It's Me, Eddie

by Edward Limonov

  Paul was madly in love with France. He knew all the French chansonniers, among whom he was especially fond of Aznavour and Brel. On the wall of his room, in oil, Paul had painted a huge portrait of Aznavour that covered the whole wall. I remember he once sang “Amsterdam!” for us, in a narrow, piss-puddled gateway on Sumskaya Street, the main street of our native Kharkov. When he imitated Jacques Brel, he puffed up and turned all purple. He had less ability and skill than Brel, but probably no less enthusiasm.

  From photographs, drawings, and plans of Paris, Paul learned all of its streets, lanes, and culs-de-sac. He painted watercolors of them in great number. I think he could have walked through Paris with his eyes closed and not gotten lost. Names like Place Pigalle, Cafe Blanche, Etoile, and Montmartre had for him the ring of unearthly music. He was frenchified to the point of pathology. He refused to talk to people in Russian, he did not enter into conversations on buses or streetcars. “I don’t understand,” he would say curtly. He still made an exception for us, his friends, but only for us. Even at that, I think he inwardly scorned us for not knowing French.

  He was working then at a tannery. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but he did heavy, nasty work for almost two years – he wanted clothes. Somewhere in the labyrinth of Moskalevka, the Jewish quarter, he found an old Jewish shoemaker, and the man made him some high boots, with high heels too, “like the Beatles’.” I forgot to mention that Paul loved the Beatles. With the help of the niece of the wife I had then, I made him a three-piece suit from a striped fabric, and a great many pairs of striped slacks. I remember that he liked his slacks very long, practically lying in folds at the bottom. It was an oddity of his.

  Paul became frenchified to such a degree that even outwardly – I am thinking particularly of his face – he ceased to look Russian and really did recall a Frenchman, most probably a resident of a small town in Brittany. Many times, back in Russia, when studying Western illustrated magazines, I encountered faces surprisingly reminiscent of my poor friend Paul’s.

  His fate is tragic. He matured too early, while it was still impossible to emigrate from the USSR: they were not yet letting the Jews out; the practice of exposing undesirable elements and ejecting them abroad did not yet exist. It was too early, but Paul was already ripe. He so wanted to leave that hated country for his beloved France, the paradise that he had created for himself in his imagination. I don’t know whether he would have been happy in that paradise. He might have been. I do know of three attempts he made to escape from the Soviet Union.

  The first went unnoticed. On leaving the tannery, Paul, who had accumulated a little money, began to spend a lot of time downtown, visiting the cafes and the not very numerous vice dens of Kharkov. Somewhere down there he became acquainted with Bunny, a large and rather cute girl whom the whole city knew as a prostitute; he married her and moved in with her. Her mother was a tradeswoman. By paying off a few policemen she had succeeded in getting around Soviet law and was making money buying hard-to-get goods in one city and selling them in another. She converted her son-in-law Paul to this business. One time she sent him to Armenia. There he learned of a high official who was taking huge sums for illegally sending people to Turkey. Ostensibly they were hired for the job of building a highway. Part of the highway was being built on Turkish territory. Paul was unlucky. When he arrived at the border the chief was already in prison.

  The second attempt was the ruin of Paul’s whole life. He was ready to burst, desperately seeking a way out. He would come to me in Moscow and say nothing, stare into space all day, distraught; in the evening he would disappear, starting out for suspicious addresses. Then he went away.

  I later learned that he had gone south to Novorossisk, and there had managed to reach an agreement with some sailors from a French ship that they would hide him and take him out of the USSR. But Dame Fortune evidently did not favor Paul. One of the crew turned out to be a man who worked for Soviet customs. Such cases are said to be frequent – these are paid informers. On the basis of his denunciation, at the outer roadstead at Batum, the last Soviet port on the Black Sea – beyond it lay Turkey – the ship was detained, a search was made, and they pulled Paul from his hideaway. They found on him political caricatures of Soviet heads of state. There was a trial, and… here, at least he had a small piece of luck, if you can call it that: he was judged insane.

  I don’t know whether he really was. I suppose he was. I don’t think he was born insane, but there was something pathological about him, and it must have developed gradually. He hated Russia too much, immoderately. “Tribe of goats,” “imbeciles,” “queerstabulary,” “Communists” – these were his usual words, spoken many times a day. He addressed them not only to Communists, but also to ordinary innocent philistines.

