His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  I remembered Stanislaw once taking offense because Steven and Nancy hadn’t invited him to a restaurant with them, and saying bitterly to me, “Steven wants very much to be creative, but he can’t be. He’s insensitive, although he has a very good brain.”

  Stanislaw wasn’t being fair then; it was his hurt feelings speaking. I didn’t want to be unfair, and so I thought that if Gatsby didn’t own this house, I would never have met Stanislaw or seen the Chinese man and the cat, and neither would the garden have existed for me, nor the cool East River, and my life would have been more boring and blacker, as black as coal.

  Having already completely justified Gatsby and having decided that everyone has his place under the sun, I suddenly remembered that on the day the angry Stanislaw had called Gatsby insensitive, the bitch Nancy had tried to humiliate me by teaching Steven how to use a little silver bell to call me from the kitchen. Steven and Nancy, their two children, and the country neighbors in Connecticut had just finished with lunch and were all still sitting at the table in the dining room. They had taken it into their heads to light a fire in the fireplace, and Nancy, obviously not feeling like making a trip to the kitchen, had rung the little bell instead. The ringing of little bells had never been heard in our house before, but I understood and went into the dining room. When I entered, Nancy turned to Steven and said, “You see how easy it is!” and then asked me to make a fire.

  “I’m embarrassed,” Gatsby said, and he really was embarrassed, and I think even ashamed for Nancy, and after that episode the bell was never heard again.

  As a result of that memory the world once again collapsed into two unequal and diametrically opposed camps — servants and masters. The almost stilled argument within me was revived. About what? The same old argument about who was more important to the world, Gatsby or me. I produce books, I thought, things of more or less «immortal» spiritual value. What does Gatsby do? He oversees the production of money. Or more accurately, he oversees the manufacture and sale of ever newer things that from my point of view aren’t really needed by mankind — automobiles and computers. His expensive cars and computers, I think, undoubtedly serve the cause of enslaving man’s body and spirit. Whereas my activity is directed towards the liberation of that body and spirit, towards the awakening of human consciousness. At least, the couple of books I’ve already written promote the awakening of doubt in people.

  Gatsby, Linda, Richardson, and the others, their group on the second floor equipped with telephones, typewriters, Xerox machines, notebooks, teletypes, and file cabinets, are constructing a new supermodern dungeon for mankind, while I, sitting by myself on the fourth floor or bent over in the kitchen with a notebook, am cutting out an escape route to freedom.

  We are enemies, it turns out — if not personal enemies, then unquestionably enemies in the social sense. And we laugh together sometimes, just as if everything were fine.

  I sat in the doorway to the garden dressed in wide linen pants. My nose was burned by the sun, but my ass was cold; odd, isn’t it? I love the freshness of life in autumn, the wind, the plants, the birds squalling something. The only thing that saddened me was that I was by myself, that there wasn’t any being with me to whom I could say, “Look, listen to it, isn’t it fine?” And then suddenly add, “You know, even though we’re going to die, it’s still fine, isn’t it?” Nothing new here in essence, gentlemen, just feelings…

  There was somebody to say it to. In proof of that, a blonde adolescent girl wearing heavy knit stockings — it had already turned colder — came out into the garden from Isabelle’s old house and strode with a ballerina’s silly gait to the swing. She lazily rocked buck and forth on it for a while, smiling thoughtfully and obviously unaware that anybody was watching her. Then noticing me, she immediately jumped down from the swing, walked over to the river and stood there for a while, and then quickly went back into her house. Why are people so afraid of each other? I wondered. It was merely my presence in the garden that had frightened her. Or not even in the garden, actually, since I was sitting in the doorway leading to our terrace. Whatever my gaze meant to her, she still ran away.

  I went back inside too. Linda had gone, and Steven was awake; I could hear him filling his bathtub with water. I went upstairs to my room. The radio announced that the wind was increasing and that a hurricane was expected that night. Just in case, I closed the special storm windows in my room and went around the house, checking to see that all the windows were shut and closing the storm windows wherever we had them.

  Steven went out. He always slams the front door so hard when he leaves that it’s impossible not to notice. The energy seething within him bursts out and makes him slam the doors. The servant, however, took his place comfortably by the window, waiting for the storm, and started reading Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. I wasn’t really in the mood for it. Certainly we can dig tank traps, I thought, but it would be better if we had our own tanks. And the servant absent-mindedly concerned himself with less concrete details. As if summing up for the day my inner struggle with Gatsby, I thought with conviction:

  There will always be oppressors and oppressed. And there will always be hope for the oppressed. And the inexhaustible light of a thousand suns of revolution will be obscured neither by the Jacobin Reign of Terror nor the Stalinist camps, for these are counterrevolution. Never! The proud revolution. The right to revolution is in every heart. Capitalism or socialism are human inventions, whereas revolution is a phenomenon of nature, like this approaching hurricane.

  I continued reading for a while in that and other books, and then fell asleep after pulling a pillow over my head, just as my army officer father had always done.

