After lunch that day we walked along Fifth Avenue, heading for Madison; she had to buy coffee for the office. Across from St. Patrick’s I asked her, “What do you think, Carol, will there be revolution in America in our lifetime?”
“Definitely,” Carol said without a moment’s thought. “Otherwise why would I work for the party?”
“I want to do some shooting, Carol,” I told her. And I meant it.
“You will, Edward,” she said, grinning.
You’re thinking we were two bloodthirsty villains who dreamed of seeing America and the whole world bleed. Nothing of the kind: I was the son of a Communist officer – my father had served his whole life in the ranks of the NKVD; that’s right, the secret police – and she was the daughter of a puritan Protestant from Illinois.
I repeat – what had I seen of this life? Eternal semistarvation, vodka, abominable little rooms. Why does a man who sells vodka, who has a liquor store, gain the acceptance of society, real acceptance, while a man who writes poetry comes all the way around the world simply to gain nothing, find nothing? And what’s more they take away the last thing he clings to – love. Eddie has fantastic strength, how else would I hold on, with my constitution, how else?
Carol told me a lot about America and its system. She told me about the Boston racial conflicts – her party newspaper was writing about them at the time – about how the newspapers conceal information when whites attack blacks, or, vice versa, inflate it if blacks attack whites. She told me that it was mainly Latin-Americans and blacks who had fought in Vietnam. And there was lots more she told me.
I went to many meetings of the Workers Party, and although their methods of struggle struck me, and still do, as undynamic – they were mainly busy “supporting” everybody, they supported the rights of the Crimean Tatars in the USSR, demanded political independence for Puerto Rico, supported Brazilian political prisoners and the right of the Ukrainians to be separated from Russia, et cetera – still, I learned a lot at their meetings. They were a party of the old type, of course, there was much in their structure that was dogmatic and obsolete. They called themselves the “Workers” Party, for example, although I don’t think their membership included any workers at all. Peter himself, the regional leader, spoke of the workers as a reactionary force.
“You’re an extremist,” Carol said to me. “If I ever get to know any extremists, I’ll introduce you. You’re better suited to them.”
The Workers Party took a very suspicious stance vis-a-vis Alexander and me. Alexander, a very suspicious man himself, said to me, “They think we’re KGB agents. Some Russian dissident has planted this idea in them. Carol doesn’t think so, of course, she has very high regard for you. But the leadership – those guys certainly do. If not, why didn’t their press carry any report on our demonstration against the New York Times - why not? After all, they made a point of being there for two hours!”
Alexander was right in this instance, I think. They never reported that we existed, although they should have found us tempting material. In counterpoise to the usually very rightist Russians, suddenly here’s a leftist cell, here’s an “Open Letter to Sakharov,” criticizing him for idealizing the West. Even the Times of London printed an account of the letter – the leftists proved more rightist, or more suspicious, than the official bourgeois newspaper.
I do not believe this party has any future. They are very isolated, they fear the streets, they fear the suburbs, in my view they have no common language with those whom they support and in whose name they speak.
A typical incident: I was accompanying Carol to the Port Authority after work; her daughter was supposed to be arriving. We walked along Fifth Avenue – at first she had wanted to go by bus or subway, but I foisted my pedestrian habit on her and we walked. It was still early, we sat awhile at the Public Library and then went over to Eighth Avenue, where the Port Authority is, via Forty-second Street. My girl-revolutionary was somewhat wary of Forty-second Street and huddled close to me in fright.
“Our comrades are afraid to walk here. There are lots of druggies and crazies here,” Carol said warily.
I started to laugh. I wasn’t afraid of Forty-second, I felt at home there any hour of the day or night. I didn’t say so at the time, but it crossed my mind that her party was nothing but a petit-bourgeois study group. If I were making a revolution I would lean first of all on the people among whom we were walking, people like me – the classless, the criminal, and the vicious. I would locate my headquarters in the toughest neighborhood, associate only with the have-nots – that is what I was thinking.
