His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  Behind Steven’s confident appearance stand his millions. Behind mine is my newly discovered self. I don’t need anybody; that’s what I’ve discovered — not a mama, not Elena, not Jenny, not anybody. I’m strong enough to live proudly by myself. And there’s no bitterness in my solitude, only joy.

  I still look for the girl in chinchilla. If I should meet her on Madison, I won’t recognize her of course, unless she’s dressed the same way, but that doesn’t matter. I’m looking for a type — that youthful charm, mystery, and inaccessibility, that alluring mixture of expensive prostitute and young girl, our civilization’s highest achievement. When I write “prostitute,” it’s not at all judgmental; on the contrary. How many speeches have our kitchen mothers in aprons and slippers recited to us all with their hands on their hips, drumming into our heads over and over again the great value of gray, decent, virtuous women like themselves, of the kitchen slave, whom we at a certain time would have to, indeed were obligated to, bring into our lives. But I, thank God, have never believed in virtue and have never understood the value of those gray creatures. I have from childhood always been fond of holidays and have continually found myself in conflict with humdrum everyday life. As a child I would ask my mother, “Mama, why isn’t it Christmas all the time?” So why don’t you all go stick it, mama and papa, and neighbors in Kharkov and Moscow, and friends and companions, and residents of New York and London and Paris, and all of you who strain yourselves to the limits of your strength to support that heavy, gray, shapeless moral clod. Fuck all of you! I want to love whatever is beautiful, brilliant, sweet-smelling, and young. I don’t want the decent, modest, and noble goose Jenny and those like her; I want the girl in chinchilla!

  When I’m in a very bad mood, instead of Madison, I walk along Central Park South, where our city’s most expensive hotels are drawn up in a line. In the spring or fall when it’s raining, especially when it’s raining, the entrances of the expensive hotels and restaurants present an unusual spectacle. Huge elegant automobiles drive up one after the other out of the mist, their chauffeurs obsequiously leaping out with big umbrellas, while absent-minded and imposing gentlemen assist their ladies from the dark warmth of the cars and fastidiously open their wallets to give the doormen a tip. Friends meet friends — they all know each other, these wealthy people — and at once kiss the little hands of their ladies there on the street, while a sudden breeze lifts the white scarf of one of die participants in that scene and carries to me, a modest passerby, the smoke of an expensive cigar and with it, the faint fragrance of warm feminine perfume.

  I have in the millionaire’s house the most expensive cigars and wines, wines that couldn’t even be found, perhaps, in the cellars of the restaurants they frequent, and if I wish, I can open a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1964 and drink it. But I’m a servant, and not one of their race. I know that sooner or later they’ll accept me under the name of writer — it’s inevitable. They won’t be able to withstand my strength, and I’ll descend on them and fuck their women, and their women will be wild about me and my masculinity and wickedness. That’s right, my masculinity, for a wave of masculinity has for the first time in my life emerged on my face with its prominent cheekbones and taken it over. But how to survive the day and its humiliations; that’s the hardest thing. I will endure it all, I think stubbornly, while examining the decked-out crowd around the Plaza — no, you won’t have that pleasure, I won’t go crazy and buy a Beretta from a pimp I know on Times Square, a little black instrument of death just like his, and bump off a congressman out of bitterness and hatred — a disgusting swine-faced congressman for all my sufferings, for all the sufferings of the pitiful failure Edward. No, I won’t give you that pleasure. I will survive, survive and endure a great many more rejections from publishers, and many more years of empty evenings like this, and thousands of walks like today’s. I will survive them and join you on the pinnacle as the most intelligent and malevolent. And not for your company, which I’m sure will be only a bit more amusing than that of Jenny and her friends, and not even for your women, but for myself. I want to prove to myself that I can. The main thing is that I respect myself.

  Returning to my refuge in the millionaire’s little house, I realize that for many years I’ve wanted somebody to be waiting for me at my door. And I carefully glance ahead, seeking the doorway of our house in the darkness to see if perhaps somebody might be sitting there and waiting for me. But there’s no one there. And that is yet one more small proof of the fact that in this world nobody cares about the servant. But then I don’t have to care about them either, the servant thinks.