  The storm woke me before dawn. Branches were flying about and the trees in our garden were cracking, and the plaster was falling from the skylight in my bathroom, so that I was afraid the glass wouldn’t withstand the buffeting of the wind and the hurricane would burst into my bedroom. To my amazement, however, it withstood it.

  The storm was still raging at eight-thirty or nine, and it wasn’t until eleven that nature more or less calmed down. Lying in the garden were the corpses of two or three smaller trees and the branches of some larger ones. The obscene fence that separates us and our little millionaire’s garden from the rest of the world had been stripped bare.

  The master had apparently come home drunk in the middle of the night and had some white wine with his lover and other, unknown friends of his (there were several glasses on the table). The doors to the garden and the street were open when I went down the next morning at seven, and there were still wet footprints on the floor. The New York Times, although it lay under the front porch overhang, was soaking wet, and so I dried it over our gas range sheet by sheet, gradually acquainting myself with the events of the day before.

  Chapter Eleven

  The winter passed. I’ve noticed that I don’t remember winters very well. My memory leaves them out, with the result that my year has only three seasons: spring, summer, and fall. The only winter I remember completely and distinctly is the winter of 1967–1968, my first in Moscow. The hellish forty-below frosts were supplemented by the fact that I was undernourished. My flesh and all my muscles ached from the cold when, after pulling on everything I had to pull on — all my clothes — I ran to the cafeteria on the corner of Uhlan Lane and the Sadovoe Circle Road. That cafeteria, an iced-over basement heaven where I ate black bread and mustard for free after paying for the obligatory glass of compote, will remain frozen in my memory forever. Sometimes I would also sneak uneaten food left on the plates — a piece of hot dog and some mashed potatoes or hot dog skin peeled off by a squeamish taxi driver. What had been inedible for the taxi driver was eaten with pleasure by the poet. I lost twenty-five pounds that winter, so I remember it all.

  The New York winter of 1979–1980 I spent fucking and working, but mostly fucking my girls, since Steven went skiing no fewer than three times. No matter what was happening in New York, he dropped his b
usiness affairs and left his papers lying around and unsorted, while Linda hissed and raged. I remember one morning in January when Steven, pink and cheerful after his most recent ski trip, came down to the kitchen in his bathrobe, and I asked him politely if he had enjoyed skiing at Aspen. The question was an innocent one, just something to ask the boss about, without any ulterior motives, but Gatsby was taken aback and for some reason started justifying himself to me.

  “I wasn’t just on vacation, Edward,” he said. “I had three separate business meetings in Colorado, all in different cities.”

  I forced out a respectful “Oh!!” What else could I say? His meetings didn’t sound that convincing. While unpacking his things and turning over the strata and rubble in his suitcases and bags, I had found not a single work document, only light reading — among others, a book called The Last Convertible, as I recall — and an indecent quantity of woman’s things: stockings, panties, mittens, and even a couple of hats. Business meetings! Olga later washed his business meetings in the laundry room. Around that time a magazine came out with that article about Gatsby portraying him as a «working-class» millionaire. And people read it and obviously believed it. He spoke very intelligently and wearily with the interviewer. Steven is good-looking and inspires confidence; what else do readers need?

  The New York spring began. With the appearance of the first green in our garden, the housekeeper Edward received a letter from Rome which left him beside himself with happiness. One of the best-known small publishers in America, Leonard Angeletti, wrote to say that he had obtained my address from a friend of his in Rome, the Russian writer Evgeny Efimenkov, and that Efimenkov had told him I had written a “great book.” And that he, Angeletti, would be flying to New York in a couple of days and wanted to see me and get the manuscript of my book with the object of possible publication by his publishing house. Angeletti named the date he would be in New York and asked me to be home so he could call and arrange a meeting.

  Sure I’d be home! Even if they had put me in prison that day, I would have escaped and crawled to the millionaire’s house wounded and bleeding. My book was going nowhere; not a single publisher was looking at it. Liza didn’t know where to send it anymore. A dead end.

  I almost had a publisher last fall. Now, just by looking at his face, I would say that as far as publishing my book was concerned, he would sit on the pot but he’d never finish shitting, and that he was completely wrong for it anyway, but then, as it happened, I still didn’t know a fucking tiling about publishers. Malcolm had been introduced to me by an artist friend of mine on purpose, but as if in passing: “Let me introduce you. This is Malcolm, a publisher, and this is Edward, a writer.” But mainly it was Malcolm who latched on to me and started asking me questions — what sort of book had I written, what it was about… The fact was that until then Malcolm hadn’t published very many books, and what he had published were mostly expensive gift editions. You know, books with glossy paper and good photographs of places of note or of minerals or flowers… The sort of book, in short, that nobody except the publisher needs, not even the person it’s given to. Token books. You give one of them to somebody, and then a week later he gets ready to visit one of his friends on his birthday and starts thinking about what sort of gift he himself will give. He doesn’t really want to spend any money, and then his eyes fall on the book put out by the publisher Malcolm. Those books are always in excellent condition; frequently they’ve never even been opened. What’s there to look at; they’re all the same.

