His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  It might be said that Edward Limonov concocted all that himself, it was all his own invention, and he really didn’t have any basis for his resentment of Steven Grey. That’s true; there wasn’t any basis for it, except that Steven Grey consciously and unconsciously and any other way you like felt himself to be the master, thereby automatically turning Linda and me into his servants. Paradoxically, Olga, shielded from him by Linda and me, wasn’t one of his servants, whereas we were. He played that game, the fucking feudal overlord, the bloated bastard, and we had to play it too. He played it unconsciously, and I was included in it unconsciously, and the fact that I realized what was going on changed nothing.

  I always knew, both then and later, that physically it was easy for me to work for him and with him. I had no objection to getting up at seven, or even at six, or to the fact that his friends or the businessmen he needed would sometimes arrive at eight — I even found that the morning’s drill stimulated me and put me in a cheerful mood. Nor did I object to the fact that I had to spend the whole day on my feet and could go off to bed only at midnight. After all, he was only in the New York house two or three days a week; you could count on your fingers the times when he stayed longer.

  But that extraordinary ability of his to transform both Linda and me into servants by his mere presence wrecked our relationship with him and turned every one of his visits into a calamity. And it certainly wasn’t that I wanted him to sit and drink vodka with me in the kitchen — I would have been the first one to say no to that. It wasn’t his friendship that I required, but rather a sense that my work was my own and wasn’t merely «service» in the menial sense of the word.

  In short, he walked over to Linda and blurted out something that must have come as a surprise even to him: “I called Nancy, and she has the portfolio with her in Connecticut.”

  Good God, how unhappy he looked! He was so disappointed, or rather not disappointed, but crushed! Why? Because it turned out we were innocent! He had already decided, decided as he always did, that it was we who were guilty. That it was us, us… To put it more simply, he wanted us, the other ones, the ones he could say it to, to be bad, guilty, and worse than him — stupid or undisciplined, but worse than him. Obviously, I’m only trying here to understand what his feelings were. Maybe they weren’t quite what I’m describing, but his expression was unhappy.

  After throwing open several cabinets with his trembling hands (and obviously blaming me that he had to do so, that he hadn’t immediately seen the glasses and the bottle in the first one and had to open several), he found the gin and poured himself a drink, his hands trembling so much that the neck of the bottle rattled against the glass. And then he started jabbering about something. No, not justifying himself, but just trying to find something to talk about with us — a sentence about his car which stood gleaming outside the kitchen window. Then, glancing at the kitchen clock, he remarked the time out loud and happily muttered something else about the traffic on the roads he would have to take to Connecticut. In his barbarian code, all this was supposed to symbolize something like an apology, a retreat, but it’s more likely that it was really the result of his own chagrin at the fact that he, the bastard, had been in the wrong.

  It was so repulsive for me to look at him that I made a frankly contemptuous face and went upstairs to the second floor, passed through Linda’s little anteroom, went into the TV room, and started looking out the window and thinking about what a son of a bitch he really was. Linda had already given in to him out of kindness, as she always does, and like him was drinking some kind of junk to calm her nerves, either whiskey or gin, who knows what. I heard only the ice tinkling in their glasses and their muted chitchat — a classic pair, the sadist and the rnas-ochist, the boss and his secretary.

  Out of the window in the TV room I could see a girl of about ten dressed in shorts, with long skinny legs, a round ass, and little breasts under her training bra. She was learning how to ride a bike. Her frayed mama, worn out probably by the many thousands of love sessions she had had in her life, stood nearby and watched. The mama was my age, and her face, tensed with so many thousands of orgasms, was covered with little muscle lines and wrinkles. The wrinkles have developed on her face in consequence of her orgasms, I thought a bit mechanically, in the tone of an instructor of anatomy, and then turned my attention to the girl, whose skin and little body were still smooth and even and whose red mouth was stuck out capriciously in the pronunciation of inaudible words. I was so moved by the spectacle of that innocent child that I unconsciously started fondling my black «service» trousers in the vicinity of my crotch.

  By virtue of a powerful imagination, my organ, the humiliated organ of a servant, found itself in the mouth of that child from a «good» and well-to-do family. Obviously, they were well-to-do and «good»; they lived next door. There are no poor people in our area. The poor come here only to work. Every morning around nine I see lines of them through the kitchen window, black women like our Olga for the most part, on their way to the houses and apartments of the neighboring rich. Around five or later, they make their way back to their outlying ghettos.

  I got ten minutes’ worth of pleasure from that wiggling girl on the bicycle. The only reason I didn’t come was that Gatsby and Linda were still babbling downstairs, and either of those unbalanced personalities could have walked in at any moment.

  Watching little girls is by no means my only hobby, the sort of hobby that lonely old gentlemen of a certain age tend to have and the sort that sometimes lands them in jail or even in die electric chair. No, I would never go after a child, but watching one out of the window is another matter, and of course I’d avail myself of the opportunity, if I lived somewhere in the country or in some provincial American town and found myself an arm’s length away from some familiar and none too innocent-looking girl of that age.

