“Do you play chess?” he asked as we said good-bye.
“Can’t stand it,” I replied.
“Do you drink vodka?”
“That I do,” I said, “but not very often anymore.”
“You can’t drink here,” he complained. “In Leningrad, if you had seven hundred grams with a nice snack, you’d be flying around town like you had wings, you’d be on top of the world. Drink here and it just deadens you, or worse. Drop in,” he said, “I’ll treat you to borscht.”
In contrast to me, he makes borscht, using special beets of some sort. They are always complaining that you can’t drink here. You can, but it’s not the same, the liquor depresses you – I’m thinking of quitting soon.
I used to work for the newspaper Russkoe Delo here in New York, and at that time I was interested in the problems of “the emigration.” After my article entitled “Disillusionment,” they fired me from the paper, away from temptation. My family was breaking up; my love, which I had considered a Great Love, was in its death throes; I myself was barely alive. All these events were crowned by the bloody twenty-second of February, my veins slashed in the doorway of the fashionable Zoli model agency, where Elena was living at the time, and then a week of life as a bum in downtown Manhattan. When I found myself at the hotel, however, or rather when I woke up there, I suddenly saw that my bad reputation had not died, people were phoning and coming to see me, still firm in their Soviet habit of believing that a journalist could help them. “Come now, folks, I’m no journalist – without a newspaper, without friends or connections.” I made every possible effort to wriggle out of these meetings, I told people I couldn’t even help myself, but there were still some meetings that I did not succeed in avoiding. Thus, for example, I had to meet with “Uncle Sasha,” my acquaintances insisted on it. “You must help him, he’s an old man, just talk to him and he’ll feel better.”
I went to see him in his room. It looked as if he lived with a dog. I glanced around for the dog, but there was none.
“I guess you had a dog?” I asked him.
“No, never,” he said, frightened. “You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
Mixed up, indeed. Bones, dry biscuits, crusts, food scraps lay on the floor in a solid hard layer, like pebbles on the seashore. The same layer of petrified leftovers lay on the table, the dresser, the windowsill, all horizontal surfaces, even the chair seats. He was an ordinary, plump, pathetic old man with a wrinkled face. I knew that all his life he had written about the sea and sailors. His sea stories had been published in Around the World and other Soviet magazines.
“I’ve been wanting to meet with you,” he said, sighing. “My situation is desperate, I don’t know what to do – I miss my wife so much. She’s Russian.” He indicated a photograph framed under glass; a tired woman gazed out at me.
“Whatever made me come here?” he went on. “I’m not up to learning the language. I live very badly. I was on welfare, two hundred and eighty dollars a month, then I reached pension age and they gave me a pension, only two hundred and eighteen dollars. I received two checks, and as an honest man I went to my Welfare Center and told them, ‘Here are the two checks, I don’t want the pension, I want welfare. My room costs a hundred and thirty dollars a month, that leaves me only eighty-eight a month for food, I can’t get by on that, I’ll die of hunger, I have a bad stomach.’ I went there in good faith, told them, returned the check. They said, ‘There’s nothing we can do. By law you have to receive a pension.’” He was practically weeping.
“Why did you come here?” I asked maliciously.
“I always wrote about the sea, you know. The minute a ship came in, I went right down to the ship. The sailors loved me. They told me about all the countries. I wanted to see them. What am I to do?” He glanced into my eyes. “I want to go back to my wife, she’s so good.” He wept.
“Go to the Soviet embassy in Washington,” I told him. “Maybe they’ll let you back. But it’s impossible to say. Beg, weep. You haven’t written anything against them here, have you?”
“No,” he said, “just this story about the sea, it’s coming out soon in an English-language magazine, but not anti-Soviet, it’s about the sea. Listen here, they wouldn’t put me away, would they?” he said, taking me by the sleeve.
