"His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Limonov Edward)

Chapter Two

I often wonder, while sitting in a lawn chair on the roof of our house on weekends, getting tan in the sunshine, reading the newspaper, and sipping a cup of coffee, what would have happened to me, what direction my life would have taken, if I hadn't met Jenny and grabbed on to her with all my might. What would have happened, if, on that rainy spring evening of April 24th, 1977, I hadn't gone with the Russian drunk Tolya to the poetry reading at Queens College where I met Jenny — Jenny, who didn't understand a word of what the Russian poetess Stella Makhmudova was saying, but who was there thanks to a happy conjunction of circumstances. What would have happened? Would I have survived or not?

I don't know. Probably I would have survived without Jenny, although sometimes it seems to me I wouldn't have. Many thanks to Tolya the drunk for coming by the hotel and literally dragging me out of my room. I really didn't want to go way the hell out to Queens College, as I remember, and I complained about it the whole trip.

Finally, after interminable bus and subway changes, we reached that seat of culture, purchased our tickets, and went into the auditorium. As we were looking for empty seats a little closer to the stage, I suddenly heard someone calling to me, "Edik! Edik!"

Looking around, I saw Vadimov, who, according to all my calculations, should have been in Russia. I walked over. With Vadimov were the ballet superstar Lodyzhnikov and a girl. The girl was sitting on Lodyzhnikov's right. A girl in a knitted sweater. A large girl. That's about all I noticed. Also that she had rather full lips, commonly called sensual, and a large, ridiculous gap between her teeth. There was something funny about her. Probably Irish, I thought for some reason. I spoke with Vadimov and Lodyzhnikov, and listened as she asked Lodyzhnikov about something. I decided she was the latest of Lodyzhnikov's girlfriends. He had a lot, none of them lasting very long.

It turned out that Vadimov was Makhmudova's husband. Vadimov had been the husband of a number of famous or beautiful women in the Soviet Union. That was his second profession, or perhaps his first, if you like. He was also a stage designer — by birth, I think. And now they were visiting America. A degree was supposed to be conferred on the poetess in recognition of the fact that the American Academy of Arts and Letters had made her an honorary member. She was forty years old, and she started out every morning with a headache and a hangover. In her past were a great many amorous adventures, just like Vadimov; she had been married to or the mistress of many of Russia's most famous men — poets and writers. And now she was married to an artist.

The auditorium noisily hummed and rustled as it waited for Makhmudova's entrance. Whatever you may say about her, she was considered to be Russia's number one woman poet. Old Russian ladies, Russian clods and nincompoops, and losers like Tolya and me had all come to hear her. Also represented in great numbers was the Russian-Jewish cultural aristocracy, a sort of international elite which had not forgotten the Russian language, or so it thought. They sat in the front rows, of course. I spotted people from two or three influential New York magazines, several wealthy widows, and a man from Odessa whom the great poet Volodya Mayakovsky had once called "Little Entente," a name that "Little Entente" was very proud of. A cunning and pushy little fat man with red hair, the energetic "Little Entente" had made a fortune during the NEP period in Russia and gotten even richer here. He could, it was said, make money out of thin air. Just how much he understood about poetry remained an open question, however, especially in view of the fact that his hearing was bad. Actually, those people had all come there not out of any real love for poetry but rather to demonstrate their affiliation with culture. It didn't matter if it was Russian culture or even something as remote from them as Chinese culture, as long as it was Culture. It's the fashion in the United States now to be cultured, to go to classical music concerts or to the opera or ballet, and they all go; they're all cultured. If some fanatical practice, say scourging rituals, were suddenly to become the rage, I have no doubt they would all abandon themselves to the practice along with all the other members of bourgeois society.

It's only thanks to those big and little ententes that, for example, someone like Lodyzhnikov can even exist, I thought to myself, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. His art is ballet, which is in fashion among the bourgeoisie now, among the fat cats, so he's a superstar and rakes it in hand over fist. As little as twenty years ago he would barely have been able to make a living dancing in America. Twenty years ago it wasn't fashionable to go to the ballet. How the bourgeoisie spent its evenings then, I couldn't say. Probably they went to Broadway musicals. I don't know. I don't like ballet. It's contemporary life I'm crazy about, and all those sleeping beauties so dear to the hearts of the ruling classes both here in the US of A and there in the U of SSR (and, really, why is that?) irritate me with their sugariness. Just look at the dancers' thighs. If ballet does have a place today, then in my opinion it's the same one the stereograph has — in the wing of a history museum.

The poetess finally made her entrance. Dressed entirely in black. Although not in a black dress, but in black velvet pants, black boots, and a black jacket that failed to conceal her rather ample bosom. Her style of reading has always seemed vulgar and saccharine to me. She belonged to the generation of stern and staunch young Soviet men and women (as they saw them-selves), the generation that had dared to enter the fray against falsehood at the beginning of the sixties. These youths — her friends, husbands, and lovers — thought it was possible to play the role of poet "in between" — in between trips to Paris and sprees at the House of Litterateurs and writing prose and verse that gave the finger to the authorities, but on the sly. Their great example, the one they chose themselves, was Pasternak, a talented poet but a timid man, confused and servile, a country philosopher, a lover of fresh air, old books, and the easy life. I, who feel like vomiting whenever I see a library, despise Pasternak. Yes.

But let's return to the poetess and the stern youths. The stern, uncompromising youths, reading their stern poems about the evils of making a career, or suddenly kicking in print the long-dead bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin, or full of indignation that somebody is beating a woman, were greeted with cheers by readers no different from themselves. Brusquely adjusting their sport coats or nylon jackets and carelessly pushing back their hair with manly gestures, the poets hurled their cant at university auditoriums overflowing with nincompoops, and the auditoriums burst into applause. The poets of that generation had tremendous followings. And then they suddenly lost permission for a long time to make their customary trips to Paris, or their books were published in editions of only a hundred thousand copies, instead of five hundred thousand or a million. And when those awful things happened, the world community at once stood up for them.