  But I would never under any circumstances take advantage of a child; grossness of that kind is for idiots who can’t restrain themselves, whereas I, despite everything, am a person of culture and taste. A servant can be a person of culture and taste too, can’t he? If the girl were to object, I wouldn’t insist. Pleasure of that kind is merely a facet of my sexuality — a sexuality I understand very well — and nothing more. I long ago realized how society fucks everything up, depriving us of life’s most interesting sensations and pleasures, fencing them off with prohibitions and taboos.

  “Don’t you dare!” But I do.

  Then, taking the place of the little girl, who had glided off to the left on her bicycle out of the frame of my vision and into the wings, so to speak, Steven appeared in the window, opened the door of his car, sat down in its polished box, which since it was spring had its top down and gleamed luxuriously with the yellow of its new leather, pushed the seat back with his powerful ass, and turned the key. At that moment the girl came back out of the wings and glided past the boss’s car, squinting at him with interest and then glancing back at him as she passed. I could see Gatsby smile complacently.

  The bastard! Even there he got the better of me. The girl couldn’t see the pale face of the servant high up in the second-floor window, but with a sweet and happy smile she took the hook of Gatsby’s car. Women and girls and children, all females in fact, love whatever is brilliant or gleams or is shining with lights — Christmas trees, cars, diamonds, gold — and never trouble themselves with what is real or genuine, with the treasures of the mind, say. The girl on the bicycle proved herself a worthy representative of her sex, and spitting my prick out of her mouth, she rode over to Gatsby in his shining box, her eyes open wide with delight.

  As you see, Gatsby still had his moments of hysteria, but they weren’t directed at me personally, or if they were, then that was something he managed to keep to himself. And there was a reason for that, as I’ve already mentioned.

  Once in March, after one of his typically long telephone conversations, Gatsby came skipping into the kitchen in a particularly good mood.

  “Edward,�
�� he said, “we’re going to have a very unusual guest this week. Can you guess who it is?”

  “The Shah of Iran,” I said, taking a stab. I didn’t say that because I have such a wonderful sense of humor. The exiled Shah actually could have been our guest, since Mr. Grey really did know him and had at one time invested large sums of money in the development of Iranian agriculture, chicken or rabbit farms, I think, although I’m not sure. I’ll add that Gatsby was pretty canny and got his money out of Iran long before «that» began — the revolution, I mean.

  We have links with Iran. In our house there are a great many books on Iranian history and culture, as well as Persian-English dictionaries, and in the living room on the third floor is a table from Iran with a circular top made of tiny mirrors that was obviously cut out of a wall somewhere. The whimsical pattern produced by the mirrors is complemented by strange birds circling the table’s marble edge. It is a very beautiful table. Mr. Grey probably vandalized a mosque or some other architectural monument to get it. There are also Persian miniatures hanging on the walls in the stairways of our house, and tasseled Persian pillows and cushions on the couches. And hanging on the wall in the third-floor living room is an immense hookah, which Mr. Grey’s oldest child, Henry, on his last visit filled countless times with hashish and smoked with his college friends. We also have a Persian bronze brazier and Persian silverware and even Persian silver ashtrays with a crowned lion holding a saber in its hand. Or maybe they aren’t ashtrays, since on their bottoms, on the reverse side, that is, there is a relief depicting a mustached man in a plumed helmet. I suspect this is the Shah’s father, but maybe not. There’s something written on them in Persian, but I don’t understand Persian.

  “No,” the boss answered seriously, “it’s not the Shah. It’s one of your compatriots, a Russian. I already told him you’re working here. It’s Efimenkov,” he said, speaking the name of a famous Soviet writer I had been on friendly terms with in my Moscow days, even visiting his house once.

  How mixed up everything is in this world, I thought. I never expected to see Efimenkov on this earth again, and especially not in my — excuse me, in Gatsby’s house. The news didn’t particularly excite me, however; I had long ago forgotten that Efimenkov even existed. I had enough of my own worries.

  But I felt that the boss would want me to be surprised, even astonished, and so like a good housekeeper I said in an excited voice, “You’re kidding! Efimenkov? That’s really amazing! That’s really incredible!”

  My master was evidently satisfied with my exclamations — he didn’t require much from his servant. “I’ve known Efimenkov for several years now,” Steven said. “We met for the first time at an international festival in Helsinki.”

  I had been aware that Gatsby knew Efimenkov, but the festival in Helsinki was beyond me. At that time in my life I had been quietly and peacefully breaking into out-of-the-way stores in my nice little provincial city of Kharkov. I don’t even know what year that festival took place — when Gatsby and the Soviet Efimenkovs started hanging out together, when they all got together and made each other’s acquaintance.

  “He’ll be here a month,” my employer told me, “not the whole time, of course, since he’ll be traveling around the country, but this will be his home base, so to speak.” You could sense that the multimillionaire Steven Grey was proud of the fact that the world-famous Soviet writer Efimenkov would be staying in his home.

