He is a Christlike man in a ragged suit jacket, his feet bare in his shoes. I know him, he's always here, he paces up and down in the crowd with his hand thrust into the pocket of this very jacket, and offers joints to the strolling crowd. The really serious smokers have their own, however; purchased joints are skimpier and weaker. The family, evidently happy to be reunited, thanks me. I bow and scrape. It was nothing… Any time… What the hell…
The family wheels off with the carriage, and I wonder why I didn't think to make a baby with Elena. She would have left anyway, but the baby would have stayed, women like her do not take the children with them when they leave. I would have had a little baby, and it might have been beautiful like Elena – I'm not bad-looking, either – I would have had a little piece of Elena, a girl or a boy, and I would have devoted, myself to the baby. Asshole, I think. But what if…
Instantly a plan springs to mind. Not now, of course. I'm not in a position to engineer it now. But later, maybe a year from now, when I have good connections and friends here, I can find some remote dacha, equip it appropriately to care for a kidnapped person, and then steal Elena. I'll find a doctor, perhaps I can persuade Oleg Chikovani, my friend who lives in Davis, California – after all, he was my friend back in Moscow; he might not be afraid to risk his medical license, being a friend – and he'll pull out the coil that allows Elena to fuck and not get pregnant. Oleg is a neurosurgeon, a specialist in operations on the brain. An operation like this would be nothing to him. And I'll fuck my girl-child and keep her locked up till she delivers, nine months.
Among people who know her I can spread the rumor that she's gone to visit her sister, who has moved from the fucking ruins of Beirut to either Rome or Paris – I can always tell some lie. And for those nine months, not all of them, but the first six, I can still fuck Elena, what can she do? Nothing. She'll be furious, yell a bit, and calm down. I'll fuck her every day, many times; in point of fact we won't have anything else to do. At the thought of such happiness my head spins, and as at any thought of Elena my cock stands up.
It will be someplace in Connecticut. Mentally I transfer the scene of the action in my fictitious kidnapping to Alex and Tatyana Glickerman's dacha. I liked their dacha; Elena and I visited there a couple of times when we were still husband and wife. Nowadays it seems she occasionally visits them alone. The Glickermans have paintings by Dali hanging even in the bathroom there. Alex is a friend of his, he's the director of a very fashionable fashion magazine, after all. As for Tatyana, the poet Mayakovsky was once in love with her, and if you recall, I have mentioned somewhere that in Moscow I was friends with Mayakovsky's mistress Lily Brik. It's odd how fate persistently links little Eddie with the sexual legends of another great poet.
Oh, my wife, even now we are not separated. How I love you, I think, horrified to discover once more the awful depth of the abyss of my love. I will, I'll do this, I tell myself with conviction. And though they will try me if they find me out, love is always in the right, always, and I'll do this. Shit if I'll submit to fate, to the fate that took Elena away from me. I have merely been temporarily in hiding, I am waiting…
The falling leaves at that dacha have slowly disappeared, but my cock is still standing; I feel a certain inner contentment, as if I had just now fucked Elena and this mysterious process had begun within her. Mmh!…
I wake from my thoughts, store the idea away in my memory. I start toward a group of people, from whose midst I hear the rumble of a guitar, the rhythm of a percussion instrument, and hoarse voices.
Some fat-faced boys, grouped under a tree, their foreheads nearly touching, are singing a song, a rhythmic one. I can hardly understand their song, but they themselves, with their tattoos and their false teeth, are familiar to me. Their type emerged in Russia at the same time as here in America. There at home we didn't know that the whole world lived by the same laws. A vision of the Kharkov beach rises before me…
Vitka Kosoy, just as fat-pussed as these fat-pusses, a hefty boy with legs like tree trunks, is plucking the guitar. His face is turned toward my even more fat-pussed friend Sanya the Red, the butcher; their foreheads are nearly touching. Staring him in the eye, Vitka plucks the guitar and sings Russian rock:
Ziganshin rock!
Ziganshin roll!
Ziganshin forty days in the snow!
The melody of this song came to us via the radio, maybe from here, from America, but the words – which tell the story of four Soviet frontier guards who got caught in a blizzard and were picked up by the Americans – were composed by the Russian people.
Kosoy is just back from Moscow, where he served three years in the army, and has brought back this song and two or three dozen others like it
They sing. People cluster around them. Here is a man in swimming trunks with palm trees. Everyone calls him Hollywood. He acquired this nickname because he speaks in quotes from foreign films. For example, we're walking in the park in the fall. Hollywood is bound to say: "These leaves rustle like American dollars."
The people in Washington Square are absolutely the same. There are small, purely American differences, the colored tattoos on their skin, for example, and the fact that some of the people, the singers and those standing around them, are black. Nevertheless, I recognize in many of them my own faraway Kharkov friends, who by now have long since taken to drink. With the smile of a sage I also notice, sitting in an embrace on the parapet, two vulgar zonked blondes. In their puffy faces, their painted, smudged mouths and eyes, I recognize our unchanging girlfriends, girls from Tyura's dacha, Masya and Kokha, except that they're talking between themselves in English. Other spectators are also familiar. This man here with the black teeth is Yurka Bembel, who was shot in 1962 for raping a minor… And this is the exemplary technology student Fima…
Contenting myself with the song – having concluded it, the whole company of singers is sharing a marijuana cigarette – I march on. I go out of the park toward the Catholic student center and walk down Thompson Street, where, after passing a little Mexican restaurant, I briefly study the diverse and unusual chessmen, which never cease to astonish me, in the window of a chess shop. Occasionally I walk more to the left, down LaCuardia, where I drop into a clothing store. The proprietress, a large fair-haired Polish woman, talks with some of the customers in Polish. I invariably reject her help and look at the hats: The Pole does not get angry, though I've never bought anything from her, I always just look. I have a special predilection for white things. After leaving the Pole's, I cross Houston – a boring street, provincial as a street out of Gogol's Mirgorod, but with two-way traffic – and go down to SoHo.
The contents of the SoHo galleries have long since palled on me. I have frequented SoHo since the day I arrived in America. Bicycles of wood, typewriters of wood, shopping bags also of wood, or a wooden plant with slender leaves that sway in the wind, as well as the skeleton of a huge fish. I survey it all with indifference. The artist, a little Japanese, also looks to be made of wood, his cheekbones, his face, his gristly ears. I got used to contemporary art back in Moscow. A good hundred artists were friends of mine. I am not astonished at a photographic cycle depicting a hole being punched in a house. Cross-sections of the rooms, views from the right and left, from above and below, and to top it all off, a chunk of wall exhibited complete with plaster – these do not astonish me. Silky tulle bags at the Castelli gallery: Rauschenberg has entered his salon period. I much prefer his work in the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third Street – cloth, iron, a used automobile tire, all crude and harsh – there is protest visible in the painting. Now Rauschenberg is a master, a luminary, rich people have bought him, his works cost big money, and naturally, though I doubt he realizes it himself, these tulle bags are his salon period, Puvis de Chavanne stuff; he has become a society painter, a decorator, "beautiful" I miss the canvas cloth, the crude execution that has disappeared from his works. America gets even with its artists by other means than Russia does. Russia is also wising up, however. An exhibit at the board of the Soviet Artists' Union by some friends of mine, artists of the extreme left, is a case in point: Russian administrators are learning from their American colleagues the more modern, humane means of killing art, namely, if you want to kill an artist, buy him.