Carol said, laughing, “This is ridiculous, to have someone from Moscow take me around New York and know the way much better than I do.”
She had doubted that I would take her the right way. I did. Granted, I was afraid – I might encounter one of my boyfriends, Chris, for example, or other, lesser, acquaintances, but it turned out all right, thank God.
Carol is very sweet and very obliging, and very businesslike. In one way I am even content that we never became lovers. At least, I don’t know what kind of problem she has, I don’t believe she’s altogether healthy. She can’t be; but she doesn’t need to be. In this world healthy people are needed for something else. The world hangs by the struggle between the healthy and the unhealthy. Fair Carol and I are in the same camp. If I wanted to, I could become a member of her party. But I’m sick of intellectual organizations, in my view the old parties are anemic. I am still seeking, I want something alive – not red tape, or money being collected in a little basket and the total announced, who gave more. I do not want to sit in meetings and then have people all scatter to their homes and calmly go to the office in the morning. I want people not to scatter. My interests lie somewhere in the sphere of semireligious Communist communes and sects, armed families and agricultural groups. As yet this is none too clear, the outlines are just beginning to take shape, but never mind, all in good time. What I want is to live with Chris and have Carol there too, and others as well, all together. And I want the free and equal people living with me to love me and caress me; I wouldn’t be so terribly lonely, a lonely animal. If I don’t perish somehow firsts – anything can happen in this world – I am determined to be happy.
The meetings with Carol are useful to me – I learn a lot about America from her and she learns a lot from me. We are friends, although, for example, she concealed the date of her trip to the USSR from me, apparently afraid that I really was a KGB agent. She told me only after she was back, when she gave me some Soviet chocolate and a twenty-kopeck coin as souvenirs. You fool! I thought. I could have given you addresses, and you’d have met people you can never meet, even if you go to the USSR a hundred times. But I’m not hurt.
Carol is an unfinished chapter, we constantly discover new ideas in common, she often waits for me near her office – fair, smiling, with or without her dark glasses, always burdened by party literature and two or three tote bags.
“Carol, all you need is a leather jacket and a red kerchief,” I tease. “A real commissar.”
The Workers Party, and in particular my friend Carol, organized a meeting in support of Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was in a Soviet prison camp. The meeting was very diverse. They had representatives of the Irish separatists there; they had the Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, a former political prisoner; they had Pyotr Livanov (God knows how he had decided on what for him was a very bold step, speaking at a meeting arranged by leftists – I think he and his friends have something to do with the fact that Alexander and I are considered KGB agents); they had Martin Sostre, a black who had spent eight years in an American prison for a political crime. I nearly howled with delight when Martin Sostre came right out and said, “I join, of course, in supporting Mustafa Dzhemilev, and in general I support the right of nations to self-determination, including of course the Crimean Tatars, but I protest the fact that when Sakharov sends an article to the New York Times, in which he writes about injustices and oppression
, infringements of individual freedom in the USSR, the Times prints his article practically on the front page, whereas similar articles about injustices and infringements of human rights here in America the Times refuses to print.”
That was what he said, Martin Sostre. A strong man. He didn’t hurry, he spoke calmly, slowly, swaying slightly, and even I understood every last word he said.
I observed Livanov, he was all contorted with horror. He was in for it, poor guy, probably hadn’t expected this. What would his hosts say to him, who had given him work, who had given him food and drink here, who had paid his “English teachers; what would the American rightists say, who had given and were still giving him money? If you survive a prison or a mental hospital over there, you get money here. But what would they say to Livanov, the American rightists, when they learned he had taken part in such a meeting?
Carol had expended enormous effort in persuading Livanov to come and speak. It had taken her a long time. Now, as chair of the meeting, my friend was full of herself, exuberantly announcing and introducing the speakers. She was satisfied.
Alexander and I were sitting in the second row. We were serene because we knew that at the crucial moment all these girls, old men and women, philosophizes and orators, Oriental poets, and playboys from Amnesty International would scatter in all directions, and people like Martin Sostre, Carol, and ourselves would remain. So we thought, and we were hardly mistaken.