The years had passed, but there she was, a stern young girl of that generation. She was reading a poem about the poetess Tsvetaeva, who had killed herself in the provincial town of Elabuga, who had hanged herself. Well, such are the current idols of the Russian intelligentsia — the timid coward Pasternak, and Mandelstam, who died next to a prison camp garbage can where he had been foraging for leftovers, Mandelstam driven mad with fear, and the hanged Tsvetaeva. If only one of them had been a wolf and had died shooting back, had died with a bullet in his brain, but at least after taking a couple of the bastards with him. I'm ashamed for Russian literature.

Makhmudova had come. She was reading poems that had been written fifteen years before. She had come. They had elected her to the Academy. But why, if she hadn't hanged herself? You can't elect a hanged poetess to the Academy. It isn't nice. But why didn't you hang yourself? I wondered. Something, I don't know what, but something should have happened to you. Why didn't it?

The rebellious stern youth, the "bad boys" of Russian literature as they are still called by others just as "rebellious," the liberal American critics, those rebellious youth were punished for their virtues by the Soviet authorities — punished with dachas, apartments, money, and large editions of their books. Accept your Academy election, stern girl. The stern boys, approaching fifty now, have worn out their pricks with rubbing, from sticking them in the eager twats of their countless young admirers. Even when I was a kid, I used to think lustful thoughts about Stella Makhmudova, Russia's number one poetical cunt.

God, the stuff she was reading! Long-dead verses that reeked of insincerity and posing. And of course there was something about Pasternak, too. Pasternak, that obliging fellow who had translated from every conceivable language a whole book of "Songs about Stalin," had obviously once made a very considerable impression on the young Makhmudova. That coward whose only slip-up had been a decision that it wasn't necessary to cower anymore, and who had therefore written and published abroad his sentimental masterpiece Dr.Zhivago, that hymn to the cowardice of the Russian intelligentsia. But he was deceived; it was still necessary to cower. And it scared him to death.

Vadimov was whispering something to me in an apologetic tone about how only the older poetry of his wife had been translated. "She's writing some very good things now, unusual poems," he told me, leaning in my direction, although I hadn't said anything either about new poems or about old ones. Maybe my face betrayed my thoughts.

"Sure," I said, "poets always like the new things better."

It was just a meaningless phrase. Obviously I couldn't tell Vadimov what I really thought of his wife and her poetry. When it comes down to it, I always feel sorry for people, and I couldn't tell the stern young girl that she hasn't been a stern young girl for quite a while now, but is just a sad middle-aged broad with big tits. And a fat belly. I'm sure if you took off her skin-tight pants, you'd find red marks where they cut into her belly. That whole generation went terribly wrong somewhere, and none of them has left behind a bloody track from his wounds. Everything was superficial, not really serious, done merely for "points."

The girl sitting on Lodyzhnikov's right kept asking him about something from time to time. He answered her, but I couldn't hear what it was. Only later did Jenny tell me what they had been talking about. It turned out she had asked Lodyzhnikov after I turned up who "that person" was ("You seemed funny to me, Edward"), and Lodyzhnikov had answered, "Oh, just another Russian!" The bastard! He knew I was a long way from being just another Russian. He'd read my first novel in manuscript and hadn't been able to put it down, had even taken it with him to rehearsal to read during breaks. My novel had shocked and impressed him, just as it later impressed Efimenkov. But Efimenkov was more honest. Another Russian! Don't be ridiculous!

Lodyzhnikov is a snob. Money made him one. He mainly associates with rich old ladies from Park and Fifth Avenues and with celebrities like himself. He fled Russia a penniless youth, the same as we all were then, but now he has millions. I haven't counted his money, but I think for just going on stage he gets from four to seven thousand dollars. Imagine, for one appearance alone! There's something grotesquely unfair about that. Even if he dances better than anybody else in the world, why should he get so much? Isn't the fame enough? Isn't it enough that his picture's in all the world's newspapers and magazines? Seven thousand dollars for one evening! There are families that can't even earn that kind of money after a whole year of hard work.

I know many dancers who do a completely different kind of dancing, not classical but contemporary ballet. Since that art is vital, the bourgeoisie doesn't support it; it only likes what's moribund and innocuous, and those dancers therefore haven't got a penny. To see them, you have to go not to the Metropolitan Opera, but to dark little theaters with slanting ceilings and peeling walls somewhere way the hell off-off-Off-Broadway or on the Lower East Side, or some place like that.

No doubt Lodyzhnikov is a decent fellow. I don't believe he's a mean or bad person. But he doesn't give a shit about the rest of the world and its poverty. Lodyzhnikov takes an animal pleasure in his fame and money, every day becoming, in the company of his rich old ladies, more and more of a snob. He's acquiring their habits too. For example, he has three dogs and two cats. What does he, a man in his "early thirties" living by himself, need with a litter of dogs and cats?

Give the money to the poor, you bastard! I thought ironically as I watched him.

I know I'm jealous of him. And I'm not ashamed of it, because I have a right to be. I'm more talented than he is; I know that too, although it has been enormously difficult for me. He's lying to himself when he says I'm just another Russian. He has always singled me out from the others. That I'm sure of. He's even afraid to associate with me, as mutual friends have told me. "He'll put me in his next book," Lodyzhnikov said to them. Actually, I wouldn't "put him in," since he's not right for the hero of a book; he's an ordinary creature, even though a superstar. It's television and the newspapers that make all these celebrities so important, whereas in real life they're usually shy and uninteresting little nothings. It's rare to find a real human being among them.

After the poetess had finished reading, there was a party given in her honor by Queens College at which I drank a lot and out of boredom shared several joints with Vadimov, who desperately wanted to be contemporary and American. I wasted quite a few joints on Vadimov and some other bumpkins, in fact, and the poetess smoked a couple too, but Lodyzhnikov turned them down; he was looking out for his body. Some crazy old couple took me for Lodyzhnikov and asked for my autograph. I thought it was hilarious, but Lodyzhnikov didn't, for some reason.

