I used to go both to musical and theatrical performances, make the rounds of all the SoHo galleries twice a week. I went to a theatrical performance in the Village by a certain Susanna Russell, during a terrible rainstorm; I was wet to the skin despite my umbrella, but I didn't care. I was in such a state that nothing could make me get sick; that was ruled out.
After every such contact with life I returned satisfied and stimulated. I was with life after all, I was not alone. I came to know New York, the life of New York, and the nuances of its life rather rapidly, much more rapidly than I learned English.
Oh yes – so I walked around in this little room and studied the posters. I left before the end of the lecture, collecting as many posters as I could in the corridor. Some of them lie in my hotel room to this day, and one, in support of gay rights, I hung on the door. It's still there, in color, with underlining under the words in the text that I didn't know. Now I know them.
Several pictures on the poster show happy homosexuals embracing; others, people with slogans demanding civil rights for gays. I too feel that they – I mean we – should be given full civil rights, and without any fucking delay. Only I don't think this will change anything in a state as depraved as America. Well, isolated advances maybe, but insincerity and hypocrisy will not permit, for example, putting an open pederast in any important position.
All right then – Carol. We had been meaning to get together for a long time, my friend was in no hurry and very cautious. His caution he had brought from the USSR. At long last, one evening in May, I walked into my friend's place and saw a little blonde. Thin; she had a cigarette of course, she smoked all the time. She would smoke only half of a cigarette, the remainder she stubbed in an ashtray, and these remainders of hers gave off a lot of smoke. She spoke tolerable Russian, stubbornly called her cigarettes papirosy (which really means a Russian-style filter tip), and after a few introductory sentences plunged me immediately into the question of the need for Russians to acknowledge Ukrainian independence. Oof! At that moment I was much more interested in another problem: I needed people, lots of contacts, connections, people and more people. I dreamed about relationships with people in my sleep, I was languishing without people, but I had not turned to the Russians because they had nothing to give me. I was spoiling to get into this world, but I knew the Russians in minute detail and was repelled by their inadequacy here. I was strong in my weakness, I did not want to submit to the unjust system of this world, any more than I had submitted to the unjust system of the Soviet world. But the Russians almost all submitted, they accepted this world order.
Face on, Carol was completely without flaws, even beautiful. But in profile there was something wrong with her face, some sort of mischance between her lips and nose. This is merely a cavil, after my beautiful wife. At the time, and that evening in particular, I was obsessed with Alexander's and my next article: we urgently needed it translated and no one wanted to do it because the few people capable of it, having done us the favor once and not having received any money for it, did not want to do it a second or third time.
Carol volunteered to translate it herself. This fact alone made me like her already. On the question of granting independence to the Ukraine, I supported her but expressed doubt as to the expediency of dividing up the bearskin before the bear was shot, especially right now, when the Soviet government was stronger than ever. I did not say that it was absurd. But that's what I thought. Besides, I added, right now the ties between the Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukraine were far stronger than they appeared to Ukrainian emigres; suffice it to say that there were nine million Russians living on Ukrainian territory…
Our host and his wife joined the conversation. Really a writer, not just a language tutor, our host was becoming day by day an ever greater admirer of Russia and patriot of his people, although he had been bursting to get out of Russia and had finally done it. This phenomenon is natural in a Russian. The writer felt that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were so closely related in both language and culture that there was no need to divide them artificially. Practically and realistically, independence might be necessary, for example, to the Baltic peoples – the Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, who had little in common with Russian language or Russian culture – but for the Ukrainians, White Russians, and Russians it was better and more natural to live together than to be split up and isolated.
I think the writer was nearer the truth than Carol, member of the Workers Party, daughter of Protestant farmers, for he was proceeding from the actual state of affairs, she from the party program and current opinion, according to which all peoples and ethnic groups – be they nothing at all, a man and a half – were deserving of independence and self-determination.
I didn't express my secret opinion that national groups should be not segregated but united, only not on the basis of a state in which a small group from a provincial ethnic intelligentsia would again make themselves into great rulers, propagating a new backwardness and barbarism in the world. No. All nationalities must be totally mixed, must renounce ethnic prejudices, "blood" and that sort of nonsense, in the name of world unity, even in the name of stopping nationalistic wars – even for that alone it would be worth being mixed. Mixed biologically, acknowledging the danger of ethnic groupings. Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks – enough of all that. It must stop, at long last.
Neither Carol nor the writer was ready for these ideas, I thought – too abrupt. I therefore held my peace and merely asked what would happen to me. My father was Ukrainian, my mother Russian, what was I supposed to do? Which state should I resettle in, Ukrainian or Russian? With whom should I sympathize, whose side should I be on? Besides, I knew both languages equally well, and had been raised on Russian culture.
They did not know what to say. "Independence is necessary!" said the confident Carol. Okay, let there be independence. But would it be any easier for a Ukrainian Limonov in a Ukrainian state? Here I had lived in the Russian state, a Russian writer, and what did I have to show? Not one published work in ten years. The real issue is not the attainment of independence for all nationalities, but something else – how to rebuild the foundations of human life so as to deliver the world at least from war, deliver it from inequality of property, deliver it from the universal killing of life by work, teach the world love, not anger and hatred, which are the inevitable result of national isolation.
I did not say all that. They would have thought I was crazy. What's this about "delivering the world from work"? Better to keep silent, or else first acquaintance would make this leftist young lady turn away, she would not want my company. And oh, how I needed company.
We ate fried eggs and cutlets, drank wine, and finished our vodka. The conversation moved on from Ukrainian self-determination to something Eddie-baby was fucking bored with, his article "Disillusionment." Eddie had written and published a shitload of articles in the sleazy emigre rag. But this was the one that got noticed, because here I wrote for the first time that the Western world had not justified the hopes placed in it by the Jews and non-Jews who had left Russia; in many ways it had turned out to be even worse than the Soviet world. After this wretched article little Eddie acquired a reputation as a KGB agent and leftist, but the article was what automatically enabled me, thank God, to break with the quagmire of the Russian emigration. Quickly and painlessly.