"No, man," Slavka is saying to Kadik, "your Eugene couldn't make it as a decent saxophone player. Maybe he's good enough for Kharkov, but there are other cities, old buddy. In the Baltic republics – and I'm not even talking about Mother Moscow – they'd kick him off the stage…"
"Old buddy, you don't know what you're talking about, old buddy!" Kadik says indignantly. "I was at the festival with Eugene! Eugene played with the Americans. Bill Novak himself invited Eugene to play with the orchestra. Eugene is a first-class saxophone player, old buddy, a world-class saxophone player!"
"Stop it, stop overpraising your friends, Kadillak," Slavka squeaks. "The only reason you do it is to make yourself seem bigger in your own eyes. Don't talk that stuff to me, old buddy Kadik, I've studied existentialism, I've read the works of Sartre. You're all so superficial, old buddies…," he says, catching Eddie-baby's eye to enlist his support.
Eddie-baby doesn't want to get involved in their argument – let them work it out by themselves. He doesn't know whether Eugene's a good saxophone player or not. Eddie-baby's father discovered a long time ago that Eddie-baby has no ear for music and no voice either. Eddie-baby thus has no problem with the fact that when it comes to music he's an ignoramus, and that all the musical ability in his family went to his father. As his mother says, there just wasn't anything left over for him.
As Slavka and Kadik argue, the crowd around the grocery store changes its form: certain groups break up, people leave, and their ranks are replenished by other workers returning from the parade. Eddie-baby knows that it will be like this till very late in the evening, when the store finally closes. It's as if there were a club here, and even at seven o'clock, the time when the Soviet people and the people of Saltovka along with them will officially sit down to supper to celebrate the forty-first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, these men and kids will still be standing here and arguing till they're hoarse, and yelling, and embracing each other, and drinking their biomitsin or their port. They've gotten used to it, and there's no longer anything to be done about it. And not only that, but later on, sometime after ten o'clock, the men who have already left will find some pretext to tear themselves away from their supper tables and their families and come back here.
There is a real club right around the corner next door, the one in the Stakhanovite Movie Theater with its plush curtains, its marble foyer, its large hall, and its red plush chairs and easy chairs, but the men and kids don't go there. In the first place, they don't sell biomitsin and vodka there, and you can't get cucumbers or processed cheese, and old lady Lusha and the moochers don't go around with their glasses there, and there's no fresh air and windy snowstorm flying in your face as there is now, and no light rain and sunshine as there is in the summer. In the second place, even if they did suddenly start selling biomitsin and vodka at the club, the men and kids still wouldn't go there. They're intimidated by the club and its impressive portraits of old men in ties, and its cherry red plush, and its tidy smoking room. Furthermore, you get drunk a lot quicker in its stuffy, centrally heated premises. Eddie-baby knows the club director's son, Yurka Panchenko, and sometimes he uses that acquaintance to get invited to dances at the club, but only rarely. The kids don't like the Stakhanovite Club either; they prefer the much cozier little Bombay, and for more serious entertainment they take the trolley to the already mentioned Victory.
The huge building that houses the Victory Club and Movie Theater is a product of the first period of Soviet constructivist thought – a concrete cube that towers in the center of the square where tens of thousands of people gather not only on holidays but on Saturdays as well. Despite its constructivist style, the Victory looks something like an exaggerated version of the Greek Parthenon. In the community center located in the Victory there are hundreds of rooms, and behind the building extends a broad park whose left side is occupied by a huge summertime dancing area big enough for a thousand dancers. The Saltovka and Tyurenka kids go to the Victory for serious entertainment and for great battles that take place there several times a year, usually in the summer.
The territory of the Victory community center belongs to Plekhanovka. Plekhanovka is a city all by itself. A vast number of kids live in the neighborhood of Plekhanov Street, which is very long – probably as many kids as live in Saltovka and Tyurenka combined. Usually the kids from Plekhanovka maintain their neutrality and allow the kids from Saltovka and Tyurenka, on the one hand, and from Zhuravlyovka, on the other, to come "to Victory," as all the kids say. Sometimes, however, the kids from Plekhanovka cunningly join forces with one enemy faction or the other, and then true guerrilla warfare breaks out, with ambushes, attacks, and knife stabs in the back. From time to time somebody even gets killed.
8
Kadik has to go. Although Eddie-baby thinks it's still too early for him to leave, that Slavka the Gypsy is getting on his nerves.
"So long, Eddie-baby," Kadik says. "Be sure to go to Victory tomorrow and recite, all right? If you want, I'll drop by for you around six?"
"Why don't you," Eddie agrees. "I'm not sure I'll read my poems for the goat herd, but at least we can get drunk. And my mother will shut up after she talks to you. She likes you."
Kadik leaves, striking his metal-tipped shoes hard on the asphalt. He has the same kind of shoes that Eddie-baby has, or rather, the same kind of huge, almost horseshoelike strips are screwed into his soles. It's their own invention. The strips are made out of an especially hard steel. Poor Edka Dodonov broke several tungsten carbide drill bits putting three holes in each strip for screws. But it was worth it. Kadik and Eddie-baby get to flaunt their metal strips, and thanks to them are able to recognize each other in the dark, since if you lightly drag your heels on the asphalt as you walk, you can produce an arc of reddish yellow sparks in your wake. You look, and if you see sparks on the other side of dark Saltov Road, then it means that Kadik's coming and nobody else.
Slavka the Gypsy and Eddie-baby smoke for a while, looking around. Noticing that Kolka Varzhainov has joined Vitka Golovashov and Lyonka Korovin, Eddie-baby goes over to them, since he needs to say a few words to Kolka. The Gypsy trails after him. Eddie-baby, of course, could tell the Gypsy to fuck off, but it's hard for him to do that. Even though the Gypsy is as much of a pest as any moocher, he's an old guy and there's not too goddamn much you can do with him.
The kids all greet each other, and Kolka Varzhainov takes off his glove.
"Have a swig, Ed," Lyonka says to him. Lyonka was the smallest in their class until last summer, when he suddenly turned into a giant. Since he's still not used to his height and doesn't know what to do with his body, he stoops a little. Lyonka holds out a bottle of biomitsin to Eddie. Eddie-baby takes a swig and senses nearby the intense energy of the Gypsy, who is ready to take the bottle the very instant Eddie removes it from his lips.
So be it, there's enough. Another time they would have calmly told him to fuck off, but today's a holiday, everybody has money, and everybody's generous.
"Oh, that's good!" says the Gypsy, half emptying the bottle. "Thank you, old buddies, for humoring an old man down on his luck. Next time the bottle's on me."
Everybody knows that Slavka will never have any money, so how could there be a next time?