"This really is not too fucking bad!" Garik announces, sincerely delighted. "You, old man, have a double Arc of Venus. According to all the books, that means exceptional sexual activity. A monster fucker!" Garik intones. "A single Arc of Venus is rare enough. But a double Arc is the rarest of life's gifts. True, it's broken in several places – the Arc of Venus, I mean. That's your neuroses," Garik says, speaking in a rush.
Garik doesn't have a goddamn thing to do, so he's studying palmistry in some old books. He quit school and now sits for days on a bench near his building, strumming his guitar. He doesn't even get dressed and can be found wearing only his robe and slippers. Nobody else in all of Saltovka has a robe, not even Plotnikov, but Garik does. He sits scratching one leg with the other and quietly singing songs that nobody else in Saltovka knows. Garik's favorite song is one about cocaine:
My wings are broken and clipped,
Fate smiles evilly at me,
And all the roads around are covered
With the silvery dust of cocaine…
Garik claims to have tried cocaine. "Maybe he has and maybe he hasn't," Eddie thinks. Eddie read in a book somewhere that during the civil war after the revolution, the White officers and even the famous Women's Battalion snorted cocaine. Since then, however, nobody has even heard of it. Maybe it disappeared. But there's still morphine. Garik once talked Eddie into trying an injection and inserted the syringe into Eddie's vein himself. Eddie didn't like it at all. After the injection, he felt weak and confused and wanted to throw up. Garik declared at the time that Eddie didn't know shit about drugs and that he was sorry he had wasted the morphine on him.
Garik is mumbling something else about Eddie's Heart line, but Eddie hears the words as if they're coming from far away. He thinks that palmistry is medieval fanaticism and a complete fraud. There's only one thing that's real as far as he's concerned: in spite of his double Arc of Venus, Svetka has obviously dumped him and chosen Shurik. If she had wanted to conceal the fact that she didn't go to Dnepropetrovsk but stayed behind in Saltovka, she wouldn't have shown herself on the street, and certainly not with Shurik.
"I'm going," Eddie announces, and stands up.
"What about the dominoes?" Garik asks. "You forgot your dominoes."
"You keep them!" Eddie tosses back, without turning around. He strides over to Svetka's entrance. Only now does he realize that he has been putting off for half an hour going up to Svetka's and asking her to explain it all. He has been putting it off out of fear of the unpleasant.
29
Svetka lives in Apartment No.14. Exactly the same as her age. Eddie goes up to the door and raises his hand to knock, but after standing there for a moment with his hand in the air, he suddenly puts his ear to the door and listens… It seems to him that he can hear music softly playing on the other side. But it's also possible that it's just his imagination. "If you closed the door to Svetka's room, then with both doors closed, you wouldn't be able to hear anything," Eddie thinks. "Let alone quiet music."
Eddie knocks anyway. And waits.
There's no answer. Eddie's partly glad that no one answers – maybe Svetka's out. But he can't go away having knocked just once, and not very loudly at that. It's nighttime and everybody's asleep, and maybe in a deep sleep, since they're worn out from the holidays, so that if he's actually going to wake Svetka up, he has to knock louder. He knocks again, loudly and insistently and continuously. He knocks and then puts his ear to the door.
This time Eddie clearly hears footsteps, a banging noise – a door perhaps – and maybe even subdued whispering. And so, like an excited animal sensing some misfortune, he stops knocking on Svetka's door with its number 14 and pounds on it instead, raining blows down with his fists.
"Who's there?" Svetka's frightened voice is at last heard on the other side of the door.
"Open up! It's me, Eddie," he forces himself to say, and pounds again, renewing his attack on the door.
"Don't completely lose your mind!" Svetka says angrily from the other side. "I'll open it in a second. I just have to put something on." And the sound of her footsteps moves away into the depths of the apartment; she's obviously barefoot.
Eddie leans his forehead against the door and is suddenly aware that he's almost crying. "Fucking Svetka!" he thinks. "The whore! It's her fault Shurik's here, and everything else is her fault too!" It's her meanness that's forcing Eddie to stand outside her door sick and crazy. Eddie feels the same way he did after Garik's morphine – weak and weepy, disgusting and helpless…
The door swings open. Svetka is standing in the doorway as furious as she can be, wearing her mother's robe.
"You should be ashamed!" she hisses. "What's the matter with you – couldn't you pick another time? It's after three o'clock in the morning!"
Roughly pushing Svetka aside without listening to her, Eddie walks past her into the apartment and looks into her bedroom. The daybed is open, and there are pink sheets on the mattress. "They're her mother's," Eddie thinks.
"What are you doing?" Svetka demands, running after him. "This isn't your home! Don't you dare go into my mother's room!" she cries, seeing that Eddie's heading in that direction. "She's asleep!" Svetka yells, and grabs Eddie by the arm.
"Oh, you!" Eddie exclaims in contempt. "Oh, you!" he repeats. And tearing his arm away, he pushes hard at the door to Auntie Klava's room. He doesn't care what he's doing anymore, since he's one hundred percent sure that Shurik's in there.
But Shurik isn't in Svetka's mother's room. And neither is Svetka's mother. Eddie suspiciously checks the corners, goes to the wardrobe, and flings it open, since like all the other wardrobes in Saltovka, it's huge – easily big enough to hold Shurik. He tears it open with a jerk. And then he rummages among Svetka's mother's perfumed dresses…
"Are you out of your mind!" Svetka screams behind him. "I've always told my mother you're crazy! She's the one who made me go out with you – she said you were a good boy. I never liked you! Get out of here! Get out of here at once! Get out of my house!" she screams. "Get out, or I'll call the militia!" she shrieks.
To his own amazement, Svetka's shrieking puts Eddie in a savage rage. It seems to him that she's squealing just like a pig. He grabs Svetka by the shoulders and shakes her, shakes her with all his might, so that her doll-like head shakes as well. "You whore!" he shouts. "I thought you were supposed to go to Dnepropetrovsk, right? Everybody in Saltkovka saw you with Shurik yesterday, everybody saw you. Everybody!" And he shakes Svetka again with all his strength.
Svetka's robe falls off, exposing her naked body, naked except for a pair of pink silk panties. The pink panties hang loosely on Svetka's body; obviously they belong to her mother, just like the robe.
"Prostitute!" Eddie yells. "Just like your mother. A prostitute!" And he suddenly lunges for the sobbing Svetka's stomach, grabbing her by her mother's slippery silk panties. "Take those prostitute rags off!" he yells. "So you want to be a prostitute just like your mother? So you're learning how to do it? You're in training, right?!" Eddie yells, hating Svetka at that moment with his whole being. Sobbing, Svetka resists.
Entwined like two desperate enemies, they fall to the floor. Eddie finally tears her mother's panties off Svetka, and Svetka is now lying underneath him on the floor completely naked, covering her cunt with her palm. She has closed her eyes and turned her head away, no longer crying, and she's breathing heavily…
Eddie feels such intense anger at Svetka that he wants to cause her pain. He grabs her breast in one hand and pinches her small pink nipple.
"Ow!" Svetka breathes.
Eddie torments Svetka's little breasts, the whitest in the world, with both hands, and then says, surprising himself: