"Did you give it to her?" Bagrov asked with interest.
"I did," Nahum said, "but I'll be damned if I'll get involved with her, she has a pimp."
"No, better not," Bagrov said.
"Fucking emigration!" Nahum said.
"We have to steal, rob, kill," I said. "Organize a Russian mafia."
"If I write them a letter," Bagrov said, not listening to me, "the guys back in the Soviet Union, they won't understand a fucking thing. I have this friend, a real sport, he's always dreamed of going to the Olympic games. I'm going to write him that I drove my car to the Montreal Olympics – he'll be so envious. What's more, I wasn't working, I went to Montreal on unemployment."
"You'll never explain it to him – that for all your car and your Montreal you can be up to your ears in shit here. It's impossible to explain," Nahum said. "Fucking emigration!"
"No, you can't explain. And if he came he wouldn't care about Montreal, he'd be sitting in shit too. As for the car, I paid a hundred and fifty for it. A shitbox."
When we finished our swim – they, grown men, turned somersaults in the waves like children, something I, little Eddie, could not stand for long – the sun was already setting and we were the last to leave the beach. We talked about how few people in America go in the water and swim. Most just sit on the beach, or go in up to their knees and splash, whereas in the USSR everyone tries to see who can swim farthest, and overzealous swimmers are fished out by the lifeboats and forced to swim ashore.
"That's the fundamental difference between the Russian character and the American. Maximalism," I said, laughing.
We walked to the dishwashers' house and had a feast in one of their rooms. A feast of two dishwashers, a welder, a man on unemployment, and a man on welfare. A few years ago, had we forgathered in the USSR, we would have been, a poet, a musician, a champion Soviet athlete, a millionaire (one of the dishwashers, Semyon, had had about a million in Russia), and a nationally known television journalist.
"The manager kept an eye on us all day today, he knew we were having company, that's why we couldn't filch as much food as usual," the dishwashers explained. We devoured pressed chicken, talked vivaciously, poured from a half-gallon bottle of whiskey – all in haste, it was already dark and we still had to drive to Manhattan.
The musician was working here to accumulate the money for a ticket to Germany; he wanted to try yet another variant, it might be better there. His violin stood in a corner, carefully wrapped in rags, on top of the case. Washing dishes was hardly contributing to the improvement of his violin technique. Actually, the musician was not entirely sure he wanted to go to Germany. He had a parallel desire to get himself a job as a sailor on a Liberian ship, and for another thing he'd like to go to California.
As a colorful portrayal of what awaited us in the future, one of the dishwashers' colleagues appeared – an old Ukrainian. He received $66 cash a week for the same work. "He's meek, the boss is bleeding him white. Besides, he's already old, he can't work as fast as we can," the dishwashers said, right in front of the old man, not in the least ashamed. He smiled in embarrassment.
We left the hospitable dishwashers and, with the air temperature dropping all the time, set off for New York along the lovely American roads. We drove, raged, cursed, blustered, but soon we would part and each would wake alone with himself.
The Hotel Winslow. I moved in here, supposedly for a month, in order to regain my composure and look around; later on I planned to rent an apartment in the Village or a loft in SoHo. Now I find my own naivete touching. A hundred and thirty – that's all I can pay. For that kind of money the only place I could move to is Avenue C or D. In this respect the Hotel Winslow is a godsend. At least it's central, a saving on transportation; I go everywhere on foot. As for its denizens, well, I don't have to associate with them.
We do have some cultured people in the hotel. Edik Brutt, for example, is a vegetarian and reads all the time, supplements his education. He reads Greek and Latin lyrics and Omar Khayyam, he reads Shakespeare's works and Chinese philosophy, in Russian of course. A kind, quiet little fellow with a mustache, Edik has an American friend, a tall man of about forty who knows many languages. Otherwise he resembles Edik – he does not consort with women, at the age of forty he lives with his mama. This American, by the name of Bant, often takes Edik somewhere to listen to the organ. Cultural entertainment. I wouldn't last five minutes. Edik likes it. I respect him.
Edik was a cameraman in Moscow, or an assistant cameraman. He lives quietly, feeds everyone who comes to see him, lends money – he'd give you his last dollar – and he's on welfare.
Another of our hotel's intellectuals, a tall, fair man of thirty-three, is the poet Zhenya Knikich. That's a typical Leningrad surname – refined. By training he is a philologist, he defended a dissertation on the topic "Dostoevsky's Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Denizens, from the Standpoint of Eccentricity." He cooks kidneys and sausages in his cubicle, which looks out on a dark light-well; on his bed sits the homely American girl who teaches him English; all over the walls there are pieces of paper with expressions written in English, like "I want to work." That statement does not fit the facts, Zhenya doesn't much want to work; at present he is trying to get on welfare. "I am a serious scholar," he tells me. He is, I think; why not? But he and I both understand that his profession as a serious scholar – an expert on Gogol and Dostoevsky, a teacher of aesthetics – is not fucking needed here. What's needed here is serious dishwashers, people who will do the dirty work without any literary reflections. Literature here has its own mafia, art has its own mafia, any form of business has its own mafia.
The Russian emigration has its own mafiosi. Fair-haired Zhenya was unprepared for this, as was I. He worked at Russkoe Delo, as did I in my time, for one of the chief mafiosi of the Russian emigration, Moses Yakovlevich Borodatykh. Mafiosi will never let anyone else get at the feed trough. Fuck no. It's a question of bread, of meat and life, of women. We know all about this: try and break into the Soviet Writers' Union. They'll crush everything. Because it's a question of bread, meat, and cunt. A struggle to the death. For the cunts of the Elenas. It's no joke.
Sometimes I am seized with a cold anger. I look out of my little room at the high-rise walls of the neighboring buildings, at this great and terrible city, and I understand that this is all very serious. It's either the city or me. Either I become that pathetic old Ukrainian who visited my dishwasher friends at our feast – as humiliated and pathetic as we are, he is even more humiliated and pathetic – or else… "Or else" means "win." How? Who the fuck knows – by destroying the city, even. Why should I pity it? It doesn't pity me. Jointly with others, I'm not the only one like this. In any case, my corpse will never be carried out of the Hotel Winslow like a stupid board.
The terrible seriousness, the poignancy, of my position seizes me when I first wake up in the morning. I jump up, drink coffee, wash out of my head the sleepy snatches of pathetic Russian songs and poems and other fragments of a Russian delirium, and sit down to my papers – either my English or something I'm trying to write. I keep glancing out the window. Those buildings make my gorge rise. Cocksuckers! I've taken to swearing a lot here. I'll never make it in this system, I think with anguish, looking down the long and difficult road ahead. But I must give it a try.