  It was even written all over Malcolm’s face that he wanted money very badly but was scared of taking risks. Only the housekeeper Edward preoccupied for six months with his problems could have believed, gentlemen, that that coward would publish his book, one ending with the words, “Fuck you, you cocksucking bastards! You can all go to hell!”

  By that time I already had a complete text of the book in English. I’d paid the translator out of my own housekeeper’s pocket — the main thing in my life being, after all, Edward the writer and his books and not Edward the housekeeper and his problems. Let Edward the housekeeper stay home instead of hanging around restaurants or buying himself new rags on sale at Saks. He’d survive.

  Malcolm gave the Russian text to a professor in the Russian department of a university I’d never heard of, but he wouldn’t tell me the professor’s name, obviously so I wouldn’t be able to exert any influence on him, or bribe him perhaps. The professor’s review was super-favorable. There are still people who can think for themselves, I thought approvingly. It’s nice to know they exist. Among other things, my unknown friend wrote, “…the author emphasizes the dehumanizing character of both societies, maintaining that there is no place in either for the independent and creative personality.”

  Malcolm wasn’t satisfied with that opinion, and gave the English manuscript to three other people to read, and in addition read it himself and gave another copy to a scrawny forty-year-old mouse named Barbara. Barbara was his colleague and assistant; she walked his dogs the same way Madame Margarita walks Lodyzhnikov’s and did other things of that kind. Maybe Malcolm fucked her too whenever he was on a diet. Even the timid little mouse Barbara liked the book, and all his other hired readers did too, but Malcolm continued to stall and drag things out. He was still afraid.

  I once asked him over to the millionaire’s for a drink, thinking that perhaps we hadn’t had enough personal contact, that perhaps if he saw me in my actual circumstances, he would understand me better, just as Jenny had after visiting me in my hotel. He would see that I wasn’t just a temporary guest in the house of literature. After sitting a while with me over a glass of whiskey, he would realize that I was very ambitious and talented. And I thought that after that he would want to come to terms with me and publish my book.

  He came over and we had a drink. True, he didn’t stay very long — he had to run off to some dinner engagement he couldn’t put off — but I learned more about him during that brief visit than I had in all my months of meeting him at his office. He examined our house very carefully and obsequiously, servilely admiring our walls and even the shabby rugs on our floors, and he praised all the things I detested; he liked the Connecticut landscapes and our antique dishes on the buffet and our living room picture window with its view of the river, and the dimensions of the living room itself. He even tested the mattress in Steven’s bedroom with his hand. Instead of sitting with me and drinking Scotch as I had intended, he walked fawningly around the house and talked to me about my kitchen. And I got to know him. I know you, mask! I thought. You’re a petit bourgeois, little Malcolm. He badly wanted to grab up a house like that for himself so he could become a fucking grand bourgeois.

  He walked around the house and I followed and looked at his bald patch and his not so much fat but spreading ass bashfully covered up by his shiny pants. His velvet “intellectual’s” jacket didn’t impress me anymore — it was all too clear now. And when I mockingly said to him, “Malcolm, if you want a house like this, then buy my book!” it was just to spite him. I knew he wouldn’t publish it; he didn’t have the guts, little Malcolm. He didn’t even drink Scotch — he drank wine. You bald pussy, I thought, you fat-assed little pussy.

  Malcolm tried very hard to be high-society and decadent. Once he invited me to a dinner party among whose guests were some women who were finishing or already had finished dissertations on Proust and Yeats. The one who had written/was writing about Proust had nice white legs. Also present were: an old Mexican woman in broad Spanish skirts who had obviously not been fucked by anybody in about ten years, and an aging European beauty named Rosa who was supposed to be Malcolm’s girlfriend, although I found that pretty hard to believe. It seemed to me that if he wasn’t actually a homosexual of the very worst type — old, fat-assed, and bald — he was in any case something in between. Even though it was still February, I arrived dressed entirely in white and, like my boss, without my coat and in a taxi — ready for spring. When he opened the door,
Malcolm paid me a compliment so incredible that I was forced to stay at his place a good two hours, although I ought to have left immediately, since it was already clear they were a waste of time. Malcolm said, “Oh, Edward! You look just like the Great Gatsby!” Thus was I compared with my employer.

  While serving us dinner — stuffed cabbage prepared by Rosa — Malcolm apologized to me. “I’m sorry, Edward, but I don’t have as much room in my apartment as you do in your house.” What? I thought. Doesn’t he know I’m only a housekeeper? Does his servility even extend to the point where he identifies me with the house?

  Malcolm continued fucking with me until spring, and then in March he said to me (even here the whore couldn’t be a man about it and give me a simple “no”), “It’s not that I’m rejecting you, Edward — we’re still considering your book, although you have to understand that things are very difficult right now in the publishing business — but I don’t want to tie you down with any obligations. You might try your luck with some other publisher if you don’t feel like waiting for us.” To top it all, the fat-assed bastard asked me for Elena’s address in Europe. It turned out he knew her, Elena having once been, you see, an extremely popular member of New York society. Malcolm was going to Europe. Naturally, I didn’t give him the address. Malcolm was a sneaky little son of a bitch.