  They kept him in the mental hospital for a year, and before long he was sitting again on a bench near the Shevchenko monument in Kharkov, smoking a cigarette and glancing occasionally at his daughter Fabiana, who played by his Beatles boots. He talked to no one. Then he suddenly disappeared.

  No one knew where he was or what had happened to him, until an inquiry arrived at the mental hospital in Kharkov from the western border of the USSR, from the Carpathians, requesting them to forward the medical record of a Pavel Shemetov, who had been arrested while illegally crossing the western border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the vicinity of city X.

  A sad story, isn’t it? I, little Eddie, remember yet another detail. Years ago, back before the navy, Paul got married. There was a wedding reception. All the guests got dead drunk, but even so there wasn’t enough liquor. The bride, by now his wife, sent Paul for beer, she had an urge for beer. When Paul came back from the store with the case of beer, he discovered his bride in one of the rooms fucking his best friend… Nice… Perhaps it was then that he came to hate the filth and vileness of this world. The only thing he didn’t know, poor guy, was that filth and vileness existed everywhere. And how could he know, poor guy, that it was not the Russian people who were at fault here, nor the Communist system.

  Paul’s further fate, after the letter from the Carpathians, is unknown to me.

  But let us return to John. John had much less education than Paul. Paul was almost an intellectual. And he was straining toward France as the world of art, as an Eden. John was guided by far more practical considerations. He came to America to get rich, become a millionaire. And I’m sure he will. I do not have a very clear idea who owns Beautiful Moving. John takes care of all the business. He’s the driver; he’s also a helper and an administrator. He hires us, the helpers, at his own discretion. And the orders come to his, John’s, telephone. Evidently the owner merely gives him the money, or gave it to him, the original capital.

  We move people from apartment to apartment. Sometimes people move within the confines of one neighborhood, sometimes from state to state. From New Jersey to Pennsylvania, from New York to Massachusetts. The long moves are more interesting. By now I’ve seen a number of small towns, all similar to one another, in five or six eastern states, mainly in New England. If we ride together, then either we are silent, in which case I study the landscape along the road, or else the taciturn John suddenly begins to tell stories about his life on the trawler. The Jack London hero can’t hold out, he cracks, talks about himself a little, insofar as his frugal, stern nature allows.

  Usually this happens in the middle of the day. In the morning he is silent as a statue. When I jump into the cab with him, he utters only a short “Hi!” I may address him after that, but you can be damn sure I don’t get much of an answer. I’m used to him and remain silent too. Basically I like him, I like his face, figure, character. Among the spineless bellyaching intellectuals who have come to America, he is a pleasant exception – a simple, ordinary man. A curiosity. He’s a tough guy. He doesn’t argue, he works very hard and is saving money in order to open his own business. He’s a genuine Russian, although he once said he didn’t give a fuck about his nationality. Despi
te what he says, he can’t escape it – he’s Russian, like me. Russian even in that he doesn’t want to be Russian.

  As I said, he’s a very tough guy. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, saves his money, lives in a bad neighborhood, and shares an apartment with someone else. He’s very deft at handling his heavy truck. In some ways I envy him, my agemate, although little Eddie is a tough guy too, on the whole. I don’t know whether he, John, associates with women. This question interests me to a certain degree; they say he fucks some woman from whom he supposedly rents the truck. Maybe she’s his boss, too – one and the same person? I could easily find out about company affairs from John, but I don’t want to appear curious. In the final analysis, I need my $4 an hour, which I earn by lugging other people’s furniture up and down in elevators and stairways. Besides, I am interested to see Other people’s apartments – things tell me much about their owners.

  I am John’s chief helper now. Evidently he considers me a good one. He has had other helpers too. The dissident Yury Fein, a man of about forty-five, known mainly for being married to the sister of the first wife of our celebrity, our prophet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Then there’s Shneerson, also a dissident, a man who arrived in Israel in Soviet prison garb, a professor’s fat son. Shneerson quickly got out of Israel and is now on welfare. I have already mentioned that it was he who led me – half dead, my mind not functioning, my arm streaming pus – to the welfare center and got them to put me on welfare inside of a day. “Emergency situation!”