I knew from experience that if I wanted to continue the evening's entertainment, and it was still pretty early, I'd have to be pushy about it. And that meant I'd have to invite myself along with the rest of the company to supper or wherever else they were going. And so, like an experienced outsider, I attached myself to Vadimov and resolved not to let him out of my sight. I followed him everywhere until I was sure he wasn't trying to get rid of me and would take me wherever he was going. It turned out that the girl (Jenny) who had been sitting with Lodyzhnikov and Vadimov had already left, had gone home to the house where Makhmudova and her husband, Vadimov, were staying, and where they were all going to have supper. I wanted to have supper too, and so I took the bull by the horns and said I would go in the same car with them, justifying my persistence with a few mumbled words about my feeling for Vadimov and the poetess. It was a lie. I just didn't want to go back to my hotel on Broadway and the filth and the stench and the loneliness.

Finally, after we had succeeded in wresting the poetess from her crowd of Russian and non-Russian admirers, we squeezed ourselves into Professor Barth's car, the same Jon Barth who would later escort Efimenkov and who in such situations was always on the very best of terms with Soviet writers — their guide and friend. «We» in this case meant Lodyzhnikov, Makhmudova, Vadimov, and I. The car set off down the road, while Makhmudova's admirers gaped and waved.

The professor's car happily chewed up the miles, and then, after about a half hour's drive, we came to a halt, emerging into the darkness and entering an open door, and thus began what was to be perhaps one of the most important events of my life. I found myself in the multimillionaire's little house, as I would call it later. Entering, of course, I didn't have the least suspicion that my subsequent fate would be tied up for several years with that house and its inhabitants or that I would live there. No, I didn't sense anything of the sort. It was dark, and I was stoned and drunk; after all, you've got to cheer yourself up a bit in this world to keep from drifting away out of depression and boredom.

I brutally abandoned Tolya the drunk that evening, although it was in fact he who had gotten me started on that journey in the first place. There was only one place left in the car — for me. "Bolivar can't carry two." Having played his part as an instrument of fate, he vanishes from the stage. Forgive me, Tolya.

The first thing I saw was the kitchen. Wide, like a dance hall. With a huge gas stove, as in a restaurant. With a thousand components, appliances, jars, boxes, counters, and shelves. It's difficult now to say whether I noticed all that abundance then, or whether it was simply the kitchen's sheer scale that impressed me; after all, I was stoned. And then I saw the dining room where the young girl Jenny, getting tangled in her long skirt, was preparing an American-style supper — putting out plates and knives and forks and numerous other things whose function was beyond me.

The poetess, out of Russian generosity (something that has always seemed suspect to me, even though I'm a Russian myself; it's more a lack of character than generosity), had invited some thirty people to dinner, which naturally shocked Jenny, although she had the good manners not to say anything about it. Several people helped her add a leaf to the table, which though large, still wasn't big enough for all that fraternity.

Above the table hung a spiral chandelier made of dark copper and no doubt very old, an elaborate structure of tubes and lamps that looked like the coiffure of a seventeenth century lady of fashion or a hat from a picture by Picasso. On one wall stood a high, open buffet with plates and dishes standing on end and painted with fishes, the various fishes of freshwater America, obviously. Depicted on the largest of them was an enormous pike. On another wall of the dining room stood a small old cupboard, and above it hung a painting, old too, with its surface even cracked in places, depicting a plenitude of different foods, from meat to fruit. A third wall was covered from end to end with the wooden lattices of windows and a doorway opening out onto the garden of the millionaire's house. Imagine, a garden!

It was all the more impressive for me, since at the time I was residing at a dirt-cheap hotel on Broadway in the nineties, a place where fires burned. That same April several rooms near mine on the tenth floor had been completely gutted, and I remember running down the hall with a suitcase containing my manuscripts under one arm and my white suit dangling from the other. Just think — after a hotel where the drunks urinated in the elevator and where they vomited too, where the stench of urine and excrement was never aired out of the filthy rugs, where it seemed that the inhabitants never slept and where at four o'clock in the morning they were still swearing at each other from window to window across the squalid courtyard, where trash and empty bottles were simply chucked out of the windows, and where the police visited every day; after a hotel like that, you suddenly find yourself in a house with a garden. And a garden, as you later discover, that faces the river. That faces the river directly, and what could be more natural than that? And in the garden are trees and birds — as if you weren't in New York at all. And among the other houses facing the garden stands one that a couple of years before had belonged to Onassis, and next door is another that belongs, you are told, to a woman everybody calls "Mrs. Five Hundred Million." And among all those houses, Jenny's is by no means the worst, but one of the best.

At the time, obviously because we were keeping her from setting the table, Jenny had the door to the garden open, and I walked out into it with Lodyzhnikov and Vadimov and nearly went out of my mind from the fragrance of April grass recently and abundantly watered by the spring rain, and from the leadenly turbid East River with its whirlpools made by the huge ship or, more likely, barge that was floating silently and ominously by while Vadimov told me about some mutual Moscow acquaintances who, unfortunately, didn't interest me in the least, and Lodyzhnikov disdainfully interjected something in that skeptical way typical of people who are very successful but shy. I didn't hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Not far off the lights of a huge bridge shone like a Christmas tree, and on the other side of the river the cars were moving quietly and enigmatically along narrow little roads, while above a full moon had come out in the suddenly clearing sky. An immense tree in the center of the garden was still dripping with rain when we went back inside the house. It was a life so different that it seemed like another planet. I had sobered up.

Of that whole evening and of the "Russian party," as Jenny and I would later call it, I remember only the insane crush and the faces of a great many people who remained nameless, then as now. I remember too that I was very excited. After living for years in crappy, shit-smelling hotels, I was excited by the light and the talk and the food, although I was too excited to eat. Besides "Jenny's House" (one and the same for me then), there was yet another reason for my excitement. If only for an evening, I was again able to be what I am — a poet and writer. And although I valued only two or three people in that whole crowd, I was still myself again, and not that denizen of the benches of Central Park, that sullen, lonely Broadway transient with a knife in his boot who patronized pornographic movie theaters, that failure and half-dumb person who barely understood English. And so I was grateful to that crowd.

