When we move Americans – at present our customers are mostly all Americans – then my reflections are different. Recently we moved a couple from a house in Queens; they had been living together but were then separated, because we moved them to two different apartments. "What do you think, are they divorced?" I asked John.
"What do I care?" he said. "Do they pay money? They do. I make my money, I don't care about the rest."
Well, John doesn't, but Eddie does. I observed them carefully, and their belongings too. They were both small. He was like all Americans and so was she. Very typical. He had on a T-shirt and so did she. He had on denim shorts, his legs were hairy and just a bit crooked; she had denim jeans, her ass was a little droopy. He could have been anything, I think he was Jewish. A mustache, of course, how could he not have a mustache, and she smoked one cigarette after another. Their names, of course, were Susan and Peter, how could they be anything else. Two bicycles. One box labeled "Peter's Kitchen," another box "Susan's Kitchen." One box "Peter's Shoes," another "Susan's Shoes." All their things had been thrown into the boxes, not properly packed, and as we lugged all these boxes down a narrow green stairway, and then down a gray stairway, and then down three brick steps, the things kept trying to pop out and fall. They had a lot of things, but it was all somehow petty. Tiny little boxes, more little boxes, small little things, and only a few big ones – an old wooden armchair and a chest of drawers, a pair of small dressers, and that was all.
We moved Susan to an apartment on East Eighty-sixth, where there was an elevator. She got the two bicycles and her share of the boxes with the bottle necks sticking out of them.
Peter got the television, the old wooden armchair, and the bricks, which evidently served as spacers for bookshelves. I observed this couple like a stern high judge, hoping to see something in them other than typicality, other than his shock of curly hair and his mustache – in New York, every other man has a mustache and a shock of hair. I saw nothing.
By the time we moved him it was dark, and he threatened not to pay us any money due after six hours. He had, he said, only six hours' worth of work, and we were doing everything slowly, he said – after we had worked like hell lugging his little boxes and chests to the fourth floor. I broke a slight hole in the bottom of one of them with my head. Nevertheless, he paid us.
His apartment was on West 106th Street, not a particularly good neighborhood. I had worked fourteen hours that day, we had had another job in the morning, we had moved a Greek, I was very tired, my legs were buckling, and when John and I were carrying the last thing, an air conditioner, my strength gave out and the air conditioner landed right on top of me, though without injuring me.
"What the fuck are you doing, you mother?" John said softly.
"I'll just rest a minute," I said. "I got very drunk yesterday;" I added, which was true.
At the sound of our voices a curious denizen of the third floor stuck her head out into the stairwell. "What's happening?" she said.
"Nothing," John replied lazily. "It's just that this guy has worked over fourteen hours today. He's tired," and he started to laugh.
I was very ashamed that I hadn't been able to hold out and had collapsed on the stairs. Ashamed before the seaman from the trawler.
"Never mind," he said. "You're not used to it yet. Weak hands."
It was the first time God had made me aware there was a limit to my physical strength. If it hadn't been for those stairs! This didn't happen to me again, however; eventually I would become strong as a horse.
Ten minutes later, having received all the money – be would have tried to get out of paying John, but John wouldn't have given him his fucking TV and lamp, which were still on the truck, boxed separately in quilts – we were on our way downtown in the truck, trying to pass some other shithead in a truck, like us…
John… I like him. The lousy thing is that he's a racist, he doesn't like blacks. "Black trash," he calls them. His racism, that of an ordinary peasant lad from Russia, has a rather primitive character. Driving through different provincial towns with me, he determines first of all whether they have many blacks. The highest praise he can give a town is the assessment, "There's no black trash here at all." John is delighted by the state of Maine, where there are no blacks, where the air and water are clean, unpolluted. John associates blacks with pollution. "Ordinary people" are full of shit too. It was the workers that beat up the students who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. And the racial clashes in Boston – the capitalists are not to blame for them at all, it's the ordinary working gents who don't want their children to study with black children. Ordinary people too are full of shit in our time.
"I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike once," John recounts, "and the blacks in the car ahead of me turned over. They yelled from the car, but I drove around them and calmly rolled on. I looked back and a bunch of Americans had already come running, they were pulling die black trash out of the car."
"What a racist you are!" I tell him.
He's not angry, he laughs. "Racist" is a swear word to a liberal American professor; to a man from the fields of Byelorussia, a seaman from a trawler, "racist" is not a swear word.
We often return from our trips via Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Calmly driving the heavy truck, he looks at the crowd and grits through his teeth, "Monkeys, monkeys!" With no special malice, however. He points out to me a guy who is totally drunk or stoned, staggering along waving his arms. John laughs contentedly.
I do not try to dissuade him, I do not suggest that he take thought and reject his racism. It's futile. And although we calmly ride in the same truck, although I approve of him in some ways, value his simple strength and vitality, and although it seems to me that he approves of me in some ways too, the possibility cannot be excluded that coming years will place us on different sides of the barricades. He will be defending this system and this regime, along with lads just like him from the fields of Texas, Iowa, or Missouri, and I will be with the hated black trash.
This is so clear to me that I smile calmly in the truck. Ah, John, little Eddie's a tough guy too, you'd better forgive him in advance, just in case. Life is too serious, I think.
He pays me my money and steps on the gas with his canvas shoe. As he disappears around the corner I catch a fleeting glimpse of his head, his short American-style haircut. I walk to my hotel.
Lately John has warmed up to me. For one thing, he now works almost exclusively with me. For another, he occasionally calls me outside of working hours and invites me to do something with him. He begins in English but then, on my account, descends to Russian after all. Once he came over with Lenya, the former inmate of the Gulag Archipelago, in Lenya's car; it was late afternoon, but they were going to the beach. Lenya is a poor driver, but we finally reached the deserted beach on distant Coney Island. As always, in keeping with my childish, soldierly habit, I had brought nothing with me, but John of course proved to be well equipped. He had with him a mat, which he spread neatly on the sand; he had a transistor radio, which he turned on immediately; he had a first-rate volleyball, which as he put it had cost him twenty-five bucks; he had an expensive textbook of English. After a swim Mr. Businessman lay down on the mat, took his pen, opened the book, and began working the exercises.