We Russians are treated by the hotel the way blacks were treated before Emancipation. Our sheets are changed much less often than the Americans', the carpet on our floor hasn't been cleaned once the whole time I've lived here, it's horrifyingly dirty and dusty. Sometimes an American from across the hall, an old hack who is always pounding his typewriter, comes out in his underpants, takes a broom, and sweeps the carpet vigorously as a form of calisthenics. I keep wanting to tell him not to do it, since he only raises the dust and the carpet stays just as dirty, but I hate to deprive him of the exercise. Sometimes when I get drunk I think the American is an FBI agent assigned to watch me.
They give us the oldest sheets and towels, I clean my own toilet. In brief, we rate at the very bottom.
The hotel staff, I think, considers us useless freeloaders who have come to America – land of honest laborers with crewcuts – to eat them out of house and home. I know all about this. Everyone bitched about parasites in the USSR too, bullshitted about how you had to be useful to society. In Russia the people who bitched were the ones who worked least. I've been a writer for ten years now. It's not my fault that neither state needs my labor. I do my work – where's my money? Both states bullshit about the justice of their systems, but where's my money?
The hotel manager cannot stand me. A benighted lady in glasses, with the Russo-Polish name of Rogoff, she accepted me into the hotel under Edik Brutt's sponsorship. Like shit I needed his sponsorship, when there were plenty of empty rooms in the hotel, God knows who would live in cubicles like these. Mrs. Rogoff has trouble finding fault with me, but she very much wants to. Sometimes she gets a chance. Thus, in the early months I paid for my room twice a month, but after a while she suddenly demanded that I pay a month in advance. Technically she was right, but it was much more convenient for me to pay twice a month, on the days when I got my welfare check. I told her so. "But you can buy white suits and drink champagne, you do have money for that," she said.
I kept trying to think what champagne, what kind of champagne did she have in mind. Sometimes I drank California champagne, most often I did it with my friend Kirill, a young fellow from Leningrad, but how could she know that? We usually drank the champagne in Central Park. Only somewhat later did I recall that when planning for the birthday of my old friend, the artist Khachaturian – the one whose paintings hang in my cubicle – I really had bought a $10 bottle of Soviet champagne and put it in the refrigerator, so that I could take it to the celebration that night. Mrs. Rogoff must have personally checked my refrigerator every day, or else this was done on her instructions by the maid who cleaned (did not clean) my room. "And you're on welfare," Mrs. Rogoff said. "Poor America!" she exclaimed passionately. "I'm the one who's poor, not America," I replied.
The reasons for her hostility to me became fully clear only later. When she took me into the hotel she thought I was a Jew. Then when she got a good look at my chipped blue enamel cross, my only property and adornment, she realized I was not a Jew. A certain Marat Bagrov, formerly of Moscow television, who was still living at the Winslow then, told me Mrs. Rogoff had complained to him about Edik Brutt: He had deceived her and brought in a Russian. Thus, gentlemen, I know firsthand what discrimination is. I'm kidding – the Jews in our hotel live no better than I do. Far more than the fact that I'm not a Jew, I think, Mrs. Rogoff dislikes the fact that I don't look unhappy. Only one thing is required of me – to look unhappy, know my place, and not go around wearing first one suit and then another in sight of astonished spectators. I think she would take great pleasure in looking at me if I were dirty, hunchbacked, and old. It would comfort her. But a welfare recipient in lace shirts and white vests! In the summer, however, I wore white slacks, wooden platform sandals, and a little close-fitting shirt – the absolute minimum. This, too, irritated Mrs. Rogoff. Encountering me once in the elevator she said to me, staring with suspicion at my sandals and bare tanned feet, "You… like… heeppy. Rahssian heeppy," she added without a smile.
"Nyet," I said.
"Da, da," she said firmly.
The rest of the hotel staff treat me passably. The only good relationship I have is with a Japanese, or maybe he's Chinese, I can't tell, but he always smiles at me. I also say hello to an Indian in a turban, he too is attractive in my eyes. All the rest, in varying degrees, have wronged me, and I talk to them only if I am paying a bill or asking for a letter or phone message.
That is how I live. The days roll by one after another; opposite the hotel, on Madison, a whole block of buildings has been almost completely demolished, and an American skyscraper is about to go up. Some of the Jews and half Jews and fake Jews have moved out of the hotel, others have come in their stead. Like the blacks in their Harlem, they find support in communal living; in the evening they pour out on the street and sit by the hotel in the window bays, some swig from bottles in paper bags; they talk about life. If it's cold they gather in the lobby, occupying all the benches, and then the lobby is filled with the buzz and stir of voices. The hotel administration struggles against the communal habits of Soviet emigres, their predilection for gypsy campfires, but without success. It's impossible to force them not to gather, not to sit in front of the hotel. And although their rustic habit of sitting around must scare off potential victims who might suddenly wander into the hotel, the administration seems to have given up on them – what can you do.
I have very few dealings with them. I never stop and visit, confining myself to the words "Good evening!" or "Hi, everybody!" This doesn't mean I think ill of them. But in my lifetime of wandering I have seen such a variety of Russians and Russian Jews – in my view they're one and the same – that they no longer interest me. At times the "Russian" shows through more plainly in Jews than in real Russians.
So I don't stop to visit with them in front of the hotel, I go to my room. What would we talk about – about their misfortunes, about how tired they are, working as cab drivers or whatever. Recently I gave them a "Hi, everybody!" and walked past them, out into New York. Some new fellow, a Georgian Jew by his appearance, or more likely an ethnic Georgian who had masqueraded as a Jew in order to emigrate, shouted after me, "Hey, are you Russian too?"
"By now I've forgotten what I really am," I said, without stopping.
On my way back about two hours later, I passed them again, this time coming in from New York. The same mustachioed, swarthy fellow spotted me and said with an aggrieved air, "Hey, did you get rich or what, that you don't want to stop and talk?" This struck me funny, I had to laugh, but even so I didn't stop, to avoid getting acquainted. I have too many Russian acquaintances as it is. When you yourself are in a lousy fucking situation, you don't much feel like having unfortunate friends and acquaintances. And almost all Russians bear the imprint of misfortune.