It's Me, Eddie

by Edward Limonov

  She had the translation done in a day. I met her at her office; she worked for some prominent lawyer, the office was on Fifth Avenue. Luxurious chairs upholstered in genuine leather betrayed the wealth of their owner. Carol sat in a little pen enclosed by a fence, as is customary, behind a desk with an IBM typewriter and a bank of telephones. She handed me the translation; I offered her money, which she refused. I thanked her.

  “Do you want to go to a meeting in support of the rights of the Palestinian people?” Carol asked. “Admittedly, it’s a very dangerous meeting. I don’t even think many of our own comrades will come to it. It will be at Brooklyn College.”

  “Of course I want to,” I said with genuine pleasure. A dangerous meeting was just what I needed. Admittedly, if she had said, Come tomorrow to such-and-such a place, you’ll receive a submachine gun and cartridges, you’ll participate in an action, an airplane hijacking, for example, I’d have been a lot happier. I mean it, only revolution would have fully suited my mood. But I could begin with a meeting.

  “I’ll bring a friend,” I said, with Alexander in mind. “May I?”

  “Yes, of course,” Carol said. “If your friend’s not afraid. They usually watch us, we’re all on their books. You’ve probably read in the papers that our party is suing the FBI because they’ve eavesdropped on us for years, smashed the locks on party premises, monitored our papers, planted agents provocateurs -”

  “Yes, I’ve read about it in the papers.”

  “You know, when I became a member of the Workers Party, the FBI sent my parents a letter – they live in Illinois, my parents – informing them that I had become a member of the Workers Party. They always play mean tricks like that to sow dissension in families. My parents are Protestants, they’re plain people, they don’t like blacks, they don’t like outsiders, they’re racists, my brother is a rightist, this was a terrible blow to them. We were out of touch for a long time,” Carol said.

  “Your FBI has the same methods as the KGB,” I said. “That’s how the KGB behaves in Russia.”

  “And you know, the FBI has a list of twenty-eight thousand names all over America. These people will be arrested immediately, in one day, if any danger arises for the regime. They’re the ones who are deemed to be personally dangerous, oh, for example, they have influence, can lead people. One of the names near the top is Norman Mailer’s,” Carol went on. “Do you know him?”

  “I read him in Russia,” I said, “he’s been translated.”

  Carol’s remarks did not surprise me. Back in the Soviet Union I had met and maintained close relationships with Austrian leftists; I had had several such acquaintances, and I knew better than other Russians how things stood in the West. They had told me a lot. Walking with me at the Novodevichy Convent, I remember, Lisa Ouivari had said, “You should leave the USSR only if there is an immediate threat to your life.” My Elena had always drawn me to the right, now Elena was gone. And by now I knew this world well, I had no illusions.

  The Soviet Union was left behind, and its problems too; I would have to live here and die here. The question arose, How to live and how to die? As shit, subject to the laws of this world, or as a proud man insisting on his right to life?

  I had no choice, I didn’t even need to make a choice. For me, with my temperament, there was nothing to choose. I automatically found myself among the protesters and the dissatisfied, among the insurgents, partisans, rebels, the Reds and the gays, the Arabs and Communists, the blacks and the Puerto Ricans.

  The next day we met – she, Alexander, and I – and went to Brooklyn. There was still time before the meeting so we stopped at Blimpie’s for something to eat. When she was eating, taking a sandwich in her hands, I noticed that Carol’s fingernails were rough and broken. One mutilated nail turned down, almost under the finger. But there was nothing unpleasant about her hands, they were the plain hands of a thin little blonde. It was like looking at the mutilated fingers of a carpenter, steadily and calmly, knowing that this is clean, dry, and good, it’s from work, it’s as it should be.

  Near the building where the meeting was supposed to take place, we saw a multitude of police and cars; young people stood here and there in separate little groups, animatedly conversing and discussing something. I sniffed the air with satisfaction. It smelled of alarm. It smelled good.

  “Our comrades have been warned that the Jewish Defense League wants to start a riot, they’re going to try and break up the meeting,” Carol said with a grin, glancing searchingly at Alexander and me. What did I care, I was a rolling stone, a Russian Ukrainian; I had both Ossetian and Tatar blood in me, all I sought was adventure. But Alexander was a Jew; for him to participate in a meeting in support of the Palestinian people was very likely to be considered unnatural. So it seemed to me until we went up to the hall. Among those sitting in the hall were many Jews. I ceased to worry about Alexander.

  But before going through the solid wall of police and guards up to the hall, we waited awhile longer, until a young man brought us the leaflets that served as passes to the meeting.

  “He’s in our party youth organization,” Carol said. “He’s been helping us since he was sixteen, his father is a member of our party.”

  We went upstairs and found ourselves in a large room, where, after paying a contribution of a dollar, we took our seats on either side of Carol, so that she could help us if necessary – translate whatever was unclear in the orators’ speeches. Since this was the first time I had been to such an event, I looked around curiously.

  There were several Arab youths in the hall who were selling leftist literature. There was also a stand with literature. They carried Revolution and other leftist journals as well. There weren’t many people.

