His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  I thought then that Richardson is Richardson and Dostoevsky is Dostoevsky, but out loud I merely said that a writer’s possibilities are greater, since he deals with ideas, and since he does deal with ideas, he’s a lot more powerful and even dangerous. But even my hint that a writer may be a villain couldn’t dislodge Mr. Richardson from his firmly held conviction that the businessmen of the world constitute a special caste, a conviction that he well knew how to conceal behind demagogic assertions that everyone invests the same amount of labor in the world.

  I remembered an idea of mine and decided to share it with Linda and Richardson. I was interested in what they would say. Linda sometimes listens to me. She pretty much regards me as a “crazy Russian,” but sometimes I say intelligent things.

  “Listen, comrade Americans!” (I always adopt a jocular tone whenever I want to speak to Linda about serious things.) “Listen,” I said. “It seems to me that you, and please excuse the necessary generalization, always tend to take a mechanistic approach to the problems of life and mankind. That is, you approach man the same way you’d approach an automobile or a tractor. I’m not saying you don’t admit the existence of the soul,” I continued, laughing, “but you have the presumption to approach both the soul and its problems mechanistically. Even your methods of healing people, psychoanalysis, say, are at bottom predicated on repair, just like the repair of an automobile or a tractor…

  “Even your drug revolution,” I continued, “with all its so-called radicalism, with Timothy Leary and the other prophets of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and other garbage for the salvation of mankind, hasn’t introduced anything essentially new. It’s also a consequence of this mechanistic approach to man as a machine. You want to be happy? Swallow an LSD tablet or gobble up some mushroom spores, and you’ll be instantly happy. And all mankind will be happy too. It’s quick, of course…”

  Here Mr. Richardson started protesting. I stopped him with my hand. “Sometimes it seems to me that you Americans — a generalization again; forgive me, but I can’t help it — that you’re much more steeped in primitive Marxism than the Russians are. The Russians are way behind you. You’re always repeating the magic word economics. You explain everything in economic terms, and you persist in believing that every event in the world is attributable to economic causes. Both wars and revolutions — everything. I regard that as a naive point of view that’s at least a century out of date. There’s no question that bread is a motivation in the world, but it’s not the only one, or even the main one. Overpopulated India has been starving for all the thousands of years of its history, and yet it’s never had any revolutions to speak of. There’s something higher than bread, namely human spiritual energy… Heroism…”

  Suddenly realizing from Linda’s and Richardson’s faces that this new topic left them more indifferent than I had hoped, I leapt to another. “All right,” I said, “forget heroism, and take the historical event that’s closest to us, the Iranian revolution. How can you explain that in economic terms? The Shah improved the well-being of his country; there’s no question about that. According to statistics, the population of Iran before the revolution enjoyed the highest standard of living in Iranian history. But the revolution still happened; it follows that it wasn’t economics that caused the revolution, true? Perhaps it was something else then?”

  Linda and Richardson started objecting… They agreed with me on some things, and not on others. It wasn’t that we were divided into two camps — a Russian against the Americans, two Americans against a Russian. America and Americans had long since ceased to be foreign to me. I had been living in New York going on five years, and I didn’t have much sense of myself as a Russian, though, yes, I did feel like a European sometimes.

  As in all our other kitchen discussions, we didn’t reach a common view. They suddenly got tired of “politics,” and Mr. Richardson started praising my English. “I’ll admit when you first came here to work, Edward, I got a headache every time I talked to you on the phone,” he said, laughing. “Now you talk like anybody else. You still have an accent, of course, but it actually gives your English a certain interest. The girls obviously find it charming.”

  “Edward’s biggest weakness is pronunciation,” Linda said. “His vocabulary is extremely large — sometimes he even uses words I don’t know very well — but he can’t use his whole vocabulary because he doesn’t know how to pronounce the words. Get yourself a grammar book, Edward, and learn the pronunciation rules,” she concluded. “I’ve been telling you that for a year. If you like, I’ll get one for you; I’m going to Barnes and Noble next week.”

  “Sure, get one for me,” I happily agreed. “I’ll pay you back immediately.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll deduct it from your salary,” Linda laughed. “Edward once managed to get me in a snit with his pronunciation,” she told Richardson. She laughed and continued. “You remember last summer when they broke into the house next door, of course, the one that belongs to Mrs. Five Hundred Million. The thieves came through the garden, cut out part of the door with a saw, and broke into the house and stole her paintings and other valuables. The special alarm system she had in every room didn’t do any good; they just cut the wires.”

  Linda told her story and Mr. Richardson shook his head in horror. He and his family live in Massachusetts, and it scares him to hear about our New York crimes.

  “So the day after the robbery,” she continued, “Edward came upstairs to my office with a newspaper,” and here Linda tried to reproduce my accent: “‘Leesen, Leenda. Zat is zee edvartizingh in niuspepper… “

  I yelled indignantly that that wasn’t fair, that I’d never spoken with such a wooden accent, but Linda dismissed me with a wave and continued, though dropping the accent. “‘Send $399 and in two weeks you’ll get a new machine gun cheaper than any life insurance you can buy. Insure your lives with our machine gun, Americans! And the address,” Linda concluded triumphantly, “was ‘Kunoxville, Tennessee’!”

  Mr. Richarson laughed long and sincerely. And after he stopped laughing, he repeated “Kunoxville, Tennessee!” and looked at me, smiling. I laughed too and looked at Linda; she loves to tell that story. I waited for the end, which contained my victory over Linda.

  “I told him,” Linda continued very seriously, “Edward! You don’t say ‘I kunow’; you say ‘I know’ with a silent ‘k, so why do you pronounce it ‘Kunoxville’? Memorize the rule, Edward; if there’s a consonant after the ‘k, the ‘k’ isn’t pronounced in English. Or an even better rule is, if there’s an ‘n’ after the ‘k, the ‘k’ is always silent. Always. Don’t forget it, Edward, it’s ‘Noxville.

  “Do you know what he said to me?” Linda asked Richardson. This was the point of the whole story. Richardson didn’t know. Of course not. “He said, ‘Are you sure? What about those delicious little things made of dough? Knishes! “

  Mr. Richardson howled with delight. “Knishes! Knishes!” he repeated, and Linda looked at him in triumph. “‘Knish’ isn’t English, of course, but a word that’s been taken from Yiddish,” Linda said, “but it really is just about the only example where a ‘k’ standing before an ‘n’ is pronounced.”

  After he’d had a good laugh, Mr. Richardson asked me, “What did you want a machine gun from Kunoxville, Tennessee, for, Edward?”

  “What for?” I said. “Before they broke into Mrs. Five Hundred Million’s house, they robbed Mr. Carlson’s house. They went through the garden the same way. And did you read in the papers about what happened in the Berkshires recently? An owner’s twenty-year-old son and his housekeeper, a seventy-year-old woman, were killed by robbers. I want to live! I don’t have the slightest desire to die for the sake of your stepbrother’s carpets and sterling. As you perfectly well know, our front door has only one lock. And your absent-minded brother leaves the doors open all night, both the front door and the door to the garden. Our alarm system has never worked, not even while Jenny was here. And the two watchmen who are suppos
ed to guard our block sleep all night… I live alone in the house,” I went on passionately, “and I’m scared!”

  Richardson looked at me very seriously. “I had no idea that even on such an exceptional block with its own security it was still dangerous,” and he shook his head.

  The bitch Linda, who doesn’t have to live in the house, said soothingly, however, “You’re exaggerating the danger, Edward. You could be hit by a car on the street, and the statistics prove indisputably that a lot more people are killed in automobile accidents than by murderers. And anyway, you shouldn’t be permitted to get your hands on a machine gun; you’d slaughter us all. Crazy Russian!”

