Fate is mocking me. Now I lie with a man of the streets. The years have made no essential change in me. A bum, nothing but a bum, I thought contentedly, meaning myself. I turned to scrutinize Chris again. He stirred, as if sensing my gaze, but then was still again.
Slanting patches of light from the nearby street lamp penetrated here and there through the crisscrossed iron of the scaffolding. There was a smell of gasoline, I was calm and content. Added to the sense of contentment and calm was the sense of a goal achieved. Well, here I am, a real pederast, I thought with a little giggle. You didn’t back off, you outdid yourself, you knew how, good for you, Eddie boy! And although I knew in my heart that I was not entirely free in this life, that I was still a long way from absolute freedom, I had nevertheless taken a step, and a huge one, down that path.
I left him at five-twenty. That was the time on a clock that I saw when I got out to the street. I double-crossed him, left quietly as a thief, slid from his chest without waking him. Why did I do it? I don’t know, maybe I feared my future life with him – not the sexual relationship, no, maybe I feared someone else’s will, someone else’s influence, being subject to him. Maybe. It was an unfathomed but quite powerful feeling that moved me to double-cross him and crawl out of his embrace. Glancing at him over my shoulder, I looked for my metal-rimmed glasses and the key to my hotel room. Once or twice I thought he was watching, but he slept on. Miraculously, I found my glasses in the sand. I was still wearing glasses then, but they didn’t spoil my looks much, I looked like a wild man anyway, fucking crazy Eddie. I hunted down my glasses, somehow crawled out to the street, and strode away with a strange satisfaction that I had never before known, abandoning Chris and our future relationship, which might have been one variant of my fate.
I walked along dusting myself off. I had sand in my hair, sand in my ears, sand in my boots, sand everywhere. A whore returning from the night’s escapades. I smiled, I wanted to shout to life, “Well, who’s next!” I was free. Why I needed my freedom I do not know. I needed Chris much more, but contrary to common sense I left him. When I came out on Broadway I nearly wavered. But only for an instant, and I decisively strode on again toward the East Side.
A couple of weeks later I would be cursing myself for having left him, the loneliness and troubled silence would move in again, Elena’s villainous image would again torment me, and by the end of April I would have an attack, a very violent, terrible attack of horror and loneliness. But back then, arriving at the hotel, asking for another key, riding up to my floor, and flinging myself wearily on the bed, I was happy and pleased with myself. I was still happy when I woke up the next morning. I lay there smiling and thought how I must be the only Russian poet who had ever been smart enough to fuck a black man in a New York vacant lot. Lascivious recollections of Chris clasping my poopka and whispering to quiet my moans – “Take it easy, baby, take it easy” – made me roar with joyous laughter.
Carol
I met her in Queens, one evening in May. We had much in common – my father was a Communist, her parents were Protestant farmers. To her parents she was an enfant terrible, and to mine I was likewise a prodigal son and enfant terrible.
She was a pupil of an acquaintance of mine; he gave Russian lessons and Carol was his pupil. Once he told me, “I have a new pupil, a leftist, she’s in the Workers Party.” I said, “Please be so kind as to introduce me.” He and I are quite formal.
I had long wanted to meet people in the leftist parties. From my rough calculations of the future I understood that I could not get by without the leftists; sooner or later I would go over to them. I was not suited for this world. Where else could I go? Before meeting Carol I did have one experience – I went to the Free Space Center, in a dilapidated building on Lafayette Street, where a lecture on anarchism was supposed to take place. This must have been in March. Having seen an ad in the Village Voice, I went over there and walked up to the second floor – the whole place was hung with posters and flyers. Posters and flyers lay around in stacks, they were all different sizes, from handbills to newspapers.
In the room – whose decor recalled a revolutionary committee somewhere in the Russian provinces during the civil war, the same tin mugs, cigarette ashes, and dirt, scarred walls screaming with slogans – there were three people. Turning to them, I asked if this was where the lecture on anarchism would be, said I was Russian and would like to hear the lecture, I was interested. They replied yes, the lecture would take place in this room, and they asked something in their turn. When I didn’t understand the question, the man who had asked it repeated it in Russian. He turned out to be a Russian, he had left Russia in the twenties, and it was he who had been advertised in the paper as the lecturer who was supposed to speak.
He soon began. Only one more person came. I was touched by the size and composition of the audience. Five people, two of them Russian. The action took place on Lafayette Street in New York. As is evident, Americans are not much interested in anarchism.
They were taping the lecture, my countryman was spewing words into a hand-held mike, but I walked around and studied the posters on the walls. I understood colloquial speech poorly then – for that matter, my English isn’t brilliant even now – but I had, and still have, an enormous curiosity about life. This curiosity has pulled me all over Manhattan, on foot, down the terrible avenues C and D, anywhere at all, any hour of the day and night. And it has forced me to go to poetry readings, where I understood nothing but meticulously paid my contribution and listened to the unfamiliar words more attentively than anyone else. I remember one such reading at the Noho Gallery, where I sat on the floor with everyone else, and in their indifference they didn’t so much as ask who I was. I drank wine, smiled, applauded, and was a full-fledged member of the audience. There was a nice little humpbacked poet at the gallery with whom I exchanged a few words. In general the composition of the group recalled a Moscow audience. Roughly the same types of people. Except that the New Yorkers were a little less pretentious.
