Edward Limonov - His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

Looking at Jenny and comparing her with the Marchioness Houston, I returned from the realm of dreams and the petty everyday details of my struggle to the harsh reality of today. I was the lover of a servant. The full wretchedness of my situation loomed before me in the guise of the unkempt Jenny, and there in the kitchen, responding to the unaffected questions of the Marchioness Houston, to the simple courtesy of a well-bred lady, while Jenny was giving the little Lord Jesse a glass of milk, I swore to myself that I would leave Jenny that day and never return.

Fortunately I didn't keep my word. The fact is that I had nowhere else to go except back to what I had known before. And returning to Central Park to read and dream was something I simply could not do. Madame Margarita, the fairy Volodya, and the superstar Sashenka Lodyzhnikov hadn't accepted me as one of them. They might have, but on terms that would have been humiliating to me, and I didn't want that; I wanted to be treated as an equal and with respect. And anyway they didn't interest me.

My casual sexual relations had been a passing thing, and I had no wish to prolong them. I had derived something from them, a certain kind of knowledge, but the main thing, gentlemen, is that my partners were all poor homeless creatures like myself who had been cast out into the huge city either by their own volition or against it, but poor! Like me, they had their own struggles, on a much lower level, but struggles. For a good job, for success in their own narrow area of life, or perhaps for a better lover. Often I was a lucky find for my partners, but they never were for me. I didn't want to associate with poor people; they depressed me. I needed a psychologically healthy atmosphere. That was the secret.

More than Jenny, it was the millionaire's house I needed. I loved the house; it was good for me, it and its carpets and pictures, its parquet floors and thousands of books, its huge leather folios with drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, its garden, and its children's rooms — they were what I needed. Both nature and instinct had shown me the way, for the only means of getting into the house, the key to it, was Jenny. Not even through Steven Grey could I have gained entrance to it and lived there, unless he had been gay, but he wasn't.

I know what you're thinking; go ahead and ask: "Why didn't you, Limonov, who prattle so much about world revolution and the necessity of wiping a whole civilization off the face of the earth, why didn't you take even one step in that direction? Why have you been so busy with your dick, as we've seen, and with every other kind of thing, some even directly opposed to your 'goal'? Why didn't you join a revolutionary party, for example, since they exist, even in America?"

I'll tell you why I didn't. In the first place, those puny little parties would only have taken me as a minor little member, a mosquito, and I would have been handing out little newspapers and tracts on the street and going to petty little meetings, and maybe after about twenty years of party discipline and demagoguery, I would have become, say, a provincial Trotskyite boss. And then what?

And in the second place, I want action. Not one American leftist party has any chance of success now, and I don't play games that are already lost. My life is running out; I can feel it in my bones.

And then, gentlemen, you've obviously got me mixed up with somebody else. I have my own ideas, you see, and the well-fed face of the proletarian is no less unpleasant and repugnant to me than the well-fed face of the capitalist.

There was another way out — I could have let myself go and exploded in rage and left for somewhere in Beirut or South America where there's shooting, and taken a bullet in the brain for something that had nothing to do with me, something I didn't understand at all or understood only partly, and walked around with a submachine gun and felt free and alive. I have never been afraid of getting killed, but I am afraid of dying in obscurity; that's my weak point, my Achilles' heel. What can you do; everybody's got one. You'll forgive me, but I'm ambitious, even incredibly ambitious. And greedy for fame.

And therefore I would, like Lord Byron, have gone off to fight to free the Greeks, or, in my own case, the Palestinians, if I had already made a name for myself, if I had already become known to the world. So that if I were cut down by machine gun fire somewhere among the sandbags and palms of Beirut, I could be sure that the fat New York Times, which always leaves your hands so black that you have to wash them with soap and water after reading it, would come out the next day with my photograph and four lines on the first page (with the rest in the obituary section) — "Died: Edward Limonov, poet and writer, author of several novels, including It's Me, Eddie. Killed in a fire fight in the Moslem sector of Beirut."

But I knew that those lines wouldn't appear anywhere. And that's why I didn't lose control.

I think after that encounter with the Marchioness Houston, I wrote a poem, a ridiculously bitter poem, only part of which I remember, but containing the lines, "You won't make a lady out of a servant,/ Never, never, never…" To be honest, I wasn't trying to; I realized I would have to grit my teeth and endure Jenny and take advantage of the millionaire's house. The typical reflections of an opportunist, I admit, but is that against the law? Who says it is?

It turned out that at home in England the Marchioness Houston lived in a thirteenth-century castle with three hundred servants(!). Not too shabby. I hadn't even suspected that such castles exist. They even had their own zoo, with tigers and bears, as I learned from an illustrated tourist guidebook to the castle. The marchioness had brought a certain number of the guidebooks with her to America to give to friends and acquaintances, and she gave one to Jenny. She also gave Jenny, if I'm not mistaken, two hundred dollars for looking after the young Lord Jesse and serving him breakfast.

I too did a little work for the marchioness — I shortened three pairs of pants for her, one of them yellow and all bought in America. Neither Jenny nor I particularly cared for them; one pair was even made of polyester instead of cotton or wool. The fabric should have been natural — cotton, wool, or silk — as the housekeeper of that advanced and well-to-do American home knew, and as I, her boyfriend, did too. When Bridget came over, we all sat in the kitchen in various postures and condemned the marchioness for her polyester pants, deciding that the English were still very provincial, even the lords.

I too went along with what they were saying, although I was wistfully thinking too about the freshly bathed marchioness and her rather impressive bottom lying upstairs on her bed on the third floor, obviously wearing one of the red night shirts our black Olga had laundered for her.

I had gone into the laundry room and had looked at the marchioness' night shirts — I just couldn't help it. The marchioness is lying in her bed, I thought dreamily to the monotonous chatter of Jenny and Bridget, my eyes half closed… fragrant with the warmth of her body and the odor of her fashionable perfume, a smell like the one the ordinary Soviet cologne White Lilac used to have. Maybe she's stretching and rearranging her pillow…

I'm sitting here in the kitchen with my servant girl and her friend, I thought dejectedly, while my place is upstairs, in bed with the marchioness. Wherever else an opportunist's place is, it is in any case not in the kitchen.

Jenny, of course, couldn't have been aware of my treacherous thoughts, but seeing that I had suddenly grown sad, she got up from the table, came over to me, and bending down low said in a lisping whisper, her governess' whisper intended for children that I found so incredibly irritating, "Silly man. Just be patient, my period will be over tomorrow and you can go inside me then." She thought of course that I was in an agony of desire, that I wanted her. That I craved her insipid charms.