  Laughing, she said to Richardson, “Steven even suggested we put up a sign on the front door reading, ‘Beware! Mad Russian housekeeper! “

  I laughed too. Linda had no idea that an excellent semiautomatic rifle with a scope has been standing in my room since last summer. In the closet, carefully hidden behind my coats and jackets. Carefully hidden in case somebody should come into my room, but there if I need it. I didn’t send to Noxville, Tennessee, for it, however. A friend of mine brought it quietly from Texas in the trunk of his car. I had intended to register it with the police, citing the recent robberies of our neighbors and the fact that I live by myself, but then after thinking it over I decided that as a former Soviet citizen I wouldn’t be allowed to keep it.

  “It would be even better to keep a tank on the terrace,” I said. “Just in case.”

  We all started laughing and roaring again, each trying to drown out the others. At that instant Steven came into the kitchen and looked at us in amazement. We shut up at once. Linda went back up to her office, back to her desk and the salt mines, I started clearing up the dishes, and Steven took Richardson out to the garden to introduce him to the Rolls-Royceans. I had been right; they did go out into the garden.

  I cleaned up while a breeze blew through the kitchen — one of its windows and the door to the garden in the dining room were both open. It was the end of September, with a quiet chill in the air, and I thought about the fact that it was already a full year since I had worked in the country by the Hudson River, and that in the meantime I had gotten a lot stronger and more energetic and livelier, since I’d managed to give both Linda and even Richardson a really good scare.

  Peering through the grating in the kitchen window was the smiling black face of Christopher, the cook from the baronial mansion next door. He had brought me a cake, as it turned out, an apple cake. Linda won’t let Christopher in the house unless I’m in the kitchen. She doesn’t have the patience to wait while Christopher gathers together the few English words he knows and explains what he needs. She unceremoniously sends him packing. “Later, come back later!” she says. The fact is that Christopher’s from Martinique and speaks French, not English. Our acquaintance began with his knocking on my door one day in the middle of winter. I opened it and found a black man dressed in slippers, sailcloth pants, and a white T-shirt and hunched over from the cold. The man was mumbling something. I remember a little French from school, a couple of dozen words, and so I succeeded relatively quickly in establishing that he was the cook from next door, and that he had stepped out for a moment and the door had slammed shut behind him. And that there wasn’t anybody home at his house, that there was food cooking on their gas range, and that if he didn’t get back inside in the next few minutes, there would be a fire. He asked me to let him go through the garden so he could break one of the windows in their door and get back into the house. The windows facing the street in their house are, like our own, covered with heavy gratings.

  Naturally I let him into the garden and even went with him to help break out the window. I still had a few window-breaking skills left from my youth. About ten minutes later the black man came back to thank me, and from his confused account I learned that he had knocked on several other doors before mine, but that all the other neighbors had been afraid to let him into the garden. “You are a very good man!” Christopher said to me. I explained that it wasn’t that I was a good man — I insisted on that — but that our neighbors were cowardly to a pathological degree.

  Whatever, after that episode Christopher became my friend. He’s a real cook — not like me. I’m a fraud. Christopher’s cakes are delicate and delicious. I don’t much like sweets, and so my favorite is the apple, since it’s tart.

  I poured Christopher a whiskey on the rocks and sat and chatted with him awhile in a garbled mixture of French and English. While we were talking, the doorbell rang — Steven’s suits had come back from the cleaner’s, brought by another friend of mine, a forty-year-old Puerto Rican named Victor who looks between twenty-five and twenty-eight. I sat him down in the kitchen too and gave him a portion of the yellow elixir. We sat and talked. Steven wasn’t likely to come into the kitchen before six, and even if he had come in, he wouldn’t have said anything. I have my own responsibilities as housekeeper, and dozens of service people come by the house daily. At Christmas, we give them all gifts so they’ll serve us better.

  Linda came down to the kitchen and upon seeing my Internationale seated on white chairs, immediately started choking with laughter. I can’t stand it when she comes downstairs to the kitchen to rinse her teeth, which she does noisily and at length several times a day, each time using a clean glass.

  “Edward,” she said maliciously after rinsing her jaws, “aren’t you planning to go to Bloomingdale’s? I hope you remember that Steven asked you to get him two dozen pairs of underpants; he’s leaving tomorrow morning, you know.”