  Tatiana turned up again several days later under the pretext of needing to talk to me. Her usual story. I immediately stuck a large gin and tonic in her hand, since she’s much easier to deal with after she’s had something to drink.

  “You’re the one who did this to me, Limonov,” Tatiana said. “You did it on purpose so I’d get pregnant.”

  Such a declaration came as a surprise even from her. “Wait a second, how old are you, girl? You’re thirty-one and you’ve fucked a lot of men, or at least you say you have, and you enjoy it, don’t you?” I said. Tatiana was silent. I continued. “How can you screw around without taking birth-control pills or any other precautions, hm? It’s dumb. It’s idiotic. And doesn’t it seem a little abnormal to you to blame me because you’re pregnant by another man? Would I blame you if I got some girl pregnant, the village idiot, say?”

  Tatiana looked at me with her Spanish eyes and said stubbornly, “It’s still your fault. I didn’t want to go out with him, so why did you give him the phone?”

  “In the first place, you always said you wanted me to introduce you to a rich man. Didn’t you? Why did you ask then? And in the second place, if you didn’t really want to go out with him, all you had to do was say ‘no, ” I said.

  “But he was so sneaky about it, the animal,” Tatiana continued, sipping her gin and tonic. “I had no idea he would attack me. We came back from a movie and he told me he wanted to take a shower and change and we would go to a restaurant, and then he took advantage of the moment and jumped on me. And he came inside me, the Burmese animal.”

  Thus did Tatiana lament, and I laughed uncontrollably. In the first place, I wasn’t at all convinced she was pregnant. And I was also beginning to realize that getting into scrapes, both big and small, was for Tatiana a way of life.

  “Tell me, where does he live?” she started asking me.

  “Of course,” I said, “I’ll tell you right now; come on,” and I took her by the hand up to my room on the elevator, and in spite of all her «noes» took her clothes off and started fucking her. At the height of that process, the phone rang, of course. Another time I wouldn’t have picked it up for anything, but I was expecting a guest at the house, a Polish artist-friend of the boss’s, and it could have been him calling from the airport. It wasn’t. It was my boss, Steven, calling from God knows where to ask me to record a film about Vietnam on video tape for an elderly woman neighbor of his in Connecticut whose son had died in Vietnam. “It already started five minutes ago,” the boss said in an apologetic tone.

  Fuck the mother and her dead son! Why reopen old wounds? I thought, pulling my prick out of the warm Tatiana, putting on my pants and black shirt, and running downstairs to turn on the tape machine. They won’t even let you fuck in this house! I inserted a sixty-minute cassette, pressed the record button, rode back upstairs on the elevator to fuck some more, and once again plunged my prick into the only slightly cooled cunt of Tatiana, who was almost in tears and kicking and howling something about the CIA and the KGB.

  “And the CIA and KGB are all the same as you; they just sit there, the scum, and won’t let me live either!” she screamed, although thanks to the action of my prick she soon quieted down and merely moaned, while I laughed and softly and derisively said to her, “What’s that, you pregnant whore, what did you say?”

  When Tatiana’s fucking she has
an enchanting look about her, and her body, though slender, is very soft and what’s called well-fucked in Russian. An hour later, after coming on her eyes and forehead, and in her mouth, I ran downstairs again to change the cassette. I got there just in time — it was down to the last few feet. I put on a new one, pressed the record button again, and then went down to the kitchen for a drink. Sitting in the kitchen was Gatsby’s stepbrother Mr. Richardson with a couple of guests, I don’t remember who. I drank a glass of vodka, and after asking Mr. Richardson to turn the television off in an hour — the film about Vietnam was exactly two hours long, and I could hear explosions and machinegun fire coming from it — I took the elevator back upstairs and grabbed Tatiana again. The pregnant whore lazily told me that she had just that minute come again after masturbating while I was downstairs. “You didn’t think I was going to wait for you, did you?” she asked insolently.