  I remember how wide-eyed and astonished the Americans at the welfare center were when wheezing, fat, disheveled Shneerson pointed at me, a pale man with idiotically short-cropped hair, and explained to them that I had an emergency situation, I was in a terrible state, my wife had left me. They were astonished, perhaps even amused. Most of them, being aloof and self-involved, could hardly have loved another person so madly. But I must give them their due, they did not dispute my right to be the way I was. If the departure of a woman was an emergency situation for the Russians, so that they couldn’t eat, drink, work, or keep an apartment – well, then that’s the way they were, the Russians. What the hell, let’s give the man welfare.

  That may have been exactly how they thought. Or maybe, as many emigres claim, Welfare has a secret order from the American government to give welfare to all Russians who want it, in order to avoid exasperating people and appearing ridiculous in front of world society with their much-vaunted system, which is supposed to have room for everyone. A great many Russians are on welfare. I think Soviet emigres should be sent to the welfare center straight off the airplane. Having counted on mountains of gold here, they are utterly unable to assimilate the modest philosophy of the Western laborer. If they have to be like everyone else, then what was the point in coming? Here the ordinary man pronounces with pride: “I am like everyone else.”

  Yes, but John. I was talking about him. It’s amusing that all of us – intellectuals, poets, and dissidents – are under an ordinary guy from a fishing trawler. He has proved to be much better adapted to this life than we are. He does his business seriously and punctiliously. You should see the way he walks into the apartment of someone who is moving, records the place on the contract form, and demands the client’s signature. All this is done very importantly. His file folder looks important, the clamp on his clipboard sparkles, and we stand at his back – some, like Fein, very rightist; others, like me, very leftist; still others, like Shneerson, undecided – holding in readiness the dollies for moving furniture, the straps and the packing quilts. We wait for a signal from our businessman, John.

  I find all this to be terrible foolishness, both my participation in moving other people’s belongings from one place to another, and this Fein, who is forever praising America and its wise government. He even considers the Bowery and its dirty, piss-soaked inhabitants to be the result of a government plan to concentrate all beggars, alcoholics, and drug addicts in one place, the more easily to help them. My participation is terrible foolishness, but my $278 welfare is so inadequate for me that I participate in this foolishness anyway; I too am a man and need money. That is why the rightist Fein grabs the right side of the piano, and I, the extreme leftist, the left side – and here we go!

  Admittedly, I need the money only for clothes, my single weakness. I have always found the acquisition of other things disgusting, and the experience of moving other people’s belongings, the spectacle of the silly heavy sofas, the buffets, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of petty objects, has strengthened my aversion to the world of things. The owner will die, and all this shit will remain. “Never!” I whisper to myself, as I lug some Patrick’s buffet up the stairs to the fourth floor, without an elevator. “I don’t give a flying fuck for this old junk. No to things!” I say to myself. The only thing I cannot resist, alas, is beautiful clothes.

  The signature is affixed. The missus has signed. From this moment on, an invisible meter counts out our pennies. We begin to move like automated dolls. Pick up, place on the dolly, turn, roll, lift at the threshold or the step, roll again… move, unscrew mirrors, wrap them in special quilts… monotonous, rhythmic operations, varying only in the size of the object and the turns on the staircase, the approach to the elevator, the steps down to the street, and the weather.

  We’re rather a cheap company; some of our customers are emigres, because we advertise in Russkoe Delo as well as the American papers. Emigres most often live in poor neighborhoods, they have precious little in the way of belongings. Sometimes we have to move crazy old ladies to the poorhouse and carry off their dirty odds and ends of trash.

  Once we even moved iron beds with flat springs, beds for two girls of sixteen and twenty, beds they had brought from the USSR. But the girls were darling, with their neat little poopkas and high heels, Jewish girls bursting with their own juice; I feel like saying the banal, and I will: “girls with the eyes of little young lambs,” bulging eyes, silly and trusting. I am not very fond of brunettes, but I feel a kind of gratitude toward Jewish girls. A Russian poet cannot help loving them – they are his main readers and admirers. “Ah, Tolya, who in Russia reads us but the Jewish girls?” the poet Yesenin once wrote from America to the poet Mariengof in Russia.

