Those haughty rich. They ride horses wearing made-to-order beautiful suits. In the magazine pictures, they stand around in evening wear; their diamonds glitter from their ears, necks, and fingers; their hair is beautifully cut. They sit at snow-white tables. They're protected by the army, police, and hired bodyguards. And we, the hungry, look at them with envy. You just wait!
If you love money, why don't you get involved in counterfeiting? This polysyllable will bring you a pretty hefty profit. Counterfeiting successfully, you could travel, fall in love, live at ease, stay at better hotels and avoid the Nordic zones, slush and blizzard. Plying this trade you can randomly point with your aristocratic finger to a spot on a globe: «Let's go here. No, better, let's go there!»
You'll cultivate your whimsy. You'll devote a lot of time to science. In this way, you'll be able to turn yourself into an astronomer or a sailor.
I love the smell of black pepper, of perfume and liqueurs, and the smell of small extremist newspapers which call for destruction and for building nothing.
At the present I'm in love with young Z. I met him at one poorly attended gathering. He wears an English hat (he came from England a few years ago), he's poor and very handsome. He's talented, he writes his articles like a poet. I remembered one of his passages – this is where the snail is crawling up the sleeve of a dead guerrilla fighter and a butterfly is landing on his neck – and now keep repeating: «The snail is crawling and the butterfly landing» – and the dead man's nose has pollen on it.
The photographer is in love with me. One morning, when it was dawn, after a night at a big discotheque, I told him that I didn't want to fuck him, that I'm erratic and very capricious, and that, after all, I've switched to women (which was partly true), and that I was very sleepy.
If you're in love with someone, how can you fuck with others? I do, however, need a picture of myself shot in his misty, decadent style.
The discotheque
You, Eddie, good-for-nothing, spoiled fellow that you are. And the city where you live, the one you've chosen, resembles Sodom. It does take after it. What a perverse town! It's true, there's no denying it, you felt great at the discotheque yesterday, it was fun. But if you look at it with another pair of eyes something quite different turns up, doesn't it?
It's as though all the characters came out of Fellini's «Satiricon.» The in-your-face hairdos of different kinds, the whoreish little faces, brazen, made-up; everyone, of either sex, is elevated by high heels. One black fellow has taken off his pants and is dancing with just a white T-shirt covering his ass – it's not clear whether he has any underpants on. The right-hand section of the hall is gay: some are wearing lipstick; boys and men dance embracing each other – they gaze at each other lovingly and smooch. One guy has a wide, especially-designed suit, a black shirt, and a white silk scarf; another, with a sweaty, damp-haired chest, is in briefs; a third one…
The music is deafening, the air – hot and savage – is filled with marijuana. Everyone smokes openly. And everyone drinks. It's badly over-crowded.
The females – indecent, alluring – wear wanton attire, representing every epoch and nation. Many have only stockings on. And you, Eddie, are here as well. And you too frisk around convulsively, morbidly, and have already smoked some grass, and don't feel tired at all. And the woman with you, though she's seven years younger, she's too old for you: it's obvious – she's tired. And so, instead of going home at 6:00, when they close, you go at 4:20. For this kind of place people must be real young. No older than twenty, with stamina.
Oh dear, there's no avoiding it – our Rome will fall. It's not for nothing that these lesbian cuties, these delicate girls rub against each other's bellies and do not look at the boys. In this multi-colored, pulsating light, the faces appear odd and savage. The only thing lacking here is a good bloody fight.
Even if you're a philosopher, go ahead, visit a discotheque, and don't be standing there as if you're rooted to the ground – dance, then you'll learn something.
I saw my ex there that night. Smoking from a long black cigarette-holder, surrounded by a retinue of black guys (one was wearing a scintillating trench coat), she was in a white hat.
And you love it, Eddie, admit it.
I do confess that I wanted to stop the music and make an announcent: Guys, the machine guns will be distributed at the door in ten minutes. Our target is Fifth Avenue. I'll be in charge!
And out they run…
A car speeds up a parkway. This is the state of New Jersey. I'm drinking an expensive Italian wine straight from the bottle. The housekeeper is at the helm. We've made up. What can you do? I need her, and she needs me.
The bright patches of autumnal plants strike the eye. The car stops at my request. I take a few steps into the woods and having unbuttoned my white trousers, I let out a jet and notice an abnormal multitude of huge toadstools in the woods.
Done with the jet, my prick back in the pants, I tear away one huge mushroom and carry it as an ironic gift to the millionaire's housekeeper. She's irritated and I laugh under the setting sun over the spacious state of New Jersey. Our relationship is almost that of a loved but naughty son with a loving long-suffering mother, though I'm older than she by twelve years.
And we're going to some hospital where her eighty-eight-year-old grandfather is recuperating from his heart attack. She turns the ignition, and I take the bottle again. The car speeds off on the parkway.
My last wife, Lenka, she was a whore by nature, I think. Yet there was something in her – elusive – that made me happy. Maybe that's what it was – her being a whore. After all, I too am a whore by nature.
She was exceptionally beautiful, it was flattering. I was enormously ambitious but that wasn't the most important thing. She, as it turns out, was right for my love.
My image of love – I admit it now – was and is vulgar in a folksy kind of a way. You know the kind: blonde, slender, seductive girl-lady wearing a hat. And indeed Lenka wore a hat; she also was a poet.
So, what do you expect from a provincial junior poet? Eddie fell head over hills for Lenka. And to be honest, even now my heart skips a beat whenever I glimpse in a crowd a tall, shapely figure wearing a hat.
Life is given to you, go ahead, live!
Oh mother, I'm afraid!
Live! Don't be afraid!
I'm afraid, afraid of yellow drawings, of dusty beams of light, of headaches, of the old people, of pills, of children crying in the morning, of puppies' shit, of a dead bird, and of a broken blue family vase. I'm also afraid of my real surname, of my past's scum, of the letter «p,» of rolled-up blueprints, and of white bread, when it's very, very white.
This is what saves me: hearing; lemons and oranges; a new sunny morning; dad's revolver; fine, well-knit clothes; speeding in a car.
Germany once again devours her own children. Her best, the flower of the nation, its hope. There's blood on Germany's lips; her fingers are bloody. The three were murdered in the jail. Friends, my dear ones, farewell, comrades! We'll lower our black flags. We'll take vengeance on the executioners.
On a horrible gray German morning, they entered the cell, shot them twice, and hanged them. «Don't kill, don't kill, don't kill the unarmed souls in the cell!»
I'm sitting in the window overgrown with wild grapes. I'm sitting and looking at the river some twenty meters away from me.