Braids in ribbons down her back,
Dear, sweet Natasha!
The crowd has grown quiet and is listening to him now. Eddie sees that even the back rows have quieted down. They're all listening, unlike when the boxer recited. "You can hear the trolley and the shuffling of thousands of feet, but otherwise the whores are listening," Eddie thinks delightedly. He knows they won't listen to more than three poems before they start fidgeting, but while they're still quiet, he'll give them a first-class "Natasha" – like a national anthem. And he continues to recite clearly and forcefully:
The wind is fresh, and the lilacs
Are everywhere in bloom.
In a white dress on a sunny day
You've come out to take a walk…
After Eddie has chanted all twelve stanzas to them and is concluding with a repetition (except for the last two lines) of the first stanza as a refrain -
Who's that walking home,
Isn't it our friend Natasha?
Homeward with a majestic stride,
Dear Russian Natasha!
– the whole square erupts in a roar of applause, and Eddie realizes that whatever happens, however good the poems recited after him, the first prize is his. He therefore recites two more poems and despite the exclamations of "Bravo!" and "More! More!" walks away from the microphone.
"Great job!" the master of ceremonies says to him, for some reason taking a more familiar tone. "Great job! I'm sure the jury will give you first prize. Tell me, did you ever take a speech class or acting lessons?" he asks. "You handled yourself magnificently! And the poems were excellent," the master of ceremonies says, failing to remember that Eddie didn't show him "Natasha" beforehand. It's not for the victor to be judged. "Even though it's quite possible that 'Natasha' is an acrostic, that if you read the first or the last letters in the stanzas, you might come up with some rubbish or other," Eddie thinks with a laugh. "Maybe it says, 'Why don't you all get fucked in the mouth!'"
"Well, congratulations, old buddy!" shouts a happy Kadik, shaking Eddie by the shoulders. "You see how well everything works out if you just listen to old man Kadik? Today the best girls will be ours!" Kadik yelps in delight. "Go up to any one of them and take her! That is, if Svetka doesn't come to Victory," he adds, correcting himself.
The words of his friend bring Eddie back to reality and distract him from the greatest social triumph of his fifteen-year-old life. His intuition contributes a certain anxiety on its own. If he had felt that anxiety before his performance, he would have attributed it to stage fright, but now he begins to wonder if something hasn't happened to Svetka. "Maybe the train went off the tracks?" he thinks with horror, although he immediately pushes that thought out of his mind. "That's stupid – how often do trains get derailed? Svetka is about as likely to be hit by a falling brick. It's just stupid."
24
During the next half-hour Eddie-baby shakes at least a hundred hands, and he receives so many approving slaps that his shoulder aches. He wanders through the crowd on the square with Kadik, greets people he knows, and from time to time one of their acquaintances, taking out from under the flaps of his coat the ubiquitous biomitsin or portvesha – port, that is – gives the two of them a drink. The results of the poetry contest will be announced after an interval of dancing – after the jury, consisting of some completely unknown cultural figures and activists, has finished deliberating inside the movie theater – although all the kids are sure that Eddie will get first prize.
"First prize is yours, old buddy. It's in the bag," Kadik says. "You can rest easy. I listened carefully to all the other poets, and they don't come close," he says. "It's your good luck, old buddy, that there weren't any women poets or members of national minorities in the contest, Chukchis or Evenks, say. Otherwise the jury would award first prize to one of them, even if the poems were complete horseshit. That's the policy now at all the People's Festivals. They give them prizes to encourage them," Kadik says, "so they'll develop."
"Right," mutters the skeptical Vitka Golovashov, who is standing with them. "I wonder, what do you think the prize will be? They'll probably give you some crap. A book probably."
"They should award money," Eddie says. "Even if it's only a little."
"I once won a velveteen bear at a shooting gallery," Kadik says, "shooting at moving targets. I gave the bear to a certain girl who later fucked me for it."
"Kadik's probably lying," Eddie thinks. Kadik never told Eddie about that experience. Of course, he's not telling the story to Eddie but to Vitka, so it's forgivable.
Somebody's hands suddenly cover Eddie's eyes. Eddie tries to break loose, but the hands are strong ones. After a brief struggle he manages to grab his opponent by the leg and flip him onto the pavement in front of him.
"Oh, you motherfucker!" the opponent says with a slight lisp, and up from the pavement jumps the smiling Arkashka Yepkin. "What the fuck did you do that for?" he asks, although he isn't offended. "The wrestlers have gotten together and are tossing other people around…"
The wrestlers are Eddie-baby and Vitka Golovashov. Vitka is of course an experienced wrestler with a third-class rating, whereas Eddie is still considered a beginner, but even so, "the wrestlers have gotten together."
"Why don't you boxers put up your fists, then?" Vitka answers for Eddie.
Arkashka assumes a boxer's crouch, and Vitka a wrestler's. They circle around each other for a while, clearing a space in the crowd for themselves. The onlookers shout encouragement to them: "All right, let's go, let's see what you can do!" "Show us what you've got!" Vitka and Arkashka, however, have no intention of grappling. After circling around some more and then, as they say in Saltovka, giving each other "tenners" – slapping both their hands together palm to palm, in other words – they finally greet each other:
"Hey, you dipshit boxer!" Vitka declares.
"Hey, you fucking wrestler!" Arkashka replies.
They respect each other. Vitka is regarded as a wrestler with real prospects, and Arkashka is a very good boxer. Very. Even though he's only just starting out.
There are three Yepkin brothers. Two of them are boxers. The third is still too young, but he's already begun waving his fists around. Their mother is Russian, and their father is a "Chuchmek," as they say in Saltovka – some kind of Asiatic, that is, either Uzbek or Kazakh. Whatever the case, all the Yepkins have flat oriental mugs, the sly, narrow eyes of Mongol khans, muscular yellow bodies, and very good boxer's temperaments. Eddie-baby has yellow skin too, although of course not the same kind as Arkashka Yepkin has. Arkashka's face is yellow, whereas Eddie's face and hands are much whiter than the rest of his body.
"Great job, Ed, you old cocksucker!" Arkashka shouts. Sometimes Arkashka hangs out at the benches under the lindens by right of being an athlete, and so he knows about their idiotic flourish. Eddie isn't offended – Arkashka's just teasing him. Whenever necessary, he sticks up for Eddie and quietly backs him in a fight, even though as a boxer he's not supposed to get involved in street fighting – he could be disqualified.
At that moment up to the microphone steps some bald old fart whom the master of ceremonies has identified as the Kharkov writer Boris Kotlyarov, if Eddie has heard right.
"Kotlyarov?" he asks the kids.
"Yah, something like that… Kuntlyarov…," the always mocking Yepkin answers.
"That's right, Eddie, it's Kotlyarov," Kadik confirms as he listens in annoyance. Kadik doesn't like Yepkin, or Dipkin, as he calls him, and maybe he's afraid of him, because he always gets nervous when Dipkin's around. "He's already getting nervous," Eddie thinks, "and pretty soon he'll be on his way." Kadik obviously resents Eddie's other friends, and he avoids the punks in particular.