My associations to this word go way back, to my crazy second wife Anna, to the literary and artistic bohemia of Kharkov, the passion for abnormality and disease.
I was raised in the cult of madness. “Schiz,” abbreviated from schizophrenic, was the name we gave eccentrics, and it was considered praise, the highest rating a person could have. Eccentricity was encouraged. To say that a man was normal was to insult him. We segregated ourselves sharply from the herd of “normals.” How did this surrealistic cult of madness come to us, the boys and girls of the Russian provinces? Via art, of course. Anyone who had not spent time in a mental hospital was considered unworthy. A suicide attempt in my past, practically in childhood, was the kind of credential with which I, for example, had arrived in this company. The very best recommendation.
Many of my friends, both in Kharkov and later in Moscow, received “Group” pensions, as they are called in the USSR. Group 1 was considered the height of praise. A Group 1 Schiz – that was the absolute limit. Many people went too far with this game, and a very dangerous game it was. The poet Arkady Besedin brought his life to an excruciating and atrocious end, the poet Vidchenko hanged himself, we were proud of ourselves. There were but a few hundred like us in the whole city. We had nothing to do with ordinary people. Boredom, despondency, and in the last analysis a joyless death – ordinary Russian people reeked of it. Americans reek of it now.
I understood that Roseanne was one of us. But she was and she wasn’t. She easily made Group 1, but there was something unusual about her. A Jew, daughter of parents who had fled Hitler’s Germany, the little girl had dreamed of being a pianist and had played professionally from age eleven to thirteen. But American life, the American provinces, the high school where they occasionally beat her up for being Jewish (the last time when she was eighteen, she says) gradually turned Roseanne away from an artistic upbringing too complex for America, away from the piano and her pianist mama – her grandmother was also a pianist – and reshaped her life. She began to be ashamed of her European upbringing, she quit the piano and started down another path in life. It led her to Russian language and literature, led her to work actively against the war in Vietnam while an instructor at a college in one of the boroughs of New York. And then came the event that made her a Group 1 Schiz. She lost her job.
“I’m almost Russian,” she says sometimes. But a Russian, in my observation, can go schizzy from just about anything, except from losing his job. She went schizzy. She was depressed for almost two years and still has her ups and downs. She wanted to expose the man who had fired her – unjustly, she said – but the New York Times refused to print her article about the man, and she went schizzier than ever. We are unanimous on the question of the New York Times.
“The students loved me so,” she says with a sigh. Perhaps. She’s an unemployed instructor. Her terrific apartment must have been partly paid for, all these years, by her parents; her father is a wholesaler of ready-made clothes. She does not consider her father rich. She has a rich uncle and aunt with whom she quarrels whenever they meet, but the uncle and aunt assert that her father and mother don’t know how to live.
Roseanne… Once I asked her to check over a letter of mine to Allen Ginsberg. Yes, I wrote him a letter in English, very illiterate of course. One more attempt to find friends, a milieu. I asked an American poet to meet with a Russian poet. And sent him my book, We Are the National Hero, in English translation. No answer so far. He doesn’t need me a fucking bit. One more alternative eliminated, that’s all. Roseanne proved right, she knew better the men of her own country, even if they were poets. She savaged my letter when she read it. “The way it’s written, you want to stick him with your problems.” My problems again, they’re all so horribly afraid of other people’s problems. Allen Ginsberg is afraid too. They’re tough, here in their America, but happiness is not enhanced by the absence of other people’s problems…
I asked her to check the letter anyway. She began to do it, but suddenly, sitting at the typewriter, she turned preposterously nasty.
“I don’t plan to waste the whole evening on this, I worked all day writing,” she snorted.
I could not contain myself. “I’m not going to ask you for anything ever again,” I told her. “Disgusting psychopath,” I cursed inwardly, “you forget how many nights running I’ve typed the Russian texts you needed. Louse, ungrateful wretch, you’re used to getting it all yourself,” I thought, staring at her back. But this happened after I had fucked her.
