I trudge on, thinking pleasant thoughts about this shop. It would be nice to go there, browse awhile, and finally buy a bottle of Jamaican rum and drink it from a small wineglass – which I don’t have, but will – in the heat of the day. I know where I’ll buy the glass: at the comer of Perry Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the Village. They always have a variety of good crystal for sale, and if I spend a little time, look around, I’ll find a wineglass that satisfies me.
So I march on downtown, and some people smile at me because when I’m walking I try to look as though I’m reciting a prayer that I recently composed for myself, thought up in a difficult moment when I noticed that I was excessively angry at people. Here is the prayer:
No anger has my soul
No anger has my soul
Though dead my hopes and cold
No anger has my soul
Do you suppose the people around you don’t know whether you have anger in your soul or not? They know perfectly well. That’s why, on seeing that I have no anger in me, many people smile at me and many ask me the way. First a cheerful Latin-American behind the wheel of an old jalopy asks how to get to Avenue C. “Turn left, my friend, turn left,” I tell him. “You’ll come to First Avenue, then Avenue A, then B, and the next is C.” “Thanks! Have a nice day!” he calls to me, and smiles. Then a gray grandpa with a mustache, sitting in the open door of a truck, stares in fascination at the blue-enameled Orthodox cross that sticks to my chest. Grandpa may be a Ukrainian, this is their neighborhood. I stop at the fire hydrants, which are open, the water is flowing from them; I wash to the waist and walk on, without drying myself. This is natural, I get hot and I perform my ablutions.
Sometimes when I’m walking along Broadway, usually late at night – I used to walk this way from Roseanne’s – someone will approach me, beg for money. I don’t give it, I really can’t. The man who is begging can certainly obtain money in New York more easily than I can. I am always willing to stop and explain that I don’t have money, I’m on welfare, which means I’m on the same level as those who beg, if not lower. By this assertion I’m declaring that I’m a scorned individual. Everyone is satisfied. The only people I do not stop for are the ones who are very drunk or dulled out on drugs. Stopping for them is futile, it’s hard to understand what they’re mumbling. They’re not actually seeing the world around them at that moment; to them, I, Eddie-baby, am a blob in the shape of a man. They are offended, but what can you do… I do give money to people who in my view are really unfortunate.
Often I go downtown for the whole day. I usually begin with Washington Square, where I lie in the fountain, if it’s working. I put my feet in, my buns repose on the last step before water level, I lie back philosophically and contemplate my environment, or even more often I close my eyes and am merely aware, opening them infrequently. The sun, the water, the hum, and the shouts – to me it all makes up the melody of life. Often the fountain is spurting upward in a hard jet, the children throw various objects into it, beer cans, Coca-Cola cans, handkerchiefs. When thrown right, these things go flying up high, and the naked wet children squeal with delight. Other children try to sit their poopkas down on the jet so that the jet will lift them up. But either the children are very heavy, or they don’t sit down right – it never happens, the jet doesn’t lift them. One boy of about ten became very adept at aiming the fountain jet wherever he wanted by pressing his foot on the opening it spurted from. He hounded everyone else out of the fountain circle; a fat black woman and I proved to be the most stubborn. The black woman lay there and held out a long time, but the bad little boy overcame her in the end after squirting her with an ocean of water. She left. Things were more complex with me. It’s hard with guys like me. He kept squirting water on me, but I had schooled myself from childhood, like a yogi, to endure both cold and hunger serenely. He squirted and squirted, and I just lay there. But the kid turned out to be every bit as stubborn. He adapted. When he squirted my face, in particular my nose and mouth, with a whole barrage of water, I couldn’t take it, there was nothing to breathe, I had to crawl out and change places. The spectators – idlers, students, guitarists, and drug addicts – applauded wildly for both him and me.
The dogs also join in the general joy by playing in the water. They run after sticks, cans, and balk and devotedly drag them to their masters. One dog will be swifter; one will be fatter and won’t get to the thing thrown by his master in time, it is snapped up by the other, swifter person of the dog species, and then the one who has committed the offense looks guiltily at his master.