“Listen, why would they put you away…”
Who the fuck needed him, I wanted to add, and other caustic remarks, but I restrained myself. I had no pity for him. I sat before him on his dirty chair, from which he had wiped the crumbs and dust with his hand. He sat on the bed; his old feet in their blue slippers stuck up in front of me. I found him distasteful – a slovenly, silly old man. I was a man of another generation, and although I myself often sobbed into my own pillow, I wouldn’t have given a shit about the emigration if it hadn’t been for Elena. The murder of love, a world without love, was terrible to me. But I sat before him thin, mean, and tanned, in jeans and a close-fitting jacket, my little thighs curving out as I sat – a bundle of malice. I might wish for him to become like me and exchange his fears for my malicious horrors, but he could not be like me.
“You think they’ll let me in?” he said ingratiatingly.
I was sure they would not, but I had to comfort him. I knew nothing about him except what he himself had told me; he might not be so innocuous as he seemed in his present situation.
“I want to ask you,” he said, seeing me get up from the chair, “not to tell anyone about our conversation. Please.”
“I won’t,” I said. “You’ll excuse me, but someone’s expecting me.”
The blue slippers moved with me beyond the door. In the elevator I heaved a sigh of relief. Motherfucking fool.
I told Levin about our conversation anyway. Out of mischief.
Outwardly David Levin resembles a spy or an agent provocateur from a Soviet popular film. I’m no master at portraits, the most distinctive thing about his physiognomy is his bald spot; only the sides of his head are edged with fuzz. I was not acquainted with him, but I had been told that he was saying filthy things about me behind my back. He’s the greatest rumormonger, this Levin. It was Lenya Kosogor, from Volume II of the Gulag, who told me. I was so profoundly indifferent to the whole Russian emigration, old, new, and future, that all I did was laugh. But, to my surprise, when I moved into the hotel Levin stopped me one day and said reproachfully that I was arrogant and didn’t want to converse with him. I said that I wasn’t arrogant but I was in a hurry now, I would be back in a couple of hours and drop in to see him. I did.
For any Russian with the slightest degree of intelligence, no one else from Russia is an enigma. Thousands of signs show at once what this man is and who he is. Levin gives me the impression of a man who is about to burst into hysterics and start yelling. I know in advance what he’ll yell. The next line will go something like this: “Fuck off, bug-eyes, what are you staring at? How would you like to have your peepers pushed out, you goddamn filthy oyster!” This line from the underworld embodies my whole impression of Levin. I don’t know the details of his life, but I suspect that he may have done time in the USSR for criminal activity. Or maybe not.
Levin says of himself that he is a journalist. But the articles Levin has published in that same Russkoe Delo are full of shit – statements that in the USSR only KGB agents live in nice new houses, and other fables. Now he says he’s a journalist from Moscow, but when I saw him briefly one time in Rome he said he was a journalist from Arkhangelsk. Everything he says about himself is ambiguous. He says, on one hand, that he lived very well in the USSR and when he went on assignment he “flew on Central Committee planes”; on the other, that he suffered from anti-Semitism in the USSR. Now he lives exclusively on money that he gets from Jewish organizations or directly from the synagogue. Which is also welfare, in its way. Once he had an abdominal operation; I think he used his misfortune as a means to pump money from American Jews. I need him like a cunt needs a door. What could be interesting in a fifty-year-old m
an with bad health, living in a crappy hotel and writing a drama called Adam and Eve, which he bashfully read to me. I told him – also bashfully, I hated to offend even Levin – that this literary form was not congenial to me, and therefore I could not comment on his work. I couldn’t tell him that his Adam and Eve was not a literary form but a form of the fucking craziness caused by Western life, which he, like all of us, had entered into when he arrived here. He’s still bearing up, others go out of their minds.
In our first conversation Levin slung mud at the whole hotel, all its inhabitants, but it was plain that he felt lousy being alone, and from time to time he attached himself to someone. He attached himself to me too, took me with him to a concert at a synagogue, introduced me to a little Jewish woman who spoke Russian. It was the first time I had attended a service in a synagogue, and I sat through the whole service with interest and reverence, behaved decorously and attentively, whereas Levin jabbered incessantly with a little old lady. I might have entered that world, thanks to Levin, but it was boring to me; the Jewish family dinners to which I would have been invited did not suit my mood. I love gefilte fish and stuffed herring, but I am more drawn to stuffed explosives, to congresses and slogans, as you will presently see. Normality is boring to little Eddie; I shied away from it in Russia, and you won’t lure me into a life of sleep and work here. Hell no.
