When we move Americans – at present our customers are mostly all Americans – then my reflections are different. Recently we moved a couple from a house in Queens; they had been living together but were then separated, because we moved them to two different apartments. “What do you think, are they divorced?” I asked John.
“What do I care?” he said. “Do they pay money? They do. I make my money, I don’t care about the rest.”
Well, John doesn’t, but Eddie does. I observed them carefully, and their belongings too. They were both small. He was like all Americans and so was she. Very typical. He had on a T-shirt and so did she. He had on denim shorts, his legs were hairy and just a bit crooked; she had denim jeans, her ass was a little droopy. He could have been anything, I think he was Jewish. A mustache, of course, how could he not have a mustache, and she smoked one cigarette after another. Their names, of course, were Susan and Peter, how could they be anything else. Two bicycles. One box labeled “Peter’s Kitchen,” another box “Susan’s Kitchen.” One box “Peter’s Shoes,” another “Susan’s Shoes.” All their things had been thrown into the boxes, not properly packed, and as we lugged all these boxes down a narrow green stairway, and then down a gray stairway, and then down three brick steps, the things kept trying to pop out and fall. They had a lot of things, but it was all somehow petty. Tiny little boxes, more little boxes, small little things, and only a few big ones – an old wooden armchair and a chest of drawers, a pair of small dressers, and that was all.
We moved Susan to an apartment on East Eighty-sixth, where there was an elevator. She got the two bicycles and her share of the boxes with the bottle necks sticking out of them.
Peter got the television, the old wooden armchair, and the bricks, which evidently served as spacers for bookshelves. I observed this couple like a stern high judge, hoping to see something in them other than typicality, other than his shock of curly hair and his mustache – in New York, every other man has a mustache and a shock of hair. I saw nothing.
By the time we moved him it was dark, and he threatened not to pay us any money due after six hours. He had, he said, only six hours’ worth of work, and we were doing everything slowly, he said – after we had worked like hell lugging his little boxes and chests to the fourth floor. I broke a slight hole in the bottom of one of them with my head. Nevertheless, he paid us.
His apartment was on West 106th Street, not a particularly good neighborhood. I had worked fourteen hours that day, we had had another job in the morning, we had moved a Greek, I was very tired, my legs were buckling, and when John and I were carrying the last thing, an air conditioner, my strength gave out and the air conditioner landed right on top of me, though without injuring me.
“What the fuck are you doing, you mother?” John said softly.
“I’ll just rest a minute,” I said. “I got very drunk yesterday;” I added, which was true.
At the sound of our voices a curious denizen of the third floor stuck her head out into the stairwell. “What’s happening?” she said.
“Nothing,” John replied lazily. “It’s just that this guy has worked over fourteen hours today. He’s tired,” and he started to laugh.
I was very ashamed that I hadn’t been able to hold out and had collapsed on the stairs. Ashamed before the seaman from the trawler.
“Never mind,” he said. “You’re not used to it yet. Weak hands.”
It was the first time God had made me aware there was a limit to my physical strength. If it hadn’t been for those stairs! This didn’t happen to me again, however; eventually I would become strong as a horse.
Ten minutes later, having received all the money – be would have tried to get out of paying John, but John wouldn’t have given him his fucking TV and lamp, which were still on the truck, boxed separately in quilts – we were on our way downtown in the truck, trying to pass some other shithead in a truck, like us…
John… I like him. The lousy thing is that he’s a racist, he doesn’t like blacks. “Black trash,” he calls them. His racism, that of an ordinary peasant lad from Russia, has a rather primitive character. Driving through different provincial towns with me, he determines first of all whether they have many blacks. The highest praise he can give a town is the assessment, “There’s no black trash here at all.” John is delighted by the state of Maine, where there are no blacks, where the air and water are clean, unpolluted. John associates blacks with pollution. “Ordinary people” are full of shit too. It was the workers that beat up the students who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. And the racial clashes in Boston – the capitalists are not to blame for them at all, it’s the ordinary working gents who don’t want their children to study with black children. Ordinary people too are full of shit in our time.
“I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike once,” John recounts, “and the blacks in the car ahead of me turned over. They yelled from the car, but I drove around them and calmly rolled on. I looked back and a bunch of Americans had already come running, they were pulling die black trash out of the car.”
“What a racist you are!” I tell him.
He’s not angry, he laughs. “Racist” is a swear word to a liberal American professor; to a man from the fields of Byelorussia, a seaman from a trawler, “racist” is not a swear word.
We often return from our trips via Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Calmly driving the heavy truck, he looks at the crowd and grits through his teeth, “Monkeys, monkeys!” With no special malice, however. He points out to me a guy who is totally drunk or stoned, staggering along waving his arms. John laughs contentedly.
I do not try to dissuade him, I do not suggest that he take thought and reject his racism. It’s futile. And although we calmly ride in the same truck, although I approve of him in some ways, value his simple strength and vitality, and although it seems to me that he approves of me in some ways too, the possibility cannot be excluded that coming years will place us on different sides of the barricades. He will be defending this system and this regime, along with lads just like him from the fields of Texas, Iowa, or Missouri, and I will be with the hated black trash.