I remember that I helped Jenny clear the table afterwards, and I remember that I sat to her right (she was at the head of the table) and that I tried to talk to her, and that she gladly responded to me with amused curiosity. And I remember too that her front teeth with the large gap between them prompted a feeling of tenderness in me. I asked Vadimov, who sat next to me, where Jenny's parents were, why they were absent. "She lives here by herself," Vadimov answered curtly; he was talking to a beautiful woman sitting across from him, and I had distracted him. I had learned something about Jenny from my conversation with her, that her grandmother was a Pole, for example, but my impression of her, thanks to my rudimentary and slipshod knowledge of English, the alcohol (I had had more to drink), and the joints (I had more than enough of them that evening), was rather impressionistic and intuitive, although even in a normal state I'm more intuitive than reflective. And I sensed intuitively that it was very good for me there, and that I wasn't going to leave that house and its strange new life that day, that I shouldn't leave it, whatever the cost.

Jenny's girlfriend Jennifer, a somewhat heavy, pug-nosed brunette, sat across the table from me. She was dressed in dark, wide pants and something embroidered with tassels, and something else that was dark and shawl-like, as a result of which I concluded she was from Turkey. Jennifer smiled at me the whole time, probably because I was comical, a drunk and stoned Russian, but I noticed that evening that they, that is, Jenny and Jennifer, gradually began to take me more seriously, perhaps because I was interested in them, and talked to them instead of to the Russians, and moreover helped them clear the table.

There were only two characters, Jenny and me, in the evening's concluding scene, which took place in the kitchen. I found a last joint in my pocket, to which Jenny reacted with unaffected pleasure. When I told her I had had dozens of them before that and had smoked them with the Russians, she was even a bit miffed. "Why didn't you give some to me?" she asked. I told her apologetically that I didn't understand myself how it had happened that she wasn't there when I was smoking the joints and passing them out, but that I wasn't being greedy; I just hadn't realized she smoked grass. Jenny informed me she had been smoking it for eleven years and answered my excuses with feigned severity. I could tell she was just kidding me; my English was so awful it made me look ridiculous. We smoked the joint.

There's a lot of the muzhik in me, and when I'm stoned it slips out into the light of day in all its abundance and often its vulgarity. I started grabbing her, and after stroking her hair I moved on to her arms and breasts, and then I started kissing her neck, and even though she laughingly pushed me away, it was obvious and understandable that our love play was not unpleasant for her, and it continued. She wouldn't let me put my hand very far under her dress, but she did let me stroke her large and beautiful legs and kiss her. I realized later that Jenny was perhaps an inch taller than I was, and when she wore high heels, she towered over me, but I still liked her to wear them — she looked imposing and a little ridiculous, with her soft round ass swinging back and forth and her long arms and legs that made her look like a woman in a Mannerist painting.

I don't know how long our love games continued, but laughing and looking me in the eye, she suddenly said, "I know what you want. You want to stay here and fuck me."

I'll admit I never expected such a declaration from a girl I barely knew, but delighted by her candor, I boldly and shamelessly announced that yes, I did want to, and that for all she knew maybe I loved her. Jenny said she could hardly believe that I loved her, since I didn't know her at all, but as to my wanting to fuck her — that she could believe, but it was already very late and she had to get up early and go to the airport the next morning. She was leaving New York for two weeks.

I certainly didn't want to leave. And I went on grabbing her the same way the peasants (to continue the art comparisons) grab their wives in Dutch paintings — just the way it probably ought to be between a man and a woman, once you get past the well-bred grimacing and prancing that civilization requires of us. Which is why I like marijuana. It doesn't increase my sexual potential, but it does take away my veneer of education and good manners, so that there's nothing left but a naked Russian lad.

We fooled around like that for a while, and she particularly liked it when I stroked her hair, or her head, if you like. But she continued insisting that I go home — it was already three in the morning, and the poetess and Vadimov were already sound asleep somewhere upstairs. I didn't want to go and quietly resisted, becoming alarmed only when she threatened to call the police.

"I'm calling the police," she said, and went to the telephone in the kitchen corner.

"The police don't scare me," I said.

"Then I'll tell them you tried to rape me," she announced with a giggle and, wiggling her ass, started dialing the number.

She actually could be calling the damn police, I thought.

"OK, I'm going, I'm leaving, but give me your phone number and maybe I'll give you a call when you get back and we can get together?"

"Fine, fine," she said, obviously genuinely tired and anxious to go to bed. And after writing her number down on a piece of yellow paper, she gave it to me.

"Or maybe I should stay?" I said, twirling my umbrella in the doorway.

"I really am going to call the police," she said, getting angry and moving towards the phone.

"I'm leaving, I'm leaving," I hastily agreed, and then after adding uncertainly, "I'll see you," I shut the door behind me.

That night in the elevator at my hotel a well-dressed souteneur, or pimp, as the locals say, tried to talk me into coming to him whenever I needed a girl or drugs. "If you're ready to spend twenty dollars, drop by; I have very nice girls — at any time of night. I'm in 532." Although the pimp was fancily dressed and I myself was wearing a velvet jacket, both of us were on welfare, and the elevator had just been used to take the garbage from the top floors downstairs to the basement and stank from the reddish slop that had seeped into the depressions of its old floor.

And now I'll tell you something that will probably make you despise me — my relationship with Jenny began as the result of a colossal mistake on my part. Unable to distinguish among the different faces and types found in the land of America, I took the housekeeper Jenny for the mistress, for the owner. I decided she was the mistress of the millionaire's house, and living there by herself, a wealthy heiress, while her parents were traveling abroad or residing somewhere deep in the American continent, eccentrically preferring the prairies of Texas or the mountains of Colorado to that little garden on the East River. I wanted, I'll admit, to worm my way into the house, of course I wanted to, and the thought of eventually marrying that rich girl also crossed my mind — to such things are we humiliated paupers driven by the circumstances of our lives. It was with that delusion that I called her from a phone booth one rainy day in May, and to my surprise, she invited me over. I had been sure she wouldn't want to see me.

