Lenya Kosogor, thin and stooped, also had no things with him, like me. It's a prison-camp habit not to burden oneself with things – they will only be taken away. Lenya and I lay right on the sand. At first I laid my head, which was wet after my swim, on John's volleyball; then, thinking he would bawl me out for ruining the surface of the leather, I moved my head away and rested it on my own sandal.
We lay there for quite a long time in the sunshine – it was an evening sun, not hot. Lately I have grown accustomed to silence, and talkativeness irritates me at times. In this respect John is almost ideal. I kept my eyes closed. Lenya asked me a couple of questions and also fell silent. We lay there a long time.
"Let's go, Ed!" John said suddenly. He closed his notebook, took the ball, and went off a little distance from where we lay. A game of volleyball – it was possible, I thought, but I had on these fucking lenses; if I moved abruptly they might fly out. But I didn't want to appear ridiculous in front of my boss. I said only that I hadn't played volleyball in at least ten years. The game began.
At first I was cautious because of the lenses and because my hands weren't obeying me. Finally I remembered how to play, and things started to go better. John wasn't much of a player either, but gradually, as I say, things got going, and later Kosogor joined in. We played quite a long time, then Kosogor lay down again on the sand and started singing Russian songs, while we kept chasing our ball around, with our eyes narrowed against the flying sand – the ball did get away from us fairly often and fall in the sand.
You know, it was like returning to my childhood. The Kharkov beach. My tireless sun-blackened friends, at once athletes and hoodlums. The endlessly flying ball. The svelte girls, who usually played very badly, but their presence inspired the young males of the species to incredible tricks and pirouettes. Admittedly, all the participants in this scene were much younger then, there were a great many of them; that scene also had a background filled with people we knew or half knew, and most importantly, it didn't have the feeling of aching sadness. Sadness surrounded both energetic John, and Lenya Kosogor, and me. Why? I asked myself. It wasn't nostalgia, was it? I don't know whether they sensed the sadness, but to me the gray ocean was sad, and the dirty sand, and the gulls, and the remote group of people on the sand – everything was filmed with sadness. The kind of sadness, you know, that makes a man take a machine gun and start shooting into the crowd, I wouldn't do it, but as an example, that's a good way to dispel sadness.
Actually I was feeling the lack of a lifework, solidly begun and just as steadfastly pursued. What this country offered me could not be my lifework. It could be John's, he made money; or Lenya Kosogor's, he wanted something definite and material; but with my thirst for love, you know, I had it tougher than anyone. Only a Great Idea could lend purpose to my life. Riding in a car, embracing a loved friend, walking on the grass, sitting on the steps of a city church – it all feels good when every hour of your life is subordinate to a great idea and a movement. But for now, there was never anything but sadness.
I cut short the volleyball session, went for a swim, swam thinking ceaselessly about how I might find love again in this world, so that it would bloom, take on color, blaze up, become the vibrant and happy world I used to live in. I swam way far out and then turned over in the water, lay there and thought about this, while over my head, scrawling across the water, glimmered the last ray of the setting sun.
I climbed out and strolled along the beach. The others, my simple, ordinary, generally good friends, were still lying there on the sand, but I didn't feel like going over to them. I strolled in the opposite direction, where there were alien bodies and alien people, and an old man with a beard was doing calisthenic bows that smacked of prayer, directly toward the setting sun.
I walked quite a way along the tide-smoothed sand, gazing at the ocean, hoping for something, but did not encounter anything or anyone necessary for my purposes; only a few children and teenage girls arrested my attention. But between them and me there lay by now my insurmountable age, my head full of the past, my scarred arms, and always that sadness. I returned to my own people – to choose an arbitrary term, of course, an arbitrary term.
They greeted me with a piece of news. "Your friend is dead," Lenya said. "Which one?" I asked indifferently. "The Great Helmsman," Lenya said. "Get out the black paint, you'll be putting a black border on the portrait in your room."
So he's dead, I thought. He was all muddled in recent years, he scuttled Trotskyism to ape the ancient Chinese emperors, founders of dynasties, he kept on living and now he's dead. A man of the people, and muddled like the people. Why can't I live without arrogance, why am I tormented by arrogance and love?
We played some more volleyball. A towheaded nurse from a nursing home came along, John invited her to play with us, and it developed that her parents were from Poltava. I jumped for the ball, everyone laughed; even in childhood I had excelled at the risky Brazilian game, as Sanya the Red called it.
The nurse from the nursing home, as Lenya observed, wanted John to fuck her, but when it comes to sex John has affairs of his own; I don't know what kind We left.
At a seedy roadside joint we ordered ourselves some roast beef; on the sly, Lenya and I each drank half a tumbler of brandy, bought at the liquor store next door. John turned it down. He took the wheel, and we started off to New York. The tipsy inmate of the Archipelago was expressing his opinions on something from the back seat, genially and loudly. I stared intently into the surrounding cars and said nothing…
Another time John took me to inspect an American submarine for some reason. God knows why I should want to see some fucking boat, but he invited me, came for me in the truck, and I couldn't refuse John. I went along.
The boat lay in a little enclosure. It was huge. Everything on it was real, except that two good-sized holes had been cut in the sheathing and staircases soldered into them for the tourists. We clambered around in the boat's compartments for a good hour, listening to explanations from an old submariner, a clever guide who called the little girls "missy" and patiently answered both their questions and the naval questions of my friend John.
"The hell he says they had good air here, fuck it, you better not try the air here. There's no rolling in a sub, you don't feel it, that's true. But the air is shit," was John's commentary on the old submariner's stories.
John was interested in everything. He peered below, where there were batteries for power, peered into the holes of the diesels, turned a wheel and closed the hatches on our whole group so that we wouldn't hear the noise from another tour group following behind us.
I didn't give a fucking shit about that boat. I looked politely, but I would have had more interest in going to see an autopsy room, where I had also been invited recently, to watch them dissect the dead. But the boat – fuck it. Well, at least I wasn't at home, thanks to John.
After the boat he took me someplace else, without saying where. This was his usual trick. Like him, I don't crack under pressure; I kept silent, didn't ask where I was being taken, merely watched the road, trying to guess. Aha, now it was clear – this was the Tolstoy Farm. He took a right at the farm. Weaving among secondhand cars, we drove up to a single-story barracks for two families. Walked in.