This is so clear to me that I smile calmly in the truck. Ah, John, little Eddie’s a tough guy too, you’d better forgive him in advance, just in case. Life is too serious, I think.
He pays me my money and steps on the gas with his canvas shoe. As he disappears around the corner I catch a fleeting glimpse of his head, his short American-style haircut. I walk to my hotel.
Lately John has warmed up to me. For one thing, he now works almost exclusively with me. For another, he occasionally calls me outside of working hours and invites me to do something with him. He begins in English but then, on my account, descends to Russian after all. Once he came over with Lenya, the former inmate of the Gulag Archipelago, in Lenya’s car; it was late afternoon, but they were going to the beach. Lenya is a poor driver, but we finally reached the deserted beach on distant Coney Island. As always, in keeping with my childish, soldierly habit, I had brought nothing with me, but John of course proved to be well equipped. He had with him a mat, which he spread neatly on the sand; he had a transistor radio, which he turned on immediately; he had a first-rate volleyball, which as he put it had cost him twenty-five bucks; he had an expensive textbook of English. After a swim Mr. Businessman lay down on the mat, took his pen, opened the book, and began working the exercises.
Lenya Kosogor, thin and stooped, also had no things with him, like me. It’s a prison-camp habit not to burden oneself with things – they will only be taken away. Lenya and I lay right on the sand. At first I laid my head, which was wet after my swim, on John’s volleyball; then, thinking he would bawl me out for ruining the surface of the leather, I moved my head away and rested it on my own sandal.
We lay there for quite a long time in the sunshine – it was an evening sun, not hot. Lately I have grown accustomed to silence, and talkativeness irritates me at times. In this respect John is almost ideal. I kept my
eyes closed. Lenya asked me a couple of questions and also fell silent. We lay there a long time.
“Let’s go, Ed!” John said suddenly. He closed his notebook, took the ball, and went off a little distance from where we lay. A game of volleyball – it was possible, I thought, but I had on these fucking lenses; if I moved abruptly they might fly out. But I didn’t want to appear ridiculous in front of my boss. I said only that I hadn’t played volleyball in at least ten years. The game began.
At first I was cautious because of the lenses and because my hands weren’t obeying me. Finally I remembered how to play, and things started to go better. John wasn’t much of a player either, but gradually, as I say, things got going, and later Kosogor joined in. We played quite a long time, then Kosogor lay down again on the sand and started singing Russian songs, while we kept chasing our ball around, with our eyes narrowed against the flying sand – the ball did get away from us fairly often and fall in the sand.
You know, it was like returning to my childhood. The Kharkov beach. My tireless sun-blackened friends, at once athletes and hoodlums. The endlessly flying ball. The svelte girls, who usually played very badly, but their presence inspired the young males of the species to incredible tricks and pirouettes. Admittedly, all the participants in this scene were much younger then, there were a great many of them; that scene also had a background filled with people we knew or half knew, and most importantly, it didn’t have the feeling of aching sadness. Sadness surrounded both energetic John, and Lenya Kosogor, and me. Why? I asked myself. It wasn’t nostalgia, was it? I don’t know whether they sensed the sadness, but to me the gray ocean was sad, and the dirty sand, and the gulls, and the remote group of people on the sand – everything was filmed with sadness. The kind of sadness, you know, that makes a man take a machine gun and start shooting into the crowd, I wouldn’t do it, but as an example, that’s a good way to dispel sadness.
Actually I was feeling the lack of a lifework, solidly begun and just as steadfastly pursued. What this country offered me could not be my lifework. It could be John’s, he made money; or Lenya Kosogor’s, he wanted something definite and material; but with my thirst for love, you know, I had it tougher than anyone. Only a Great Idea could lend purpose to my life. Riding in a car, embracing a loved friend, walking on the grass, sitting on the steps of a city church – it all feels good when every hour of your life is subordinate to a great idea and a movement. But for now, there was never anything but sadness.
I cut short the volleyball session, went for a swim, swam thinking ceaselessly about how I might find love again in this world, so that it would bloom, take on color, blaze up, become the vibrant and happy world I used to live in. I swam way far out and then turned over in the water, lay there and thought about this, while over my head, scrawling across the water, glimmered the last ray of the setting sun.
I climbed out and strolled along the beach. The others, my simple, ordinary, generally good friends, were still lying there on the sand, but I didn’t feel like going over to them. I strolled in the opposite direction, where there were alien bodies and alien people, and an old man with a beard was doing calisthenic bows that smacked of prayer, directly toward the setting sun.
I walked quite a way along the tide-smoothed sand, gazing at the ocean, hoping for something, but did not encounter anything or anyone necessary for my purposes; only a few children and teenage girls arrested my attention. But between them and me there lay by now my insurmountable age, my head full of the past, my scarred arms, and always that sadness. I returned to my own people – to choose an arbitrary term, of course, an arbitrary term.
