Roseanne and Joe were fucking; if I had felt even a flicker of displeasure over this fact… nothing of the kind, shit, I was glad for her that someone was fucking her. It was nice he was fucking her, why not? Now she seems to have gotten tired of Joe and parted company with him, she didn't want to go away with him for the weekend. "He'll get me upset," she said. She doesn't want to get upset, doesn't give a shit about other people's problems. Besides, he drinks all the time. He's a sculptor, this Joe; maybe I'll have to see his sculptures sometime. He had in mind a rather crazy scheme to show his slides on the surface of the World Trade Center downtown, only I don't know whether it was the first tower or the second.
I wasn't at all antagonized by them, I listened attentively to the conversation, but didn't find it interesting to sit with them. They didn't argue about anything, didn't focus critically on anything, they bypassed all the critical places, laughed without apparent reason, the whole conversation was built up out of little anecdotes, out of tiny particles – funny incidents or funny words. I find it hard to say whether it's only they, "the Americans," who are uninteresting, or whether people in general have become uninteresting to me. I think it's that people in general have become uninteresting to Eddie, the ones who are only for themselves, about themselves, unto themselves. Russians are even more uninteresting to me than Americans. I'm in a lousy situation, really bad.
Roseanne is plain as day to me, so well defined that she irritates me. As you see, I can't even use her as a woman. I can't force myself even to that.
Sometimes I even seem proud of my satiety and the fact that I can calmly not use a sweet cunt. This circumstance, engendered of course by my tragedy, separates me from those who get for themselves, love themselves, live for themselves. If I knew that Roseanne needed me, that I could save her, help her, make her different, I would give myself; in essence, it doesn't matter to me now where I throw myself, if only I could give myself completely. But I can no longer help her. No one can.
She and I are drifting ever farther apart, chance acquaintances who met a few times on her yellow sheets. Eddie-baby carries away with him only the soft breeze from the Hudson River, the lights of New Jersey on the other shore, and a piece of Debussy's that she used to play.
I make money
One morning I was awakened by a call from John. "Come on down, Ed!" he said in English. Two minutes later I was downstairs and into the cab of the truck that stood by the entrance.
I was off to make myself some money. Anytime anyone offers me work, I don't turn it down. These times are few, and in practice my sole source of work is John. He is my boss and the only person I know at the renowned Beautiful Moving Company.
John – formerly Ivan – is a fascinating person. A seaman who defected from a Soviet fishing vessel in the straits of Japan. In an inflatable rubber boat, riding the current off the Japanese coast, he survived a gale and was picked up by Japanese fishermen. From Japan he applied to go to the States.
John is a manly-looking guy, tall and strong, slightly snubnosed, the same age as Eddie. A Jack London character. He speaks English exclusively. The words are horribly mispronounced, with a dreadful wooden accent, but it's English. He still condescends to speak Russian with me; he's more severe with others. This version of the "man of the people" is very familiar to me; the desire not to be Russian, the scorn for Russia, for its people and language, are also familiar. My friend Paul, though with certain deviations, was almost the same type. His story is less successful than John's but even more colorful.
God knows where Paul contracted his Francomania. Born Pavel Shemetov, the son of ordinary working parents, he lived in a small private house on the outskirts of Kharkov. During his four years in the navy, where he served as a seaman (John was navy too!), Pavel learned die French language down to the last detail. At the time I became acquainted with him his French was very sophisticated, he could speak with a Marseilles, Paris, or Breton accent at will. The French tourists who now and then passed through Kharkov on their way south – we picked them up, on Paul's initiative, in order to drink vodka with them by the fence of the Metropolitan's house, on a hill overlooking Kharkov, and barter goods with them – honestly took him for a repatriate, there had been many repatriates to the USSR from France.
Paul was madly in love with France. He knew all the French chansonniers, among whom he was especially fond of Aznavour and Brel. On the wall of his room, in oil, Paul had painted a huge portrait of Aznavour that covered the whole wall. I remember he once sang "Amsterdam!" for us, in a narrow, piss-puddled gateway on Sumskaya Street, the main street of our native Kharkov. When he imitated Jacques Brel, he puffed up and turned all purple. He had less ability and skill than Brel, but probably no less enthusiasm.
From photographs, drawings, and plans of Paris, Paul learned all of its streets, lanes, and culs-de-sac. He painted watercolors of them in great number. I think he could have walked through Paris with his eyes closed and not gotten lost. Names like Place Pigalle, Cafe Blanche, Etoile, and Montmartre had for him the ring of unearthly music. He was frenchified to the point of pathology. He refused to talk to people in Russian, he did not enter into conversations on buses or streetcars. "I don't understand," he would say curtly. He still made an exception for us, his friends, but only for us. Even at that, I think he inwardly scorned us for not knowing French.
He was working then at a tannery. I don't know exactly what he did there, but he did heavy, nasty work for almost two years – he wanted clothes. Somewhere in the labyrinth of Moskalevka, the Jewish quarter, he found an old Jewish shoemaker, and the man made him some high boots, with high heels too, "like the Beatles'." I forgot to mention that Paul loved the Beatles. With the help of the niece of the wife I had then, I made him a three-piece suit from a striped fabric, and a great many pairs of striped slacks. I remember that he liked his slacks very long, practically lying in folds at the bottom. It was an oddity of his.
Paul became frenchified to such a degree that even outwardly – I am thinking particularly of his face – he ceased to look Russian and really did recall a Frenchman, most probably a resident of a small town in Brittany. Many times, back in Russia, when studying Western illustrated magazines, I encountered faces surprisingly reminiscent of my poor friend Paul's.
His fate is tragic. He matured too early, while it was still impossible to emigrate from the USSR: they were not yet letting the Jews out; the practice of exposing undesirable elements and ejecting them abroad did not yet exist. It was too early, but Paul was already ripe. He so wanted to leave that hated country for his beloved France, the paradise that he had created for himself in his imagination. I don't know whether he would have been happy in that paradise. He might have been. I do know of three attempts he made to escape from the Soviet Union.
The first went unnoticed. On leaving the tannery, Paul, who had accumulated a little money, began to spend a lot of time downtown, visiting the cafes and the not very numerous vice dens of Kharkov. Somewhere down there he became acquainted with Bunny, a large and rather cute girl whom the whole city knew as a prostitute; he married her and moved in with her. Her mother was a tradeswoman. By paying off a few policemen she had succeeded in getting around Soviet law and was making money buying hard-to-get goods in one city and selling them in another. She converted her son-in-law Paul to this business. One time she sent him to Armenia. There he learned of a high official who was taking huge sums for illegally sending people to Turkey. Ostensibly they were hired for the job of building a highway. Part of the highway was being built on Turkish territory. Paul was unlucky. When he arrived at the border the chief was already in prison.