Whatever the case, Eddie-baby had recently discovered that he too was born with a cast-iron stomach. And then Red Sanya discovered it as well. A certain part of Uncle Zhora's advice, however, has proved useful to Eddie-baby in his life. "Before a big drinking bout take a glass of vegetable oil to lubricate your stomach if you don't want to get drunk," Uncle Zhora had taught him. "And after the performance, even if you aren't drunk, set yourself the rule of going to the toilet, placing two fingers in your mouth, and vomiting, and don't be shy about it. True, do it so that nobody sees or hears you – protect the honor of the ring. And don't eat any snacks, except maybe to chew on a pickled tomato or cucumber or to sip a little pickle juice, but that's all. Snacks don't go with drinking bouts. The snack will make you even drunker."
Armed with this knowledge and his own cast-iron stomach, the pale Eddie-baby, weighing fifty-seven kilograms and standing one meter seventy-four centimeters tall, sat across from the horde of sun-darkened blackasses. They buzzed among themselves in Azerbaijani. Eddie-baby knew that Azerbaijanis are the same thing as Turks. Eddie-baby is part Tatar himself. His mother's a Tatar – you only have to look at her cheekbones – and what's more, she's from Kazan. Eddie-baby's father jestingly calls her his "Mongol Tatar yoke." When they're serious, however, his Ukrainian father and Russian Tatar mother consider themselves Russians. Which is in fact what they are. What else could they be? In their social class, even real Ukrainians are embarrassed to speak Ukrainian; it's regarded as backward. All the kids call themselves Russians. Even the Jews Yashka Slavutsky, Sashka Lyakovich, and Lyudka Rochmann…
Eddie-baby was sitting across from the blackasses and waiting to see what they would decide.
"I'll bet five hundred rubles he can do it," said Red Sanya, downing his beer.
Eddie-baby knew that at best Sanya had two rubles in change in his pocket. But the Horse Market was his territory, and even if he were to lose the bet, he could still wriggle out of it somehow. There was no question of losing, though, since Eddie-baby had drunk an entire liter before.
"All right!" Shamil said at last, no longer speaking his barbarian tongue. "The Azerbaijani people are not fond of vodka. We drink wine and chacha. But I will bet five hundred rubles and will give them to him if this boy here actually drinks the four glasses and survives."
"What a bastard!" Eddie thought. "He's decided to humiliate me. Well, fuck them!" Five hundred rubles is half a month's labor for the workers of Saltovka. Here, however, it would take only an evening to earn that much. Sanya would have to have a cut, of course, but without Sanya the Azerbaijanis would never have bothered to talk to Eddie. Everybody knew Sanya, and they would give Sanya the money. If Eddie-baby had been alone, there's no goddamn way they would have given it to him…
Red haggled a little more with the Azerbaijanis to get them to pay for the liter of vodka and half a kilo of pickled tomatoes. Officially it was against the rules to drink vodka in the cafe, but that hardly mattered. The vodka and tomatoes appeared a couple of minutes later. And a 250-gram glass. One.
Remembering Uncle Zhora's instructions, Eddie-baby asked for three more glasses. To make it more dramatic. Opening the two half-liter bottles, Red Sanya poured them out to the last drop into the four faceted vessels arranged in a line. A crowd started to gather around the little table. Red Sanya took off his gold watch and placed it on the table. "Shall we begin?" he asked uneasily, looking inquiringly at Eddie-baby. This was the first time money was at stake, and he was nervous about it. Eddie-baby nodded and reached out his hand for the first glass…
6
Of course they won the bet. Eddie-baby was drunk, but not to the point of unconsciousness. He therefore remembers the drunken market moochers coming up to kiss him and saying he had done a great job and had stood up for Russian honor the way he should have and had shown the blackasses just what a Russian is. Later on some fat uncle with a briefcase who identified himself as the Satanist writer Mamleev from Moscow shook Eddie's hand for a long time, thanking him for proving "that even our children know how to fly," a phrase that made no sense whatever to Eddie-baby.
Wishing to cheer up the defeated Azerbaijanis, Eddie-baby informed them that his mother was a Tatar, as a result of which the Azerbaijanis politely warmed up and just as politely asked Eddie to visit them in Azerbaijan, where they would find him a good wife.
Sanya for his part kept slapping Eddie on the back and delightedly repeated, "You're all right, Ed, goddamn it! Even if you don't have an ass, you're still a great kid!"
The business about Eddie-baby's ass is one of Sanya's favorite jokes. All the older kids who gather under the lindens on Saltov Road next to the trolley stop have asses, but the skinny Eddie-baby doesn't. Sanya's joke is crude and already a little old, but it's meant in a friendly way. The fact is that the Saltovka kids "work out" pretty intensely, a fad that got started God knows how a few years back along with a wave of enthusiasm for sports in general. Some say it came from Polish magazines containing photographs of bodybuilders. Usually the kids work out with dumbbells and expanders, although the most zealous among them use weights. The majority of the Saltovka kids on "our" side of the Zhuravlyovka beach strut around in the summer like Ajaxes and Achilleses or like Greek athletes, trying to catch the interested glances of the city's beauties – the girls from the center. As a general matter, Saltovka, mighty and free Saltovka, even though it holds the city's weak and dissipated center in contempt and regards itself as separate from it, in essence bows down before the city and never takes its eyes off it. The Saltovka kids work out continually, for a certain number of hours each day, bringing their weights and other gymnastic gear out of the tiny little rooms where they live crowded together with their parents, bringing everything out into the unconfined air and even into the snow, and all of it to but one purpose – to show off their hard, muscular bodies to the girls from the center. And to the weak, round-shouldered youths and students from the center. Mighty Saltovka!
Eddie-baby tried working out too. But he still doesn't have any ass. His body is elastic and strong and well proportioned, but Eddie-baby's muscles haven't increased in size. Cat and Lyova have told Eddie not to give up, that the same thing happened to Cat until he stopped growing, and that Eddie will perhaps grow some more too. After he's fully grown, he can start to work on his muscles. "It's even dangerous to lift weights at your age, Ed."
Vitka Kosyrev, nicknamed "Cat," is a nice guy, and even intellectual, although he works as a gauger in a metal shop. Cat lives with his mother in a clean little room in Building No.5. Everybody in Saltovka talks about everybody else in terms of house numbers: "The bald guy from Building No.3," "Genka from Building No.11," and so on. Building No.5 is located right next to the trolley stop. It's only twenty-five paces from Building No.5 to the benches under the lindens.
Cat's sister married a Hungarian and now lives in Hungary. She sends packages to Kharkov and brings back beautiful Hungarian clothing for Cat and his mother whenever she comes to visit on vacation. Cat is no dude, but he wears brightly colored Hungarian pants and Hungarian jackets and sweaters. He gives half his things to his friend Lyova, but on Lyova the same clothes look very different. Unlike Cat's, Lyova's body is that of a weight lifter, heavy and shapeless, whereas Cat is tall and broad-shouldered. Lyova is like a very strong sack. The Hungarian pants fit Lyova even worse than Russian ones do. Cat and Lyova are great friends, and together they beat up a militia officer and threw away his pistol. For which they got three years each. They would have gotten more, but the militia officer was drunk. Cat and Lyova are heroes…