“He called today, I completely forgot. All my sets are partly broken, I haven’t entertained at home in ages, I always take people to restaurants,” Raymond pouted, in the tone of the man who has everything. The vile bourgeois within him had awakened, the bourgeois who in return for his money laid claim to the whole world, with all its material and spiritual valuables. One of those who had bought my silly girl-child. My hackles rose.
Outwardly I was sitting in his arms, he was mechanically stroking my shoulder. But had you been able to peep within me, gentlemen, what would you have seen? Hatred. Hatred for this man obtunded by wine and fatigue. And suddenly I realized that I would gladly have taken a knife or a razor and slit this Raymond’s throat, although it was not he who had raped me, I had raped myself. Here I sat, but I could have slit his throat, stripped off his diamond rings, headed home from the expensive apartment with the Chagall, and bought myself a prostitute for the whole night, the girl of Chinese-Malayan descent, the small and elegant one who always stands on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, but female, a girl. I would have kissed her all night, I would have made it nice for her, I’d have kissed her peepka and her pretty little heels.
And with the rest of the money I would have bought the most expensive suit at Ted Lapidus for this booby Kirill, because who else would buy it for him, and I was older and more experienced. The whole fantasy was so vivid that I involuntarily started, and thereby dispelled the fog before my eyes. Kirill and the businessman Mario materialized, and beside me Raymond’s meaty puss. “Time to go,” I said. “You wanted to get to sleep, Raymond.”
And we left. Kirill and I.
I called it quits with Raymond, although someone was supposed to phone someone, and once, as I came out of my hotel beautifully dressed, I encountered this same Raymond, and with him Sebastian in a black suit and a silly white straw hat, a “very expensive” one, in the opinion of the omnipresent Kirill, for whom I was waiting and who promptly walked up. There was a Mexican boy with them too. They looked like relatives from the Caucasus who had come to visit their Uncle Raymond in Moscow. The whole group was preoccupied with worry, they were looking for some new place to have lunch. “We should have their worries!” Kirill said enviously. Having spotted a Mexican restaurant on the other side of the street, Raymond and his Caucasian relatives hurried across. Halfway there, Raymond turned and looked at me. I smiled and waved to him. By then I had slept with Chris, I already had Chris.
Chris
As I say, I grasped at everything in my search for salvation. I even resumed my journalistic career, or rather, I tried to resurrect it.
My closest friend, Alexander – prostrated, like me, by his wife’s betrayal and his own absolute nothingness’ in this world – was living in a studio apartment on Forty-fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, in a fine building located in a neighborhood of whorehouses and vice dens. He was a trifle afraid of his neighborhood at first, being a bespectacled intellectual, a cautious Jewish youth, but later grew used to it and began to feel at home.
We often got together at his place, trying to find ways to publish our articles in America. They ran counter to the politics of America’s ruling circles, and we did not know which papers to try. The New York Times had refused to notice us. We had gone there in the fall, when I was a proofreader at Russkoe Delo, as was Alexander – we had sat across from each other there and quickly found much in common. We went to the Times with our “Open Letter to Academician Sakharov,” and the Times cut us dead, they didn’t even deign to answer us. Actually, it was a far from stupid letter and the first sober Russian voice in the West. An interview with us and an account of the letter did get printed, not in America, but in England, in the Times of London. The letter was about the idealization of the Western world by Russian intellectuals. In reality, we wrote, the West had plenty of problems and contradictions, no less acute than those of the USSR. In short, the letter was a call to cease destroying the Soviet intelligentsia – who don’t know a fucking thing about this world – by inciting them to emigrate. That was why the New York Times didn’t print it. Or maybe they considered us incompetent, or didn’t react to the unfamiliar names.
The fact remains that in America, just as in Russia, we were unable to publish our articles, that is, to express our views. Here we were forbidden another thing: to write critically about the Western world.
So Alexander and I got together at 330 West Forty-fifth Street and tried to decide what to do. Man is weak; the effort was often accompanied by beer and vodka. But, although a stuffed-shirt statesman may be afraid to admit he has formulated one or another state decision in the interval between two glasses of vodka or whiskey or while sitting on the toilet, I have always been delighted by the apparent incongruity, the inopportuneness, of manifestations of human talent and genius. And I do not intend to hide it. To hide it would be to distort, or facilitate the distortion of, human nature.
