured hireling," Eddie says to himself.
"That's what I thought, that's just what I thought!" the master of ceremonies chirps happily. "Your father's an officer. Officers are our Soviet middle class… Of course," he says, "it's all clear now…"
"And you, young man" – he turns to Kadik, who has come over to listen to what they are saying – "you're wrong about the censorship. I'm not engaging in censorship here. We don't have Stalinism in this country anymore, but we do have a huge audience out there" – and the master of ceremonies waves his hand over the square filled to the brim with people – "sometimes in the tens of thousands… No, we aren't censoring our poets; we're simply required to protect people from any possible hooliganism, any possible provocation. For example, you kids know what happened several months ago in Ukrainian Pravda, don't you?" he says, speaking to both of them now, to both Eddie and Kadik.
"No," they answer.
"A terrible provocation. And very clever, too!" The master of ceremonies smiles venomously. "A letter came to the editorial staff from Canada. In the letter a Canadian Ukrainian, a young man, wrote that he loved our country and that he was a worker, and he asked the staff to publish a poem in which he glorified the world's leading country of victorious socialism and spoke of his hatred for capitalism, which has condemned the workers to unemployment. They published the poem, but -" And here the voice of the master of ceremonies becomes a loud whisper. "Well, as a poet, Eduard, you must know what an acrostic is. Do you?" Eddie-baby nods. He knows what an acrostic is. "Well, then," the master of ceremonies announces triumphantly, "it was an acrostic! So that if you read only the first letters of each line, you got the infamous Ukrainian fascist cry: In Muskovite, Polack, and Jew, take your knife and stick it through.' So you see how it is, young people… And you say 'censorship,'" the master of ceremonies concludes, walking away from Eddie and Kadik with a smug expression on his face to announce the start of the poetry contest.
Even Kadik is dumbstruck. "Not too fucking bad!" he exclaims, laughing. "The editor was probably prosecuted."
Not that Kadik feels sorry for the editor or approves of the deceptively provocative actions of the Canadian poet, but like all the residents of Saltovka, for some reason he's glad whenever the authorities slip up. Especially since Ukrainian Pravda is viewed as a disgusting rag and is moreover in the Ukrainian language, which is considered provincial in Kharkov. Nobody wants to go to the Ukrainian schools, so now all the kids in the non-Ukrainian schools are being forced to study the Ukrainian language, even though the instruction is conducted in Russian. Eddie-baby has been studying Ukrainian since the second form and knows it very well, but where is he supposed to use it – in a village or something? And where is such a village to be found? Even in Old Saltov it's only the old people who still speak Ukrainian. The young people don't want to. In Kiev the intelligentsia use it just to show off. They stand on Kreshchatik and loudly "conversate in Ukrainian." You could just as easily show off by speaking English. "Asya, on the other hand, is a modest person who doesn't boast about her French, even though she speaks it better than any teacher of the language," Eddie thinks.
And there's no more boring subject in school than Ukrainian literature. The endless whining about "serfdom" – it makes your ears burn. There hasn't been any serfdom for a long, long time, but the whining remains.
23
Eddie is the second to perform. That's good, because by the fifth poet the audience will be tired out and start whistling and demanding music. The first poet, a muscular guy of about twenty-five, recites his poem about a boxer very badly. "He's probably a boxer himself," Kadik whispers. The poem in itself isn't that bad, although the poet is obviously imitating both Yevtushenko and Rozhdestvensky at the same time, which is fine, but nobody has taught the guy how to recite. He just mumbles into the microphone, when what he needs to do with a crowd like this is recite loudly and clearly.
"And he should stand a lot closer to the microphone," Eddie reasons, analyzing the mistakes of the boxer-poet. When the latter walks away from the microphone, the applause is pretty sparse. "He could have performed a lot better," Eddie decides. "Read well, his aggressive poem about a boxer who finally knocks out his opponent would unquestionably have pleased precisely this rowdy group of young people, which respects aggressive strength more than anything else. What a fool!" Eddie says in condescending pity of his own unsuccessful opponent.
The master of ceremonies comes over to Eddie.
"Would you like me to announce you as a Saltovka poet, Eduard?" he asks with a smile.
"Yes," Eddie answers.
"Of course," Kadik reiterates. Although Kadik doesn't like Saltovka, he does appreciate that all the Saltovka members of the audience will root for Eddie and the applause will be that much greater. What self-respecting patriot of Saltovka wouldn't clap for one of his own?
"And now I would like to present to you," the master of ceremonies says into the microphone in a hushed voice, "the youngest participant in our poetry contest… The Saltovkan poet, as he calls himself" – and here the master of ceremonies makes a significant and prolonged pause before shouting, "EDUARD SAVENKO!"
"Now, that's really professional," Eddie thinks with envy. "Whether you want to or not, you'll hear him." Even the part of the crowd that's farthest away, standing by the trolley stop hidden behind the last lamps, has now heard of the Saltovkan poet, and from all over the square comes the sound of encouraging applause. If Eddie and Kadik have counted accurately, there are thousands of people from Saltovka at the festival. Here and there are heard shouts of "Ed!" as people in the crowd start to recognize Eddie, who has now stepped up to the microphone, and then from the right-hand side of the square, from the place where the Saltovka punks have congregated, comes organized, noisy applause and more shouts of encouragement: "Ed! Ed!"
"Can you hear?" Eddie asks into the microphone in a loud, brash voice. His hands are trembling, his mouth is dry, but he knows that in a moment his stage fright will pass completely. Just as soon as he starts to recite.
"Yes! Yes!" come yells from the crowd.
"'Natasha,' do 'Natasha'!" A heartrending cry is suddenly heard. And from other places in the crowd come other voices in support of the first: "Do 'Natasha'!" It's obvious the kids have heard "Natasha" one of the many times he recited it at the beach.
Eddie wrote "Natasha" after spending Easter at Vitka Nemchenko's. Eddie hadn't actually intended to recite "Natasha" for the contest and therefore hadn't shown it to the master of ceremonies. But now, standing face to face with thousands of people, he thinks that maybe he will do "Natasha" after all – why not? His audiences have always liked it. Only he won't recite the last stanza about the punks, since the master of ceremonies and the auxiliaries might gang up on him and throw him off the stage. Smiling, Eddie almost asks into the microphone in a powerful but friendly way the first lines of the poem:
Who's that walking home,
Isn't it our friend Natasha?