Even after that, Levin came to see me several times. Although I had earnestly implanted in myself a love of my fellow man and believed that all unfortunates must be pitied, although Levin fitted my conception of the “unfortunate man” and I really was sorry for him despite his malice, even so, t had to break off my acquaintance with him. Everything he saw in my room and everything I told him (calculating in advance that he would take it all and multiply and inflate and distort) he managed to exaggerate hyperbolically and foolishly. The portrait of Mao Tse-tung on the wall became my joining the Chinese Party. What the Chinese Party might be I did not know, but I had to curtail the number of Russians, and Levin fell to the curtailment, a poor malicious victim. I say hello to him and sometimes spend half a minute telling him lies. He doesn’t believe me, but he listens, and then I go away. “Business,” I say, “I’ve got things to do.”
People look pathetic, uprooted from their places, without their accustomed surroundings, without their normal work, dropped to the bottom of life. Once I drove to Long Beach for a swim with the savage Jew Marat Bagrov. He’s the man who contrived to hold a counterdemonstration against a demonstration on Fifth Avenue on behalf of the free exit of Jews from the USSR. He came out with the slogans “Stop demagoguery!” and “Help us here!” Well, we went to Long Beach. Marat Bagrov drove a car that was stolen from him the next day, and a former Soviet cycling champion named Nahum and I were the passengers. Our group was to visit two dishwashers who were working there at Long Beach in a home for senior citizens. With hardly a glance into the semibasement rooms where the dishwashers lived – one of them an ex-musician, the other an ex-wheeler-dealer, an expert in smoking fish – I climbed over the fence to the beach to avoid paying the two dollars.
Seagulls, the ocean, a salty fog, hangover. I lay for a long time alone, unaware what world I was in. Later Bagrov-and Nahum came down.
“Fucking emigration!” The thirty-four-year-old ex-champion said it over and over. “When I first arrived in New York I went out to buy a newspaper, I bought Russkoe Delo, and there was your article. It hit me like a hammer. What have I done, I thought, why the fuck did I come here.”
He talked and dug a hole in the sand. “Fucking emigration” was his constant refrain. He had already worked at several places. At his last job he had repaired bicycles; along with two other workers, a Puerto Rican and a black, he had organized a strike, demanding equal pay for their work. One of them was paid $2.50 an hour, the second $3.00, and the third $3.50.
“The boss summoned the black, and when he came in, the boss said, ‘Why aren’t you working, these are working hours,’” Nahum said, still mechanically digging the hole. “The black told the boss he had a doctor’s appointment, that was why he had left early today. Then he asked the Puerto Rican why he’d left work early. He got scared too and said he had to go to Social Security today. But I asked the boss why didn’t he pay us all equally, when we did the same work…” Nahum was becoming impassioned. “He fired the black, he said, ‘You may go.’ But I left on my own, I’m working as a welder now – I weld beds, these are very expensive, stylish beds. I weld once, then grind down the joints; if there aren’t any holes or blisters, fine, if there are I weld them again and grind them down again. I come home and my hair is full of grit…”
Nahum lives on Broadway, on the West Side; they have a hotel there like ours, where they put Jews. I don’t know what the rooms are like but the neighborhood is worse, much tougher.
“Are you fucking your black woman?” Bagrov asked him matter-of-factly.
“Not that one, not anymore,” Nahum replied. “She got too brassy. She used to take a five, now it’s seven-fifty. That wouldn’t matter, but once she knocked at two in the morning, I let her in, ‘Let’s fuck,’ she says. I say let’s, but free. ‘Free?’ she says, ‘no way.’ So I say, ‘I’ve only got a ten, that’s all the money I have.’ ‘Give me the ten,’ she says, ‘I’ll bring you the change tomorrow and give it to you free.’ We fucked and she totally disappeared for a week. And I didn’t have any more money. She came back a week later and demanded money in advance, and not a word about the change. ‘Get your ass out of here,’ I said. And she wails, ‘Give me two dollars, I came up here to see you, the doorman opened the door for me and brought me up in the elevator, I promised him two dollars for letting me in.’”
