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

Unemployed blacks were hanging around the spit-stained bus station as if waiting for a miracle, and just as in all the other waiting rooms of the world, on the red chairs of that waiting room sat the usual crowd of idiots as if brought in and placed there, while nearby somebody was kicking a machine that was obligated to dispense gum to people but wouldn't. In short, a bus station like any other. Jenny's father, who was supposed to meet us, naturally wasn't there, and she started making calls to Virginia, on the other side of the Potomac.

Then they arrived, Jenny's father and mother, in a huge swamp-colored car meant for a large family. They'd gotten mixed up about the bus schedule somehow. I'd never been to Washington before, and they therefore showed the future husband of their daughter a little of the empire's capital. The first thing her father took me past was the FBI building, of course, and why not, since half of his life had been connected with that organization. Jenny, for her part, observed that Mr. Herbert Hoover always sent her mother official congratulations on the birth of each new child, and that if I would remind her when we got back to the house, she would find the letters and show them to me.

"Didn't he send any money?" inquired the practical Limonov.

"No," Jenny's mother said with regret.

"If you had lived in Russia," I said, "you would have been a mother-heroine, and the state would have given you a medal for your children and paid you money."

"That would have been nice," her mother said.

To myself I thought what I usually did, that there was no fucking need for all those children, since there wasn't enough to eat on the planet anyway, and that there were already so many people running and crawling over the surface of the globe, both in the huge cities and the rural districts, that the crowd was impossible to bear even psychologically. And furthermore, if one was going to be objective about it, I already knew two of their children, Jenny and Debby, and neither had yet distinguished herself in the world in any way, nor was there any hope that they ever would. All of your ten children, mama, I thought, will tread the earth for another half-century, devouring its meat and grain to sustain themselves, but that's all they'll ever do, mama, that's all. The only thing mankind can brag about is its history, and history, mama, is something your children will never have any part in. They're outside history, mama… I thought to myself, while our car, driven by a former special agent of the FBI, crossed the Potomac and the family joyfully showed Limonov the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery.

Why, even Kennedy's a minor figure in the historical scheme of things, I thought, a local bureaucrat-hero of no particular mettle. You'd have to be feebleminded to be born into such a family and not become President. Whereas your children, mama, are just rabbits, unfortunately just rabbits, I thought pityingly, since I wasn't malicious and had myself made a gigantic effort not to be a rabbit, and even though my own destiny was unclear, I understood that making an effort was half the battle. I had, however dimly, always known that, and for that reason had even in the toilets of the world stood gazing suspiciously at my face, distancing myself from their human din, their rabbit commotion. I wanted my own face, and not the flushed face of a rabbit. My own, however fucked-up, bitter, and tear-stained, but my own!

Their house stood on a hill, a split-level house built into the hill with most of the rooms on the upper of its two floors. The house stuck out into the middle of an orchard, or, excuse me, not an orchard, since for the most part its trees weren't fruit trees but pines and other varieties that I, an inhabitant of asphalt jungles, didn't know the names of in either Russian or English, and so we'll abstain from old-fashioned landscape descriptions and merely call them trees. In short, then, there was a house, trees, as much as an acre or more of greenery, hammocks, a small vegetable garden cultivated mainly for pleasure by the children, a dog named Achilles given to the family by Isabelle as a gift, a drum set in the room belonging to Robert, another of the Jacksons' sons, pictures of rock-and-roll stars, children, and her parents in Deb-by's room, and, in the evening, fireflies on the property outside.

An abundant American dinner awaited us: the inevitable steaks and salad. They drank wine in the house, not to get drunk, but they drank — the tip of Jenny's mother's nose was a suspicious red, but it's possible too that she had a cold. During the meal all the children and their father got after Jenny in a friendly way for her boundless admiration for Dr. Krishna. Even Debby scoffed at her. I supported the children cautiously, afraid that Jenny would take offense. Her mother took a middle position.

Soon afterward Jenny herself started laughing at Dr. Krishna and his medical knowledge, but not then. She got very, very angry then and suddenly started shouting, "Cut it out! Cut it out, people!" an expression I liked so much that I at once added it to my own vocabulary.

So we "cut it out" and started talking about something else. As soon as we'd finished dinner, the children started showing me family photographs, one album after another. In the beginning there were two — the young mother and father. The father wore a military uniform; it was wartime. Then a wedding: the men in jackets with enormous shoulders and flared trousers, the ladies in hats worn to one side. Everybody looked so old then, I remarked to myself. A peculiarity of the times, perhaps? Then came the babies, lying on their backs or sides and dressed in white or pink. Almost all the more recent pictures were Polaroids. From album to album the children gradually grew until they finally assumed their present-day form. I looked at them as they crowded around me and said, "Good kids! You did that very well; you grew up fast." They all laughed.

In keeping with the proprieties, they gave me a separate bedroom. After all, I was Jenny's boyfriend and not her husband. They had set aside a place for me in a huge room downstairs, a sort of second living room whose door opened directly onto the garden. Before going to sleep, and after their parents had gone off to their own room, we all went up to Debby's room and smoked a joint. The grass belonged to Debby and Robert — the brother and sister were good friends — and turned out to be very strong. We lazily sat or lay in various corners of the room among the dolls, the pictures of rock stars, and the photographs of Debby's former boyfriends. There were a surprising number of the latter, despite her seventeen years.

The next morning I woke up before almost everybody else in the house and went out into the yard, where I made a careful reconnaissance of the whole territory. I carefully examined the vegetables in the garden, tested the hammock, though I was soon driven away from there by the mosquitoes, and then returned to the house, where I noticed a tangle of bicycles in the room where I'd been sleeping. I got on one of them and rode off, but after circling the house, I came back, since I had no idea where to go. At that moment, Debby came out of the house yawning. For some reason, I was especially glad to see her and no one else, and I went over to her and like a curious tourist started asking her all about the garden. It turned out that she was raising the tomatoes, whereas the pumpkins belonged to her thirteen-year-old brother, Ronald. After properly manifesting my delight in regard to her tomato plants, I remembered the bicycles again and suggested we go for a ride. "Okay!" she said. She was very easy to please.

We went into the house and had a cup of coffee. Her parents hadn't yet made their appearance, and I didn't even know where their room was, there were so many doors. We had already taken our seats on our bicycles, when at the last moment we were joined by Robert, who, as it turned out, had just taken his car to a garage. We set off: Robert first, then me, and then Debby on a little bicycle that obviously belonged to the youngest of the children, the eleven-year-old Kevin. After we had climbed to the top of the asphalt road high above the house and were already resting on our pedals, I heard an anxious voice call, "Edward!" Looking in the direction of the voice, I saw Jenny standing in her nightgown at the front door. She was standing on one leg and scratching it with the other. The mad Edward merely smiled at her and waved.