Roseanne decided to have a Fourth of July party. “It’s a long time since I invited people over, but I don’t have the money, I’m poor, I have to tell them to bring something to drink, I can’t buy wine and liquor for them. One of my friends will bring meat for shashlik.”
On July third I went to the stores with her. She was wearing the sort of dress that American women always wear when shopping close to home, a cross between an apron and a Russian sarafan. It was a very sunny hot day, we bought wine in a liquor store, and I bought a bottle of vodka. Because of my white clothes the salesman took me for a Russian sailor from one of the tall ships that had arrived in New York for America’s Bicentennial Celebration and lay in the Hudson River. Someone selected fruit for her; he was a Latin-American she had known for many years, and she exchanged friendly insults with him, something on the subject of smoking. Either they had both quit smoking, or he had given up and begun smoking again, or she had, something in that vein.
Suddenly I felt good about this neighborhood, about Broadway streaming past flooded in sunlight – the produce store was right on Broadway – about the microcosm of salesmen and customers who had known each other for years, for decades. I envied her a bit, Roseanne. Then we trudged back, and her neighbors greeted her, and I felt good that I was so healthy and tan, in my open shirt, with my silver cross with the chipped blue enamel on my chest, with my green, bright eyes. And I was inwardly grateful to her for having brought me into this world as if I belonged here, walking with her, Roseanne. Although I had passed by this very spot on Broadway time and again, it had never seemed to me so congenial, as if I belonged, because today I was not a passerby.
That same day I cleaned up her terrace, which was no easy job, the wind had deposited a lot of grit on the green artificial grass rug. I cut up meat for shashlik and marinated it, washed windows, and left her late.
I was grateful to her, and she to me, we hung idiotic colored lanterns in all the penthouse windows, then had some whiskey and nearly fucked. I held back only out of mischief, having decided to fuck her exactly on the Fourth of July. I wanted the symbolism. She very much wanted to fuck, poor thing, and moaned pitifully when I stroked and hugged her. As she later confessed to me, she is supersensitive to being touched, while a kiss on the lips leaves her almost indifferent. She and I are alike in this; for me, too, the lips are the most insensitive part of the body. That evening was hard on her, but I held back, said good-bye anyway and left after telling her provocatively that we would make love tomorrow, the Fourth of July. She laughed.
What a fucking Fourth that was! The party was set for one o’clock, but since I knew American ways by now, I arrived at two, having bought her a dozen red roses, for which she seemed most sincerely glad. A great many people were already there, among them several Russians: a writer and instructor – already known to you, gentlemen, he’s the one who brought me together with Carol the Trotskyite – and his wife Masha; the photographer Seva with his wife – he had worked about a year and a half for the well-known diver Cousteau. Seva came with his cameras, set them up and took pictures of the ships passing right under the windows. The Soviet Kruzenshtern was officially largest of all, the very largest sailing ship of the present day. “That’s ours, largest of all!” I said with a laugh, nudging the writer.
After taking a turn through the crowd and quickly downing several glasses of wine, I began, along with a bearded man by the name of Karl, to make shashlik. Karl had brought a covered pot full of his own shash
lik, made the Greek way, marinated in vegetable oil. Karl raised a storm of activity, slicing tomatoes and onions and putting them all on skewers. He knew a few words of Russian.
People are very fond of watching others work. Right away a smiling black girl from Jamaica came over; her father was a priest in his homeland, the girl spoke English very well, much better than Americans do. With many curious people scurrying around us, Karl and I had cleaned the peppers and were sitting there slicing them when Roseanne appeared, leading a very tall fat man in shorts.
“This is the proprietor of the hotel you live in,” she said.
He started to laugh, I started to laugh, but inwardly recalling what she had told me about him, I thought, “In addition to our dismal Winslow he owns forty-five buildings in Manhattan; he hasn’t got a million, he’s got much more. He has a law office on the second floor of our hotel – his hotel – but they say he doesn’t practice law at all. Why the fuck should he…”
The man in shorts withdrew into the crowd. “The elephant.” Mentally I gave him the nickname, and it occurred to me that my life would be easier if, for the same $130, he gave me a room that was a little bit bigger, a little bit more spacious than my prison cubicle. But why should he do this for me, I decided. What was I to him?