“Did you give it to her?” Bagrov asked with interest.
“I did,” Nahum said, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll get involved with her, she has a pimp.”
“No, better not,” Bagrov said.
“Fucking emigration!” Nahum said.
“We have to steal, rob, kill,” I said. “Organize a Russian mafia.”
“If I write them a letter,” Bagrov said, not listening to me, “the guys back in the Soviet Union, they won’t understand a fucking thing. I have this friend, a real sport, he’s always dreamed of going to the Olympic games. I’m going to write him that I drove my car to the Montreal Olympics – he’ll be so envious. What’s more, I wasn’t working, I went to Montreal on unemployment.”
“You’ll never explain it to him – that for all your car and your Montreal you can be up to your ears in shit here. It’s impossible to explain,” Nahum said. “Fucking emigration!”
“No, you can’t explain. And if he came he wouldn’t care about Montreal, he’d be sitting in shit too. As for the car, I paid a hundred and fifty for it. A shitbox.”
When we finished our swim – they, grown men, turned somersaults in the waves like children, something I, little Eddie, could not stand for long – the sun was already setting and we were the last to leave the beach. We talked about how few people in America go in the water and swim. Most just sit on the beach, or go in up to their knees and splash, whereas in the USSR everyone tries to see who can swim farthest, and overzealous swimmers are fished out by the lifeboats and forced to swim ashore.
“That’s the fundamental difference between the Russian character and the American. Maximalism,” I said, laughing.
We walked to the dishwashers’ house and had a feast in one of their rooms. A feast of two dishwashers, a welder, a man on unemployment, and a man on welfare. A few years ago, had we forgathered in the USSR, we would have been, a poet, a musician, a champion Soviet athlete, a millionaire (one of the dishwashers, Semyon, had had about a million in Russia), and a nationally known television journalist.
“The manager kept an eye on us all day today, he knew we were having company, that’s why we couldn’t filch as much food as usual,” the dishwashers explained. We devoured pressed chicken, talked vivaciously, poured from a half-gallon bottle of whiskey
– all in haste, it was already dark and we still had to drive to Manhattan.
The musician was working here to accumulate the money for a ticket to Germany; he wanted to try yet another variant, it might be better there. His violin stood in a corner, carefully wrapped in rags, on top of the case. Washing dishes was hardly contributing to the improvement of his violin technique. Actually, the musician was not entirely sure he wanted to go to Germany. He had a parallel desire to get himself a job as a sailor on a Liberian ship, and for another thing he’d like to go to California.
As a colorful portrayal of what awaited us in the future, one of the dishwashers’ colleagues appeared – an old Ukrainian. He received $66 cash a week for the same work. “He’s meek, the boss is bleeding him white. Besides, he’s already old, he can’t work as fast as we can,” the dishwashers said, right in front of the old man, not in the least ashamed. He smiled in embarrassment.
We left the hospitable dishwashers and, with the air temperature dropping all the time, set off for New York along the lovely American roads. We drove, raged, cursed, blustered, but soon we would part and each would wake alone with himself.
The Hotel Winslow. I moved in here, supposedly for a month, in order to regain my composure and look around; later on I planned to rent an apartment in the Village or a loft in SoHo. Now I find my own naivete touching. A hundred and thirty – that’s all I can pay. For that kind of money the only place I could move to is Avenue C or D. In this respect the Hotel Winslow is a godsend. At least it’s central, a saving on transportation; I go everywhere on foot. As for its denizens, well, I don’t have to associate with them.
We do have some cultured people in the hotel. Edik Brutt, for example, is a vegetarian and reads all the time, supplements his education. He reads Greek and Latin lyrics and Omar Khayyam, he reads Shakespeare’s works and Chinese philosophy, in Russian of course. A kind, quiet little fellow with a mustache, Edik has an American friend, a tall man of about forty who knows many languages. Otherwise he resembles Edik – he does not consort with women, at the age of forty he lives with his mama. This American, by the name of Bant, often takes Edik somewhere to listen to the organ. Cultural entertainment. I wouldn’t last five minutes. Edik likes it. I respect him.
It's Me, Eddie Page 2