Ah, dear Jenny, maybe you had your own reasons for taking in an unemployed foreign poet fifteen years your senior. Maybe you were satisfying your own inferiority complex, the complex of a housekeeper, by taking a poet for one of your lovers, even if he was a Russian poet.

But even if that's true, what difference does it make. The fact remains that you provided me with food and drink and gave me your body at a most difficult time in my life, and that that was enough to quiet and confound my proud soul, my proud and bitter soul, and to make me think, even with a kind of disappointment, that here was Jenny who for some reason didn't act like other people, who didn't keep it all for herself, but shared with others.

Yes, it all began with a mistake. Vadimov obviously didn't have any idea himself in the beginning who Jenny was — his English wasn't any better than mine — and when he did realize, it was too late to tell me; he had already gone back to Russia. I remember that Jenny mentioned Steven's name a lot in the first days of our acquaintance, although not long ago I found in my diary the following entry for that time: "Jenny's busy today, the little bitch; she has company, the sister of her music teacher Steven, or whoever the fuck he is." You can imagine how approximate my knowledge of English was if I took Steven for a music teacher. He was in fact the one who commissioned music! My guess now is that Jenny had obviously used the word «master» in the sense of "boss," and I had taken it to mean "teacher." Idiot! I called her a "little bitch" because I still didn't trust her. I didn't trust anybody then, nor do I now. There was only one person I ever had any faith in, and that was Jenny.

I showed up at her place after work. I had gotten a job for a few days painting the wall of an office on 42nd Street a disgusting yellow color. I remember that I walked along happily, almost rejoicing from awareness that I was on my way to the house of a rich girl and that she wanted to see me.

Jenny, clean, calm, contented, was sitting in the "solarium," although I didn't know then that that was what it was called. She was listening to music, calm, well-fed, old music, Vivaldi perhaps. She sat me down across from her on another green sofa with only a transparent plastic table between us, and we started talking. Or rather she asked me about my life, and I, getting confused and embarrassed, tried both to speak coherent English and somehow to make myself more interesting. I made up a lot of lies about myself, some of which I was able to put right later by referring to my then poor knowledge of the language, while others have remained uncorrected to this day, but I was, as I recall, very afraid that she would think I wasn't worth the effort and wouldn't want to see me anymore. In my pocket I had seventy-five dollars I had borrowed specifically for the occasion, and I involuntarily kept checking it, I think.

What did I talk to her about? I suddenly realized that in spite of myself, I wanted to make her feel sorry for me, and I remember that in telling her about my life, I mentioned my second wife, Anna, who had gone crazy, and my last wife, Elena, who had left me here because I didn't have any money. "Because of money" made an impression on Jenny; she even started blinking very fast and angrily muttered, "The bitch!" Inspired, and sensing in my bones that there wasn't very much time left and that if I didn't succeed in getting her interested in the next hour or so, I probably wouldn't have another chance like that again in my life, I informed her with fateful resolve that no one had ever loved me in my whole life, that my mother hadn't lived with me, but had left my father and me when I was only two, and that I had lived among soldiers until I was fifteen and had been raised by them. I sat there and told inspired lies about myself while looking out into the garden, where it was green and deserted and where a child's swing was swaying slowly and temptingly in the breeze. It's a good thing my super-decent mama couldn't hear, my mother who in almost forty years of living with my father had probably spent not even a single evening outside the house. Forgive me, Mama, but you wouldn't have wanted your son to perish, would you?

Mechanically staring into the garden, I clumsily struggled to pronounce the difficult English words, hurrying and stumbling over them, and wishing I had a glass of wine, some vodka, a joint — anything that would have relaxed me and helped me to make up even more and better stories. Watching her face, I had the sense that it wasn't working, that I was boring her, since she had grown very quiet and thoughtful, and was sitting there without moving, leaning back on the green sofa and lightly pulling with one hand at the strands of her chestnut hair parted on the side, her carefully washed chestnut hair. And she was moving her foot a little too — she was barefoot, and why not, with such soft carpets and such brilliantly polished parquet. I thought it wasn't working, but I was in fact saying then the full one hundred percent of what she needed to hear, she, Jenny Jackson, an American girl with English, Irish, and Polish blood in her veins. The point is, gentlemen, that she was unbelievably softhearted. But I only found that out later. I didn't know it then, and that's why those first hours with her have remained so painful a memory.

I blurted out all those admissions and then was suddenly quiet, physically aware, sensing it instinctively, that the sky in the garden was turning a dark blue. There was so much sky in her garden. And it was turning a dark blue and then graying and darkening.

Jenny sat half-turned toward me, wearing that evening the dress that I came to prefer over all her others, a dress with a little hood and narrow, very narrow gray-black stripes, a wide skirt that reached down below her knees, and a tight-fitting bodice — very pretty. She sat half-turned toward me and said nothing. Then suddenly she whispered, "Poor thing!" and faced me. A tear was rolling down her cheek.

Success! During the pause I had managed to conceive a hatred both for her mansion and for her "rich and idle" person, and in the infinite despair of my thoughts in that moment had already consigned the house and the garden to wholesale pillage, filling the place with my mythical comrades-in-revolution — I could already hear their footsteps and voices and the clank of their weapons.

"Poor thing." Even though I had lied about some things, it still referred to me. But wasn't I a "poor thing" in fact? I was. That meant she understood, that meant she was a human being, however unexpected and strange that was.

But poor Edward wasn't able to rejoice in his victory; he was too exhausted from an effort that had exceeded his strength. I remember dropping my arms to my knees and staring at the green rug, never imagining that more than once in the future I would have to vacuum it and even from time to time fuck members of the opposite sex on it when I was too impatient to go to my room… And not long ago I happened to find on that same green rug the doming, watches, bracelets, rings, and undergarments of a certain lady and my boss, Steven Grey, but not the owners themselves… That all happened much later, however. On that May evening, as we were sitting there, the tear still rolling down Jenny's cheek, the doorbell rang, or rather it chimed, and sniffing like a baby, she said, "That's my sister," and went to open the door.

