«We'll get over this too,» I think listlessly.
I also think that the last time I cut the beets into pieces that were too big – it doesn't look good in a spoon…
Once – all covered by flour – I stayed alone in the kitchen making pelmeni until midnight. The two Latinos, the dishwashers, washed the pans right after I used them. Not a word in English.
«Here, Eduardo, are your future friends, the soldiers. Talk to them,» I told myself. «You're standing face to face with them.» They treated me to their strong coffee. And I poured them some wine that I had stolen. And I let them go early. I left late. Comrade Limonov, the commander.
He's moved, yes, he's moved! Got rid of Hotel Embassy and skid row. Now he's living in an apartment on the East Side, sharing it with a twenty-three-year-old Jewish kid. Our Eduardo has two small rooms. One is his bedroom, the other his study. And though he earns money with occasional dirty work, he has still made a step up the social ladder. He couldn't care a shit for this step, still he made it. It's accomplished.
Though the millionaire's housekeeper helps him, and though his income hardly exceeds $200 a month, still he became a full member of the capitalist society. He acquired a hat, put installed a mirror, spread the housekeeper's rug on the floor, and took her sheets and towels. Some folks gave him a bed, a table; pictures hang on the wall, a lamp shines on the desk. Life stirs again for the umpteenth time.
And on the wall there's an article about Eduardo in an Italian paper, with his picture. «This is just the beginning,» thinks the stubborn fellow, sitting under the article. And he stares out the window onto the cold December.
I met a girl at a party. She never took off her wig and kept adjusting it even when we made love and later when we showered together. Apparently, there was something serious about her hair, or maybe there was no hair at all under the wig. A Bald Diva, so to speak.
She didn't realize that this kind of nonsense hasn't bothered me for a long a time. The important thing is that her body pulled and tugged me towards her. I fucked her for two nights and one day in a row; I even scratched my prick against her until it bled. She had sheafs of pricks dancing in her eyes – she did, this Jewish girl.
During the short intermissions between our love-making we had only enough time to visit her friend at 25th Street – a black photographer, a tired fellow of about forty, a specialist in sado-masochism.
The girl was also a photographer. In her pictures, the nude models are clustered in fuzzy groups, their breasts and pubes bursting with sparks or radiating light.
Decorating my new apartment I've hung, among others, an old picture of Elena sitting naked on a tray, while I'm standing behind her in a National Hero jacket. I sit down on a hot radiator and say:
«This is it, Lenka! After two years I'm not afraid of you anymore. I've hung you on the wall. I've mastered you. I've overcome you, Lenka. You'll hang here as an historic exhibit. Actually, you'll provide an extra benefit to Eddie Limonov, your ex-husband, by encouraging the girls who visit me to become intimate with me. Since Eddie had such a beautiful wife, we have to put out for him – this is what the girls will think. So hang in there, Lenka, and help me even in that way, you bitch, whore…»
Eddie, Eddie baby,
You're a nice guy.
Beautiful and randy,
I love you, you're mine!
The songs we sing together,
The waltzes we dance -
You are tough like leather
The wound in your soul's immense!
– I sang this in conclusion.
«Girls, my dear ones!» On a cold rainy morning, lying under a blanket, just returned home in a leather coat, after taking a cab – he had uttered this aloud, addressing all the girls who have recently appeared around him, most of them twenty two years of age. I addressed those who take off their clothes with me, into whose tender and sensitive slits I insert my tender and sensitive tool and we go on rubbing against each other for a long, long time.
«Girls, my dear ones! You're the only ones I have in this world!» They arrive at my place by subway, wearing cheap nylon jackets in the cold, in the rain and snow, and they go to bed with me. «Please forgive me for something that I myself don't understand!»
Looking through the window: this babe trots along in a white beret, under it a tuft of blond hair. «Aha, coming from the supermarket, you slut. You cocksucking slut!» He thought crudely, feeling happy about his virility and charm, about being in his prime, and of his triumph over the recent horrors.
One day, at dawn, in dry February, I saw a big rust-colored rat on a deserted 5th Avenue. She came out of a hole in the underground (semi-underground) basement of a fashionable store and calmly crossed the avenue. A few days earlier in that icy year, my wife had walked out on me.
I'm vicious, I'm irritable, I'm no good, I'm not interesting. I think a lot about revolution and terrorism, and I think little about reality. I've lived long enough to have gray in my hair but I'm naive, as one girl, Virginia, told me. I'm a dreamer, as another girl said. I've prepared a bad future for myself, I'll come to a bad end, in horrible anguish, as one poet said.
«I'll die in anguish, in a prison or at the gallows,» as I have discovered and become frightened. I have no money, no one supports me. During the evening for the poet Voznesensky at Columbia University, the Russian literature professors stared at the poet's throat, but looked away while shaking my hand.
And yet I'm proud that I'm irritable, I'm proud that I'm vicious. And I'm certain that I'm good, way better than that lot – the narrow, domesticated professors and the tame, domesticated, pseudo-rebellious poets.
Nowadays, I want to be a man who, at night, opens a fence (a car door, castle gates) and says to a shivering youth (a quivering girl): Come in, my friend! (Come in, miss!) It's warm and pleasant in here. Take this gold and live it up.
I used to want to be a shivering youth, getting ready to jump off a bridge, who suddenly accosts a stunningly well-dressed gray-haired man who says: Are you poor? Did your lady abandon you? Stop it! There's no need. Don't kill yourself. Here's money. Take a trip somewhere. Relax. Live it up!
Once, during the usual boring merry-making at the millionaire's house, I ran downstairs, opened the door into the black December garden and stared sadly at the bulging river and at the patterned branches of trees against the troubled sky. There was also a sacramental moon and I was thinking about this lady-girl in a white, almost gossamer dress. She was laughing nervously and dancing with me hysterically, becoming wet through the dress (the sap of desire?). She was enticingly beautiful in her bitch-like, youthful passion – directed towards me, and towards everyone else. Towards the world.
Her hot neck, her long gloves-up to her elbow, smeared with brown grass – it was cold and shivery as we fucked under a tree, as though in a rush. It was a mixture of half-romance and half-pornography…
«Edward!» someone called from upstairs. Edward – that's me. The housekeeper's girlfriend walks up to me. «What are you doing out here alone?» she asked.
It's cold. Sometimes it rains. Today it's cold. It's been a year since – as I understand – I've been under the careful eye of the FBI. After the article carried some time ago by an Italian paper, they – one would think – focused on me even more. For now, it's just for my words and books, not for some subversive acts.