  I realized then that the whole world is one big village for Mr. Grey, that for him a celebrity is a celebrity and that, snob that he is, a Soviet celebrity might be of an even higher rank, since as a Communist he would have the advantage of being exotic. In conversation with somebody, say the British Marchioness Houston, whom the boss is not indifferent to and who according to Jenny had once been his mistress, Steven will find an opportunity to remark importantly, “Efimenkov and I got really drunk yesterday…” As you’ll see in a moment, they really did get drunk on the one evening they spent together, but that isn’t the point. In sharing his home with Efimenkov, Steven felt he was an international figure, someone who took part in international events and who had a place not only in the economic but also in the cultural life of the world, and that’s obviously the reason why Efimenkov was so desirable a guest for him. He was one more confirmation of Gatsby’s own importance in the world.

  May God grant Efimenkov long life for making my time in the millionaire’s house more bearable for me, and for raising me in the boss’s esteem to the point where he no longer yells, “God damn you! God damn you!” to my face, and where, if he loses his temper, at least he thinks about it before letting it take the mad form of biting his lip and snorting like a Cyclops before the nearsighted, bespectacled green eyes of his servant Edward Limonov.

  The reason? Edward Limonov had written a book. A great many people in the world have written books, and among them a great many Russians, including Efimenkov himself, who so far has written and published, if I’m not mistaken, thirty-three of them, but Edward Limonov, “my new butler,” as Steven Grey himself had called him in a telephone conversation with the Marchioness Houston that Linda had overheard and reported — that same Limonov a couple of years before had written a book that shocked and even astonished Evgeny Efimenkov.

  Efimenkov had heard about the book but hadn’t read it yet. Rumors about it had been circulating in Russia, where the new butler had sent it through a little American girl — the manuscript, I mean. And just before Efimenkov’s arrival in my country, in the United States of America, Limonov’s book had come out in condensed form in one of the Russian-language journals published in Paris, and caused quite a stir among all the Russians. Some of them loved the book, and others hated it.

  Almost the very first thing that Efimenkov said to Mr. Grey’s servant after he was helped out of the yellow New York taxicab by Jon Barth, the graying professor of Russian literature and, as I suppose, completely innocuous CIA informer (so that it’s no accident he’s always hanging around all the Soviet literary dignitaries who come here, that he’s never more than a step away) — almost the first thing that Efimenkov said to the servant was, “Edik! I hear you’ve written a novel. How about letting me read it?”

  If you take into account that Efimenkov was never really a close friend of Limonov’s, and that the man getting out of the taxi was a Soviet writer who had come to America in connection with the publication of one of his books and was staying at the multimillionaire’s house only as a result of his own relative independence, his status as one of the most famous writers in the world, whereas Limonov was that multimillionaire’s housekeeper and an émigré and therefore presumably anti-Soviet — only if you take all that into account, will you understand just how interested in the book Efimenkov must have been, if he asked about it as soon as he got in the door. For you, perhaps, that might not mean anything, but in Soviet terms, it was a greeting with wide-open arms.

  I let him have it. I gave it to him to read. And it blew him away.

  And with good reason. The book talked about homosexuality, and about what it feels like when a man is the one who is fucked, and about the hero’s other sexual experiences, and it did so openly, without hedging: A cunt was called a cunt without any concealment, and love was rendered in sharp outlines without any mincing or mawkishness. Moreover, it was clear that the hero was happy neither with the Soviet way of life nor with this one either, the one ruled by Gatsbys, although I still didn’t know Steven then. In short, there was much that was pointed and stained with blood in that book. The hero didn’t play at being macho when he didn’t have anybody to fuck; he masturbated, and that’s the way it was written — he masturbated. The hero wasn’t afraid to lay himself bare, and that in fact was what impressed Efimenkov. And the most «awful» thing about the book was that the hero bore my name. He too was called Edward Limonov.

  I didn’t give him the book the very first day he asked, but on the third day, I think — the first time he spent the evening at home. Steven
was off somewhere in Europe, and Efimenkov didn’t go anywhere that night but stayed at home and read my book. The next morning he was supposed to fly to Colorado with Barth, and so when I gave him the manuscript, he had politely asked if he could take it with him. I told him he could, if he promised not to lose it. I had other copies — the translator had one, and there were more at various other places around the globe — so I nobly gave my consent.

  When he came back several days later, Gatsby was at home, as Efimenkov was well aware. Nevertheless, the first thing he yelled from the doorway, lifting his head up after a quick glance into the kitchen, was, “Edik! Edik!” He knew if I wasn’t in the kitchen, I would be in my room on the fourth floor. In response to Efimenkov’s shouting, the boss came out of his office on the second floor and dashed downstairs to him, but Efimenkov waved him aside and headed up to my room. It was a complete triumph for me. A complete triumph over my boss. The servant was victorious. Art had leapt higher than his millions, if only for an instant.