Sister Debby had brought a saxophone with her; she played the saxophone, as it turned out — little sister Debby, that is. The saxophone was placed on its legs there in the solarium next to a barrel organ and a music box — in the music corner. Sister Debby didn't resemble sister Jenny at all. She was very slender, with short black hair and olive skin, and thanks to her gaudily painted lips and eyes, she looked like a hoodlum and older than her seventeen years. Sister Debby had come up from Virginia, where the whole family lived, as it turned out — the first reliable information I got then. It also turned out that besides Debby, Jenny had three other sisters and five brothers.

"God," I said. "You're like Latin Americans; they're the ones who're supposed to have such big families."

"Ten children is really good," Jenny said. "You have somebody to play with when you're little and somebody to share your troubles with. An only child is always unhappy and lonely. You left Russia, Edward, and now your parents are all by themselves." Saying this, Jenny looked at me significantly and then continued. "If they had had more children, they wouldn't be so lonely now." Jenny was very sensible, it turned out.

That evening the three of us went out together. "Let's go somewhere for a drink," Jenny said carelessly. "Debby's tired of Virginia; she wants to go out."

"Of course, let's go out," I said, although inwardly I was terrified about what I would do if I didn't have enough money. But it was impossible to refuse, even though I would gladly have bought a bottle and drunk it there at home; that's what I always did.

And so we went out. The slender and insolently vulgar Debby put on a gray poncho, and I had on a checked jacket that the above-mentioned Tolya had once given me for nothing and that I had shortened and taken in, and a black cap from Paris I was very proud of that still had the label "Enchanted Hunter" in it. I had bought it for $1.25 at a used clothing store on the Lower East Side. Over her pretty little dress Jenny wore a long knitted cardigan with little knitted balls dangling from strings.

Once outside I took Jenny by the hand, and she walked along obediently without removing her hand, although she was in fact leading the way, not I. As a resident of the Upper West Side, I didn't know very much about their wealthy East. After we had looked into several small restaurants, our attention was drawn, I remember, to a crowded out-of-the-way place paneled in old wood where, however, a famous old harpist performed. We took our seats next to the stage, from which die harpist, who had a good figure but also the look of an outright lesbian and sadist, gazed amiably at the sisters from time to time. It was then that I learned of the existence of the drink called "tequila sunrise," which the sisters ordered, while I drank my customary J amp; B, a habit I'll probably keep until the end of my days. You have to have something to fall back on when people say, "What will you have?" and you're supposed to have a favorite drink. Well, I drink J amp; B.

Naturally the harpist started talking to the girls during the intermission, while a lanky, though suspiciously cultivated and considerate waiter addressed a few silly remarks to me I don't remember anymore. We eventually drank a fair amount there, and after Jenny and I had sufficiently stroked and squeezed each other's hands, and nudged each other with our knees under the table, and exchanged other displays of affection of the sort that are appropriate in public places, and the harpist had started to cover her harp with its case, Debby announced that it was time to leave, as indeed it was, and we tumbled out onto the street. I had enough money; the sisters didn't want to eat, thank God — or thanks to them, since maybe they just pretended not to.

For some reason we all laughed a lot on the way home, and Jenny ran away from me down the street, her cardigan flying behind her, and when I caught her, the little knitted balls on the strings were all rapidly swinging. I tried to kiss her, but she moved away from me, yelling something about Russians and how shameless her Polish grandmother said they all were, but she didn't move away very far. Debby, who was following behind, smiled a grown-up smile at all the commotion we were making.

After we got back to the house, Debby immediately went off to bed, while I sat with Jenny for another hour or so, kissing her again and putting my hands under her dress and taking hold of her legs, her belly, and her panties…

She wouldn't let me. She wouldn't give in. I wasn't very insistent. I realized with Jenny it was better not to hurry; it would all happen in time. Of course, I would have preferred to fuck her then — I really wanted to — but I was afraid of pressuring her even a little; she might get scared and not want to see me anymore. But I left in excellent spirits, happy and exhilarated — the adventurer after a successfully concluded operation.

I called her the next day. Not too early, though I woke up very early myself and wanted to call her at once. I didn't have anything else to do anyway. My sole occupation then was to get up at eight after sleeping badly, collect my things — books and notebooks — in a plastic bag, and set off for Central Park to lie in the sun and read, given the fact that the park was only a few short blocks away. Lying there on the grass in my underpants among people as unlucky or crazy as I was, I tortured myself with books, teaching and coaching myself by reading my first English books with a dictionary. The selection was very strange: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which had just come out in paperback, and a book with a green cover by Che Guevara called Episodes of the Revolutionary War, which I'd swiped from somebody. I still have those books, and when I leaf through them on occasion, I unfailingly find tufts of dried grass between the pages, since I didn't lie quietly but turned over, presenting first my chest to the sun and then my back, while dreaming of my future, of my brave and glorious future, and of the ways I might bring it about.

I had been lying in Central Park since March and the loneliness was beginning to make me a little crazy. I usually went back to my hotel around five or six and cooked dinner on a hotplate — something quick, macaroni with hot dogs or chicken soup — and then after eating it, and maybe a brief nap, I rolled out onto the streets again.

As you see, it was a bleak and soldierly life, and its diversions were pretty much reduced to grass, which I regularly bought then for thirty-five dollars an ounce, obtaining another portion as soon as I'd smoked up the first, and one-night stands, which usually took place in a state of extreme intoxication from grass and alcohol.

I didn't attach much importance to the one-night stands, my drunken imagination easily endowing my partners with their merit, although as a rule not one of them survived the test of morning, or turned out in the light of day to be of any value to my life. But in the period I'm describing here, even those affairs had virtually ceased. The longest to hold out was Rena, an extremely ugly but incredibly horny middle-aged Rumanian Jew who lived near the Museum of Natural History and who taught ballet, I believe. I would always remember her unexpectedly somewhere on the street in the middle of the night, call her up, go over to her place, walk in, and start fucking her right in the doorway. I would simply step over the threshold, lift up her skirt, and, since her cunt was always moist and ready, brutally fuck her.