Roseanne says the elephant once wanted to sleep with her. She says this about everyone. She said it even about little Charles, dressed in the operatic smock of a Rimsky-Korsakov shepherd, Charles of the Village Voice, buried in work. This is not a very normal thing to say. It may seem so to her; I don’t know. The truth may be that she slept with the elephant, not merely that he wanted her to, but what business is it of mine, I don’t love Roseanne, what do I care.
I don’t love Roseanne. I realized it almost at once, after I caught her a few times in that hysterical pose, with her head thrown back, the way a cornered rat looks at you. I don’t love her because she doesn’t love me, she doesn’t love anyone… I am firm in the knowledge that I need someone, it makes no difference whether a man or a woman, so long as that someone loves me. I already knew clearly by then – I had become wiser, after all, more normal, and had recently been compelled to think so much – I knew that my whole life had been a search for love, at times an unconscious search, at times a conscious one.
I had found love – Elena. But, innocent or guilty, in her savage will to destroy she had destroyed everything I had built. That is her custom, to destroy, she has never built anything, only destroyed. Now, for lack of another object, she is destroying herself. I am searching anew. How strange; but it may be that I have the strength for one more love.
I caught myself scanning the men and women in the group with identical interest. It was rather an odd feeling: I sat on Roseanne’s soft, perhaps too soft, plastic couch, among her plants, conversed with her guests, all the while thinking about myself and seeking someone for myself. There was no one.
There were dried-up American women intellectuals, I knew all about them: they did not interest me, nor I them. Even crazy Roseanne, with the yellow skin of her broad face stretched in a tight smile, was much better. She at least had an interest in people. No love for them, but an interest in them. She had gathered around her a little knot of freaks, one of whom was me. I am under no delusions – of course I’m a freak. The dried-up thirty-year-old American ladies were not to my taste, they knew it all, and I thought they would be boring to fuck. They had no illusions, they no longer hoped for anything in this life but firmly and dryly went their uninteresting way. Where to? To nowhere, to death, of course, where we all go. Alternating this march with intellectual conversations, they were American-style intellectuals. Had I seen protest in the eyes of even one of them, protest and pain, I would have approached her. No, there was nothing of the sort.
The beefy, bull-like American men, showing the effects of at least three generations of good nutrition, did not interest me either. I grew bored. After exchanging a couple of jokes with the Russians I withdrew again to the penthouse terrace, under the open sky, and busied myself grilling shashlik with Karl. I brought along a bottle of vodka, I like it when I have the bottle handy. Since the place was packed, Roseanne could not enforce her zhlobby German-Jewish-American system of serving up the liquor in “decent” measures without handing a man the bottle, a system that always infuriates and insults me.
I stood the bottle in the shade of the shashlik pot and continued to work, talking back and forth with Karl and his wife and other people who approached the table, and at the same time helped myself to vodka whenever I felt like it. We had already begun to hand out the shashliks as they got done; being the chef, of course, I was eating one of the first, washing down the meat with more of the same vodka, when suddenly…
Suddenly Roseanne led a woman over to me. Bear in mind, I was seeing her for the first and last time. She… She was a Chinese woman, her father was Chinese, as I later learned, and her mother Russian. She had an uncommonly luminous face. I scrutinized her later, but at the time the only thing that struck my eye was the light of her face, and I saw that she was beautiful. As they wrote in the old Chinese classics, not in the slightest embarrassed by cliches – and I have read quite a few Chinese classics in translation – “She was like the flower of the lotus.” A soft oriental smile played on her lips, and she was gay and sweet, open to the whole world and to me. “This is my best friend,” Roseanne said, “my former roommate.”