One fool of a boxer dragged his mistress into the fountain and spent half an hour in there, choking and probably taking a great many blows on the muzzle as he tried to bite the jet of water. Poor thing, he deemed it a most evil enemy. His eyes were bloodshot, his muzzle was flayed, he wheezed and choked, the jet kept lifting him up by the chest, beat him on the muzzle again and again. The mistress, a perfectly proper-looking woman – God knows what had brought her here, it was certainly her first time – was thoroughly soaked, and a preposterous bra and underpants of an almost Russian cut showed through the wet fabric of her dress. The philistines of the two countries are alike.
Washington Square is pointed out in guidebooks to New York as a place of note, and sometimes real Americans pass through, countrymen and country ladies, glancing over their shoulders. To us natives they look very funny; observing them, the guitarists, students, idlers, and joint-smokers laugh, and so do I. These people dressed in their bulky American country finery look especially funny in Washington Square. They have a great deal in common with Soviet philistines, dressed in their ample dusty suits in the terrible continental heat.
I have a whole complex of diversions in Washington Square. Sometimes, along with everyone else, I listen to the Poet. His name is unknown to me, I call him the Poet. I could easily find out his name, but for some reason I don’t. A short little man with a beard and a balding head, wearing a black shirt over loose sateen pants, also black, and sandals on his bare feet, he clambers up on one of the elevated bumps in the fountain’s low round wall and reads his poetry. Usually he stands on the exact same bump where I sat while Irina and Khachaturian – my friends, they consider themselves my friends – dressed the veins in my arm, stuck a plaster on them. That was at the very beginning of March, the slashed veins were still barely closed; unattended, they were oozing pus. Irina and Khachaturian put iodine on my arm, then stuck an American plaster on it. The whole of Washington Square observed this operation.
The poet always heads for the exact same pedestal. That is why I haven’t made the poet’s acquaintance, he and I are linked by this pedestal as it is. The poet lays by his feet a shopping bag similar to the ones that elderly Soviet ladies used in the fifties – black, crude, made of oilcloth. He rummages unhurriedly in his bag, takes out a single page, and begins to read: He reads with expression, with gesticulation. His voice is hoarse, he has lots of enthusiasm, but he’s a long way from Lyonka Cubanov’s shrill, sobbing, lamenting delivery, a Moscow style that originated perhaps in the laments of northern Russia. Doesn’t make the grade, I think with superiority.
The poet reads, some people even turn down their radios a little. Alternately rummaging in his bag and reading, the poet does ten or fifteen poems and then sits down. He swigs from a bottle of wine and talks with any listeners who wish to talk, occasionally letting them too have a swallow of wine. He’s a nice guy, that’s obvious, he’s about forty-five, and to me Washington Square would be empty without him.
After lying here for three or four hours, listening to all the conversations around me, now and then being captivated by the girls who fall for my wonderful tanned figure (which girls, as you know, attract and repel me simultaneously; that is why I fear them and have failed in two or three intimate relationships. I was scared shitless, alas, though I had promised myself to take advantage of all opportunities, to enter into all contacts) – after lying here awhile, I get up and move to another spot
, somewhere on the grass, under a bush, but again, nearly always in the sun, only occasionally in the shade. If the Ramakrishna chariot comes, I watch the members of that sect dancing to the tambourine. I know them all by sight, know which is better or worse at dancing and playing the drum or the tambourine. Their little boy, also robed in orange gauze, touches my heart. At one time I thought about going to live in their commune, I still think about it even now. Probably I am prevented by my ambition from carrying out this plan. It could still happen, however.
To me, even though they are inauthentic, the Ramakrishnas are redolent of my native East. I lie on the grass in a relaxed position, my head pillowed only on my arm, often with my eyes closed, and then all that sounds in my ears is one of their rotating prayers:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna!
Krishna, Krishna, Hare Hare!
Hare Rama, Hare Rama!
Rama Rama, Hare Hare!
