"I won't," I said. "You'll excuse me, but someone's expecting me."
The blue slippers moved with me beyond the door. In the elevator I heaved a sigh of relief. Motherfucking fool.
I told Levin about our conversation anyway. Out of mischief.
Outwardly David Levin resembles a spy or an agent provocateur from a Soviet popular film. I'm no master at portraits, the most distinctive thing about his physiognomy is his bald spot; only the sides of his head are edged with fuzz. I was not acquainted with him, but I had been told that he was saying filthy things about me behind my back. He's the greatest rumormonger, this Levin. It was Lenya Kosogor, from Volume II of the Gulag, who told me. I was so profoundly indifferent to the whole Russian emigration, old, new, and future, that all I did was laugh. But, to my surprise, when I moved into the hotel Levin stopped me one day and said reproachfully that I was arrogant and didn't want to converse with him. I said that I wasn't arrogant but I was in a hurry now, I would be back in a couple of hours and drop in to see him. I did.
For any Russian with the slightest degree of intelligence, no one else from Russia is an enigma. Thousands of signs show at once what this man is and who he is. Levin gives me the impression of a man who is about to burst into hysterics and start yelling. I know in advance what he'll yell. The next line will go something like this: "Fuck off, bug-eyes, what are you staring at? How would you like to have your peepers pushed out, you goddamn filthy oyster!" This line from the underworld embodies my whole impression of Levin. I don't know the details of his life, but I suspect that he may have done time in the USSR for criminal activity. Or maybe not.
Levin says of himself that he is a journalist. But the articles Levin has published in that same Russkoe Delo are full of shit – statements that in the USSR only KGB agents live in nice new houses, and other fables. Now he says he's a journalist from Moscow, but when I saw him briefly one time in Rome he said he was a journalist from Arkhangelsk. Everything he says about himself is ambiguous. He says, on one hand, that he lived very well in the USSR and when he went on assignment he "flew on Central Committee planes"; on the other, that he suffered from anti-Semitism in the USSR. Now he lives exclusively on money that he gets from Jewish organizations or directly from the synagogue. Which is also welfare, in its way. Once he had an abdominal operation; I think he used his misfortune as a means to pump money from American Jews. I need him like a cunt needs a door. What could be interesting in a fifty-year-old man with bad health, living in a crappy hotel and writing a drama called Adam and Eve, which he bashfully read to me. I told him – also bashfully, I hated to offend even Levin – that this literary form was not congenial to me, and therefore I could not comment on his work. I couldn't tell him that his Adam and Eve was not a literary form but a form of the fucking craziness caused by Western life, which he, like all of us, had entered into when he arrived here. He's still bearing up, others go out of their minds.
In our first conversation Levin slung mud at the whole hotel, all its inhabitants, but it was plain that he felt lousy being alone, and from time to time he attached himself to someone. He attached himself to me too, took me with him to a concert at a synagogue, introduced me to a little Jewish woman who spoke Russian. It was the first time I had attended a service in a synagogue, and I sat through the whole service with interest and reverence, behaved decorously and attentively, whereas Levin jabbered incessantly with a little old lady. I might have entered that world, thanks to Levin, but it was boring to me; the Jewish family dinners to which I would have been invited did not suit my mood. I love gefilte fish and stuffed herring, but I am more drawn to stuffed explosives, to congresses and slogans, as you will presently see. Normality is boring to little Eddie; I shied away from it in Russia, and you won't lure me into a life of sleep and work here. Hell no.
Even after that, Levin came to see me several times. Although I had earnestly implanted in myself a love of my fellow man and believed that all unfortunates must be pitied, although Levin fitted my conception of the "unfortunate man" and I really was sorry for him despite his malice, even so, t had to break off my acquaintance with him. Everything he saw in my room and everything I told him (calculating in advance that he would take it all and multiply and inflate and distort) he managed to exaggerate hyperbolically and foolishly. The portrait of Mao Tse-tung on the wall became my joining the Chinese Party. What the Chinese Party might be I did not know, but I had to curtail the number of Russians, and Levin fell to the curtailment, a poor malicious victim. I say hello to him and sometimes spend half a minute telling him lies. He doesn't believe me, but he listens, and then I go away. "Business," I say, "I've got things to do."
People look pathetic, uprooted from their places, without their accustomed surroundings, without their normal work, dropped to the bottom of life. Once I drove to Long Beach for a swim with the savage Jew Marat Bagrov. He's the man who contrived to hold a counterdemonstration against a demonstration on Fifth Avenue on behalf of the free exit of Jews from the USSR. He came out with the slogans "Stop demagoguery!" and "Help us here!" Well, we went to Long Beach. Marat Bagrov drove a car that was stolen from him the next day, and a former Soviet cycling champion named Nahum and I were the passengers. Our group was to visit two dishwashers who were working there at Long Beach in a home for senior citizens. With hardly a glance into the semibasement rooms where the dishwashers lived – one of them an ex-musician, the other an ex-wheeler-dealer, an expert in smoking fish – I climbed over the fence to the beach to avoid paying the two dollars.
Seagulls, the ocean, a salty fog, hangover. I lay for a long time alone, unaware what world I was in. Later Bagrov-and Nahum came down.
"Fucking emigration!" The thirty-four-year-old ex-champion said it over and over. "When I first arrived in New York I went out to buy a newspaper, I bought Russkoe Delo, and there was your article. It hit me like a hammer. What have I done, I thought, why the fuck did I come here."
He talked and dug a hole in the sand. "Fucking emigration" was his constant refrain. He had already worked at several places. At his last job he had repaired bicycles; along with two other workers, a Puerto Rican and a black, he had organized a strike, demanding equal pay for their work. One of them was paid $2.50 an hour, the second $3.00, and the third $3.50.
"The boss summoned the black, and when he came in, the boss said, 'Why aren't you working, these are working hours,'" Nahum said, still mechanically digging the hole. "The black told the boss he had a doctor's appointment, that was why he had left early today. Then he asked the Puerto Rican why he'd left work early. He got scared too and said he had to go to Social Security today. But I asked the boss why didn't he pay us all equally, when we did the same work…" Nahum was becoming impassioned. "He fired the black, he said, 'You may go.' But I left on my own, I'm working as a welder now – I weld beds, these are very expensive, stylish beds. I weld once, then grind down the joints; if there aren't any holes or blisters, fine, if there are I weld them again and grind them down again. I come home and my hair is full of grit…"
Nahum lives on Broadway, on the West Side; they have a hotel there like ours, where they put Jews. I don't know what the rooms are like but the neighborhood is worse, much tougher.
"Are you fucking your black woman?" Bagrov asked him matter-of-factly.
"Not that one, not anymore," Nahum replied. "She got too brassy. She used to take a five, now it's seven-fifty. That wouldn't matter, but once she knocked at two in the morning, I let her in, 'Let's fuck,' she says. I say let's, but free. 'Free?' she says, 'no way.' So I say, 'I've only got a ten, that's all the money I have.' 'Give me the ten,' she says, 'I'll bring you the change tomorrow and give it to you free.' We fucked and she totally disappeared for a week. And I didn't have any more money. She came back a week later and demanded money in advance, and not a word about the change. 'Get your ass out of here,' I said. And she wails, 'Give me two dollars, I came up here to see you, the doorman opened the door for me and brought me up in the elevator, I promised him two dollars for letting me in.'"