The roommate smiled in a way that made me want to embrace her then and there, kiss her, touch her, rub against her, and actually lie down with her right on the spot and caress her, which I did, about an hour later. I always have immediate reactions, they often get me in trouble. This was the second time it had happened to me during my stay in New York. The first time was when I encountered a very beautiful actress named Margot, whom I began to kiss and hug right at a party, in her husband’s presence – by coincidence, he was Chinese – and almost went to bed with her. She had on a stunning object, a hat with a feather, hats have always done me in. I whispered wild Russian caresses and diminutives to Margot, words that exist in no other language, she was ashamed, she smiled, turned her face away and said helplessly, “This is scandalous, scandalous,” but plainly she herself liked all this, she saw what she was rousing within me; I did not look altogether like an ordinary cunt-chaser with a hard-on.
That time my wife and someone else dragged me away. Even though she had reached an agreement with me about a free life, Elena was far from delighted with my behavior. True, she attributed her displeasure to the fact that I was behaving indecently. Elena, of course, was the height of decency. If I liked a creature with honey eyes, in a feathered hat, and I showed it, why was it indecent?
This fascinating Chinese girl had a lightning effect on me. All my behavior that night, from then until early morning, was irrational and subject solely to the unconscious, which, as has been shown by my numerous studies on myself, acts in concert with my conscious. Roseanne led the Chinese girl away to introduce her to others, but now I knew what I had to do. In my terrible agitation – “She is here! She has come! She is found!” – I began to drink, of course, and instantly drank off a huge quantity of vodka. I remember I brought out a second bottle and started in on it. Everything after that was told to me by others – Roseanne, and the photographer Seva. I’ll tell you later what they told me, but the night into which I then plunged came to a sudden end, and I beheld myself wet, sitting on the bed in Roseanne’s bedroom.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Night,” she said.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“They all left long ago. You got so drunk you don’t remember anything. We held you under the shower, Karl tried to sober you up, you were in the shower for maybe three hours, but it was no use. How could you get so drunk! I was very ashamed for you, I even cried. True, that black man who makes amulets and necklaces was very drunk too, and your friend the writer was drunk. He and Masha got so drunk, when we dragged you into the s
hower Masha screamed: ‘Don’t touch him, he’s a great Russian poet! All of you together aren’t worth his fingernail, leave him alone! He does what he needs to! Get away from him, villains!’ She was crazy and drunk,” Roseanne concluded spitefully.
I grinned. Masha was one of us, she had been raised in the best traditions of Moscow’s bohemia, she knew what to scream. Masha was a baptized Uzbek. Here in New York she zealously attended church, sang in the choir, but the best traditions of Moscow’s free bohemia were firmly lodged within her. She knew that if your friend was being dragged off, then drunk or not you had to save him, even by screaming. Not for nothing had she been the lover of two consecutive Moscow celebrities, the sculptor Erast Provozvestny and the poet Heinrich Sapgir. Both were renowned for their scandalous alcoholic rows and even brawls. That sort of thing was accepted in the world I came from, it was not considered a disgrace; anyone had the right to relax, if he could and wanted to.
I recalled that today was the Fourth of July, and that I was supposed to fuck Roseanne. My head ached, I could hardly imagine where so many hours of my time had gone to, there wasn’t even a dark hole left where they had been, those hours; but I was distracted from the discussion. I had to fuck her, otherwise I would cease to respect myself. Later I could try to reconstruct what I had done with those hours, but now I should carry out the promise I had made to myself.
“Come to bed,” I told her. “I want you.”
It was a lie, of course. Although I sometimes did want to fuck her, both before and after this, I didn’t want her at all just now, when I was tired and drunk. Nevertheless I forcibly diverted my thoughts from my condition and became absorbed in her body, occupied myself with it.
I remember that after overcoming her halfhearted, nil, resistance, I very attentively undressed her, began to kiss and stroke her. I behaved as I usually did with women, stroked and caressed her, kissed her bosom. I must give her her due: she had a beautiful little bosom, it lay quite tranquil at her age, my new girl friend was past thirty, after all, but she had a beautiful bosom… you see, I don’t take away what belongs to her. I did all that, and then climbed onto her. I threw one leg over, then the other, and lay down. I am very fond of stroking a woman’s neck, chin, and bosom with my hand. I played with them all, and in Roseanne they were ever so slightly weary, autumn was in her body, autumn.
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