They're first to run and get a new book by a celebrity poet, and you'll meet their swooning eyes if you look into a hall during a concert of any rock group or classical music performance. They study ballet and photography; they're independent and persistent. Though often truly lecherous and very sexy, they can restrain themselves for the sake of duty and family. One can find rare and refined flowers among them – these become courtesans and patrons of arts.
No matter how hard they try to get rid of the Jewish girls through the Auschwitzes and other powerful means, they keep running on the streets of the world's most cosmopolitan cities; their arms up, holding on to the bus handrail, they keep staring mistily at you; they keep giving to you – the Slavic and other nations' youth – their bodies.
An opera was performed. I walked in.
The electric chair – it's unpleasant and painful, and you get butterflies in your stomach as though at school before exams but it doesn't last. It's too bad though they don't show this on TV, and that the reporters don't get to ask questions before the departure to the other world, and that it's too clean and probably too bright from the artificial light.
It's easy to imagine one's own death in that chair-my crying mother (God forbid) brought over from Moscow in 1990, one of my wives (whichever one happens to be there). They shave the back of my head, give me the stinking prison shirt (I wonder if they wash them, or maybe the rich America gives a new shirt each time?). It's shit – death in the electric chair.
It's way better on the battlefield – you plop into the redolent grass and you often have time to say something graceful to your friend and sometimes you even find time to caress your girlfriend's face.
1
Eddie, that's what Kadik called me. Edward, do you remember Kadik? Edik and Kadik, Kadik and Edik, bosom buddies. Kadik – he's mother was a mail-carrier – learned how to play saxophone. He wasn't a bad kid, had his talents. Lidka ruined him. The first cunt he happened on. Was older than he. He ran outside to cry because of her. This was during a drunken wedding.
Borka Khrushkov fucked girls. And you didn't, and you didn't. But now you fuck any girl you meet, and who does Borka Khrushkov fuck? Probably just his wife, or maybe he's in prison, and so he doesn't fuck anyone. Poor Borka Khrushkov.
Edward is gobbling a chicken. It's hard as wood. He puffs and pants, trying his best. He's scratched his throat and has smeared chicken fat all over himself.
It serves him right – he bought it because it was so cheap. Who saw anything cheaper than this? Thirty-eight cents for a pound. It's twice as cheap as any ordinary cheap chicken. Now Edward's stuck. Don't buy cheap meat, gentlemen!
I'm not going to throw it away, I'll eat it up anyway. I'm not some picky American who leaves half a plate of meat and then throws it into the garbage. I come from a country where the wars and misfortunes came in droves this century. I treat food with care. I've never thrown food away. After I'm done eating, a cat or a dog has nothing to lick from my plate. I'm a Russian peasant by nature, as I've mentioned before. This frugality about food comes also from my hungry years in Moscow, it's not just genetic (both of my grandfathers were born in the country). I gnaw on the bones – be it fish or meat bones – I polish them all equally clean, and I never cut the fat out. I eat everything.
I've drawn a woman and put a cross in-between her legs. I was drawing unconsciously but all the arrows were directed at her. A wall of nasty arrows were menacing the naked woman with a cross between her legs while she was helplessly opening her arms. Instead of a head, the woman had a wheel, a depressing wheel.
The sheet of paper was full of horror and terror. Thus I was drawing unconsciously in dark blue ball-point pen while having a lively – jolly even – conversation over the phone with one of my girlfriends.
For some reason I've attached a lonely faucet at the bottom of the wall of arrows – two drops were falling from it. An indecent faucet with a valve.
Ah, Edka the poet. Fine job he has – toppling governments. Yes, it's subtle, it's exciting, it's huge money.
You come into the office, there sits Edka, the bespectacled poet, smiling politely. «Would you like to have a government toppled? How much will you pay?»
And it starts… Ah, Edka the poet from 1st Avenue in New York. Will I live long enough to see this come true, will I be able to?… And the dream is vivid, active, powerful.
Without saying goodbye, like an Englishman, a nervous paleontologist, an ichthyosauruses specialist, left a big, turgid party in a Greenwich Village basement apartment. I too was leaving, and we walked together along a row of houses. This is what he was saying:
«I love the kind of fish whose jaws you can walk right through, and keep walking in its stomach as though it were the State Department.
So that if you were to stroll there with a lady you wouldn't experience any discomfort and you wouldn't need to cling to the walls. Spaciousness is my first criterion for fish.»
With these words, the paleontologist jumped into a cab which just stopped in front of us and whirled away from me forever.
«Steal, steal, steal, take as much as you can barely carry. Heaps, piles, packs, bags, baskets can be taken from Bloomingdale's on bicycles, carts, and trucks to your apartment.
Cologne, a basket of perfume; let it lap there, green, all the hats, all kinds of fur coats, suits, and sweaters. Steal, take it, go ahead rob, have fun, enjoy it! And whatever you can't carry, chuck it into the mud, into the snow. Whatever we aren't taking, cut it up with the razor, so that nobody gets it. Here's a razor, it slips into my hand, go ahead! Wreck everything, put it through a grinder!
«Hit that lamp! Take the umbrella, Jean! Over the chandelier, Philip, frigging hit that mirror!» (Crash, crush!)
«And we were breaking our backs for this, knocking ourselves out, giving up our lives – here, take it! Hey, tear the women's underwear, cut it up both pink and blue. Cover the floor with the panties. See how big they are, Lazar! What a size! Imagine the ass they're for?!»
«We'll trash this department too. Let's dance on these pretty, white nightgowns. The nice middle-class wives fuck in these flannel rags at night and during the day, they put on these robes for their lovers – they show off their cunts when the flaps fly open, how do you like that?»
«Hit this, Karlos! Enrico, give us a hand! Run over here, Juan! It's what you were looking for, oro, gold!!!» (Grrrrr!)
«Let's get some grub in the food section! Want some chocolate? Here, put it into your pocket. Get a whole sack of it. Two sacks».
«Crash the glass!» (Bang!)
«Trash this shit!»
«Pull that rod out and hit this fucking hard!» (Wham! Crash!)
«Push that cunt with a chair – that will stop her from standing up for the bourgeois property!» «Don't kill me, boys!»
«Give it to this bitch. She has to be a manager, or even an owner.»
«Boys, boys! What are you doing? Please, don't!»
«Fuck that made-up bitch, go ahead guys!
It's a long time we've been dirt poor, our pricks smolder from lack of good clean meat!»
«And the pianos, Alexander, together with the outraged people we'll fling the pianos down the steps. They'll use it as firewood.» (Crrrush! Rrrrram!)