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

I didn't understand anything about women's diseases then, nor do I understand anything about them now, but something was clearly wrong with Jenny. I gave up sex with her for a while, and she went to Dr. Krishna, who applied himself to finding out what was the matter with her. We now slept soundly on separate beds, and she changed her refrain a little. "Edward, I love you. We're both not well. How unhappy we are!" she whined, and asked me for such innocent pleasures as remained to us — massaging her back or playing with her hair.

While with one hand I unwillingly stroked her hair and held a glass of wine in the other, she chattered incessantly. "God sent you to me," she said. "I love you because you're nice to me." I can imagine how her usual men must have treated her, I thought to myself, if she regards my almost indifferent attitude toward her as something special.

"Keep stroking my hair, don't stop, I like it," she said, using her lisping tone again, and I stroked her hair some more while sipping my wine, an excellent 1966 Bordeaux. She continued babbling: "As soon as I get better, Edward, we can do it again, but we'll have to take precautions, since we don't have enough money to have a baby — can you imagine you and me and a baby in your hotel?" Jenny spoke the last sentence very seriously. "No," I said. But I could imagine it very well — she and I and the baby covered with shit walking down Broadway, and a bottle of cheap wine sticking out of the pocket of my torn jacket — and it seemed so wildly funny to me that I could barely sip the expensive wine.

"We'll have to take precautions," she repeated.

"Uh-huh," I said, "but I thought you already were taking precautions, that you were taking pills."

"No, that's against my principles." (Abortion was against her principles too.) "I only recognize mechanical means," she said severely.

What kind of mechanical means? I wondered, reviving. What does she mean, a condom maybe? Ugh, how disgusting! I thought. I tried fucking with a condom one or two times in my life — it just didn't work. "All right," I said out loud, "we'll use mechanical means."

"We'll have money someday, Edward," she said enthusiastically. "We've got to!"

But how? thought Edward, the heel. I may have money someday, but live with you, my poor little kitchen angel, is something I will never do. You already bore me, and the prospect of spending my whole life with a woman who has to make such an effort to come doesn't appeal to me at all. I like expensive whores, lascivious kittens who tear you up inside and arouse you. But you're a country girl, a stupid girl with a big fat ass and fat thighs, a twenty-year-old girl. And you don't get under my skin, and you don't smell of perfume.

"I love you very much, Edward!" she whined again.

It was starting to annoy me. She needed to be told off, to be put in her place. I turned off the light and lay down on my back. "Jenny," I said, "I want to ask you something very important."

"What is it, Edward?" Jenny answered in the darkness in a cautious voice.

"You see, Jenny, I want the kind of love in this world where, if they sent me to prison and gave me a life sentence, say — and what the future holds for me is still very unclear — my woman would get herself a submachine gun and free me. Could you love me like that?"

After a moment's silence, she said, "Edward, that's ridiculous. Just because you get into trouble, that doesn't mean I should too. I'll still love you, I won't disown you, but," and then she said the fateful words, "it's your problem."

Jenny went on to explain, but I wasn't listening anymore. I had in an instant managed to secure for myself the moral right to think whatever I wanted of her, had done so because I was serious about life and had asked her in all seriousness, even though I knew she wouldn't pass the test. I was weighing and planning my future, and I needed people who were real. She wasn't one of them.

Though the inner distance between us was becoming ever greater, on the surface we lived almost like husband and wife. I would arrive at the millionaire's house on Friday evening, and begin Saturday morning on the roof, sunning myself and drinking coffee, or pretending that I was sunning myself and drinking coffee, while in fact digging around in the rooms. When there weren't any guests around, Edward, the housekeeper's lover, became complete master of the house and liked to be left alone and undisturbed, and of all the rooms in the house he definitely preferred those that belonged to the children.

I was envious. I had never had my own room either as a child or as a youth, although in the best dreams of my boyhood, I had envisioned one in the form of a steamboat cabin — a white, happy childhood with white curtains stirring in the breeze and a gleaming river visible through all the windows, and a colored bed and my own dresser for my clothes, and booklined shelves, and a white washstand with a round mirror.

Our whole family — my father and mother and I — shared a single room. It was the fifties, in a country that had been utterly destroyed by war, and there was a housing crisis. All I had was my own little «corner» where I kept my things — my father's old knapsack, an old topography textbook of the same age, a few books on foreign lands and plants, and some maps. I was so hampered by the adults and wanted a private place of my own so badly, that, being an energetic boy, I resolved to excavate myself a room. With my characteristic practicality, I immediately set about it, digging a hole in the communal apartment house basement where we and our neighbors stored potatoes and coal. I dug in the evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp and carried the dirt outside in bags which I emptied under the huge elderberry bushes that surrounded the building. In the daytime I covered up the hole with boards on top of which I piled coal. I imagined submachine guns hanging on the walls of my dug-out (from hooks, I think) and bunks for the other "kids," although I had no clear idea who they might be. I might perhaps have finished my hole and finally enjoyed the privacy of my somewhat strange children's room (let's call it a children's room on the "Russian model"), but our family moved to another building, and I know nothing of the subsequent fate of that vacuum in the heavy Ukrainian clay. I hope nobody fell into it.

While looking over the room belonging to Henry, Steven Grey's oldest son, I started to feel terribly sorry for myself and my unfinished dug-out. Christ! I thought, you've reached the age of thirty-four and have never even once had a decent place to live. I looked in the drawers, stared at the amateur color photographs of happy children, sniffed the crab claw, felt the little Chinese figurine, turned the pages of a vacation book about a bunny rabbit, and jealously examined a cowboy hat from somebody else's childhood, a huge eraser, modeling clay, and some foil, all those little things that no child can possibly manage without. A piece of old wood stood on a chest and a stuffed owl scowled from a top shelf. The yellow floor, the blue shag rug, the cork wall on which was thumbtacked yet another sunny photograph — green and sky blue, with four children on the grass, one sticking his tongue out, and an azure sea visible through some rocks in the background. It's been many years now since Steven Grey and his family settled permanently in Connecticut, and the New York house has remained much as it was when they lived here. And the children's rooms have too. On one wall in an old frame hung a copy of the last issue of a newspaper published, as it turned out, on board the unfortunate Lusitania. The issue was dated May 7, 1915. The headlines were "The Dardanelles," "The Italian Crisis," "An Important Japanese Operation," and "Extensive Use of Gas against the British by the Enemy." There was also an announcement of an upcoming concert in the ship's saloon: "Concert in Saloon!" And there was a report by Sir J. French from the European front, written in the unvarying style shared by military communiqués the world over — the attempt to conceal and downplay a fucked-up situation: "The same morning three units carried out a concerted attack on a position in the Bois de Pally recently captured by us. This attack achieved die enemy's goal of gaining a foothold against our front line, but our counterattack permitted us to retake half of the hill almost immediately…" You're screwed, Sir J. French, I thought. They'll throw even more men at you at night, since the main thing is to gain a foothold, and in the morning your front line will become their rear.