  The meeting gradually got under way. There were six people on the podium, including two blacks, representatives of black organizations. The first to speak was a Lebanese student who talked about the civil war in Lebanon. I remember one place in his speech where he said that the goal of his comrades in the Lebanese leftist groups was not the acquisition of power in Lebanon, not the struggle with Israel, but world revolution! I liked that, I applauded him heartily. In those days I was just finishing “The New York Daily Radio Broadcast,” a work in which I described some events of the future world revolution. I took a personal attitude toward the revolution. I did not seek refuge in lofty words. I deduced my love for world revolution naturally from my own personal tragedy – a tragedy in which both countries were involved, both the USSR and America, and in which civilization was to blame. This civilization did not acknowledge me, it ignored my labor, it denied me my legitimate place in the sun, it had destroyed my love, it would have killed me too, but for some reason I stood my ground. And I live on, reeling and taking risks. My craving for revolution, being built on the personal, is far more powerful and natural than any artificial revolutionary principle.

  The speaker after the Lebanese was a smallish man of indeterminate nationality. He might have been Mexican or Latin-American. This was a professional orator, his address was concise, polished, clever, and convincing.

  “That’s Peter, the leader of our regional organization,” Carol whispered to me in Russian.

  “He’s a real pro, has a good rap,” I said with envy, wondering when I would be able to speak like him. I very much wanted to get up and say, in the name of present-day Russians, that not all of us were shit for sale, not all of us would go to work for Radio Liberty and support their deceitful regime.

  “What does ‘rap’ mean?” Carol asked.

  “Talk,” I said. I had forgotten that Carol couldn’t know Russian slang.

  Peter turned out to be not Latin-American but Jewish, a fact that he also made use of at the end of the meeting, in a very clever and deft reply to some questions from a lad in a yarmulke. The lad appeared to be a very good and honorable Jew, judging by how agitated and fidgety he was in speaking about the Palestinian question. Peter answered him patiently, and, at the end, inflicted the decis
ive blow lightly and abruptly, by saying suddenly that one should not confuse Zionism and Jews, and that he, Peter, was also a Jew, by the way. I appreciated the elegance of his speech, as did those present, who rewarded Peter with applause.

  The speeches by the two blacks were simple, not so elegant and professional as Peter’s but weighty and convincing. I liked the blacks very much. Militants. With lads like these I’d join in any venture.

  All during the meeting there were suspicious characters hanging around outside the glass walls of the hall. The guards and police made their rounds every few minutes. A sort of whisper of alarm was audible in the air. At the door to the hall there was a constant small group of Jewish young people without identifying marks, of unknown political affiliation. But, finally, the meeting came to an end, apparently a happy one. People did not hurry to break up. A note of alarm echoed afresh in the words of a guard, who said we should use a certain exit because it was guarded by the police, they did not recommend that we use the other exits.

  None of this mattered much to me, of course. I had my knife in my boot as usual, I felt like a fight. I had nothing against the members of the JDL, nationalists of all nations are alike. But I was closer to Alexander, and closer to Leib Davidovich Trotsky, than to doubtful nationalistic dogmas.

  To my disappointment, however, nothing happened. Criminal Eddie got no chance. On the way back Carol introduced me to her comrades, among whom were several homely young Jewish women in rumpled slacks and an open-faced fellow in khaki work clothes. “He works at our press,” Carol said. All of them, each in different degree, spoke Russian. The man was even a translator. Their press was putting out Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, in Russian. Subsequently, a month later, I was to receive this book and be the first Russian to read it. The first, not counting those who had read it in Trotsky’s manuscript.

  The book was to leave me with mixed emotions. Over certain pages, which described the great armed popular processions, I would sob, and whisper in my little room, “Can it be that I shall never have this!” I would weep in ecstasies of envy and hope over this thick, three-volume history, over our Russian Revolution. “Can it be that I shall never have this!”

  Other pages stirred me to malice – especially those where Trotsky writes with indignation about how the Provisional Government, after the February Revolution, herded the workers back to work, demanded that they carry on as usual at the plants and factories. The workers were indignant: “We made the revolution, and they’re herding us back to the factories!”

  Trotsky the prostitute! I thought. What you forced the workers to do after your October Revolution was just the same: you demanded that the workers return to work. For you – the provincial journalists and half-educated students who, thanks to the revolution, rocketed to leadership in a huge state – the revolution really took place, but what about the workers? For the workers it didn’t exist. In every regime the worker is forced to work. You had nothing else to offer them. The class that made the revolution made it not for itself but for you. To this day no one has offered anything else, no one knows how to abolish the very concept of work, make an attempt on the foundation. That will be the real revolution, when the concept of work – I mean work for money, for a living – disappears.

  By a strange coincidence, party comrades were to bring me this book right in the middle of our demonstration against the New York Times. Several of them observed for quite a while, even helping us hand out leaflets.