  Linda loves to spoil my fun. Actually, though, I didn’t mind going to Bloomingdale’s, especially since I planned to use the occasion to buy several pairs of underpants for myself and stick Linda with the bill. If I got away with it and she didn’t notice the quantity but only the amount of the charge, I’d get free underpants.

  I left the house with Christopher and the Puerto Rican and set off to Bloomingdale’s in the cool autumn sunshine to buy my employer underwear. Linda used to do it before, and not Jenny, as I had assumed. Jenny, it turns out, didn’t understand anything about Steven’s rags. Now that duty has fallen to me.

  Bloomingdale’s smelled of expensive perfume and was filled with rich people strolling around with packages of the things they’d bought. In the men’s department decency and severity prevailed. I took a long time making my selection, walking around very importantly and looking and sniffing. Shopping is a sacred affair, and must never be hurried. Obviously, I spent less time on his underpants than I did on choosing the nine pairs I got for myself. I even picked out some white ones for myself, and there were dark blue and black ones too. They were of an excellent shape, elegant and not too large. They should never be large — that’s vulgar. Expensive underpants, obviously, and pure cotton. Mine were a size smaller than Steven’s. I paid and walked away, happily pressing my purchases to my chest.

  Coming out of the entrance to Bloomingdale’s, the servant felt on top of the world and in command of his life, and he gazed haughtily and invitingly at the sleek, manicured girls and ladies he met. Step aside! Here comes a master of life! And I had only nine pairs of underpants. Three pairs per cylinder.

  Admiring the fall, I walked back to the millionaire’s house and thought about how much I love my New York and its perpetual nervous activity, and about how I’ve gotten used to living here, so that I hardly remember Russia anymore — a sweet childhood dream. And as I breathed in the dear autumn air, I thought too that if I had been born to wealth, I would have been a completely different kind of writer, maybe of the Oscar Wilde type, although my spirit would probably have been just as restless as it is now. The leaves were falling and an already very fresh breeze was blowing. The Rolls-Royce was gone when I got home, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Our barbarian was taking a nap. He was tired. Linda and Mr. Richardson were wagging their tongues on the second floor while Linda automatically dealt herself a hand of solitaire, her one distractio
n from work. No, excuse me, I forgot her other passion. Whenever Linda has some free time, she carefully diagrams on a piece of graph paper a project for the reorganization of her «closet» — her storage room, that is. She diagrams the project over and over with a zeal that would have been the envy of the planners of the Aswan Dam or the Bratsk Hydroelectric Station. I laugh at Linda everytime I find her absorbed in that activity. Just like Noah and his ark, she is trying to put into her closet both the possible and the impossible: two file cabinets, shelves for paper and books, and even a small desk with drawers. The project’s end is still not in sight. Linda laughs at herself too but stubbornly continues to devise ever newer plans.

  I sat with them for a while. Richardson was telling Linda why a certain small firm had gone bankrupt, and I soon lost interest and went out to the garden. Flowers were blooming on the terrace and our stray garden cat was lying asleep on his back. When I came out, he opened an eye, saw it was me, and closed it again. The cat knows I respect his independence, and so he just went on dozing, expelling from his body and fur the moisture from the rain that had just fallen in great quantity. The cat basked in the September sunshine, and since he knew me, he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Sitting on his haunches on the grass in front of his house was a Chinese man, a well-known artist, and he looked at the glass-covered house with a sadly astonished expression on his face as if he were seeing it for the first time in his life.

  If only Steven would sleep a while longer, I thought, it would be so nice for everybody. Mr. Richardson and Linda could continue calmly chatting on the second floor, and I’d be able to stay out here in the garden. And then I started philosophizing. I decided that the Chinese man and the cat were invisible to Steven Gatsby. He meddles in life too crudely, whereas if you want to see something in it, you have to enter very carefully so as not to frighten it away. In fact, I thought, it’s as if Steven doesn’t even exist, since the Chinese man on his haunches and the cat are invisible to him. Whereas I, a servant, am more useful to the world, for I see the Chinese man and the cat and am able to tell about them. Steven sees only his papers and feels only his body, and his function in the world is basically to set things in motion.