It was necessary to end that illicit affair, however, since she had unfortunately fallen in love with me. I was beginning to catch adoring looks in my direction, and I realized I'd better get out before it was too late. Vile aesthete and conceited animal that I was, aspiring to the best women in the world, how could I allow myself to go out with an ugly little hawk-nosed Rumanian Jew? Even granting that she was much better, more noble, and more spiritual than I, as in fact was probably the case, I still preferred in that time of extreme need to suffer without a cunt rather than suffer from an inferiority complex at showing myself in broad daylight with Rena. The last straw was her obsessive desire to meet Lodyzhnikov after I had carelessly let slip that I knew him.

So you can imagine how great was my need for Jenny. She of course had no idea of the role I had prepared for her, that I expected her to be my woman, my friend, my language teacher, and to support me, and that I had also decided to move in with her in time, since I still didn't realize, dolt, who she was.

But when I finally called on that May morning, having as a precaution first turned myself for three hours or so on the grass in Central Park, she told me to my surprise that she was busy and that we couldn't see each other. The "music teacher" Steven's sister from California was staying at the millionaire's house at the time. Imagine how disappointed I was. Who wouldn't have been? An annoying obstacle on my way to the top. I was in a hurry; I needed to prove to everybody just what sort of person it was they were neglecting. The rich Jenny and her house were substantial evidence.

She has guests, I thought bitterly. The cunt. As if there were anybody more important to her than me. Guests. I would have gone over and joined her guests, but Jenny didn't invite me. Maybe she's afraid to be alone with me. She wants to but is afraid; that happens sometimes, I reflected.

I went back to my hotel earlier than usual that day. I didn't feel much like reading. A black neighbor from my floor named Ken was sitting on a bench with a group of alcoholic friends, all black, in the dusty strip of greenery that separates the two opposing streams of Broadway traffic and drinking something. When he saw me, he jumped happily to his feet and shouted "Baby!" and beckoned to me. But I didn't go; I only waved to him from a distance and strode into the hotel's stinking maw.

It was probably a week before I saw Jenny again. She responded to my calls by saying that she was busy since Steven's sister was still there, and that she didn't feel well. I suspiciously thought she wasn't telling the truth, and lay in my hotel. Going to the park would have been silly anyway; the muggy spring rains had started. Even the sheets were unpleasantly damp, and I lay naked on the bed and gave myself up to despair, as only I, the psychopath Edward Limonov, am capable of doing. I even started crying. And from idleness, I also had a tremendous desire to fuck, and a dull feeling in my head. I even remember once howling quietly and mournfully for a whole evening, while I tossed and turned in bed and recalled Jenny's large legs, her long neck, her soft breasts, and her rather fat belly, which I had held in my hands. But I couldn't allow myself to masturbate; I don't know exactly why, but I couldn't. It was as if I felt some obligation to Jenny or to myself. I wanted to be a man, and not a pitiful masturbator.

Finally after the week had passed, Jenny called me herself. We had been talking about ten minutes, when she suddenly surprised me by saying, "Edward, I want to say something important to you."

Put on my guard, I answered, "Yes, of course, Jenny. What is it?"

"I have to tell you, Edward, that you're a very good, very educated, and very sensitive person, but I haven't 'fallen in love' with you." She was silent for a moment. I was silent too. "I like you," she resumed, "but I'm selfish. Very selfish. Very. If you want to be my friend, that's fine. But not love."

I had the presence of mind to agree with her. I said: "All right, we'll be friends. Can I come over in half an hour? We'll have a drink."

"Come over," she consented. "I have some company, Debby and her boyfriend, and some girlfriends of mine, if they won't bother you."

"No, they won't bother me," I said.

I left the hotel and set off through Central Park to the East Side, bitterly thinking to myself about her and about me and about how I would obviously never have any luck in life and about how foolish it was of her to reject me. Central Park after the week's rain was deserted, luxuriant, utterly beautiful, fresh-smelling, and without end, the way it is in May. It had just stopped raining, and I walked through that verdant paradise completely alone with the trees and plants; New York's tireless bicyclists still hadn't come out, nor had the drug pushers taken up their usual places.

By the time I emerged from the park on the East Side, I had already calmed down. Well, all right, what does it matter? I thought brightly. I'll find another way out, I'll still climb out of this shit. I'll still find a way out of it, even if Jenny won't be my springboard. There'll be other chances. Cheer up, Officer Limonov, I told myself, and even walked more energetically, firmly striking my heels on the pavement. Ah, what a fool Jenny is not to want to try somebody as unique as me.

Thus I walked along reasoning to myself, and when I had almost gotten to her house, I suddenly thought, Listen, Limonov, she's only twenty years old. Don't take what she says too seriously. Let her say whatever she wants to, and you try to change it. Have you actually forgotten Catullus? Remember the lines, "What a woman says to her ardent lover/should be written in wind and running water…" That's exactly the sort of thing she said over the phone to you, and you came unglued.

Catullus cheered me up immediately, and when Jenny opened the door dressed in a belly dancer's costume — in a bra embroidered in bugles and shiny thread that had originally been made for Debby, as I later found out, and in very wide Moslem pants set low on her hips, I said, "Hi, Jen," and merrily kissed her. She looked suspiciously at me, sniffed my breath, and asked, "Have you been drinking, Edward?" I said I hadn't.

They were all sitting out on the terrace in the garden when the officer Limonov came in. Besides Debby and her Japanese boyfriend, Michael, there was a tall, slim Irish girl named Bridget, with auburn hair, as befits Irish girls, and unbelievably fair skin, as also befits Irish girls. After answering my «Hi» with her own, the first thing Bridget asked me was, "Do you have any grass?" I didn't have any with me; I knew Jenny had just given it up. She was allegedly suffering from back pain which she attributed to smoking marijuana since she was eleven. It wasn't her idea; she'd gotten it from her Indian homeopath, Dr. Krishna. And maybe the doctor was right. During the period in question Jenny was fascinated with homeopathy and went to Dr. Krishna regularly not only as his patient but as his disciple.

