Did you know that in March I was interviewed by Roy Stillman, and that he asked me, “What did you find most striking about America?” I answered, “The fact that it exists. That it is a reality.”
For us, America was like Carthage or Troy. And suddenly it turned out that Broadway is a reality, Tiffany’s is a reality, the Flatiron Building is a reality, and the Mississippi is a reality.
Once I was walking in lower Manhattan. I stopped by a bar called Johnny’s. I went inside, ordered an Irish coffee, and found a seat by the window.
I sensed that there was someone under the table. I bent down – it was a bum, drunk. A black guy, completely drunk, wearing a red shirt. (Incidentally, I saw exactly the same shirt once on Yevtushenko.*)
And suddenly I nearly cried with happiness. Could this really be me, drinking Irish coffee in a bar called Johnny’s, with a black bum under the table?
Of course, there is no such thing as happiness, as Pushkin says. But there is also no peace, and beyond that, I’m weak of will, so I have to differ with him.
And of course, all this is tinsel, paper streamers – the bar, the drunk black guy, the Irish coffee. But it means that, in the end, there is something to paper streamers. How many times in the last decades have fashions in women’s hats changed? And paper streamers remain paper streamers for a thousand years.
Let’s assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kinds of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?
I’m staying in the Curtis Hotel, with a multitude of various amusements. There’s a bar. There’s a swimming pool. There’s a suspicious-looking Havana Room. There’s a souvenir shop, where I acquired swimming trunks for the Mississippi. (On the front, a design of a sausage and two hard-boiled eggs.)
There are clean sheets, hot water, a television set, writing paper. There is a terrific neighbour, Ernst Neizvestny. (He just convincingly demonstrated to Harrison Salisbury:* “The vertical is God. The horizontal is Life. In the point of intersection, there is me, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Kafka.”)
There is you, to whom I’m sending this idiotic letter.
I’m in the hotel. I’m taking part in some incomprehensible symposium. I have on me close to a hundred dollars.
Early in the morning, I walk out of the hotel. It is cool and raw. A man, looking down and out, stops me and asks, “Do you have a match?” I answer, “Hold on.” And I hand him a lighter. And the man has trouble lighting up in the wind. Then I add, “Inhale, inhale.” And it’s unlikely that he’ll stare after me. Because these are the few words I can say without an accent.
He says, “Cool today.” And I answer, in English, “Sure.” And we go off our separate ways, two absolutely free people – a participant in a puzzling symposium and a down-and-out fellow in a sweater that Yevtushenko would be envious of.
Last night we played bingo. Neizvestny played and lost four times. That means he’ll win some other, unknown game.
Hugs to you all. We’ll see each other soon. I’m bringing a small excerpt and the end of a prison novella. It was sent to me through Levin, from Texas. The beginning is missing. It began, I remember, like this: “In the north, it generally gets dark early. And in the zone especially.”
I’ll put that sentence in somewhere.
Well, till we meet.
AS SOON AS THE ROAR of the motors stopped, the pine trees rustled high above the heads of the men. The prisoners quit work, pulled spoons out of the tops of their boots and walked to the barn.
The “slopper” dipped his ladle deep in a dark and viscous liquid. The men ate silently, then got out tobacco pouches and lit up from the embers.
The smoke of the campfire disappeared upwards, becoming pale October sky. It was quiet. The pines rustled in the space above the logging sector that had become empty without the motors rumbling.
“Shall we talk of those marvellous creatures?” Zek Brigadier Agoshin said, pulling his torn zek three-flap cap down over his eyes.
“Forget it,” Beluga said. “After your conversations no one can sleep.”
“No one can sleep? Then you just better give up and break your thing over your knee. You’ll grow a bigger and better one when you get out.”
The zeks laughed in spite of themselves. The autumn air was saturated with the smell of motor oil. The trees rocked in the pale sky. The sun fell unevenly on the rough yellowish logs.
There were two who sat smoking a little apart from the others, a short-legged fellow in a worn quilted vest named Yerokhin, and a former foreman, a native of the Chernigov district, a lean man named Zamarayev.
“You’re a shallow person, Yerokha,” Zamarayev was saying, “shallow and not serious. Your kind belongs in the grave or the zoo.”
“Lay off,” Yerokhin said. “He barges in like this was a snack bar. I’m not getting rusty, you know. I can still stick you.”
“I’m terrified… You just blather on and on, while life is going by.”
Yerokhin got angry. “Tell your story walking. Your crap won’t fly here. And anyway, what’s the use of talking to you? You’re completely dense. Just the other day you went running at a radio with a pitchfork. In a word, a peasant.”
“In our village there is a radio receiver in every cabin,” Zamarayev said. He lifted his eyes dreamily and continued, “I had a five-wall myself… a barn with a slate roof… a log cow shed… outside the windows, honeysuckle… I lived by my conscience. It would happen that a kum came by, to have a meal after a fast—”
“Kum?” Yerokhin said uneasily. “An agent, or what?”
“An agent… It’s you who’s the agent. A kum, I say… A kinsman. He’d come over. Bring a bottle of port grape wine. My kum was a serious man, an invalid—”
“A Party member, or what?” Yerokhin interrupted again.
“A non-Party Communist,” Zamarayev rapped out crisply. “Lost a leg in the Yezhov times.”*
“Meaning he’s an enemy of the people?”
“Not an enemy, but a lieutenant in the OGPU.* Guarded the likes of us jackals. Deprived of his leg, froze it on his battle post. They discharged him from the ranks, but they did give him a pension.”
“They should have known better,” Yerokhin said.
Zamarayev did not hear him. A happy smile flickered on his face. He continued, “And my kum likes to joke. Sometimes he’d say from the doorway, ‘Go and get us a little one!’ I’m getting into my galoshes when he laughs. ‘As you were, I’ve got it here.’ And pulls out a bottle of red. In our village they had the rouble-forty wine, but it tasted like the rouble-seventy-two kind. We’d pour our glasses, so it used to be. God’s bounty, harmony at home. I lived in good conscience.”
“In good conscience. So what did they get you for?”
Zamarayev, silent, hit a twig against the top of his boot.
“For what, I said, were you arrested?” Yerokhin said, not letting up.
“Well, for linseed oil.”
“You stole, is that it?”
“What, that linseed oil?”
“Well.”
“That linseed oil, yes.”
“In good conscience. And then what’d you do with it? Take it off to market?”
“No, drank it instead of lemonade.”
“Right.” Yerokhin grinned. “So how much linseed oil did you move?”
“Ech, that was a time,” Zamarayev said, “that was a time. That linseed oil? Two tons or so.”
“How much does that come to? Half a grand?”
“In the legal suit, forty thousand. Old roubles, of course.”
“Oho! And if you translate that into booze?”
“You’re a shallow person,” Zamarayev said angrily. “You’ve got one thing in your head. You should join the circus instead of the kangaroo. You ever hear of the kangaroo? The one with the purse on its belly.”