The drawers hold nothing more interesting than the little envelope. Writing pads, notebooks, extra erasers, vast numbers of slides of his works. I patiently look through all his slides in the hope of seeing photographs of her. A secret little voice whispers, "in indecent poses." Indecent poses, hell! I merely want to know more than I do, and perhaps to overwhelm the Why? But the slides are only his – slides of his works. More letters, business cards from people and organizations. All this is diluted in a vast quantity of financial documents, a vast torrent of bank bills, all sorts of things; I can't tell what they are.
I open a little box. Lying in it are dark grains and fragments, and on top two fat, homestyle marijuana cigarettes, a far cry from the skimpy joints made to be sold for a dollar apiece on Forty-second Street or in Washington Square.
Then I poke around on the shelves, where his lithographs lie neatly interleaved with paper. They do not interest me. I am looking for something else. At last I see what I'm looking for – photographs of her. Enlargements, she didn't skimp, she was giving a present to her dear friend. Not to me – to him. Photographs done by little-known photographers, they are imitations of the works of well-known masters, or rather, imitations of their formal execution. They are not Avedon, of course, or Francesco Scavullo, or Horowitz, or… Imitative photographs. Elena smeared with something shiny, her hair slicked down; Elena in a highly improbable, unnatural pose; Elena with her face painted like an Indian mask…
Alas, it's all pretty feeble. The fact is, the photographs are all whorish and no good. My darling isn't getting very far with her career. But her career was what she talked about, proud girl. "I love nobody, my career is all that interests me."
I look at photographs of this woman's body, now alien to me, and I see before me the whole system. The chic profession of the photographer. I know how photographers knock themselves out for decades trying to make it here. My friend Lyonka Lubenitsky, who recently had a photo on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, really feels beat when he comes to my hole at night. Hard times, can't make any money.
Thousands of photographers work in New York. Tens of thousands of people are involved in photography. They all dream of the glory and riches of an Avedon or a Eugene Smith, but few of them know how hellishly hard Avedon works. Lyonka Lubenitsky knows, he worked for over a year as an assistant at Avedon's for $75 a week. The models all dream of the career of a Verushka or a Twiggy. Tens of thousands of girls report to their agencies every day, and then set off in taxis and on foot to different addresses, knock at studio doors. Elena is one of them. Her chances are slim.
I turn page after page. The photographers toy with her body like a ball, the body of the girl from the Frunze Embankment. Her little nipples, shoulders, poopka flip past, I remember one photograph she had, it was left behind in Moscow. Elena is four or five years old; she stands with her mother, making a face and looking away. It's already all there, in that photograph. All her life she has looked away.
I am seeking an answer, I have to kill the Why, kill it through understanding, otherwise it will kill me, may kill me, and therefore I peer at these photographs so hard it hurts. Part of the answer may be there. But what's there is a lie. The lie of the untalented, the third-rate. The only truthful thing in them, rising from their depths, bursting through their gloss, is the thirst to live, at the price of any mistake, to accept as life anything at all, anything that moves, and to live, to lie underneath someone, be photographed, ride someone else's horse, love someone else's house, someone else's studio, someone else's objects and books, but to live.
I was not life, in her understanding, not at all. I did not move, she detected no signs of movement in me. I was, in her opinion, an unmoving object. The squalid apartment on Lexington – she thought that was me. She wanted to live. Physical, material life, that was the only thing she understood. She didn't give a damn about the values of civilization, history, religion, morals. She hardly knew of them. Instinct – I think she understood that. A poetess, besides; too powerful an imagination. Didn't I tell you she wrote poetry? Sorry, I forgot, but that is very important.
Presently she will sober up a little, Jean-Pierre's studio will no longer seem to her a fairy-tale palace, nor he the kindly doctor from her childhood. Presently he will demand the $100 she borrowed for the trip to Milan. That's normal, they no longer sleep together – so pay back your debt.
Rummaging in his papers, I see some neat columns of figures. The purposes for which the money was spent are noted at the side. Too bad I can't read his writing, I might encounter Elena's name here too. He has complained several times to Kirill that Elena was bilking him, she cost too much.
I turn his list over and over in my hands. I am unused to this sort of thing, I don't condemn it but I'm unused to it. Their very method of keeping their earnings in a bank develops qualities in them that are negative from the viewpoint of a Russian, and especially a typical bohemian like me, I think as I continue to rummage through his papers. Thriftiness, a pedantic tidiness with money, isolation from other people…
I'm used to other foreigners, fun-loving and friendly people who throw currency around openhandedly, sometimes uproariously. In Moscow every one of us had an American acquaintance, not all of them were openhanded but many were. Perhaps because the dollar was actually worth a great deal in Moscow. Colonial, dependent Russia…
In New York I came up against normal Americans. "Them." Lately I've developed an inescapable feeling that I'm not Russian, was not fully Russian even in Russia, national traits are very approximate; still, I shall permit myself to speak of something I dislike. I often hear "them" use the expression, "That's your problem." It's just an expression, but it irritates me greatly. One time, God knows where, my butcher friend Sanya the Red picked up the expression Tebe zhit – "It's your life!" He used it apropos of everything, where it was necessary and unnecessary, uttering it with the gravity of a philosopher. Even so, "It's your life!" is much warmer. These words are used when another person has refused friendly advice: Well then, see for yourself, I tried to help you, you don't want advice, I yield, it's your life.
"That's your problem!" is used in order to dissociate oneself from other people's problems, set a boundary between oneself and bothersome people trying to worm into one's world. I heard this expression from Monsieur Jean-Pierre during the ghastly February days when, as I lay in bed dying, knowing that Elena had left him too, or so I thought, I called and asked him to meet me for a drink. So help me Cod, I had no evil in mind. But he said to me, "That's your problem, yours and Elena's. That's not my problem." Didn't say it maliciously; no, indifferently. And he was right, who am I to him? Foolish me, why did I bother him with my tribal, barbarian social habits?
Oh, he has so many financial papers! I can't tell whether all these are sums that he's supposed to pay or that someone is supposed to pay him. I'm sick of his papers, and I stuff them all back into the desks and up on the shelves, but neatly, not roughly, trying to put each one where it was before. No reason at all for the owner to know that someone has been checking on him.
Jean-Pierre, Jean-Pierre – for an artist he's extremely cautious. But weren't there some like him in Russia? There were. Why carp at him! Don't carp at your wife's lover, Limonov. You're compensating yourself for the insult he inflicted. All the same, he's a bit of a coward, cautious. Later this will be confirmed: when he learns about my demonstration against the New York Times he will warn me, with wary friendliness, that they can refuse citizenship, they can deport one from America. He is amazed at Elena's lively, extravagant, devil-may-care behavior, her lack of concern for the future; like Susanna, he says of her, half in delight, "Crazy!" My indifference toward citizenship likewise amazes him. American citizenship! Of course, in his eyes I too am crazy. He is rather tame.