I used to go both to musical and theatrical performances, make the rounds of all the SoHo galleries twice a week. I went to a theatrical performance in the Village by a certain Susanna Russell, during a terrible rainstorm; I was wet to the skin despite my umbrella, but I didn’t care. I was in such a state that nothing could make me get sick; that was ruled out.
After every such contact with life I returned satisfied and stimulated. I was with life after all, I was not alone. I came to know New York, the life of New York, and the nuances of its life rather rapidly, much more rapidly than I learned English.
Oh yes – so I walked around in this little room and studied the posters. I left before the end of the lecture, collecting as many posters as I could in the corridor. Some of them lie in my hotel room to this day, and one, in support of gay rights, I hung on the door. It’s still there, in color, with underlining under the words in the text that I didn’t know. Now I know them.
Several pictures on the poster show happy homosexuals embracing; others, people with slogans demanding civil rights for gays. I too feel that they – I mean we – should be given full civil rights, and without any fucking delay. Only I don’t think this will change anything in a state as depraved as America. Well, isolated advances maybe, but insincerity and hypocrisy will not permit, for example, putting an open pederast in any important position.
All right then – Carol. We had been meaning to get together for a long time, my friend was in no hurry and very cautious. His caution he had brought from the USSR. At long last, one evening in May, I walked into my friend’s place and saw a little blonde. Thin; she had a cigarette of course, she smoked all the time. She would smoke only half of a cigarette, the remainder she stubbed in an ashtray, and these remainders of hers gave off a lot of smoke. She spoke tolerable Russian, stubbornly called her cigarettes papirosy (which really means a Russian-style filter tip), and after a few introductory sentences plunged me immediately into the question of the need for Russians
to acknowledge Ukrainian independence. Oof! At that moment I was much more interested in another problem: I needed people, lots of contacts, connections, people and more people. I dreamed about relationships with people in my sleep, I was languishing without people, but I had not turned to the Russians because they had nothing to give me. I was spoiling to get into this world, but I knew the Russians in minute detail and was repelled by their inadequacy here. I was strong in my weakness, I did not want to submit to the unjust system of this world, any more than I had submitted to the unjust system of the Soviet world. But the Russians almost all submitted, they accepted this world order.
Face on, Carol was completely without flaws, even beautiful. But in profile there was something wrong with her face, some sort of mischance between her lips and nose. This is merely a cavil, after my beautiful wife. At the time, and that evening in particular, I was obsessed with Alexander’s and my next article: we urgently needed it translated and no one wanted to do it because the few people capable of it, having done us the favor once and not having received any money for it, did not want to do it a second or third time.
Carol volunteered to translate it herself. This fact alone made me like her already. On the question of granting independence to the Ukraine, I supported her but expressed doubt as to the expediency of dividing up the bearskin before the bear was shot, especially right now, when the Soviet government was stronger than ever. I did not say that it was absurd. But that’s what I thought. Besides, I added, right now the ties between the Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukraine were far stronger than they appeared to Ukrainian emigres; suffice it to say that there were nine million Russians living on Ukrainian territory…
Our host and his wife joined the conversation. Really a writer, not just a language tutor, our host was becoming day by day an ever greater admirer of Russia and patriot of his people, although he had been bursting to get out of Russia and had finally done it. This phenomenon is natural in a Russian. The writer felt that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were so closely related in both language and culture that there was no need to divide them artificially. Practically and realistically, independence might be necessary, for example, to the Baltic peoples – the Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, who had little in common with Russian language or Russian culture – but for the Ukrainians, White Russians, and Russians it was better and more natural to live together than to be split up and isolated.
I think the writer was nearer the truth than Carol, member of the Workers Party, daughter of Protestant farmers, for he was proceeding from the actual state of affairs, she from the party program and current opinion, according to which all peoples and ethnic groups – be they nothing at all, a man and a half – were deserving of independence and self-determination.
I didn’t express my secret opinion that national groups should be not segregated but united, only not on the basis of a state in which a small group from a provincial ethnic intelligentsia would again make themselves into great rulers, propagating a new backwardness and barbarism in the world. No. All nationalities must be totally mixed, must renounce ethnic prejudices, “blood” and that sort of nonsense, in the name of world unity, even in the name of stopping nationalistic wars – even for that alone it would be worth being mixed. Mixed biologically, acknowledging the danger of ethnic groupings. Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks – enough of all that. It must stop, at long last.
Neither Carol nor the writer was ready for these ideas, I thought – too abrupt. I therefore held my peace and merely asked what would happen to me. My father was Ukrainian, my mother Russian, what was I supposed to do? Which state should I resettle in, Ukrainian or Russian? With whom should I sympathize, whose side should I be on? Besides, I knew both languages equally well, and had been raised on Russian culture.