They greeted me with a piece of news. “Your friend is dead,” Lenya said. “Which one?” I asked indifferently. “The Great Helmsman,” Lenya said. “Get out the black paint, you’ll be putting a black border on the portrait in your room.”
So he’s dead, I thought. He was all muddled in recent years, he scuttled Trotskyism to ape the ancient Chinese emperors, founders of dynasties, he kept on living and now he’s dead. A man of the people, and muddled like the people. Why can’t I live without arrogance, why am I tormented by arrogance and love?
We played some more volleyball. A towheaded nurse from a nursing home came along, John invited her to play with us, and it developed that her parents were from Poltava. I jumped for the ball, everyone laughed; even in childhood I had excelled at the risky Brazilian game, as Sanya the Red called it.
The nurse from the nursing home, as Lenya observed, wanted John to fuck her, but when it comes to sex John has affairs of his own; I don’t know what kind We left.
At a seedy roadside joint we ordered ourselves some roast beef; on the sly, Lenya and I each drank half a tumbler of brandy, bought at the liquor store next door. John turned it down. He took the wheel, and we started off to New York. The tipsy inmate of the Archipelago was expressing his opinions on something from the back seat, genially and loudly. I stared intently into the surrounding cars and said nothing…
Another time John took me to inspect an American submarine for some reason. God knows why I should want to see some fucking boat, but he invited me, came for me in the truck, and I couldn’t refuse John. I went along.
The boat lay in a little enclosure. It was huge. Everything on it was real, except that two good-sized holes had been cut in the sheathing and staircases soldered into them for the tourists. We clambered around in the boat’s compartments for a good hour, listening to explanations from an old submariner, a clever guide who called the little girls “missy” and patiently answered both their questions and the naval questions of my friend John.
“The hell he says they had good air here, fuck it, you better not try the air here. There’s no rolling in a sub, you don’t feel it, that’s true. But the air is shit,” was John’s commentary on the old submariner’s stories.
John was interested in everything. He peered below, where there were batteries for power, peered into the holes of the diesels, turned a wheel and closed the hatches on our whole group so that we wouldn’t hear the noise from another tour group following behind us.
I didn’t give a fucking shit about that boat. I looked politely, but I would have had more interest in going to see an autopsy room, where I had also been invited recently, to watch them dissect the dead. But the boat – fuck it. Well, at least I wasn’t at home, thanks to John.
After the boat he took me someplace else, without saying where. This was his usual trick. Like him, I don’t crack under pressure; I kept silent, didn’t ask where I was being taken, merely watched the road, trying to guess. Aha, now it was clear – this was the Tolstoy Farm. He took a right at the farm. Weaving among secondhand cars, we drove up to a single-story barracks for two families. Walked in.
“This is Ed.” He presented me to a guy with gray temples. “His name is John, like mine,” John said, rudely pointing at the man.
“Yes, some people call me John,” the man said gently, “and some Vanya.”
The apartment was wretchedly small, the host’s small daughter was asleep in the small neighboring bedroom, and I was horribly bored and even depressed, until she woke up and came in. You will shortly understand why.
John had brought a Magnetophon with him, a crude popular model with a tinny sound; he switched it on, some American girl sang. This Vanya – mentally I called him “Vanechka,” sweet Vanya, because he was suffused with gentleness, both what he said and his whole figure, I definitely liked this fellow who worked at a plastics factory – this Vanya laughed at John’s Magnetophon. John explained that he had bought the Magnetophon to practice his English. But they called the magnetophon a tape recorder, I forgot.
The girl on the tape sang words to the effect that what had been yesterday would never return and that this was terrible, and many other sad words besides. After the girl, John had recorded an old Russian man, a Kuzmich or Petrovich. “Whatever you want, Kuzmich. Talk or sing,” said John on the tape recorder. John in the chair flinched. And when Kuzmic
h, getting the words wrong, started to sing the Russian folk song “When I Was a Coachman,” I am sorry to say I got up and quietly went outdoors.
I had no fucking use for these tear-jerking Russian songs about loved ones found dead under the snow. They were too close to home. At that time even an English-Russian dictionary filled me with terror. The words “lover,” “passionate,” “intercourse,” and others like them tormented me with the torments of hell. I writhed when I read them. Russian songs were all I needed.
I went outdoors; the trees were rustling, the grass showed green, night was falling, a Bulgarian youth from the family next door was sitting on the porch tapping his high heel on the threshold. I went over to the van in which we had arrived, leaned my forehead against its high yellow chassis, and quieted down. From the house I could hear the doleful song. Why all this? I thought. Was it really impossible to live our whole lives in love and happiness? Life’ is so short, so small. What is she seeking, Elena, what force drives her forward or back? Why must I suffer terrible moments like these, and much worse? We could have spent our whole lives together – as adventurers, whores, prostitutes, but together. The last phrase is my favorite: sex is sex, fuck whom you wish, but why betray my heart?
It's Me, Eddie Page 26