Carol calls me often now.
“Hello, Edward,” Carol says on the phone. “It’s me – Carol.”
“Hi, Carol! Glad to hear from you,” I reply.
“We’re having a meeting today,” Carol says. “Do you want to come?”
“Of course, Carol,” I reply. “You know how I’m interested in everything.”
“Then let’s meet at six o’clock by the subway at Lexington and Fifty-first Street,” she says.
“Yes, Carol – six o’clock,” I say.
We meet at six, we kiss, I take one bag from her, that’s all she allows, and we go down into the subway.
Once in a while, at lunchtime, you may find us on Fifty-third Street between Madison Avenue and Fifth, sitting by the waterfall.
Sonya
I rarely get invited anywhere, but I so love company. Once I went to a party given by the only person who still receives me – Sashka Zhigulin, photographer and troublemaker. I’ve already mentioned him, a real horse’s ass, little kid and visionary, all his dreams and the dreams of his friends are focused on getting rich without especially working. There may be more to him, but this characterization also applies.
He lives in a big, semidark studio on East Fifty-eighth Street and goes to great lengths to pay his $300 a month and hold on to it, because he can invite guests here and pose as a grown-up.
In keeping with my silly habit, a habit very odd in a Russian, I arrived precisely at eight. No other guests were there yet, of course, and I stood around foolishly in my lace shirt, white slacks, lilac velvet blazer, and splendid white vest, while Sashka’s friends worked. They were moving furniture, opening jars and bottles, putting up posters, and I didn’t want to do anything. From boredom and apathy, I left – went for cigarettes, observed the sky growing dark over the streets, inhaled the scent of green leaves; it was May, Central Park was nearby and it reeked of spring weather and excitement. I came back, and the helpers had left to change their clothes. The only ones there were Sashka, who shortly disappeared too, into the bathroom, and this girl, Cod knows what she was doing there, a short girl with bushy, typically Jewish hair and a strangely affected way of speaking, drawling out her sentences or, vice versa, saying them too rapidly, like a bad actress taking pains to enunciate her lines clearly. As it later turned out, she had indeed attended a theatrical group in her native Odessa and was considered very talented. I have always been attracted to malformed specimens. Thus did Sonya enter my life.
We spent the whole evening together. One by one, as they showed up, I introduced her to my friends and acquaintances. Among the latter were both Jean-Pierre – an artist who lives in SoHo, my wife’s first lover – and Susanna, also her lover. The fleet-winged Elena herself, with a wave of her hat, had flown off to Milan. All three of us had seen her off. She was still in Milan, flashing her brilliant plumage and driving the Italians out of their minds, I suppose, men and women alike. It doesn’t take much to drive poor simple working folk – businessmen or artists – out of their minds.
I was still in a state of confusion, and Sonya was the first woman, if such she can be called, the term is hardly correct in respect to her, as you will see – more exactly, she was the first individual of feminine gender with whom I wanted, God knows why, to become intimate. The first after Elena.
Before this there had been lunatic encounters in an alcoholic haze, incomprehensible evening gatherings, infrequent parties. Women from Australia and women from Italy would come looming up, swivel their faces, say something about kangaroos or contemporary art, step back, disappear, and finally melt into the background, from which they had stepped forward for an instant with a swish of their skirts only to slip back again deep into chaos. I was almost always drunk, openly hostile toward them, and at the same time overflirtatious, lest I appear to be a homosexual. Body and soul together – unanimous for this once, having been cruelly insulted by Elena – I rejected the women, pushed them away, and I invariably woke up alone. I doubt I could have fucked a woman then or had any intimate relationship with her at all. Did I want to? Or did I feel I “had to”? I don’t know. Sonya did not scare me. She was afraid of everything herself.
