The love of weapons is in my blood. As far back as I can remember, when I was a little boy, I used to swoon at the mere sight of my father's pistol. I saw something holy in the dark metal. Even now I consider a weapon a holy and mysterious symboclass="underline" an object used to take a man's life cannot but be holy and mysterious. The very profile of a revolver, of all its parts, holds a Wagnerian horror. Cold steel, with its different profiles, is no exception. My knife looked somnolent and lazy. Plainly, it knew that nothing of interest awaited it, there was no good job coming up in the near future, so it was bored and indifferent.
"Put your knife away," Bagrov said. "Here we are." I climbed out, said good-bye, and charged into the entrance with my gallon jug, but the knife took its place in my boot, went off to bed.
Alexander has a habit – you ring him from downstairs, he presses the buzzer to open the door. But when you go up, he never opens his door ahead of time, never meets you on the threshold, you have to ring again at the door, and he still doesn't open it promptly even if he's expecting you. I keep waiting for him to deviate from his habit. No, today everything was the same as ever, with the obligatory pauses.
We have a division of labor when we're drinking: I cook, he washes the dishes. I boiled up some sort of pasta, then stuck a package of sausages into it, and we went to work in earnest on the gallon jug. The meal was at a table that stood arbitrarily in the corner of the room, we sat under a table lamp. We always talk about news and events, Alexander brings Russian emigre gossip from the newspaper. Often there aren't any events, so much the worse. Once in a great while I get off on the subject of my wife. But only once in a while, and if I do say anything about her, I immediately catch myself and change the subject.
"You were a fool not to kill her," Alexander told me once with the artlessness and clarity of King Solomon or a secret police tribunal. "You strangled her, you should've finished her off. I at least have a baby, or I'd kill my own wife. It wouldn't be good for the baby, she'd be left alone, but you should've killed Elena."
By May, as you will see, he and I would revive, write several articles that no one would publish, hold our May 27 demonstration against the New York Times, and get another interview printed in the Times of London. In May we would try various other gambits as well, dig up all kinds of possibilities in life, but back then, in April, we often just ruminated and got drunk. Besides, he had a weakness for sleeping with his own wife. Either his phone would be out of order and I couldn't get through to him, or he'd disappear over Saturday and Sunday.
That evening was probably as usual. Alexander undoubtedly told me that the paper had received a letter from some dissident, maybe from Krasnov-Levitin, or maybe the wily Maksimov had sent his routine appeal, directed less to the Soviet regime than to the Western left-wing intelligentsia, "deadened with surfeit and idleness," or the bearded Solzhenitsyn had amazed the world with his next deep thought on the world order, or some person had proposed detaching something else from the USSR, some other territory. The names of these "national heroes" of ours were always on our lips.
In our desire to kill the hateful gallon we were already behaving like athletes straining toward victory. I was also in the bad habit of mixing drinks. To revive myself, as I drank, I had a couple of cans of ale and several shots of vodka in the intervals between red burgundy. No wonder, then, that time became a dark sack, and the next illumination, opening of the eyes, call it what you will, found Alexander and me in some sort of temple. A service was going on. One thing I could not understand – whether it was a synagogue or some other kind of temple. I was more inclined to think it was a synagogue. We were sitting on a bench, and for some reason Alexander kept smiling all the time, his face was very joyful. Maybe he had just been given a gift. Money, maybe.
For that reason I turned to myself. Let's go on with our games. I pulled my beloved knife from my boot and stuck it into the floor, or rather, into some boards that constituted a footrest. Next to me a whole family of believers exchanged wild glances. I'm not planning to kill anyone, Messrs. Jews or Catholics or Protestants, I'm just madly in love with weapons, and I have no temple of my own where I can pray to the Great Knife or the Great Revolver. No, so that's why I pray to Him here, I thought. Then I went into a sort of delirium, several times tore the knife from the board and kissed it, stuck it back into the footrest. Once I dropped His Majesty the Knife, and his thunder reverberated throughout the temple because my German friend from Solingen had a heavy metal handle. The service ended with the priest's offering his hand to everyone, even to the foolishly smiling Alexander, but not to me. I was on the point of taking offense but then forgot about it, rightly deciding that I should not take offense at a priest of an unknown religion.
Again there was a dark pit, and the onset of a new illumination, revealing the smiling faces of some priestesses of love, who out of a special susceptibility to us – two stinking drunk, but, I think, very appealing bespectacled characters – had agreed to make love with us for $5. They were very sweet, these girls. Alexander would not have stopped any disagreeable ones, nor would they have stopped him. These were a light chocolate color, there were two of them, they were much more beautiful than proper women. Eighth Avenue has many beautiful and even touching prostitutes, Lexington has many beautiful ones too; when I lived there I exchanged greetings with them every evening.
Murmuring agreeably, the girls put their arms around us and pulled us along with them. They had a trained eye, they knew, exactly and definitely, that we had $5 between us and no more. You can't fool them. Money is their main interest, of course, but they're obviously no strangers to human feeling. They smelled nice, they had provocative long legs; these girls were much better than any ordinary secretary or pimply American coed. I had nothing against them. Why I didn't go with them, but sent Alexander off to enjoy one and promised to wait for him, I do not know. I believe there was some deep-seated force within me that made me think: All women are disagreeable. Prostitutes are much better than all the rest, they have almost no falsehood in them, they're natural women, and if they've undertaken to make love with the two of us for $5 when it's not even raining, not the kind of weather when they don't have clients, then that is obviously their pleasure. But even so, I'm not going with them.
I didn't want to think it through, but I knew that I would not go with them today – some other time. Why not? Was I afraid, perhaps? Not true. They were so sincere and homey, they might have been in my class in grade school. And in that April mood of mine I had essentially lost the instinct for self-preservation; I feared no one and nothing at all in this world because I was prepared to die at any moment. I believe I was seeking death – unconsciously, but I was. Then why would I be afraid of two beautiful minks? Afraid they were decoys? Afraid of pimps? You know I don't give a damn, I don't own a thing. That wasn't it. Women no longer existed for me. I was thoroughly drunk, yet I rejected them, almost involuntarily, which especially means that what happened a little later that night was no accident, my body wanted it.
I left Alexander; he went off with one of the girls to her place to make love, and I went into the gaping dark of the West Side streets, somewhere around Tenth or Eleventh Avenue. I remember myself walking away, as if I had been staring at my own back through the eyes of a bystander.
The light flared next when I entered some sort of walled-in area, apparently a playground for children. Dark corners have always attracted me. I remember even in Moscow I loved to go into boarded-up houses, which everyone feared and where bandits supposedly lived. When I was good and drunk I would remember those houses and set out for one. After climbing in through a broken window or door, stepping over piles of petrified shit and puddles of urine, cursing and singing Russian folksongs, I would discover some poor unfortunates in the house, alcoholics or tramps, with whom, after making their acquaintance, I would have a long and incoherent conversation. In one of those places someone conked me with a bottle and appropriated two rubles. But the habit stayed with me.