Coming back from the store, Yepkin puts his hand on Eddie's shoulder and in a guilty lisp says,
"If you want, Ed, I'll punch that clown's face in for you. Do you want me to?"
"It's all right," Eddie says in reply. "Never mind, I'll take care of it myself. It's my business."
And it really is his business, Eddie reasons as he drinks the biomitsin Yepkin brought back. They have gone into the park, which is bare but still provides some protection from a potential militia attack, since drinking in the square during People's Festivals isn't allowed – it's against the law. It's his business how he'll straighten things out with that bastard who's been dishonestly pretending to be Svetka's friend. "And Svetka's a whore!" the wounded Eddie thinks. "She preferred me, she preferred me to Shurik. Me!"
Eddie drinks, lifting the bottle skyward, but instead of the dark sky and the denuded treetops, which look more like tangles of barbed wire than treetops, he sees Svetka in the lilac serge dress and crinoline that she wore when she and Ritka came to the party at their school, that she in fact had on when they first met, and he hears the affectionate doll-like laugh she laughed when he kissed her in the empty classroom and the moonlight fell through the window onto the chalk and the blackboard. His Svetka. How could she?
Eddie-baby is hurt in a way he's unused to. Not hurt the way he was four years ago when his whole body ached from the blows of the young Siberian bull Yurka Obeyuk. A deeper sort of pain hurts Eddie now. "As if somebody cut me up inside with a razor," he thinks in astonishment. "As if somebody cut my insides up with a razor. And there isn't any bleeding because it's inside, but your heart's all cut up," he thinks. Encountering pain of that kind for the first time, he understands nothing of his own situation except his sense of injustice. "Why?" he asks himself, tormented by his failure to understand.
The only thing that keeps him from animal-like cries of pain is paragraph one of the Saltovka Youth Code, which says, "Be a man at all times and in all places." "Only women cry in the presence of other people," Eddie thinks, "and only women admit that they're in pain. A man endures it and says nothing." If he were acquainted with the Japanese code of bushido or with the teachings of the Stoics, if he had read Marcus Aurelius or Yukio Mishima, he would know that the Saltovkan code is not very different from those codes, and in considering the similarities and differences between them, he would have something to occupy his thoughts and might thereby ease some of his pain, but Eddie-baby hasn't heard of bushido and the Hagakure or the Stoics; he has only his pain – a primitive pain down inside, and the doll-like little face of Svetka before his eyes, and her small, amazingly white breasts, which she would sometimes let him touch…
As the kids are leaving the park after finishing their bottles and are on their way back to the crowd, which is humming like the boiler room of a huge steamship, Kadik walks along beside Eddie and whiningly exhorts him.
"Stop it, Eddie-baby, don't take it so hard!" Kadik says. "Let's go rub shoulders with the crowd. We'll pick up some girls, all right? They all saw you perform. Today it'll be easy. Or you know what?" Kadik says with more animation. "Why don't we go to Sums, eh? We'll take a stroll down there. I'll introduce you to the best old buddies, all right, Eddie?"
"Why the fuck do you keep pestering me?" Eddie says to him in a remote voice, suddenly coming to a halt. Kadik's whining is interfering with his thoughts about Svetka.
"Well, why do you think!" Kadik answers, offended. "All I did was make a suggestion. I just wanted to take your mind off that skinny minor, and you start snapping at me…"
Before they get into a real argument, however, a little kid from Tyurenka comes running up to Eddie. Everybody calls him Dymok, although his real name is Dima. He's only twelve or thirteen, and once he even told Eddie himself that Eddie was already over the hill. Out of breath, he shouts,
"Where the fuck have you been, poet? Tuzik has been looking for you for a long time. He wants to talk to you. Let's go!" And Dymok grabs Eddie by the sleeve of his jacket. "Tuzik told me to bring you to him."
Hearing the name Tuzik, Kadik turns pale; Tuzik is the hetman of all the Tyurenka punks. He's twenty years old, but he's hiding out from the army and lives… Well, who knows where he lives? Wherever it is, he never goes out without his huge German bayonet and at least a dozen adjutants. According to rumors, the place where he hides out is defended by kids with rifles. Be that as it may, Tuzik is a mysterious and frightening person. Why did he send for Eddie-baby? What does Tuzik want with him?
"Didn't 'he' say what 'he' wants Eddie for?" Kadik cautiously asks Dymok.
"Fuck off, dude," Dymok says to Kadik. "He didn't send for you. So why don't you get the fuck out of here!" he adds contemptuously.
Dymok is a famous personality. He's the pet of everybody in Tyurenka, and as a result, at his twelve years, he's a pretty spoiled little bastard. When they want to fuck somebody over, the Tyurenka punks always send Dymok in first. Dymok will approach a good-sized adult and, looking up at him from below, shout something very insulting like, "Hey, you stupid prick, give me a light!"
It's rare that anyone addressed in that fashion can resist the temptation to give Dymok a cuff on the back of the head. Which is precisely what the Tyurenka punks are waiting for. Immediately, as if popping up out of the earth, at least a dozen Tyurenka cutthroats appear, and shouting the classic line, "What do you think you're doing, you bastard, hitting a minor!" they start beating the man up. They beat him with whatever they have, since the Tyurenka punks aren't particular – iron rods, brass knuckles, chains – and if the man is very strong, they put their knives into action. However big the man – or even the men – what can he do against a crowd of enraged minors? Even if he's a world champion in wrestling or boxing or even jujitsu, what can he do against jackals falling upon him in waves? "You won't get very far against an iron bar," as the Tyurenka saying puts it.
While all this is going on, Dymok circles around and either tries to kick the fallen man in the face with his heel or cut him a little with the special wooden-handled blade he carries for that purpose. Even if you don't actually kill the one who's been knocked down, you can at least decorate his face for the rest of his life.
"You guys stay here. I'll go by myself," Eddie tells Kadik and Vitka and Lyonka. Yepkin has already left; he had a date with a girl.
"Watch it…," Kadik says to Eddie as he walks away. He can't say, "Be careful!" as long as Dymok's around.
Eddie-baby isn't afraid for himself. Tuzik won't touch him, since even he respects Red Sanya and doesn't want to spoil his relationship with him by assaulting his best pal. "That would be a really dumb thing to do," Eddie decides, although why Tuzik has sent for him or what he wants from him, Eddie has no idea…
Although Eddie and Kostya don't say anything about it, they hold Tuzik in contempt, since they don't understand why, with more than a hundred punks at his disposal, or even more than that if he wants, he doesn't try anything big but is content just to make a lot of noise and carry on violently, for the most part beating up and robbing completely innocent pedestrians on Voroshilov Avenue. "A petty gangster," was Kostya's reaction to Tuzik once, although he wouldn't mind having Tuzik's army. Tuzik has a whole army of punks, and his name strikes terror in all the girls at their school without exception, although Sashka Tishchenko, who is from Tyurenka, once told Eddie that Tuzik even has a wife or something.