In short, Alexander and I drank and worked and discussed. We drank vodka, and along with the vodka we drank ale – for some reason I had taken a liking to it – and everything else we could get our hands on. Then we would set out to cruise the streets. As we walked to Eighth Avenue the girls said hello to us, and not merely in the line of duty – we were a familiar sight, they knew us. The two men in glasses were also known to the people who handed out flyers advertising the bordello, and to the kinky-haired man who issued them their flyers and paid them their money. After passing number 300, where the steep lighted staircase led to the cheapest bordello in New York, one of the cheapest, at least, we turned on Eighth Avenue, down or up, according to our own whim. The cruise began…
Everything had been as usual that April day. Attacks of anguish were coming over me several times a week then, or perhaps even oftener. I don’t remember how the day began – no, wait, I wrote the scene where Elena is executed in “The New York Radio Broadcast,” and was very weary from always returning to the same painful theme, Elena’s betrayal of me. There were swarms of people in the corridor outside my door. They were filming Marat Bagrov in his room, filming him on assignment for Israeli propaganda: Look how hard life is for those who leave Israel. Actually, at least three countries have an interest in our emigre souls – they harass us constantly, swear by us, use us, all three of them. So at that moment Marat Bagrov, former Moscow TV journalist, was being exploited by a man from Israel – former Soviet writer Ephraim Vesyoly – and his American friends. Cables, accessories, lenses, and cameras crowded my door. I went out into New York, wandered, as if aimlessly, to Lexington Avenue, and twice found myself at her place, that is, the Zoli agency, where Elena was living then. I felt sad and disgusted. Suddenly I caught myself on the point of passing out. I had to save myself. I went back to the hotel.
The fucking exploitation scene was still going on. The Moscow TV figure, long unaccustomed to attention, was carried away with the sound of his own voice. The villain Vesyoly was serene. I knocked at Edik Brutt’s door and asked for a $5 loan. Edik, kind soul, even consented to go and get the wine with me because I was afraid of passing out from anguish.
We went. Edik, mustachioed and somnolent, and I. I bought a gallon of California red for $3.49 and we started back. We encountered a strange man with a Russian face, who glanced at me, then grinned and said suddenly, “Faggot,” and turned on Park Avenue. “An odd encounter,” I said to Edik. “I don’t think he’s staying at our hotel.”
We returned to the hotel, and the sacrament was still going on. Another denizen of our dormitory, Mr. Levin, was now angrily gritting out something about the Soviet regime and anti-Semitism in Russia. We shut ourselves in my room, and I prevailed on Edik to have a symbolic drink with me, at least one. And I set myself to soaking up my gallon…
Gradually I recovered and brightened up. Somebody summoned Edik, perhaps His Majesty the Interviewer, I don’t remember who, but somebody. Then they summoned me, I went – they gave me a table. I took it, and a bookshelf as well. Marat Bagrov h
ad timed the interview for the day he was to move out of the hotel. An ex-furrier named Borya, one of the most worthwhile people in the hotel, helped me move the table into my room. I treated him to a glass. I drank two or three myself. Marat Bagrov was invited too. Ephraim Vesyoly and the crew would have been invited, but they had decamped with their fiendish gear.
When Marat Bagrov and I had knocked back our glasses, the telephone rang. “What are you doing?” asked Alexander’s animated voice.
“Drinking a gallon of wine. I’ve hardly drunk a third of it,” I said, “but I want to drink it all.” A gallon of California burgundy usually calms me right down.
“Listen, come on over,” Alexander said. “Come and bring the jug with you. We’ll both drink; I have ale and vodka too. I feel like getting drunk,” he added. With that, he probably straightened his glasses. He’s a very quiet fellow, but capable of recklessness.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll stick the jug in a bag and be right over.”
