Often I go downtown for the whole day. I usually begin with Washington Square, where I lie in the fountain, if it's working. I put my feet in, my buns repose on the last step before water level, I lie back philosophically and contemplate my environment, or even more often I close my eyes and am merely aware, opening them infrequently. The sun, the water, the hum, and the shouts – to me it all makes up the melody of life. Often the fountain is spurting upward in a hard jet, the children throw various objects into it, beer cans, Coca-Cola cans, handkerchiefs. When thrown right, these things go flying up high, and the naked wet children squeal with delight. Other children try to sit their poopkas down on the jet so that the jet will lift them up. But either the children are very heavy, or they don't sit down right – it never happens, the jet doesn't lift them. One boy of about ten became very adept at aiming the fountain jet wherever he wanted by pressing his foot on the opening it spurted from. He hounded everyone else out of the fountain circle; a fat black woman and I proved to be the most stubborn. The black woman lay there and held out a long time, but the bad little boy overcame her in the end after squirting her with an ocean of water. She left. Things were more complex with me. It's hard with guys like me. He kept squirting water on me, but I had schooled myself from childhood, like a yogi, to endure both cold and hunger serenely. He squirted and squirted, and I just lay there. But the kid turned out to be every bit as stubborn. He adapted. When he squirted my face, in particular my nose and mouth, with a whole barrage of water, I couldn't take it, there was nothing to breathe, I had to crawl out and change places. The spectators – idlers, students, guitarists, and drug addicts – applauded wildly for both him and me.
The dogs also join in the general joy by playing in the water. They run after sticks, cans, and balk and devotedly drag them to their masters. One dog will be swifter; one will be fatter and won't get to the thing thrown by his master in time, it is snapped up by the other, swifter person of the dog species, and then the one who has committed the offense looks guiltily at his master.
One fool of a boxer dragged his mistress into the fountain and spent half an hour in there, choking and probably taking a great many blows on the muzzle as he tried to bite the jet of water. Poor thing, he deemed it a most evil enemy. His eyes were bloodshot, his muzzle was flayed, he wheezed and choked, the jet kept lifting him up by the chest, beat him on the muzzle again and again. The mistress, a perfectly proper-looking woman – God knows what had brought her here, it was certainly her first time – was thoroughly soaked, and a preposterous bra and underpants of an almost Russian cut showed through the wet fabric of her dress. The philistines of the two countries are alike.
Washington Square is pointed out in guidebooks to New York as a place of note, and sometimes real Americans pass through, countrymen and country ladies, glancing over their shoulders. To us natives they look very funny; observing them, the guitarists, students, idlers, and joint-smokers laugh, and so do I. These people dressed in their bulky American country finery look especially funny in Washington Square. They have a great deal in common with Soviet philistines, dressed in their ample dusty suits in the terrible continental heat.
I have a whole complex of diversions in Washington Square. Sometimes, along with everyone else, I listen to the Poet. His name is unknown to me, I call him the Poet. I could easily find out his name, but for some reason I don't. A short little man with a beard and a balding head, wearing a black shirt over loose sateen pants, also black, and sandals on his bare feet, he clambers up on one of the elevated bumps in the fountain's low round wall and reads his poetry. Usually he stands on the exact same bump where I sat while Irina and Khachaturian – my friends, they consider themselves my friends – dressed the veins in my arm, stuck a plaster on them. That was at the very beginning of March, the slashed veins were still barely closed; unattended, they were oozing pus. Irina and Khachaturian put iodine on my arm, then stuck an American plaster on it. The whole of Washington Square observed this operation.
The poet always heads for the exact same pedestal. That is why I haven't made the poet's acquaintance, he and I are linked by this pedestal as it is. The poet lays by his feet a shopping bag similar to the ones that elderly Soviet ladies used in the fifties – black, crude, made of oilcloth. He rummages unhurriedly in his bag, takes out a single page, and begins to read: He reads with expression, with gesticulation. His voice is hoarse, he has lots of enthusiasm, but he's a long way from Lyonka Cubanov's shrill, sobbing, lamenting delivery, a Moscow style that originated perhaps in the laments of northern Russia. Doesn't make the grade, I think with superiority.
The poet reads, some people even turn down their radios a little. Alternately rummaging in his bag and reading, the poet does ten or fifteen poems and then sits down. He swigs from a bottle of wine and talks with any listeners who wish to talk, occasionally letting them too have a swallow of wine. He's a nice guy, that's obvious, he's about forty-five, and to me Washington Square would be empty without him.
After lying here for three or four hours, listening to all the conversations around me, now and then being captivated by the girls who fall for my wonderful tanned figure (which girls, as you know, attract and repel me simultaneously; that is why I fear them and have failed in two or three intimate relationships. I was scared shitless, alas, though I had promised myself to take advantage of all opportunities, to enter into all contacts) – after lying here awhile, I get up and move to another spot, somewhere on the grass, under a bush, but again, nearly always in the sun, only occasionally in the shade. If the Ramakrishna chariot comes, I watch the members of that sect dancing to the tambourine. I know them all by sight, know which is better or worse at dancing and playing the drum or the tambourine. Their little boy, also robed in orange gauze, touches my heart. At one time I thought about going to live in their commune, I still think about it even now. Probably I am prevented by my ambition from carrying out this plan. It could still happen, however.
To me, even though they are inauthentic, the Ramakrishnas are redolent of my native East. I lie on the grass in a relaxed position, my head pillowed only on my arm, often with my eyes closed, and then all that sounds in my ears is one of their rotating prayers:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna!
Krishna, Krishna, Hare Hare!
Hare Rama, Hare Rama!
Rama Rama, Hare Hare!
After spending perhaps an hour listening to the rhythmical din of the tambourines, I decide to change position and sit for a while on a bench. A fair-haired young mama, dressed in God knows what, clothes from Botticelli's time, asks me to guard a fair-haired and just as whimsically dressed child lying in a carriage. If only she wouldn't come back, I think, glancing at the baby with interest. I would sit and wait a while, then take the child for myself. I'd have someone to care for, someone to love, and someone to work for. Even though the child would grow up and abandon me – that's inevitable. The ones you love always leave you. But surely it would be fifteen years before he left, I would hear his ringing laughter, I'd cook for him, walk with him till I dropped, raise him myself, not send him to school, I'd play with him and run along the seashore, I think dreamily.
Despite all his ironic mockery and malice, Eddie-baby, like a lonely dog that has lost its master, dreams of dogging someone's footsteps, devoting himself to someone. The dreams are interrupted, as always in such cases, by harsh reality. The little mama comes back with papa.