Sometimes it seemed to me that Margarita liked me. She smiled at me just as often as Luz did, and furthermore she gave me homemade treats now and then. But they all treated me frequently to their Dominican dishes: roast yams and roast bananas, and meatballs something like our golubtsy. Margarita treated all of the students, not just me, but I doubt I'm mistaken, she obviously liked me, it was plain to see. In that period of my life I did not understand how anyone could like me. I held a very low opinion, an utterly scornful opinion, of myself as a man. She may have liked my green eyes or dark skin or abundantly scarred wrists – God only knows what a woman will like.
I was Russian; they liked that too. I doubt they knew there was such a thing as the Jewish emigration from Russia; it was pointless to explain that I was Russian by nationality but had come here on a visa fictitiously sent to me from Israel and with the consent of the Soviet authorities. Superfluous information. I was Russian, and that was that. As Mrs. Sirota explained to them and to me, Russia was located in Europe. Thus I became a man from Europe. They were from Central and Latin America. And we were all from the world.
I, a man who had fled here from the USSR in search of artistic freedom, that is, the opportunity to publish my works here – it was a rather frivolous act, my works being unneeded here, needed only there, in Russia – I was compelled against my will to be a representative of my country, the only representative of Russia, the USSR, that they had ever had in their lives.
As God is my witness, I tried to represent my country decently. I did not fuck around showing off to them or, first and foremost, to myself; I did not view the world from imaginary standpoints, I tried to view it honestly. It was no concern of these women whether I had been published or not; after all, there are hardly thousands like me.
What they did understand was something else. A land in which higher education was free, medical care was free, where rent amounted to an insignificant fraction of one's pay, where the difference between a worker's 150-ruble paycheck and the 500-ruble paycheck of an academician or even a KGB colonel was only 350 rubles – these, gentlemen, are not the astronomical sums at which the fortunes of America's wealthiest families are estimated, alongside the pitiful $110 to $120 a week that Eddie earned as a busboy at the Hilton – such a land could not be a bad one.
Unlike the Western intelligentsia, they had not been through the long journey of enchantment with the Russian Revolution and Russia, and disenchantment with it. They had been through none of this. Vague rumors circulated among them about a land where people like themselves led a good life. Always the rumors.
I did not go into details, and could not have explained to them the last sixty years of Russian history – Stalinism, the victims, the prison camps – they would have turned a deaf ear to all that. Their own history, too, was rich in victims and atrocities. They were not proud and ambitious, they and their husbands did not write poetry and books, did not paint pictures; they had no rabid desire to squeeze their names, at all costs, into their country's history, or better yet the world's; therefore they wouldn't even have recognized the prohibitions and obstacles in this path, which they had no use for at all. They lived and were kind and treated a Russian to roast yams and loved their Joses and bore children and photographed them in their best clothes, and this was their life.
Much more natural than mine, I confess. I drifted around the world, because of ambition lost my love, and having lost it, realized that love was far dearer to me than ambition or life itself and began to seek love anew; and that is the state I am in now, searching for love. As regards love in this world, there is more of it in Russia, of course, than here. That is plain to the naked eye. Forgive me, but though they may say that Eddie-baby knows little of America, there is less love here, gentlemen, far less…
I gave myself over to all these thoughts as I returned from my class. I walked down Columbus. I always walked without hurrying, I read all the signs; if it was very hot I took off my shirt. That day, however, I was wearing a suit; when the sun came out it was scorching, and I took off my jacket. The Dominican women always hurried home when they got out of school, their children were waiting for them. Sometimes I walked with Luz, Colombian Ana, Margarita, or someone else – perhaps dark-eyed Maria with the face of a saint – to the subway, half a block from our Community Center, and elicited Spanish words from them on the way. I know perhaps two dozen words now and take pleasure in pronouncing them. I would much rather study Spanish, on the whole. It is richer and more congenial to me, just as all Spanish-speaking people are more congenial to me than buttoned-up clerks in neckties, or disciplined, Skinny secretaries. I make an exception only for Carol, only for her.
When I lost my unhappy Russian maiden, who was driven out of her fucking mind by this country, I also lost interest in cultured white women. In my morbid view, many liberated ladies, or ladies in the process of liberation, are liberating themselves from the love of another person, not from love of the self. Monsters of indifference. "My bread, my meat, my cunt, my apartment," the monsters say. I hate the civilization that has generated monsters of indifference, the civilization on whose banner I would write the most murderous expression since the origin of mankind: "That's your problem." Horror and evil are contained in this short formula, which unites all the Jean-Pierres, Susannas, and Elenas of the world. And I, little Eddie, am terrified: What if my soul finds no one here to devote itself to? Then it is doomed to eternal loneliness even beyond the grave. And that is hell.
Among the Spanish-speaking population of my great city I see much less indifference. Why? Only because they came later to this civilization, it hasn't yet corroded them so much. But it threatens even them. Admittedly, I don't think it will have time to destroy them. The civilization itself will die, strangled by the rebellion of human nature, which demands love.
"What about Russia?" you ask. But Russia and her social structure are also a product of this civilization, and although certain changes have been made there, they don't help much. Love is on the way out in Russia too. But the world needs love, cries out for love. I see that what the world needs is not national self-determination; not governments made up of one group or another; not a change from one bureaucracy to another, capitalistic or socialistic; not capitalists or Communists in power, the both of them in suits and ties. The world needs the collapse of the foundations of this man-hating civilization, new norms for behavior and social relations, the world needs real equality of property; equality at last, and not the lie that the French, in their time, wrote on the banners of their revolution. We need people to love one another so that we may all live loved by others and with peace and happiness in our hearts. And love will come to the world if the causes of unlove are annihilated. There will be no terrible Elenas then, because the Eddies will not expect anything from the Elenas, the nature of the Eddies will be different and that of the Elenas different, and no one will be able to buy any Elena, because there will be nothing to buy with, no one will have a material advantage over other people…
So I came away from my school with a happy smile. I walked along dirty Broadway. At every corner, bordello flyers were thrust on me: Take it, Eddie-baby, come and be comforted, get fifteen minutes of love. I turned on Forty-sixth Street, I knocked at a black door, and Alyoshka Slavkov, poet, opened it to me. He stood in a cloud of steam. Hot water was flowing in the kitchen, and no one had been able to stop the water for a month. I walked into Alyoshka's, as usual saw the clown's black bowler hats and the musician's instrument – Alyoshka shared his black hole with a clown and a musician, also emigres from Russia – saw the three mattresses and all sorts of rags and dirt, and demanded of Alyoshka something to eat.