"No," the boss answered seriously, "it's not the Shah. It's one of your compatriots, a Russian. I already told him you're working here. It's Efimenkov," he said, speaking the name of a famous Soviet writer I had been on friendly terms with in my Moscow days, even visiting his house once.
How mixed up everything is in this world, I thought. I never expected to see Efimenkov on this earth again, and especially not in my — excuse me, in Gatsby's house. The news didn't particularly excite me, however; I had long ago forgotten that Efimenkov even existed. I had enough of my own worries.
But I felt that the boss would want me to be surprised, even astonished, and so like a good housekeeper I said in an excited voice, "You're kidding! Efimenkov? That's really amazing! That's really incredible!"
My master was evidently satisfied with my exclamations — he didn't require much from his servant. "I've known Efimenkov for several years now," Steven said. "We met for the first time at an international festival in Helsinki."
I had been aware that Gatsby knew Efimenkov, but the festival in Helsinki was beyond me. At that time in my life I had been quietly and peacefully breaking into out-of-the-way stores in my nice little provincial city of Kharkov. I don't even know what year that festival took place — when Gatsby and the Soviet Efimenkovs started hanging out together, when they all got together and made each other's acquaintance.
"He'll be here a month," my employer told me, "not the whole time, of course, since he'll be traveling around the country, but this will be his home base, so to speak." You could sense that the multimillionaire Steven Grey was proud of the fact that the world-famous Soviet writer Efimenkov would be staying in his home.
I realized then that the whole world is one big village for Mr. Grey, that for him a celebrity is a celebrity and that, snob that he is, a Soviet celebrity might be of an even higher rank, since as a Communist he would have the advantage of being exotic. In conversation with somebody, say the British Marchioness Houston, whom the boss is not indifferent to and who according to Jenny had once been his mistress, Steven will find an opportunity to remark importantly, "Efimenkov and I got really drunk yesterday…" As you'll see in a moment, they really did get drunk on the one evening they spent together, but that isn't the point. In sharing his home with Efimenkov, Steven felt he was an international figure, someone who took part in international events and who had a place not only in the economic but also in the cultural life of the world, and that's obviously the reason why Efimenkov was so desirable a guest for him. He was one more confirmation of Gatsby's own importance in the world.
May God grant Efimenkov long life for making my time in the millionaire's house more bearable for me, and for raising me in the boss's esteem to the point where he no longer yells, "God damn you! God damn you!" to my face, and where, if he loses his temper, at least he thinks about it before letting it take the mad form of biting his lip and snorting like a Cyclops before the nearsighted, bespectacled green eyes of his servant Edward Limonov.
The reason? Edward Limonov had written a book. A great many people in the world have written books, and among them a great many Russians, including Efimenkov himself, who so far has written and published, if I'm not mistaken, thirty-three of them, but Edward Limonov, "my new butler," as Steven Grey himself had called him in a telephone conversation with the Marchioness Houston that Linda had overheard and reported — that same Limonov a couple of years before had written a book that shocked and even astonished Evgeny Efimenkov.
Efimenkov had heard about the book but hadn't read it yet. Rumors about it had been circulating in Russia, where the new butler had sent it through a little American girl — the manuscript, I mean. And just before Efimenkov's arrival in my country, in the United States of America, Limonov's book had come out in condensed form in one of the Russian-language journals published in Paris, and caused quite a stir among all the Russians. Some of them loved the book, and others hated it.
Almost the very first thing that Efimenkov said to Mr. Grey's servant after he was helped out of the yellow New York taxicab by Jon Barth, the graying professor of Russian literature and, as I suppose, completely innocuous CIA informer (so that it's no accident he's always hanging around all the Soviet literary dignitaries who come here, that he's never more than a step away) — almost the first thing that Efimenkov said to the servant was, "Edik! I hear you've written a novel. How about letting me read it?"
If you take into account that Efimenkov was never really a close friend of Limonov's, and that the man getting out of the taxi was a Soviet writer who had come to America in connection with the publication of one of his books and was staying at the multimillionaire's house only as a result of his own relative independence, his status as one of the most famous writers in the world, whereas Limonov was that multimillionaire's housekeeper and an émigré and therefore presumably anti-Soviet — only if you take all that into account, will you understand just how interested in the book Efimenkov must have been, if he asked about it as soon as he got in the door. For you, perhaps, that might not mean anything, but in Soviet terms, it was a greeting with wide-open arms.
I let him have it. I gave it to him to read. And it blew him away.
And with good reason. The book talked about homosexuality, and about what it feels like when a man is the one who is fucked, and about the hero's other sexual experiences, and it did so openly, without hedging: A cunt was called a cunt without any concealment, and love was rendered in sharp outlines without any mincing or mawkishness. Moreover, it was clear that the hero was happy neither with the Soviet way of life nor with this one either, the one ruled by Gatsbys, although I still didn't know Steven then. In short, there was much that was pointed and stained with blood in that book. The hero didn't play at being macho when he didn't have anybody to fuck; he masturbated, and that's the way it was written — he masturbated. The hero wasn't afraid to lay himself bare, and that in fact was what impressed Efimenkov. And the most «awful» thing about the book was that the hero bore my name. He too was called Edward Limonov.
I didn't give him the book the very first day he asked, but on the third day, I think — the first time he spent the evening at home. Steven was off somewhere in Europe, and Efimenkov didn't go anywhere that night but stayed at home and read my book. The next morning he was supposed to fly to Colorado with Barth, and so when I gave him the manuscript, he had politely asked if he could take it with him. I told him he could, if he promised not to lose it. I had other copies — the translator had one, and there were more at various other places around the globe — so I nobly gave my consent.
When he came back several days later, Gatsby was at home, as Efimenkov was well aware. Nevertheless, the first thing he yelled from the doorway, lifting his head up after a quick glance into the kitchen, was, "Edik! Edik!" He knew if I wasn't in the kitchen, I would be in my room on the fourth floor. In response to Efimenkov's shouting, the boss came out of his office on the second floor and dashed downstairs to him, but Efimenkov waved him aside and headed up to my room. It was a complete triumph for me. A complete triumph over my boss. The servant was victorious. Art had leapt higher than his millions, if only for an instant.