  My working minutes tick by, bathed in sweat, amid self-abasement and the countless jostling memories awakened now by a ray of sun, now by a book that has fallen from a badly tied box… “I was reading it, then she came in – Elena – and we…” Hauling and carrying extensive Russian libraries is an especially strange pastime. Here in America, Russian books produce an unexpected effect. Carrying the dull green spines, the collected works of the Chekhovs, Leskovs, and other eulogizers and denizens of sleepy Russian noondays, I think vicious thoughts about the whole of my loathsome native Russian literature, which has been largely responsible for my life. Dull green bastards, Chekhov languishing in boredom, his eternal students, people who don’t know how to get themselves going, who vegetate through this life, they lurk in these pages like diaphanous sunflower husks. Even the print, small and crowded, is repulsive to me. And I am repulsive to myself. It’s much pleasanter to move the bright American books, not all of which, moreover, are intelligible to me, thank Cod.

  We have moved a set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and are now moving boxes of loose papers stamped “Radio Liberty.” Dirty dipshit operation… so that’s where he works! The owner of the papers is an intellectual from Kiev, with a graying beard. For some reason they all unthinkingly begin to collaborate with the CIA. I, who received not a ruble from the Soviet regime, would seem to have more grounds for being embittered at my former homeland and going to work for an organization financed by the American intelligence service and aimed at the destruction of Russia. But I don’t work for anyone. I did not collaborate with the KGB there and am not about to collaborate with the CIA here – to me, they are two identical operations.

  The owner of the library, with the little gray beard, enthusiastically tells Fein tha
t an article of his has been accepted for the anniversary issue of Posev. Bonehead, he’s found something to be proud of. In the USSR the graybeard was a screenwriter – worked for the Soviet regime. I did not encounter any free screenwriters in the USSR; naturally, he wrote what the authorities needed. Here he also writes exactly what the authorities need – such people work for the authorities under all regimes. They were born to serve, to carry out functions. They change masters without any special pangs of conscience. And why not?

  Prostitute! I think, meaning the graybeard. The prostitute is also dragging chests around, breathing heavily; he is saving time and money. Evidently they don’t pay him any too much at Radio Liberty. Or else it’s greed. “How much is your Homeland today?” I feel like asking him… He keeps dragging. His son, a tanned athlete of about sixteen, is also carrying things. Mama, who looks younger than she is, does not carry furniture. “Mama can be fucked,” says the ubiquitous Kirill, who is present with me as always. I brought him to earn a little money. It is probably the first time in his life he has worked as a mover. The big aristocrat finds it disgusting to carry furniture, he has little knowledge of the correct way to pick things up, he just barely holds on. But he does, although the job is hard for him to take and probably humiliating. Since I am actually from the lower classes and have seen all kinds of situations in this life, sweat is no novelty to me, though I haven’t done any moving for ten years. But Kirill’s face shows depression, loathing for the work, and boredom. His expression will change, giving place to a certain satisfaction, only after he gets his money, but as it turns out, John has had time to notice it. He will not invite the aristocrat to move furniture again, young men like this don’t appeal to him. He does not understand the conventions of this world.

  What the fuck does this prostitute want with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia? I am still wondering about our client. It is clear that the only reason he needs the encyclopedia and his huge Russian Orthographic Dictionary is so that he can be more literate in selling out his Homeland. He has even brought over some paperbacks on patriotic heroes of World War II. Why? As possible material for his scripts. For some sort of expose. There was another writer like that, but from the Second Emigration; I think he’s still writing. He reads a Soviet book, supposedly finds anti-Soviet tendencies in the author, and there’s his article. That’s how he lives, article after article. And there’s another one, a former Soviet officer, who contrives to publish one and the same thing in two places, sends it to Radio Liberty and Russkoe Delo – changes the title, revises two paragraphs, and sends it off. Two fees. That’s how he’s lived his thirty years abroad. A good cook. Likes to eat. It’s not their fault, poor fellows. They want to eat. But if you’re going to work in your own way and measure this world – whether the USSR or America – by your own standards, then what will you eat? You can’t feed on the Holy Spirit, can you?