  After that meeting, Carol invited us to her place; she lives in Brooklyn, six or eight other members of her party live in the same building – it’s like a party cell. We went by subway, then on foot. Alexander, suspicious Alexander, hooked on Freudianism, dropped behind the rest of the company and said to me in a whisper, “Listen, why are they all so flawed, don’t you see it? Look at those girls – there’s something wrong with them. Carol herself is normal, but even at that, she seems to me to have some sexual problem.”

  “Listen, Alya, what do you want?” I said. “Revolutionaries have always been like this, in my observation. You can find flaws in Lenin or anyone you please. Does that matter to you and me? What we need is a clique; you know you have to belong to some clique in this world. Who else accepts you, who’s interested in you? But they accept you and me, they need us, they invited us. We have one way out: go to them. Aren’t we flawed, you and I? You must agree we are, to some extent.”

  I was right. We seemed to have every reason to be drifting, not necessarily toward the Workers Party, but toward the dissatisfied of this world. The satisfied had no fucking need of us. Why we would not go to them, to the satisfied, was another question.

  We arrived at Carol’s roomy apartment, which she shared with a girl friend. Her roommate was asleep somewhere in back. We settled in the living room, Carol made some sandwiches, we drank the beer we had bought, and talked. Later the orator came, Peter. They asked us a lot of questions, we asked a lot of questions, the evening dragged on till after two in the morning. I had some sexual hopes for Carol, as for every person at that time. Despite her sex, I found her agreeable for some reason. Roughly speaking, I wanted to make love with her, but people kept coming and going, all the neighbors were at Carol’s, and I couldn’t even get a word with her – except that she sat on her heels by the couch where I had found room, and sometimes translated what I didn’t understand, without letting me yield my place on the couch to her. That was as intimate as we got.

  Finally everyone left. Alexander and I were the last to leave. Why the last? She would not let us go with everyone else. “Don’t all leave at once,” she said. In company, with other people, she was gay and evidently very witty, since people laughed at her words from time to time – unfortunately, I understood almost none of her jokes. She crawled around on the floor, there weren’t many chairs, all the guests preferred to sit on the floor, Carol preferred it too.

  She came put and saw us to the subway. Outdoors it proved to be very chilly, ft had suddenly turned much colder. We got to the subway entrance; she was about to take leave of us, but I said to her, “Carol, excuse me, I need a word with you in private.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Alexander, “one moment.”

  “No problem,” Alexander said.

  We walked away. I took her by the arms and said, “Do you want me to stay with you, Carol?”

  She put her arms around me and said, “You’re so nice, but perhaps your friend wants to talk with you?”

  I didn’t quite understand her, we stood in the cold, I was practically shaking with cold, we kissed and stood with our arms around each other. She was thin all over, nothing to her, and yet she had a daughter thirteen years old. The daughter lived with her parents in Illinois.

  “You’re very nice,” Carol said softly. “Tomorrow, on Sunday, I’ll be in Manhattan, I have to stop by the office. I forgot my new hat there, I bought it yesterday. I’m leaving for three days to see my parents in Illinois, and I wanted to show them my hat. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll get together.”

  I was very cold and tired, and I didn’t insist. Perhaps I should have. But I was freezing. We hugged again and kissed, and she left. “Go along,” I told her, “you’ll freeze.”

  While Alexander and I rode the subway we had a lively discussion of our new party comrades. Alexander said it was all clear to him. I called on him to abstain from conclusions for the time being; it was too early to decide, on the basis of one meeting, how we should view them. We got off at Broadway. Its sidewalks and pavements, as usual in the cold, were belching clouds of steam. Alexander turned left toward his Forty-fifth Street, I went up and to the right. In the all-night eateries people sat and chewed.

  She did not call the next day; I waited for her call till two. This upset me greatly, I was already thinking of her as my beloved; such is my nature. I had much more in common with her than with any of the rest. In addition to being a revolutionary she was also a journalist, and quite recently the Worker – the o
rgan of the American Communist Party – had come down hard on her for her article on Leonid Plyushch, a Ukrainian dissident.

  She did not call, but that morning and the night before, I had accustomed myself to the thought that she would be my beloved, I had even thought how I would dress her – and now this. I don’t like it when things fall through. I was very upset and did not immediately regain my composure that day.

  She turned up several days later. She apologized. She hadn’t come in for the hat on Sunday; first thing in the morning, she had headed straight to the airport and flown to Illinois; she hadn’t had time to come in for the hat, the flight was very early, and she hadn’t wanted to wake me. “After all, you went to bed very late the night before,” she said. We arranged to go to lunch together. We met.

  We sat across from each other and talked about what we were doing. Alexander and I were plotting our demonstration at the time, and I told her about our plans. Suddenly she said, “You know, I want to tell you that I have a friend. I feel very awkward, I like you, you’re nice, but I’ve had this friend now for several years. He’s not a member of our party, but he’s a leftist and works in a leftist publishing house.”

  My face showed nothing. I was already so used to blows of fate that this wasn’t even a blow. Never mind, I’ll survive, I thought, although it’s no fun when your dreams crumble to dust. In my imagination we had been living together and working jointly for the party.

  “Okay,” I said simply. That was the end of my romance with her, but our political relationship continues to this day, although I am disillusioned with the Workers Party as an effective party.