I was wearing a nice tight denim jacket, and jeans tucked in – no, rolled way high, to reveal my very beautiful high-heeled boots of tricolor leather. For my own pleasure I thrust an excellent German knife from Solingen into my boot, then put the jug in a bag and went out.
Downstairs, from the pickup truck containing the migrant Bagrov’s things, I was hailed by Bagrov himself, Edik Brutt, and some other extra. “Where are you going?” they said. “To Forty-fifth Street,” I said, “between Eighth and Ninth avenues.” “Get in,” Bagrov said, “that’s practically on the way, I’m moving to Fiftieth and Tenth Avenue.”
I got in, we started off. Past columns of pedestrians, past gilded Broadway reeking of urine, past a solid wall of strolling people. My glance lovingly picked out of the crowd the long-limbed figures of whimsically dressed young black men and women. I have a weakness for eccentric circus clothes. Although I cannot afford much of anything because of my extreme poverty, still, all my shirts are lace, one of my blazers is lilac velvet, and the white suit is a beauty, my pride and joy. My shoes always have very high heels, I even own some pink ones, and I buy them where all the blacks buy theirs, in the two best stores on Broadway, at the corner of Forty-fifth and the corner of Forty-sixth, lovely little far-out shops where it’s all high heels and all provocative and preposterous to squares. I want even my shoes to be a festival. Why not?
The truck moved west along Forty-fifth, past theaters and mounted policemen. In front of one building we had the honor of beholding with our own eyes our Lilliputian mayor. All the emigres recognized him joyfully. He got out of a car with some other puffy-faced characters, and several reporters took pictures of the mayor with professional adeptness but no special enthusiasm. There was no great security force in evidence. Everyone in the truck went on and on about how there was no point shooting at the mayor in such a crush, and we had trouble making progress, moving barely a meter or two at each change of the light. The driver, Bagrov, and I applied ourselves to my gallon jug a few times. I got out my knife and started toying with it.
The love of weapons is in my blood. As far back as I can remember, when I was a little boy, I used to swoon at the mere sight of my father’s pistol. I saw something holy in the dark metal. Even now I consider a weapon a holy and mysterious symbol: an object used to take a man’s life cannot but be holy and mysterious. The very profile of a revolver, of all its parts, holds a Wagnerian horror. Cold steel, with its different profiles, is no exception. My knife looked somnolent and lazy. Plainly, it knew that nothing of interest awaited it, there was no good job coming up in the near future, so it was bored and indifferent.
“Put your knife away,” Bagrov said. “Here we are.” I climbed out, said good-bye, and charged into the entrance with my gallon jug, but the knife took its place in my boot, went off to bed.
Alexander has a habit – you ring him from downstairs, he presses the buzzer to open the door. But when you go up, he never opens his door ahead of time, never meets you on the threshold, you have to ring again at the door, and he still doesn’t open it promptly even if he’s expecting you. I keep waiting for him to deviate from his habit. No, today everything was the same as ever, with the obligatory pauses.
We have a division of labor when we’re drinking: I cook, he washes the dishes. I boiled up some sort of pasta, then stuck a package of sausages into it, and we went to work in earnest on the gallon jug. The meal was at a table that stood arbitrarily in the corner of the room, we sat under a table lamp. We always talk about news and events, Alexander brings Russian emigre gossip from the newspaper. Often there aren’t any events, so much the worse. Once in a great while I get off on the subject of my wife. But only once in a while, and if I do say anything about her, I immediately catch myself and change the subject.
“You were a fool not to kill her,” Alexander told me once with the artlessness and clarity of King Solomon or a secret police tribunal. “You strangled her, you should’ve finished her off. I at least have a baby, or I’d kill my own wife. It wouldn’t be good for the baby, she’d be left alone, but you should’ve killed Elena.”
By May, as you will see, he and I would revive, write several articles that no one would publish, hold our May 27 demonstration against the New York Times, and get another interview printed in the Times of London. In May we would try various other gambits as well, dig up all kinds of possibilities in life, but back then, in April, we often just ruminated and got drunk. Besides, he had a weakness for sleeping with his own wife. Either his phone would be out of order and I couldn’t get through to him, or he’d disappear over Saturday and Sunday.
