You can recognize them from the back, by a sort of anguished depression in their posture. Although I hardly associate with them, I always recognize them in the elevator. Depression is their distinguishing mark. Between the first and the sixteenth floors they manage to start a conversation with you, inquire whether the new emigres, one and all, will be given American citizenship in honor of the American Bicentennial; perhaps they will ask you to compose a petition to the President in this connection. What the fuck do they want with citizenship? They themselves don't know.
Or the conversation may take the opposite tack:
"Did you hear? In October they're going to let us in!"
"Let us in where?" I asked.
"What do you mean, where? Russia. A pilot defected from the USSR in a fighter plane, now they're going to let us back, to compensate, understand? One defected, and they let two thousand back. Two thousand want to go back. And half the applicants begin by asking to be sent straight from the airplane to prison camp, they want to do time for their crime, for having left the Motherland. But aren't you planning to go back? If they took anybody it would be you. Didn't I hear that you had been published again in both Pravda and Izvestia?"
"Oh, that was a long time ago, back in June," I said. "They translated an excerpt from the Times of London, and even that got distorted. No, I'm not planning on it, what the fuck would I do there? And besides, I'd be ashamed to go back. They'd laugh. I'm not going, I'll never go back."
"You're still young," the man said. "Give it a try, maybe you'll make it here.
"But I'm going," he continued quietly. "I had big ideas over there, you know, I thought much too highly of myself, but when I got here I saw there wasn't a thing I could do. I want peace. Somewhere south of Moscow, a little cabin in the Tula region; catch a few fish, do some hunting, get myself a job teaching in the village school. This is hell," he said. "New York is a city for madmen. I'm going back, I've been knocking around here long enough. They've got no fucking freedom here, just try and say anything bold at work. No fuss, no muss, but you're out on your ear."
He had worked various places, mainly washing dishes. He is getting unemployment, $47 a week. He lives on the West Side in the Eighties, and had come to the hotel to see a friend.
"Do you play chess?" he asked as we said good-bye.
"Can't stand it," I replied.
"Do you drink vodka?"
"That I do," I said, "but not very often anymore."
"You can't drink here," he complained. "In Leningrad, if you had seven hundred grams with a nice snack, you'd be flying around town like you had wings, you'd be on top of the world. Drink here and it just deadens you, or worse. Drop in," he said, "I'll treat you to borscht."
In contrast to me, he makes borscht, using special beets of some sort. They are always complaining that you can't drink here. You can, but it's not the same, the liquor depresses you – I'm thinking of quitting soon.
I used to work for the newspaper Russkoe Delo here in New York, and at that time I was interested in the problems of "the emigration." After my article entitled "Disillusionment," they fired me from the paper, away from temptation. My family was breaking up; my love, which I had considered a Great Love, was in its death throes; I myself was barely alive. All these events were crowned by the bloody twenty-second of February, my veins slashed in the doorway of the fashionable Zoli model agency, where Elena was living at the time, and then a week of life as a bum in downtown Manhattan. When I found myself at the hotel, however, or rather when I woke up there, I suddenly saw that my bad reputation had not died, people were phoning and coming to see me, still firm in their Soviet habit of believing that a journalist could help them. "Come now, folks, I'm no journalist – without a newspaper, without friends or connections." I made every possible effort to wriggle out of these meetings, I told people I couldn't even help myself, but there were still some meetings that I did not succeed in avoiding. Thus, for example, I had to meet with "Uncle Sasha," my acquaintances insisted on it. "You must help him, he's an old man, just talk to him and he'll feel better."
I went to see him in his room. It looked as if he lived with a dog. I glanced around for the dog, but there was none.
"I guess you had a dog?" I asked him.
"No, never," he said, frightened. "You've got me mixed up with someone else."
Mixed up, indeed. Bones, dry biscuits, crusts, food scraps lay on the floor in a solid hard layer, like pebbles on the seashore. The same layer of petrified leftovers lay on the table, the dresser, the windowsill, all horizontal surfaces, even the chair seats. He was an ordinary, plump, pathetic old man with a wrinkled face. I knew that all his life he had written about the sea and sailors. His sea stories had been published in Around the World and other Soviet magazines.
"I've been wanting to meet with you," he said, sighing. "My situation is desperate, I don't know what to do – I miss my wife so much. She's Russian." He indicated a photograph framed under glass; a tired woman gazed out at me.
"Whatever made me come here?" he went on. "I'm not up to learning the language. I live very badly. I was on welfare, two hundred and eighty dollars a month, then I reached pension age and they gave me a pension, only two hundred and eighteen dollars. I received two checks, and as an honest man I went to my Welfare Center and told them, 'Here are the two checks, I don't want the pension, I want welfare. My room costs a hundred and thirty dollars a month, that leaves me only eighty-eight a month for food, I can't get by on that, I'll die of hunger, I have a bad stomach.' I went there in good faith, told them, returned the check. They said, 'There's nothing we can do. By law you have to receive a pension.'" He was practically weeping.
"Why did you come here?" I asked maliciously.
"I always wrote about the sea, you know. The minute a ship came in, I went right down to the ship. The sailors loved me. They told me about all the countries. I wanted to see them. What am I to do?" He glanced into my eyes. "I want to go back to my wife, she's so good." He wept.
"Go to the Soviet embassy in Washington," I told him. "Maybe they'll let you back. But it's impossible to say. Beg, weep. You haven't written anything against them here, have you?"
"No," he said, "just this story about the sea, it's coming out soon in an English-language magazine, but not anti-Soviet, it's about the sea. Listen here, they wouldn't put me away, would they?" he said, taking me by the sleeve.
"Listen, why would they put you away…"
Who the fuck needed him, I wanted to add, and other caustic remarks, but I restrained myself. I had no pity for him. I sat before him on his dirty chair, from which he had wiped the crumbs and dust with his hand. He sat on the bed; his old feet in their blue slippers stuck up in front of me. I found him distasteful – a slovenly, silly old man. I was a man of another generation, and although I myself often sobbed into my own pillow, I wouldn't have given a shit about the emigration if it hadn't been for Elena. The murder of love, a world without love, was terrible to me. But I sat before him thin, mean, and tanned, in jeans and a close-fitting jacket, my little thighs curving out as I sat – a bundle of malice. I might wish for him to become like me and exchange his fears for my malicious horrors, but he could not be like me.
"You think they'll let me in?" he said ingratiatingly.
I was sure they would not, but I had to comfort him. I knew nothing about him except what he himself had told me; he might not be so innocuous as he seemed in his present situation.
"I want to ask you," he said, seeing me get up from the chair, "not to tell anyone about our conversation. Please."