This first evening, the young lady from Odessa (she’s very shy about that, of course) is shocked by the thoroughly proper introductions with which she is honored. “This is Jean-Pierre, my wife’s ex-lover.” “This is Susanna, her lover.” The drunken but sweet-smelling Susanna kisses me almost with family feeling. I am not past caring, but I pity Susanna and scorn Jean; that gives me the strength to relate to them calmly. And besides, I know how to play my hand, add fuel to the fire. Introducing my “family” to this little Jewish philistine, I know that essentially they differ very little from her. Nevertheless, I am inflicting a blow, I’m giving her a lesson in depravity, Moscow-style, and eccentricity, also big-city-style. I’m giving her a lesson in relationships among people of far more exalted rank than the relationships she has known up to now. “This is how perverted we were in our native Moscow, and still are, here in New York,” I am saying.
Well, what of it. I am playing a primitive game, of course, but since she rather interests me, this provincial little Jewish girl, I utilize the second-rate resources of ordinary Moscow-style seduction.
Jean-Pierre and Susanna – I’m a depraved man, then, if I can be friends with them. Unobtrusively, as if by the way, I mention my publications, being translated in several countries around the world. I’m an important man, then. And third – I tell her about my liaisons with men. It’s a shock, of course, a blow. But never mind, she will absorb it. I have yet to encounter the person who will give up what is interesting, even though it is “bad.” Because so much has hit her tonight, Sonya leaves very early, at eleven o’clock (which will never happen with her again). She has to think; let her go and think. I see her to the bus, and I say that I like her very much, at the same time observing that her upper lip is very homely.
This evening I still have ahead of me a halfhearted attempt at intimacy – my first and last – with my “relative,” Susanna. I make the attempt partly out of mischief and partly out of an awareness of a certain moral right to her. All evening, drunken Susanna is after blue-eyed Jannetta, who is also Russian. My chances are small, but I’ll try. Miss Garcia cherishes a fondness for Russian girls. Garcia is as common a name as Ivanova is in Russia. And Susanna corresponds, in commonness, to Ludka. Ludka Ivanova.
Cherishes a fondness. She embraces Jannetta, gets a hand up under her skirt. Kirill and I – you remember, he’s Jannetta’s lover – clown around doin
g a homosexual dance, although neither of us has that kind of feeling for the other. I want to help Kirill and somehow dispel the awkwardness that has developed around the pair of “girls.” Kirill is nothing but an overgrown kid. I see that he is distraught over Susanna’s public attempts on his Jannetta and doesn’t know what to do. He does not succeed in laughing it off. He may even cry. Jannetta is older than he; it seems to me she’s experiencing pleasure at the touch of the drunken but adamant Miss Garcia – Ludka Ivanova.
Then comes a lapse of an hour, hour and a half. By now everyone is gone and I am in Susanna’s apartment, sitting on the very bed where the photograph was taken: naked Susanna and Elena, lying in one another’s arms making love, or just having finished. It was taken, I suspect, by the naked Jean. He and Susanna are forever slouching around with cameras. I sit on this bed, I wait, I think, and in the bathroom Miss Garcia pukes uncontrollably. Good Lord, what bad luck! Why did she get so stinking drunk! I had thought it would be symbolic to fuck Susanna on this ill-fated bed. Later she comes in, still pale and contorted with pain from the spasmodic heavings of her stomach. It is hard to look at her – aging face, make-up streaked and runny, lashes and eyelids all messed up. All is futility: the night is over, the fires have burned out, Jannetta has escaped her. I feel very sorry for her. I, at least, have art, the desire to make a monument of myself, but what does she have? Even if she is a lesbian, her brief summer of pleasure is passing by.
She points out to me a photograph – on the wall, framed under glass – of Elena, her lover. To her, Elena is a light in the window. Time and again she says lovingly that Elena’s crazy, she’s…
Had it not been for Elena’s culture-shock, of course, had she not been so blind – she didn’t know a fucking thing about the new life, about classes and groups of people – then Susanna, the honest working-girl who sins evenings and weekends, the exemplary good daughter who supports an old mother, would never have laid eyes on the rare little bird with the beautiful plumage… Elena.
It's Me, Eddie Page 13