That evening was probably as usual. Alexander undoubtedly told me that the paper had received a letter from some dissident, maybe from Krasnov-Levitin, or maybe the wily Maksimov had sent his routine appeal, directed less to the Soviet regime than to the Western left-wing intelligentsia, “deadened with surfeit and idleness,” or the bearded Solzhenitsyn had amazed the world with his next deep thought on the world order, or some person had proposed detaching something else from the USSR, some other territory. The names of these “national heroes” of ours were always on our lips.
In our desire to kill the hateful gallon we were already behaving like athletes straining toward victory. I was also in the bad habit of mixing drinks. To revive myself, as I drank, I had a couple of cans of ale and several shots of vodka in the intervals between red burgundy. No wonder, then, that time became a dark sack, and the next illumination, opening of the eyes, call it what you will, found Alexander and me in some sort of temple. A service was going on. One thing I could not understand – whether it was a synagogue or some other kind of temple. I was more inclined to think it was a synagogue. We were sitting on a bench, and for some reason Alexander kept smiling all the time, his face was very joyful. Maybe he had just been given a gift. Money, maybe.
For that reason I turned to myself. Let’s go on with our games. I pulled my beloved knife from my boot and stuck it into the floor, or rather, into some boards that constituted a footrest. Next to me a whole family of believers exchanged wild glances. I’m not planning to kill anyone, Messrs. Jews or Catholics or Protestants, I’m just madly in love with weapons, and I have no temple of my own where I can pray to the Great Knife or the Great Revolver. No, so that’s why I pray to Him here, I thought. Then I went into a sort of delirium, several times tore the knife from the board and kissed it, stuck it back into the footrest. Once I dropped His Majesty the Knife, and his thunder reverberated throughout the temple because my German friend from Solingen had a heavy metal handle. The service ended with the priest’s offering his hand to everyone, even to the foolishly smiling Alexander, but not to me. I was on the point of taking offense but then forgot about it, rightly deciding that I should not take offense at a priest of an unknown religion.
Again there was a dark pit, and the onset of a new illumination, revealing the smiling faces of some priestesses of love, who out of a special susceptibility to us – two stinking drunk, but, I think,
very appealing bespectacled characters – had agreed to make love with us for $5. They were very sweet, these girls. Alexander would not have stopped any disagreeable ones, nor would they have stopped him. These were a light chocolate color, there were two of them, they were much more beautiful than proper women. Eighth Avenue has many beautiful and even touching prostitutes, Lexington has many beautiful ones too; when I lived there I exchanged greetings with them every evening.
Murmuring agreeably, the girls put their arms around us and pulled us along with them. They had a trained eye, they knew, exactly and definitely, that we had $5 between us and no more. You can’t fool them. Money is their main interest, of course, but they’re obviously no strangers to human feeling. They smelled nice, they had provocative long legs; these girls were much better than any ordinary secretary or pimply American coed. I had nothing against them. Why I didn’t go with them, but sent Alexander off to enjoy one and promised to wait for him, I do not know. I believe there was some deep-seated force within me that made me think: All women are disagreeable. Prostitutes are much better than all the rest, they have almost no falsehood in them, they’re natural women, and if they’ve undertaken to make love with the two of us for $5 when it’s not even raining, not the kind of weather when they don’t have clients, then that is obviously their pleasure. But even so, I’m not going with them.
I didn’t want to think it through, but I knew that I would not go with them today – some other time. Why not? Was I afraid, perhaps? Not true. They were so sincere and homey, they might have been in my class in grade school. And in that April mood of mine I had essentially lost the instinct for self-preservation; I feared no one and nothing at all in this world because I was prepared to die at any moment. I believe I was seeking death – unconsciously, but I was. Then why would I be afraid of two beautiful minks? Afraid they were decoys? Afraid of pimps? You know I don’t give a damn, I don’t own a thing. That wasn’t it. Women no longer existed for me. I was thoroughly drunk, yet I rejected them, almost involuntarily, which especially means that what happened a little later that night was no accident, my body wanted it.
It's Me, Eddie Page 9