Whatever you say, August is drawing to a close, and the leaves of ivy on «our» cottage begin to fall. Dry and gray, they lie on the metal chairs out on the terrace.
I can't think about it for long – it's obvious that it's just a sign sent to me by the leaves, a sign of change, the sign of a question: «And what about you?» Well, me too – it's not a tank top anymore but a shirt; it's not the two-year-old sandals but boots. There's gray in my shaggy hair, and the angry face of a savage rat is combined whimsically with the remaining poetic gentleness and charm. What can you do? This is me.
Being human is very stupid.
I saw something stirring in the bushes of Central Park. A little black creature, either a bird or a rat. I looked, I got curious, I began to sift through the bushes, fussing and running around, peeking from this side and that – I wasted a good five minutes and then thought: «What the fuck! I'm supposed to be on my fucking way to my hotel, this is not my fucking business!»
And I left.
A visit with a crazy cost me a lot of blood. He turned out to be fat – belly and thighs. Semiparalized, he rode around in his well-lit studio in his chair.
His crumbling consciousness was a characteristic feature of his insanity. He had me pulling out (and then putting back) layers of yellow, dusty letters and sketches, all the while spying lest I disturb the order (the chaos) in which they were arranged. Once, under his instructions, I had to rifle through some twenty-six pieces of paper before he was satisfied with a pink scrap. But then he ordered that I return the scrap to its place. His other feats: he put on my glasses and tried to give me his phone book for a present.
The crazy was quite sentimental – he kept reminiscing about his numerous wives. It was as though all the women he or I mentioned used to be his wives.
Many of the crazy's sketches were chaotic, mere daubs, but some – particularly a yellow and green portrait with a double face, and the birth of Venus from the foam of a wave – were striking in their nervous power.
I barely survived the two hours with this crazy. Precisely because it was this particular crazy. It seemed that there was some resemblance to me. The others sickos I could take with no sweat. The purpose of my visit was to bring him Russian cabbage soup – the crazy had Russian parents.
For my hotel depression, for being completely lonely, for dog shit by my door, for watching TV all night alone, for the inaccessible redolent beauties seen at the expensive stores, for life without smiles, and for all the other delights I want to get even with this world.
And it won't do getting on top of a roof with a shotgun to shoot at the passers-by. They're not to blame, they're victims themselves. Instead, this whole system must be brought crashing down, so that there's no stone left unturned. I want to raze all the institutions.- I want this so bad my stomach hurts. It's like wanting to go for a walk barefoot on the fresh spring grass.
And have it so that no one is privileged materially over others. And so that neither the actors, nor the singers, nor the presidents have more than the other folk. And get rid of that disgusting money altogether. And burn the banks to the ground. And leave this Babylon, let it be overgrown with grass, let it crumble and fall, let the ocean eat it away.
When you see all the stuff that remains after one dies, you realize how stupid it is to collect it in the first place. Knick knacks, brick-a-brack, journals and magazines, everything that's left, goes out to the street and into a dumpster.
The heirs took all the valuables but these letters. The letters with blurried words. From an inamorata. And only a curious, sad fellow like me stands by an open trash bag and rummages through someone's cinders.
It happens too that they bring me pants and jackets – for free – from an auction, left by the dead. I reflect on them for a long time. Then, of course, I do go ahead and alter them.
Out of all the memories I have of picking flowers, there's one that's especially vivid – out in the Koktebel mountains in Crimea.
I went to pick wild tulips early in the morning, right after it had stopped raining. I reached the right spot up the clouds and there – only in the shafts of light-I managed to fish out flowers from the dark and wet grass. I wasn't satisfied until I had a fresh, taut bunch in my hands. I was happy. There was no one in the mountains. And the trail is barely visible even five steps away. «Devil's Finger,» a cliff, was covered by fog – as though it was never there.
When I returned, my beloved was still asleep. I put the tulips in water in many vases and lay down with my beloved. It began to rain again… And all of this, alas, has passed…
Happiness is a state when you're able to love the present. Not the past, not the future, but the present.
There are things that are impossible to recall or to describe so that others can understand. For example, hunger, that epiphany of hunger that you reach when you're hard up for months and don't have enough to eat.
A flaming bowl of soup is transfigured into a solar disk – you remember it for years.
What wonderful and bloody horrors occur to you when you're hungry! What executions and tortures you invent for the rich and well-fed when you bump into them in the streets, as they come out of the brightly lit restaurant doors in fur coats and tatters! And what pleasure – indescribable for an ordinary man, a man with hungry eyes – if you manage to fuck a rich girl. You meet her somewhere accidentally, and then you fuck her. «I, a plebeian, lumpen, still I'm fucking you, that's right, I'm fucking you.»
It's a supreme kind of sex if you have a woman who's higher than you, who's clean and belongs to another. Now that I've come of age I often feel like fucking a wellgroomed, high-society lady, on her way to becoming a plump, respectable mother, a wife to some gray-haired idiot.
I want to fuck her in a rude, inconsiderate way, peasantlike, and no foreplay or petting either. Freud, Freid, however you pronounce it, Old Sigmund, whenever this heavy ass appears from under her redolent rags, I forget everything you've taught me and there's only vengeance, vengeance, and vengeance: «I'm fucking their woman without any right, their woman!» They say black men feel this when they have a white woman. I'm not black but I feel it.
Training
I'm hiding, waiting in secret. I'm learning. I'm sitting in the kitchen of the millionaire's house (I'm the maid's friend and lover) – who can notice me? I'm biding my time until my personal 1917 will thunder in. But until then I scrub the rooms, or I touch up a door, or I screw in a bolt, or sew a skirt, or alter pants – I earn my keep. The wife of a lord – a visitor from London – paid me a compliment yesterday, «Such beautiful boots you have!» I wanted to reply by telling her, «What a nondescript mug you have. You and your queen too. But I kept quiet. I'm not going to insult her, I thought. What does she know about me, anyway?
A friend or lover of the same lady – a famous architect, passing through the kitchen to get his yet another drink, glanced at my hands and became ecstatic. «You have the hands of a creative person,» he proclaimed. This time I couldn't deny myself the pleasure and said – carefully and with malice that only I could appreciate: «Perhaps of a destructive person, who knows?»
That's how I walk in the midst of enemies. I learn, I sit quietly in a corner. I don't open my mouth much, I do more listening. I'm waiting, gathering my strength. Then we'll talk. At the moment, I'm in training.
And that lady from London – she even has her own elephant. I saw the picture: she's sitting on her elephant. In London.