After spending perhaps an hour listening to the rhythmical din of the tambourines, I decide to change position and sit for a while on a bench. A fair-haired young mama, dressed in God knows what, clothes from Botticelli’s time, asks me to guard a fair-haired and just as whimsically dressed child lying in a carriage. If only she wouldn’t come back, I think, glancing at the baby with interest. I would sit and wait a while, then take the child for myself. I’d have someone to care for, someone to love, and someone to work for. Even though the child would grow up and abandon me – that’s inevitable. The ones you love always leave you. But surely it would be fifteen years before he left, I would hear his ringing laughter, I’d cook for him, walk with him till I dropped, raise him myself, not send him to school, I’d play with him and run along the seashore, I think dreamily.
Despite all his ironic mockery and malice, Eddie-baby, like a lonely dog that has lost its master, dreams of dogging someone’s footsteps, devoting himself to someone. The dreams are interrupted, as always in such cases, by harsh reality. The little mama comes back with papa.
He is a Christlike man in a ragged suit jacket, his feet bare in his shoes. I know him, he’s always here, he paces up and down in the crowd with his hand thrust into the pocket of this very jacket, and offers joints to the strolling crowd. The really serious smokers have their own, however; purchased joints are skimpier and weaker. The family, evidently happy to be reunited, thanks me. I bow and scrape. It was nothing… Any time… What the hell…
The family wheels off with the carriage, and I wonder why I didn’t think to make a baby with Elena. She would have left anyway, but the baby would have stayed, women like her do not take the children with them when they leave. I would have had a little baby, and it might have been beautiful like Elena – I’m not bad-looking, either – I would have had a little piece of Elena, a girl or a boy, and I would have devoted, myself to the baby. Asshole, I think. But what if…
Instantly a plan springs to mind. Not now, of course. I’m not in a position to engineer it now. But later, maybe a year from now, when I have good connections and friends here, I can find some remote dacha, equip it appropriately to care for a kidnapped person, and then steal Elena. I’ll find a doctor, perhaps I can persuade Oleg Chikovani, my friend who lives in Davis, California – after all, he was my friend back in Moscow; he might not be afraid to risk his medical license, being a friend – and he’ll pull out the coil that allows Elena to fuck and not get pregnant. Oleg is a neurosurgeon, a specialist in operations on the brain. An operation like this would be nothing to him. And I’ll fuck my girl-child and keep her locked up till she delivers, nine months.
Among people who know her I can spread the rumor that she’s gone to visit her sister, who has moved from the fucking ruins of Beirut to either Rome or Paris – I can always tell some lie. And for those nine months, not all of them, but the first six, I can still fuck Elena, what can she do? Nothing. She’ll be furious, yell a bit, and calm down. I’ll fuck her every day, many times; in point of fact we won’t have anything else to do. At the thought of such happiness my head spins, and as at any thought of Elena my cock stands up.
It will be someplace in Connecticut. Mentally I transfer the scene of the action in my fictitious kidnapping to Alex and Tatyana Glickerman’s dacha. I liked their dacha; Elena and I visited there a couple of times when we were still husband and wife. Nowadays it seems she occasionally visits them alone. The Glickermans have paintings by Dali hanging even in the bathroom there. Alex is a friend of his, he’s the director of a very fashionable fashion magazine, after all. As for Tatyana, the poet Mayakovsky was once in love with her, and if you recall, I have mentioned somewhere that in Moscow I was friends with Mayakovsky’s mistress Lily Brik. It’s odd how fate persistently links little Eddie with the sexual legends of another great poet.
Oh, my wife, even now we are not separated. How I love you, I think, horrified to discover once more the awful depth of the abyss of my love. I will, I’ll do this, I tell myself with conviction. And though they will try me if they find me out, love is always in the right, always, and I’ll do this. Shit if I’ll submit to fate, to the fate that took Elena away from me. I have merely been temporarily in hiding, I am waiting…
The falling leaves at that dacha have slowly disappeared, but my cock is still standing; I feel a certain inner contentment, as if I had just now fucked Elena and this mysterious process had begun within her. Mmh!…
I wake from my thoughts, store the idea away in my memory. I start toward a group of people, from whose midst I hear the rumble of a guitar, the rhythm of a percussion instrument, and hoarse voices.