  “All right,” I said, “that means you’re still hot,” and pulling her bottom to me — she was lying on her side — I stuck my prick into her crack, which was already beginning to dry. When after a little while we were both starting to enjoy it again, the abominable intercom buzzer sounded, the same one that Efimenkov had used to wake me up in the middle of the night. What the fuck is it now? I thought without climbing off of Tatiana. The buzzer didn’t go off again, but there was soon a knock at the door.

  “Edward, somebody’s ringing die front doorbell,” Richardson’s voice said.

  “Well, could you see who it is?” I yelled angrily.

  So they wouldn’t even let me fuck. I went downstairs a few minutes later — they’d upset my rhythm anyway and dragged me away from the excellent fountain inside that crazy woman — I went downstairs and met the new guest, Steven’s artist-friend Stanislaw, gave him an extra key to the millionaire’s house, and told him he would be staying in one of the children’s rooms, the other rooms already being occupied. I even had some vodka with him, and then went back to my room, where I rolled and lit myself a joint — the crazy Tatiana didn’t smoke — and then grabbed her again in earnest. I remember almost crushing her large soft breasts, which she was usually ashamed of, and angrily thrusting my prick into her. We didn’t stop till five o’clock the next morning. And she didn’t say anything more about being pregnant or about Ghupta and the CIA.

  The first time I heard about Stanislaw was from Gatsby, and I remembered that unusual evening very well. Gatsby was sick and had decided to stay home — probably the only time in his whole life that the stubborn Gatsby actually gave in and stayed home. He’d been sick for a long time before that, three weeks maybe, and was coughing so badly that I had no doubt that he was in the final stages of tuberculosis and that very soon I’d be without an employer. He was dying but stubbornly holding on to his insane mode of life — drinking Scotch with five ice cubes, running outside without a coat on even though it was winter, and so forth. By that evening he was at the end of his rope. The antibiotics he’d been taking weren’t doing any good, and he had stayed home and was sitting red-nosed and miserable in the kitchen clad in his warmest robe and in warm pajamas under the robe and eating some of my chicken soup — Nancy had called from Connecticut with the special request to eat soup without fail — and panting for breath he told me one thing and another. I was sitting across from him; for the first time he hadn’t sent for anybody, since he was obviously embarrassed about his illness, but he still needed somebody to talk to. A peaceful kitchen scene.

  Why did we start talking about Stanislaw? I had asked the boss what I should do with the picture that had been standing in the TV room since Jenny’s time. Should I hang it there in the kitchen? Gatsby objected to that, to hanging the picture in the kitchen, since Stanislaw, the author of that, in my opinion, ugly work, or at least one that overwhelmed me with boredom whenever I looked at it (a moon over mountains — abstract, a mere howl), might suddenly turn up, and it would be awkward for him, for Steven, that is, if the author found his gift hanging in the kitchen. Okay. I didn’t say any more about moving the picture, but Mr. Grey didn’t want to drop the subject, and he told me about Stanislaw. Mr. Grey was amazed by him.

  “He’s such an old goat, it’s unbelievable!” said Gatsby. “He even tried to grab Nancy once, Edward, if you can believe that! What an old goat!”

  I could believe it. Gatsby hadn’t said what, what part of Nancy’s body, Stanislaw had tried to grab — maybe it was awkward for him to tell his butler that Stanislaw had tried to grab his wife’s ass? Or had in fact grabbed it, for what else could “tried to grab” mean? That he was merely thinking about it? How could Gatsby know what Stanislaw was thinking?

  “He was visiting me in Connecticut, and he tried to grab Nancy,” Gatsby continued delightedly. It was obvious that even if he didn’t like what had happened, Stanislaw’s audacity was very much to his taste. I didn’t ask Gatsby how he reacted — did he pretend he hadn’t noticed the satyr? I don’t think he would have been reluctant to punch Stanislaw in the jaw, but he did have a certain respect for audacity in other people.

  “He even went after Jenny,” Gatsby continued, “and she complained to me about it. I said to him, ‘Stanislaw, please, don’t terrorize my employees. “

  Steven obviously used the word «employees» for my benefit. Telling the story to someone else he would probably have said “my servants.”