I later calculated that Jenny changed enthusiasms about every six months. During the year and a half we were together, homeopathy was replaced by jogging — onward to health! — and jogging by the health food fad. Jenny, like tens of millions of other Americans, took up whatever was foisted on her by America's popular culture and its advertising machinery, eagerly exchanging enthusiasms as the popular culture dictated and, like every other victim, readily believing that they were her own. The roller skating epidemic fortunately took over the United States after we had split up, or I would certainly have been in on her smashed knees and broken arms.

I had to disappoint Bridget; I didn't have any grass. She kept her head, however, and very quickly got drunk.

When I arrived they were engaged in sporadic searching for the little bronze finger cymbals used in belly dancing. Jenny called them "zilts," or something. She had put her costume on and was all set to start dancing — the stereo was already scattering clouds of Middle Eastern music through the house — when the cymbals had suddenly disappeared and there wasn't anything to mark the rhythm with. Jenny got mad and started whining, while the rest of us looked in the drawers and moved the books on the shelves and finally found them, thank God.

Jenny danced several numbers, first wrapping herself up in a piece of Indian cloth I assume Dr. Krishna had given her, then unwrapping herself. I suspected then that the handsome, graying, seventy-two-year-old Dr. Krishna was sleeping with her, but he wasn't. I wasn't very far from the truth, however. Although Krishna wasn't sleeping with Jenny, he was sleeping with another of his patients and disciples, with that same girlfriend of Jenny's I had met on my first evening in the millionaire's house — with Jennifer. And she was only nineteen.

We know these doctors, I thought. Covered with the unearned glory of the hermits and gurus of old India, they come to the United States and put together whole fortunes, the swindlers, by relying on the naïveté of young Americans and their natural attraction to everything astonishing and unusual. At the same time, they don't forget to fuck the prettier and younger of their admirers and disciples, if such be at hand.

Jenny wrapped herself up in the cloth and then unwrapped herself, but I never did find out whether Krishna had given it to her. She danced very well, I thought; she had just the fat belly needed for that Arabo-Turko-Persian show. It moved exactly the way it was supposed to, twitching like a jackhammer. I tried it later on, but I couldn't do it; that kind of automatic abruptness of movement is possible only after years of training, and then only if you have the gift.

I only thought Jenny was a bit big for belly dancing. Those Eastern women with their fat bottoms and bellies who regale the eyes of Eastern men immediately after the hot mutton has been devoured are small, intentionally small. Jenny would probably seem awkward and clumsy to some Eastern men. Her other shortcoming was her chestnut hair. A belly dancer's hair should be jet black, as should her cunt hair. I noticed long ago, by the way, that cunts with black hair are always red, that is, of vivid hue. The cunts of blondes, on the other hand, are paler in color, pastel, so to speak. The black-haired cunt should be more appealing to Eastern men; it's red like the mutton they've just eaten.

But it's quite possible I'm wrong, very possible in fact, since Jenny was even invited to dance nightly at The Oasis, an expensive Middle Eastern restaurant where you can watch women's fat bellies gyrating while you're eating your dinner. That means her dancer's art was worth something. It often happened later that when Jenny lost her temper with Steven the "music teacher," she would threaten to quit her job and go to The Oasis, where she could make lots of money. "A lot of money, every night!" she would say angrily. "I'll manage!" she would add with conviction. I too thought she'd manage. She had worked as a babysitter for about ten years and was already out on her own when she was sixteen.

Everything was proper enough in the beginning, but then we all got drunk. There was as much wine as you could want, and "hard drinks" too, as in the best liquor store.

Jenny had apparently forgotten all about our phone conversation, or else her expressed desire to remain just friends had been only a passing whim or was perhaps merely her way of flirting.

The whole party stayed over at Jenny's, and I remember her sleepy voice as she assigned everybody a place in the house. By one o'clock, they had all gone off to their various floors. Jenny didn't put me to bed, however, although I do recall that as I returned from her house to humid New York, I was smiling and sure of my future.

We started seeing each other almost every day. In the evening I would come to the millionaire's house and usually we would sit in the kitchen or in the solarium and talk quietly, telling each other the stories of our lives and getting to know each other. Sometimes I would even buy Jenny roses, and once I brought as a gift an English translation of a very beautiful poem of mine. It began with the words, "As if a silent branch had traced a line/ And in memory gently bended down,/ A southern alpine glade with rooted tree,/ like the steps of someone dear in water…"

Even though I had written the poem five years before my arrival in the millionaire's garden, it for some reason seemed to me that with my poet's vision I had seen not only the garden, which really did look like a southern alpine glade with a huge tree in the center from which a swing was suspended, but also the leather chairs in Steven's office and many other details besides.

Jenny didn't seem to pay attention to the poem then; she skimmed through it and put it aside, and I had already decided she was indifferent to art, which offended me a little, but very late that night she called me at my hotel after I had gone to bed and asked me to recite my poems to her. I explained that the poem I'd given her was the only one that had been translated into English, but unperturbed she answered: "It doesn't matter. Read them in Russian, Edward."

The funny part is that she liked it. She listened over and over for half an hour at a time without understanding a single word, and after that she would call me up in the middle of the night and ask me to recite to her.

Sometimes when she was barely awake.

But we didn't sleep together or make love. Often we would lie on the grass in the garden for hours after dark, hardly speaking, but caressing each other like infatuated adolescents. Then, in the summer of 1977, I thought that there were times when I was in love with her in the most sincere way; I didn't have to pretend. But maybe I wasn't so much in love with her as with the empty green garden, the passing ships, the gray water of the East River, and the big house filled with books and elegant things, eh, "Comrade Limonov"? — as the manager of the Hotel Diplomat used to called me.

But I did fuck her soon after the first and last time she visited me at the hotel. That completely unexpected visit was to play an important role in our relationship.