7
After Eddie-baby and Kadik have drunk the first bottle of biomitsin, smoked a couple of cigarettes, and started in on the second bottle, Kadik suddenly blurts out,
"Hey, Eddie-baby, I completely forgot. Tomorrow at the Victory there's going to be a poetry contest. Why don't you recite your poems?"
"Where at the Victory?" asks Eddie-baby. He doesn't understand.
"Well, at the Victory, in the movie theater. It's part of the October celebrations. You can sign up for it and recite your poems on the stage. After that a jury will award prizes," says the self-possessed Kadik, lighting up another Yava cigarette. "The poems have to be your own, and you can recite whatever you want. Of course, it's better if you show them the poems beforehand. You're allowed to do two or three."
"How do you know all this?" Eddie-baby asks suspiciously.
"I saw it in the paper," Kadik says, "in Socialist Kharkov. It was lying on my old lady's table. Go ahead and do it, Eddie-baby. Show the goat herd how to write poetry. If you want, I'll go with you."
"But there'll be thousands of people there," Eddie-baby says doubtfully.
"Well, that's good. You've never recited before such a huge crowd. They have powerful equipment there, good amplifiers and mikes," Kadik says with a certain envy for their amplifiers and their mikes. "You can hear everything. Why don't you go? The girls will see you. You'll be famous. How about it, Eddie?"
Kadik has faith in Eddie-baby. Even though he doesn't care that much about poetry, he believes that Eddie-baby is talented. Kadik wants Eddie-baby to be famous and is always coming to him with different projects. Once he even dragged him down to the local youth newspaper, New Komsomol Guard, although nothing came of it and they didn't publish Eddie's poems. The paper's offices are on Sumsky, or on "Sums," as Kadik calls his favorite street for short. He doesn't always use his slang with Eddie-baby, since Eddie doesn't understand half of it and makes fun of him. He uses his slang with his dudes from the center. In their lingo, the phrase "I'm walking down Sumsky Street" comes out as "I'm cruising down Sums," and "to eat" is "to feed."
"What do you say, old buddy, shall we go?" Kadik says pleadingly, but then he suddenly stops and looks over Eddie's shoulder with annoyance.
"What are the respected old buddies doing here at such an early hour?" a familiar voice says behind Eddie-baby's back. Without turning around, Eddie-baby knows at once whose it is. Slavka Zablodsky, nicknamed the "Gypsy," has managed to come down to the grocery store in person. It's no easy matter to get rid of Slavka. He has a way of hanging around, although you wouldn't actually call him a moocher. An unsavory character.
Unsavory and interesting. It's too bad Kadik doesn't like Slavka, although he ought to, since for a very short time Slavka was also a member of the Blue Horse. There was a time when the name of the Kharkov Blue Horse resounded throughout the country. That was two years ago after the article in Komsomol Truth, when the Kharkov dudes became notorious. They wrote in the paper that the guys and girls of the Blue Horse dressed garishly, didn't work, listened to Western music, and had orgies. Eddie-baby asked Kadik about the orgies once. The latter carelessly answered that yes, "the old buddies did swill together, listen to jazz, and hump their ladies," but that there was no way the goat herd could understand pleasures of that kind, since the only thing the goat herd cared about was how to live life as boringly as possible and keep everybody else from having any fun.
"The respected old buddies are of course swilling on the national holiday," continues Slavka, emerging from behind Eddie-baby's back. Eddie-baby doesn't turn around to look at Slavka; he's cultivating a manly character. In the present instance he's imitating a fictional hero from one of the several cowboy films Khrushchev brought back from America and allowed to be shown to the public. Eddie-baby wants to be self-possessed.
"The respected old buddies Kadik and Edik have joined with the nation's masses and are amicably swilling biomitsin on the anniversary of the Great October Revolution," Slavka says, and extending his hand for the bottle, he declares, "The last surviving member of the antisocial organization the Blue Horse wants to get drunk with the nation's masses too."
"You've swilled enough already," Kadik mutters, although he hands him the bottle. Slavka greedily sucks on it. Despite the cold and the light snow that has already begun to fall, Slavka is dressed in an almost summer-weight white raincoat and worn-out shoes of indeterminate color that merge imperceptibly with the wide cuffs of his black pants.
Noticing Eddie-baby's glance, Slavka finally tears himself away from the bottle, takes a breath, and says, "What are you looking at? Haven't you ever seen an aristocrat down on his luck before? I just got back from Tallinn yesterday. Somebody stole my suitcase."
Eddie-baby is sure that Slavka is lying about somebody having stolen his suitcase. Slavka himself might casually steal somebody else's suitcase, and had actually done so once; he took a suitcase from his friend, the trumpet player Koka. They were on their way back from Tallinn, in fact. All the dudes go there from time to time. It's the thing to do.
And it is in fact because of that business that Kadik doesn't like Slavka the Gypsy – his hands aren't clean. But the main reason for Kadik's hostility is that Koka is one of Eugene's friends, and Kadik always takes Eugene's side. Stealing isn't considered such a bad thing among the Saltovka kids, but to steal from one of your own is low. If Slavka had stolen not from the dudes but from the punks – from the kids that Eddie-baby hangs around with (Kadik is almost the only dude among his friends) – they would have "done some writing" on his face with a razor. "To do some writing" means "to cut up." You can cut somebody up with a knife without killing him by gripping the knife so that the tip of the blade sticks out no more than the width of a couple of fingers. You can also do some writing on somebody with a razor – a safety razor, obviously. To do some writing on somebody also means to teach him a lesson, to give him something to remember – a scar – so that he'll think about it next time. Eddie-baby has been going around with a straight razor in the pocket of his jacket ever since he was eleven. Everybody in Saltovka and Tyurenka carries something, usually a knife, although Borka Vetrov often has a TT pistol on him, and Kostya Bondarenko, besides carrying a hunting knife in a sheath sewn into the lining of his coat, is armed with a heavy little weight on a chain.
Eddie-baby looks Slavka up and down and thinks he has a shabby look about him. Perhaps he wasn't in Tallinn, but he's definitely been hanging around somewhere, because he hasn't been seen in the district since spring. Slavka has a long nose, black hair, black eyes, and very rare olive skin, which is why he's called the Gypsy. He's the older brother in his family. His younger brother, the spectacled Yurka, is considered an intellectual in the district, since he wears glasses and studies hard at the technical secondary school. The kids make fun of Yurka, but they don't treat him badly; they can understand him. He works during the day at the Piston Factory and runs off to his technical school in the evening. Slavka, however, is a parasite, and by the standards of Saltovka he's already old – twenty-four – although he's not the only one who doesn't work. A lot of the kids don't – Kadik doesn't, for example – but Slavka's a beggar. Slavka never has any money, and he always goes out with the intention of finding an opportunity to swill at somebody else's expense. Sometimes, he goes off somewhere for a while, as he did last summer, but then he turns up again. "He really does look more like a weasel than anything else," Eddie-baby thinks, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye while Kadik and Slavka trade hostile remarks. "A pretty disgusting personality," Eddie-baby thinks with revulsion, noticing a thin film of dried saliva in the corner of Slavka's mouth, "and we've been drinking out of the same bottle with him." All the same, Eddie-baby has a weakness for Slavka, since he enjoys listening to his stories.