  “He’s one of the Polish mafia,” the boss continued. “You know, all those Polanskis and Kozinskis…”

  “And Brzezinskis,” I added, and Gatsby laughed.

  “An unbelievable old goat!” Gatsby summed up.

  After such a testimonial, I was eager to make Stanislaw’s acquaintance and observe him in action whenever he came to our house.

  He looked pretty good for his age — slim, although his face was a little worn, it’s true, but you wouldn’t have said he was fifty — forty at the most. The only thing not quite right about him was that his clothing was out of date. He was dressed the way they dressed at the end of the sixties — in flared pants that fit tight across his ass, a close-fitting short jacket, and long hair.

  I haven’t dressed that way in a long time. I wear pants that are narrow at the bottom and wide in the seat, and my jackets are a good size with big shoulders, as if one or two sizes too large. My hair is cut now like James Dean’s — you know, die famous actor of the fifties. The fifties are very «in» right now, as I’m well aware, and why shouldn’t I be; after all, I’m a contemporary servant of the world bourgeoisie.

  But let’s leave me and return to Stanislaw. The Pole and die Russian got along well from their very first meeting, although I was busy with Tatiana and couldn’t give him very much time, except for the glass of vodka we each had in the kitchen before I went back upstairs to fuck her, making my apologies to him and brazenly telling him I had a warm body in my bed. You know how we are, I thought complacently to myself; we fuck too and know how to.

  The whole time Stanislaw resided in our heaven — he told Gatsby that he had come for just a few days, but thanks to my personal generosity and the fact that Gatsby was in Europe, he stayed more than two weeks — I had a body in my bed. And I gave him a terrible complex, an awful complex! I wasn’t doing it just for his sake; it merely worked out that way. And here too the Poles lost, gentlemen, just as in the historical rivalry between Poland and Russia. During those two weeks he fucked only Marisza, the daughter of one of their Polish writers. Whereas I had, during the same period, at least six women, including the above-mentioned Tatiana, Teresa, the musician Natasha, and the Dutch girl Maria, and one evening Sarah dropped by, and in addition a married woman came specially from the state of Israel to fuck me — she’d read my book.

  From time to time I made my appearance in the kitchen, in our club so to speak, where Stanislaw would invariably be calling all over New York, trying to get his old connections going again. He had come to New York from his home in Texas with a pile of pictures he was trying to peddle on his own — without gallery representation.
I no longer respected people who didn’t have a gallery; even I, a servant, had my own literary agent. You’ve got to be professional, Stanislaw, I thought, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a professional artist or a professional hit man. Thank you, Great United States; you have at least taught me something. And although Stanislaw maintained that he had no need of a gallery and showed me his portfolio with photographs of himself — Stanislaw with Roman Polanski, Stanislaw with Henry Miller, Stanislaw with Mary Hemingway — I began to discern in this cheerful Polish lecher and buffoon the all-too-familiar features of a failure worried that he was fifty and getting old.

  I would creep down to the kitchen yawning and stretching — I was never fully rested, as is understandable — and Stanislaw would already be sitting by the phone and making calls. Not that he was hard pressed — not at all. In Texas they had built sculptures based on his designs. In a steel slab of extraordinary thickness young scholars enthusiastic about the project had made a hole using something like an atomic cannon. A hole ripped out just the way he wanted it. He was depicting holes. We live in a magnificent time, gentlemen, a time when everything is beyond our reach and nothing is forbidden — a time in fact for making holes. The hole may even be the symbol of our time — a torn and gaping hole leading nowhere.

  Stanislaw had enough for meat and butter, but with artists, as with writers, if you’re not among the first, you consider yourself a failure. The headlines in newspapers, the photographs, and the monographs are enjoyed by the few at the top. All that remained for Stanislaw was Marisza.

  He would look and look at girls I would show him, and how could I not, since from time to time we would all sit in the kitchen, and his young friend Krysztof, a large, easygoing retired athlete, would come over too, and we would drink and smoke grass. Once Stanislaw couldn’t restrain himself and started stroking Natasha’s hair; she looks about twelve, gentlemen — you know, a small, blonde, rosy-cheeked creature with a white ass.