They did not know what to say. “Independence is necessary!” said the confident Carol. Okay, let there be independence. But would it be any easier for a Ukrainian Limonov in a Ukrainian state? Here I had lived in the Russian state, a Russian writer, and what did I have to show? Not one published work in ten years. The real issue is not the attainment of independence for all nationalities, but something else – how to rebuild the foundations of human life so as to deliver the world at least from war, deliver it from inequality of property, deliver it from the universal killing of life by work, teach the world love, not anger and hatred, which are the inevitable result of national isolation.
I did not say all that. They would have thought I was crazy. What’s this about “delivering the world from work”? Better to keep silent, or else first acquaintance would make this leftist young lady turn away, she would not want my company. And oh, how I needed company.
We ate fried eggs and cutlets, drank wine, and finished our vodka. The conversation moved on from Ukrainian self-determination to something Eddie-baby was fucking bored with, his article “Disillusionment.” Eddie had written and published a shitload of articles in the sleazy emigre rag. But this was the one that got noticed, because here I wrote for the first time that the Western world had not justified the hopes placed in it by the Jews and non-Jews who had left Russia; in many ways it had turned out to be even worse than the Soviet world. After this wretched article little Eddie acquired a reputation as a KGB agent and leftist, but the article was what automatically enabled me, thank God, to break with the quagmire of the Russian emigration. Quickly and painlessly.
The Godfather of the Russian emigration, Moses Yakovlevich Borodatykh himself – editor and owner of the paper – had allowed the article to be printed. He acted rashly: the desire for a pointed article to stir up interest in the paper, the search for commercial advantage, his own business sense got Moses Yakovlevich into trouble. Later he kicked himself, but it was too late.
Things got especially awkward for the Godfather on February 29, when Nedelya, the Moscow Sunday supplement to Izvestia, the USSR’s government newspaper, in an anniversary issue dedicated to the Twenty-fifth Party Congress, came out with a full-page article called “The Bitter Word ‘Disillusionment’” – about my article, and about me in particular. There was even a montage by V.Metchenko, with skyscrapers in the background and against them the head of a young man in glasses, homologous with the head of Eddie Limonov.
They were using my article over there for their own purposes, naturally, but that’s to be expected, they all use us for their own purposes. The only thing is, we the people do not use them, the government. God knows what we need them for, the governments, if they not only fail to serve the people but also go against the people.
We talked for a while about the ill-fated article. The writer was cautious and did not get involved in political issues; party comrade Carol agreed with me, of course, in my critical outlook on America and the whole Western world, but overestimated the dissident movement in the USSR, considering it far more powerful and numerous than it really was.
It was boring for me to explain Russia’s misfortunes, I was sick to death of them, but I had to. I halfheartedly observed to Carol that dissidence was a phenomenon exclusively of the intelligentsia and had no ties with the people; the movement was very small – all the protests were signed by the same few, twenty to fifty people. “And by now,” I said, “most of the movement’s more distinguished members are abroad.”
I went on to say that I considered the dissident movement very right-wing, and that if the single aim of their struggle was to replace the current leaders of the Soviet state with others, the Sakharovs and Solzhenitsyns, then they’d better not, for although the views of said persons were muddled and unrealistic, they had any amount of imagination and energy and would obviously pose a danger should they come to power. Their potential political and social experiments would be dangerous for the populace of the Soviet Union, and the more imagination and energy they had the more dangerous it would be. The USSR’s current leaders, thank God, were too mediocre to conduct drastic experiments, but at the same time they had bureaucratic know-how in leadership, they wer
e pretty good at their business; and that, at present, was far more necessary to Russia than all this unrealistic nonsense, these schemes for returning to the February Revolution or to capitalism.
That was roughly the scope of our conversation. Masha, the writer’s wife, suggested we have some more vodka, tried to get us organized, but we were too carried away. We stayed until almost two, although the next morning Carol the revolutionary would have to go from Brooklyn to her office in Manhattan, where she worked as a secretary. We left together.
“This is the first time I’ve met a Russian with such leftist views,” Carol said.
“I’m not alone, I have friends who share my views. Not many, but some. Besides, everyone who comes over from Russia moves to the left here, without fail, especially the young people,” I said.
“If you’re interested in the leftist movement,” Carol said, “I can invite you when we have our Workers Party meetings.”
“Unfortunately I have a lot of trouble with the language, Carol, I won’t understand it all; but I’ll be happy to come, I need this very much, my whole life is bound up with the Revolution.”
Then we got on the subway and she told me about her party, trying to shout over the roar. After digging in two bulky tote bags filled with magazines, newspapers, reprints, copies, and other papers – the bags of a genuine agitator and propagandist – she pulled out a newspaper, their party paper, and their party magazine, and gave them to me. Both the paper and the magazine told about the struggles of the different ethnic and party groups, both here in America and all over the world – in South Africa and Latin America, the USSR and Asia. I rode as far as Grand Central and got off, after arranging for her to call me the next day and tell me how things were going with the translation of the article, which she would try to do at work if her boss wasn’t there.
It's Me, Eddie Page 11
