Yes, but John. I was talking about him. It's amusing that all of us – intellectuals, poets, and dissidents – are under an ordinary guy from a fishing trawler. He has proved to be much better adapted to this life than we are. He does his business seriously and punctiliously. You should see the way he walks into the apartment of someone who is moving, records the place on the contract form, and demands the client's signature. All this is done very importantly. His file folder looks important, the clamp on his clipboard sparkles, and we stand at his back – some, like Fein, very rightist; others, like me, very leftist; still others, like Shneerson, undecided – holding in readiness the dollies for moving furniture, the straps and the packing quilts. We wait for a signal from our businessman, John.
I find all this to be terrible foolishness, both my participation in moving other people's belongings from one place to another, and this Fein, who is forever praising America and its wise government. He even considers the Bowery and its dirty, piss-soaked inhabitants to be the result of a government plan to concentrate all beggars, alcoholics, and drug addicts in one place, the more easily to help them. My participation is terrible foolishness, but my $278 welfare is so inadequate for me that I participate in this foolishness anyway; I too am a man and need money. That is why the rightist Fein grabs the right side of the piano, and I, the extreme leftist, the left side – and here we go!
Admittedly, I need the money only for clothes, my single weakness. I have always found the acquisition of other things disgusting, and the experience of moving other people's belongings, the spectacle of the silly heavy sofas, the buffets, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of petty objects, has strengthened my aversion to the world of things. The owner will die, and all this shit will remain. "Never!" I whisper to myself, as I lug some Patrick's buffet up the stairs to the fourth floor, without an elevator. "I don't give a flying fuck for this old junk. No to things!" I say to myself. The only thing I cannot resist, alas, is beautiful clothes.
The signature is affixed. The missus has signed. From this moment on, an invisible meter counts out our pennies. We begin to move like automated dolls. Pick up, place on the dolly, turn, roll, lift at the threshold or the step, roll again… move, unscrew mirrors, wrap them in special quilts… monotonous, rhythmic operations, varying only in the size of the object and the turns on the staircase, the approach to the elevator, the steps down to the street, and the weather.
We're rather a cheap company; some of our customers are emigres, because we advertise in Russkoe Delo as well as the American papers. Emigres most often live in poor neighborhoods, they have precious little in the way of belongings. Sometimes we have to move crazy old ladies to the poorhouse and carry off their dirty odds and ends of trash.
Once we even moved iron beds with flat springs, beds for two girls of sixteen and twenty, beds they had brought from the USSR. But the girls were darling, with their neat little poopkas and high heels, Jewish girls bursting with their own juice; I feel like saying the banal, and I wilclass="underline" "girls with the eyes of little young lambs," bulging eyes, silly and trusting. I am not very fond of brunettes, but I feel a kind of gratitude toward Jewish girls. A Russian poet cannot help loving them – they are his main readers and admirers. "Ah, Tolya, who in Russia reads us but the Jewish girls?" the poet Yesenin once wrote from America to the poet Mariengof in Russia.
My working minutes tick by, bathed in sweat, amid self-abasement and the countless jostling memories awakened now by a ray of sun, now by a book that has fallen from a badly tied box… "I was reading it, then she came in – Elena – and we…" Hauling and carrying extensive Russian libraries is an especially strange pastime. Here in America, Russian books produce an unexpected effect. Carrying the dull green spines, the collected works of the Chekhovs, Leskovs, and other eulogizers and denizens of sleepy Russian noondays, I think vicious thoughts about the whole of my loathsome native Russian literature, which has been largely responsible for my life. Dull green bastards, Chekhov languishing in boredom, his eternal students, people who don't know how to get themselves going, who vegetate through this life, they lurk in these pages like diaphanous sunflower husks. Even the print, small and crowded, is repulsive to me. And I am repulsive to myself. It's much pleasanter to move the bright American books, not all of which, moreover, are intelligible to me, thank Cod.
We have moved a set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and are now moving boxes of loose papers stamped "Radio Liberty." Dirty dipshit operation… so that's where he works! The owner of the papers is an intellectual from Kiev, with a graying beard. For some reason they all unthinkingly begin to collaborate with the CIA. I, who received not a ruble from the Soviet regime, would seem to have more grounds for being embittered at my former homeland and going to work for an organization financed by the American intelligence service and aimed at the destruction of Russia. But I don't work for anyone. I did not collaborate with the KGB there and am not about to collaborate with the CIA here – to me, they are two identical operations.
The owner of the library, with the little gray beard, enthusiastically tells Fein that an article of his has been accepted for the anniversary issue of Posev. Bonehead, he's found something to be proud of. In the USSR the graybeard was a screenwriter – worked for the Soviet regime. I did not encounter any free screenwriters in the USSR; naturally, he wrote what the authorities needed. Here he also writes exactly what the authorities need – such people work for the authorities under all regimes. They were born to serve, to carry out functions. They change masters without any special pangs of conscience. And why not?
Prostitute! I think, meaning the graybeard. The prostitute is also dragging chests around, breathing heavily; he is saving time and money. Evidently they don't pay him any too much at Radio Liberty. Or else it's greed. "How much is your Homeland today?" I feel like asking him… He keeps dragging. His son, a tanned athlete of about sixteen, is also carrying things. Mama, who looks younger than she is, does not carry furniture. "Mama can be fucked," says the ubiquitous Kirill, who is present with me as always. I brought him to earn a little money. It is probably the first time in his life he has worked as a mover. The big aristocrat finds it disgusting to carry furniture, he has little knowledge of the correct way to pick things up, he just barely holds on. But he does, although the job is hard for him to take and probably humiliating. Since I am actually from the lower classes and have seen all kinds of situations in this life, sweat is no novelty to me, though I haven't done any moving for ten years. But Kirill's face shows depression, loathing for the work, and boredom. His expression will change, giving place to a certain satisfaction, only after he gets his money, but as it turns out, John has had time to notice it. He will not invite the aristocrat to move furniture again, young men like this don't appeal to him. He does not understand the conventions of this world.
What the fuck does this prostitute want with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia? I am still wondering about our client. It is clear that the only reason he needs the encyclopedia and his huge Russian Orthographic Dictionary is so that he can be more literate in selling out his Homeland. He has even brought over some paperbacks on patriotic heroes of World War II. Why? As possible material for his scripts. For some sort of expose. There was another writer like that, but from the Second Emigration; I think he's still writing. He reads a Soviet book, supposedly finds anti-Soviet tendencies in the author, and there's his article. That's how he lives, article after article. And there's another one, a former Soviet officer, who contrives to publish one and the same thing in two places, sends it to Radio Liberty and Russkoe Delo – changes the title, revises two paragraphs, and sends it off. Two fees. That's how he's lived his thirty years abroad. A good cook. Likes to eat. It's not their fault, poor fellows. They want to eat. But if you're going to work in your own way and measure this world – whether the USSR or America – by your own standards, then what will you eat? You can't feed on the Holy Spirit, can you?