Kadik opens one of the bottles – which presents no problem, since biomitsin bottles don't have corks but metal caps like those on vodka bottles, which are easy to tear off – and offers it to Eddie-baby. Both of them, both Eddie-baby and Kadik, prefer to drink from the bottle, and both are very good at it. Eddie-baby can throw back his head, open his mouth, and with hardly a swallow pour the whole bottle down his throat as if into a barrel.
The one thing Eddie-baby can't do is drink vodka through his nose. Kadik, however, is able to drink a whole 150-gram glass of vodka that way. True, he doesn't do it every day. It burns his nose. But he does it for girls or when there's money at stake. Even the moochers – the grocery store all-stars – who have seen a few things in their day, respect Kadik for this ability and forgive him his yellow jacket and his narrow pants and his hair slicked down with brilliantine.
5
On the other hand, Kadik can't drink as much vodka as Eddie-baby can. Eddie-baby sometimes uses his extraordinary talent by drinking vodka on bets at the Horse Market. He doesn't do it very often anymore, since almost all the butchers and rich Azerbaijanis know him there by now, but he used to drink on bets once a week.
Red Sanya was working as a butcher at the Horse Market then. Usually he had money, but one evening they badly wanted to get drunk and he was broke. That's when they thought up the idea of taking bets. They went to the cafe-bar, to the snack bar where the Azerbaijanis who sell fruit at the Horse Market usually gather, and there, after buying himself and Eddie-baby a mug of beer each, Red Sanya began carefully sticking it to a group of Azerbaijanis at a neighboring table, telling them that they didn't know how to drink.
Little by little Sanya managed to provoke the Azerbaijanis to the point where when he offered to bet them to see who could drink the most, their leader, a local Azerbaijani named Shamil, who lives next door to the Horse Market, said,
"All right, let's drink, then. Although you, Red, are such a big fellow that it wouldn't be very fair to drink against you, even though we Azerbaijanis drink more for our size than you Russians do."
Sanya really is about one meter eighty centimeters tall, and although he's only twenty-two, he's broad and strong and weighs a hundred kilograms. As a matter of fact, Sanya isn't Russian at all; he's German. His mother's name is Elsa. Nobody has ever seen his father, but as a friend of Sanya's, Eddie-baby knows that his father's name is Walther, just like the pistol. And he's German too. Sanya's sister, Svetka, has a different father, who's Russian. Sanya's mother works as a ticket collector at the Stakhanovite Club. Sanya is called "Red" Sanya because his skin's all pink – he was born that way. His face is pink too. Sanya looks like Goering, which Eddie-baby likes – he saw a picture of Goering once in a book on the Nuremberg trials, and he saw him again in a color film about the Great Patriotic War. Goering's pink too, like Sanya. Or was.
"Don't give me that crap, Shamil," Sanya answered him. "Not just me, but even my little brother here" – and he pointed to Eddie-baby – "can outdrink any one of you. Right, Ed?" he asked Eddie-baby, calling him "Ed" so it would sound more impressive. They had in fact agreed earlier how they would act. Sanya himself couldn't drink as much as the seemingly innocent Eddie-baby could.
"You mean him?" Shamil asked with a smirk, and looked Eddie up and down. "Why, he's only got two days left even without vodka!"
The Azerbaijanis, or "blackasses," as Sanya calls them behind their backs, roared with laughter.
"This guy can drink a whole liter," Sanya said. And he said it very coolly.
"Don't bullshit me, Red," Shamil said, beginning to lose his temper. "A whole liter of vodka would kill him."
Eddie-baby was thinking to himself how insolent these blackasses really are. Insolent, cocky little pricks. Although they do have a lot of money. They bring their fruit to Kharkov and sell it for three times as much. Vitka Cross-Eyes, when he was on leave not long ago from Moscow, where he's stationed now (he was lucky), once blabbed during a binge about how, just when he was about to be drafted (and he didn't really have anything to lose, since he would have to go anyway, whether into the army or to prison, where he would get seven years instead of three in the army and then have his sentence reduced by half in view of its being a first offense), he and two other guys robbed some Azerbaijanis who were sitting next to them on the train to Baku. They grabbed their suitcase full of cash. Cross-Eyes laughed and said that it wasn't really a very risky thing to do, since the Azerbaijanis wouldn't go to the militia anyway. The tangerines they were selling as produce from a collective farm were in fact from their own private plots, and anyway private Soviet citizens aren't allowed to have the kind of cash they were carrying with them. The main problem was that the bastards are always armed whenever they're carrying money. They could kill you.
Eddie-baby's exterior remained very calm; he was training himself. He was thinking, "Fucking Azerbaijanis!" but out loud he said, "Four two-hundred-fifty-gram glasses in the space of an hour at fifteen-minute intervals."
The Azerbaijanis grew quiet. None of them could drink that much vodka. As Eddie-baby was well aware. It is a very rare person who can. He himself was taught to drink by Uncle Zhora from their building, although from another entrance – Vanka's father. Uncle Zhora was a POW in Germany and went to France with the German who was in charge of him.
At first they made Uncle Zhora work in a mine in the Ruhr – in the Ruhr coal basin, which is like our own Donbass – and he stayed there for a while. To Uncle Zhora's way of thinking, the Germans weren't so bad; it was the Russians who were the worst, their own foremen and overseers – since the Germans themselves didn't really like to go down into the mine, being of the opinion that there were enough foreign workers for that. Uncle Zhora was noticed by a German engineer named Stefan, who realized that Uncle Zhora drank but never got drunk. And the German came up with an idea. He started taking Uncle Zhora out of the mine, at first for just a couple of days at a time, and driving him around the city. Eddie-baby doesn't remember which German city the mine was closest to, but in the evenings Uncle Zhora would drink vodka in its taverns and astound the German public. Stefan set the stage for that astonishment very dramatically – with a preparatory drumroll and a line of large, faceted Russian glasses arranged on the table next to Uncle Zhora. Uncle Zhora would be dressed as if in Russian national costume, in clothing that Stefan had bought for him at a theater, although the costume was in fact Hungarian.
After a while, inasmuch as Uncle Zhora's public drinking of vodka had become very popular, Stefan left the mine and took Uncle Zhora with him as though he were putting him into his personal service. In fact, however, the two of them were very quietly mining cash for themselves, and in the end they even got as far as Paris.
"In Paris," Uncle Zhora said with satisfaction, remembering his glorious past, "I performed at the famous Folies Bergeres. There were posters all over the city: Tonight The Russian Bear Drinks Vodka!'"
Uncle Zhora said it's impossible to learn how to drink. You have to be born with a cast-iron throat and stomach. "Even a good tippler must know when and how much he can drink," he said. "There were periods when I refused to perform because I sensed that my stomach was unable to handle as much vodka as it usually could. However much Stefan swore at me, accusing me of ruining an excellent engagement and telling me that we were losing money, I would never give in. And that's why I'm still alive today," Uncle Zhora observed sententiously.
Eddie-baby suspects that Uncle Zhora was embroidering just a little. For example, could he really have "performed" at the Folies Bergeres? And did he ever really go to Paris at all?