"Goods" are girls in Kharkov language. Eddie bitterly thinks to himself that his own goods – Svetka, that is – likes, or rather used to like, his poetry, but she doesn't really understand it very well. Her mother, Auntie Klava, likes Eddie's poems a lot more, even though everybody says she's a prostitute. She likes Eddie.
Out loud, however, Eddie says something quite different. "What goods really go for is cash. And the good life. That's the best way to lure them."
To Eddie these words seem very sad, but the kids laugh for some reason. They hand the bottle back to Eddie, and this time he takes a good swig in order to forget about Svetka and her mother and everything else. They can all go fuck themselves. Right now, right here, he's fine!
"Hey, poet," Tuzik calls, "come here!"
Eddie goes down to the hetman.
"Keep her warm while I go take a leak," Tuzik laughs as he gets up from his girl. "Sit down."
Somewhat dumbfounded by this strange invitation, Eddie stands there hesitating, not knowing what to do. He's starting not to like the situation. Tuzik's voice is already stoned, no longer steady. Eddie-baby suddenly remembers the crazed sergeant and his blackass soldiers.
"Sit down, sit down!" Tuzik pushes him to the ground. "It's her idea. Sit down! She likes you."
The hetman staggers down the steps and goes over to the fence to take a leak. The hetman's girl, Galya-Kokha, laughs in the dark.
"Are you scared?" she asks Eddie-baby.
"No," Eddie lies. "Is there some reason I should be?"
"Everybody's scared of him," Galya-Kokha says, and laughs again. "Except me, that is. Hold me if you're not scared. I'm cold!" she exclaims in a mock-pitiful voice.
Eddie throws his arm around Galya and starts to embrace her. "She's very warm," Eddie-baby thinks to himself. "The hetman's girl could warm up anybody you like. So why warm her?"
Galya-Kokha turns her face toward him, and Eddie-baby sees her up close for the first time. She's not the kind of girl he thought she was at first. She's old! She has to be over twenty. Maybe even twenty-five. Most of the Tyurenka girls are bleach blondes, but the hetman's girl's hair isn't bleached – you can tell by her light gray eyes. Or maybe they're blue. Eddie isn't sure in the dark.
"What are you looking at?" Galya-Kokha asks.
"I'm studying you," Eddie improvises. "I have to write a poem about you."
Galya-Kokha laughs.
Tuzik comes back after taking his leak.
"That's enough sitting," he says patronizingly, slapping Eddie on the neck. "Anyway, it's time for her to go home. Would you like to walk her?" he asks Eddie-baby.
Eddie-baby is afraid of the hetman's girl. He doesn't want to walk her home. Besides, he knows that he absolutely must see Svetka tonight and have it out with her. Otherwise, he'll just keep thinking about her, and his broken heart, or whatever it is that hurts there on the inside, will start to ache. His soul, maybe? Medicine has determined that man has no soul. So what is it that aches, then?
"I can't. I have to meet somebody later," he forces out. And then he adds, "It's business."
"You're a busy man, poet," says Tuzik in a voice that also contains a threat. Eddie is starting to get the idea that Tuzik isn't as simple as he first thought. In any case, he has beautifully mastered the art of commanding his subordinates. Everything he says is double-edged, a mixture of threat and encouragement that makes you nervous and unsure of yourself.
"Zhorka! Vladimir Ilich!" Tuzik shouts. "Take her home!"
Eddie has heard about Vladimir Ilich. Bald virtually from the age of fifteen, the Tyurenka kid looks, so they say, like a young Lenin, which is why they call him "Vladimir Ilich." Here in the dark, of course, Eddie can't get a really good look at him, especially since Vladimir Ilich is wearing a white cap pulled down over his eyes.
"So long, poet!" Kokha says, and unexpectedly kisses him on the mouth. Eddie doesn't even realize what has happened before the girl unglues herself from him and leaves in the company of the two punks.
"I said she likes you," Tuzik grins. "And now let's have something to drink!" he shouts. "Sashka, play us the one about Lyolya!"
To his surprise Eddie realizes that one of his classmates, Sashka Tishchenko, is sitting by the fence with his guitar.
In a hoarse and very unschoolboylike voice Sashka begins to sing:
Lyolya was a Komsomolka. Yeah-yeah!
(The rest of the kids join in: "Yeah-yeah!")
She had a gang of hoods. Yeah-yeah!
As soon as evening falls,
Lyolya walks into town
With her gang of hoods. Yeah-yeah!
Eddie-baby knows this song very well, and it has always bothered him. In the song the punks "gang-bang" Lyolya, only it's not clear whether she's giving it to them herself or whether they're raping her each time. Judging from the song, it seems it ought to be rape. But then why is it "with her gang of hoods"?
…Skirt torn up to her navel,
A foreskin sticking from her twat,
And hetman Grishka laughs!
At this point in the song Sashka stops, and Tuzik drunkenly laughs… And while he laughs, Sashka accompanies him on the guitar. When Tuzik stops laughing, Sashka resumes his song. Its plot unfolds – they gang-bang Lyolya for a long time, just like Mushka… At the point where the punks are fucking Lyolya, an "old fart" turns up and tries to get in line too. But the punks say to him,
"Hey, old fart, what are you doing?
Why don't you go fuck at home?
Or won't your old lady let you?!" Yeah-yeah!…
To the punks' observation about his old lady, the old fart gallantly answers the following (Sashka performs the aria of the old fart in a nasal voice):
"Citizens, is that really your business?
Could be that I'm sick of my old lady."
The old fart crossed himself
And flung himself on Lyolya,
And the work went on apace. Yeah-yeah!
"Yeah-yeah," the gang chimes in threateningly, swinging their bottles in the air…
27
An hour later the Tyurenka gang, now swollen into a vast multitude, is surging along Voroshilov Avenue. The punks are on their way home from the Victory. Tuzik is grotesquely drunk. He walks leaning on Dymok and Eddie-baby and from time to time suddenly yells, "Am I really not going to kill anybody today?" He hangs heavily on the two minors. His famous bayonet is stuck in his belt under his white shirt and jacket. "How does he keep from sticking himself in the stomach?" Eddie wonders. "He's used to it probably."
Eddie is drunk too, although not of course in the same way that Tuzik is. He could have detached himself from the gang a long time ago, but for some reason, vanity probably, he's walking along holding up the hetman of the Tyurenka punks and following the trolley line on Voroshilov Avenue, which goes past the tight-shut gates of the one- and even two-story private dwellings that face the street there. The people who live on Voroshilov Avenue are well-to-do; everywhere German shepherds – or kabyzdokhi, as they're called in Tyurenka, from the expression kaby sdokh, which means "drop dead" in Ukrainian – are growling and struggling against their chains.
"Well, am I really not going to kill anybody today?" Tuzik howls again, wrapping his arms around the minors' necks. His shirt has come out of his pants and is sticking out from under his jacket. He has an insanely sinister look. Eddie wouldn't want to run into him as an enemy.
Any chance pedestrians, hearing the racket and rumble and noise made by the gang (from an excess of youthful strength, several of the kids have been ripping boards off fences and throwing cobblestones at the kabyzdokhi or at windows that have foolishly been left unshuttered), have obviously gone into hiding, perhaps turning quickly into one of the little alleys that lead off of Voroshilov Avenue. At least, the kids haven't run into anybody so far.