Some fat-faced boys, grouped under a tree, their foreheads nearly touching, are singing a song, a rhythmic one. I can hardly understand their song, but they themselves, with their tattoos and their false teeth, are familiar to me. Their type emerged in Russia at the same time as here in America. There at home we didn’t know that the whole world lived by the same laws. A vision of the Kharkov beach rises before me…
Vitka Kosoy, just as fat-pussed as these fat-pusses, a hefty boy with legs like tree trunks, is plucking the guitar. His face is turned toward my even more fat-pussed friend Sanya the Red, the butcher; their foreheads are nearly touching. Staring him in the eye, Vitka plucks the guitar and sings Russian rock:
Ziganshin rock!
Ziganshin roll!
Ziganshin forty days in the snow!
The melody of this song came to us via the radio, maybe from here, from America, but the words – which tell the story of four Soviet frontier guards who got caught in a blizzard and were picked up by the Americans – were composed by the Russian people.
Kosoy is just back from Moscow, where he served three years in the army, and has brought back this song and two or three dozen others like it
They sing. People cluster around them. Here is a man in swimming trunks with palm trees. Everyone calls him Hollywood. He acquired this nickname because he speaks in quotes from foreign films. For example, we’re walking in the park in the fall. Hollywood is bound to say: “These leaves rustle like American dollars.”
The people in Washington Square are absolutely the same. There are small, purely American differences, the colored tattoos on their skin, for example, and the fact that some of the people, the singers and those standing around them, are black. Nevertheless, I recognize in many of them my own faraway Kharkov friends, who by now have long since taken to drink. With the smile of a sage I also notice, sitting in an embrace on the parapet, two vulgar zonked blondes. In their puffy faces, their painted, smudged mouths and eyes, I recognize our unchanging girlfriends, girls from Tyura’s dacha, Masya and Kokha, except that they’re talking between themselves in English. Other spectators are also familiar. This man here with the black teeth is Yurka Bembel, who was shot in 1962 for raping a minor… And this is the exemplary technology student Fima…
Contenting myself with the song – having concluded it, the whole company of singers is sharing a marijuana cigarette – I march on. I go out of the park toward the Catholic s
tudent center and walk down Thompson Street, where, after passing a little Mexican restaurant, I briefly study the diverse and unusual chessmen, which never cease to astonish me, in the window of a chess shop. Occasionally I walk more to the left, down LaCuardia, where I drop into a clothing store. The proprietress, a large fair-haired Polish woman, talks with some of the customers in Polish. I invariably reject her help and look at the hats: The Pole does not get angry, though I’ve never bought anything from her, I always just look. I have a special predilection for white things. After leaving the Pole’s, I cross Houston – a boring street, provincial as a street out of Gogol’s Mirgorod, but with two-way traffic – and go down to SoHo.
The contents of the SoHo galleries have long since palled on me. I have frequented SoHo since the day I arrived in America. Bicycles of wood, typewriters of wood, shopping bags also of wood, or a wooden plant with slender leaves that sway in the wind, as well as the skeleton of a huge fish. I survey it all with indifference. The artist, a little Japanese, also looks to be made of wood, his cheekbones, his face, his gristly ears. I got used to contemporary art back in Moscow. A good hundred artists were friends of mine. I am not astonished at a photographic cycle depicting a hole being punched in a house. Cross-sections of the rooms, views from the right and left, from above and below, and to top it all off, a chunk of wall exhibited complete with plaster – these do not astonish me. Silky tulle bags at the Castelli gallery: Rauschenberg has entered his salon period. I much prefer his work in the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third Street – cloth, iron, a used automobile tire, all crude and harsh – there is protest visible in the painting. Now Rauschenberg is a master, a luminary, rich people have bought him, his works cost big money, and naturally, though I doubt he realizes it himself, these tulle bags are his salon period, Puvis de Chavanne stuff; he has become a society painter, a decorator, “beautiful” I miss the canvas cloth, the crude execution that has disappeared from his works. America gets even with its artists by other means than Russia does. Russia is also wising up, however. An exhibit at the board of the Soviet Artists’ Union by some friends of mine, artists of the extreme left, is a case in point: Russian administrators are learning from their American colleagues the more modern, humane means of killing art, namely, if you want to kill an artist, buy him.
It's Me, Eddie Page 28
