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

As soon as I finished eating, I went upstairs to Henry's old room without saying anything, opened the door to the roof, and sat down in the doorway. A few minutes later Jenny came in.

"If you won't go to my doctor, I'll never fuck you again and I won't see you anymore," she said angrily.

Go fuck yourself, I thought. She gave me gonorrhea, and now it's my fault too. I'm fed up with your fucking house, you servant, and this whole musty summertime story. You peasant cunt! And I walked out, saying, "I'll come back when you calm down."

Neither Jenny nor I could hold out in proud solitude for very long. Two days at most. During that time I managed to make the rounds of the darker Broadway dives and visit two prostitutes. There was never any doubt in my mind that I didn't have gonorrhea, and if I had, the prostitutes would probably have detected it, since they always carefully examine the client's penis before setting down to work. After rolling in the mud a little, I at once felt better and freer, and in two days was again sleeping on "the other bed," while Jenny groaned in her sleep nearby — the air conditioner was on, and it was cold.

Autumn came. I remember peering out the window at the wet terrace and its wet chairs with the usual autumn thoughts going through my mind, as if looking timidly out at chaos from the comfortable nook I had wrested from life — the millionaire's town house. Sometimes I would open the door to the terrace and stand confidently on the threshold, while chaos whistled around my feet. Looking at it from the millionaire's little house, it didn't scare me — it wasn't intimidating but defeated, not what it had been from my hotel. Seen from the hotel, it was a genuine, epic, old-fashioned, invincible chaos. But in the town house I just poured myself a shot of cognac, put a slice of lemon and a piece of Camembert on a red breakfast tray, sat down in the solarium with some quiet music on and maybe a book in my hands, and gazed into die rainy garden undismayed.

You see, the rich have over us poor not only the advantages of property; they are also freer from the onslaughts of chaos. It mounts its attacks, but the rich man merely lights a fire in his fireplace or orders somebody else to do it (I light Mr. Grey's fires for him), and sits down, warms his hands, lights his pipe, and puffs a pleasant tobacco. Chaos is frightened away by the fireplace and the pipe. And it's frightened away most of all by beautiful women. Whereas all the poor man can do is hang around the streets, so that whenever the weather is bad, his whole life comes to pieces.

So my life was sweet. My only duty was maintaining good relations with Jenny. And, as you see, I did maintain them, upsetting them only occasionally, but never seriously. Whenever she started in on her favorite topic — the children she wanted to have with me — I nodded with enthusiasm, "Sure, sure, Jenny, of course we'll have children." But at the same time I thought that to merge my sperm with her ovum, or whatever it's called, would be contrary to nature.

It was during this time that Dr. Krishna finally had the sense to examine Jenny thoroughly — I don't think it was his idea alone; somebody had obviously suggested it to him — and a huge tumor was discovered in her vagina. So much for obscurantism. You can believe in whatever you want, in forms with three hundred questions or in gonorrhea, and never have the sense to conduct a simple medical examination, to look inside her cunt. In any case, Jenny now thought she had cancer (!) and was undergoing treatment. Whatever sexual relations I had with her came to an end. She didn't feel like sucking my cock anymore. First, we were already pals; second, how could a person do that if she had cancer?.. It wouldn't have bothered me.

I really wanted to fuck, but I did my best to sublimate, to transfer my sexual energy to some other domain. I became furiously active, and after several setbacks finally found a literary agent with Madame Margarita's help, or more accurately, a female literary agent, and she agreed to work with me. Unfortunately, Liza's still working with me, and the book that so delighted Efimenkov remains unsold…

I also did all the things the classic failure's supposed to do. I wrote long letters to the newspapers and magazines, on political topics mostly, and I even sent a letter to President Carter, which nobody answered of course. The newspapers and magazines didn't answer either. I used Jenny to check my clumsy translations into English, and she either laughed or got mad, but she still helped me. In exchange I got some patterns and made her skirts with ruffles, which she had grown increasingly fond of. I have no illusion the skirts I made were masterpieces of the tailor's art, but Jenny liked them and they made her happy. So, as you see, we worked together excellently in life, even if not in bed.

From time to time Jenny would buy me presents. Knowing, say, that I liked beautiful boots and that my own were starting to wear out, she would with a smile suddenly hand me a box — "Surprise!" — containing just the kind of boots I wanted to replace my old ones with. Once she bought me several pairs of jeans and some sweaters all at once, which, given the dilapidated state of my wardrobe, were very much to the point. In general she took care of me like a mother.

At that time I was still going to Madame Margarita's to make piroshki and pelmeni, although less and less often. Unfortunately, die very good cook and gay man of letters Volodya and the enthusiast Madame Margarita turned out to be poor businessmen, or rather, not poor businessmen, but unable to devote all their time to piroshki and pelmeni. Volodya was writing a book about ballet and seeking and rejecting new lovers and in the evenings going either to gay baths or to the parties of the rich. Madame Margarita was busy with Lodyzhnikov's business… You need to be a harassed little person who knows that if he doesn't sell a certain number of piroshki and pelmeni each day, his family won't have anything to eat. Then the business will succeed. After shuffling through their papers, and counting and recounting, and adding, multiplying, and dividing, but mainly subtracting, they decided to quit.

But as so often happens, another way of making money suddenly appeared on the horizon, this time in the form of one of Madame Margarita's friends, the French woman Christine, who already owned one restaurant that gave her an appreciable income, and who had decided to open another on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Third Avenue with a Russian evening bar serving appetizers. Volodya, who had already squandered the advance on his ballet book, planned to go to work there as the head chef, taking me on as a cook, to which I agreed, although not without reservations, to be honest, but I still agreed, having decided at the same time to get off welfare. The fact is, I really wanted some sign of visible progress in my life, and I wanted it soon. What made up my mind was the fact that we would be expected to work evenings, from five until one in the morning, so I would have my days free and could still write. But the restaurant still wasn't open, and on my way to and from Jenny's, I would peer into its chalked-over windows at the workmen rushing urgently about.

On one of the last days of my pelmeni-making I got involved in spite of myself in a heated political argument with Madame Margarita and Volodya. I didn't really want to argue, but I lost my head. Somehow they egged me on imperceptibly, to the point where their placid philistinism irritated me so much that I jumped in. Basically our positions were these: Madame Margarita and Volodya believed that only Russia was shit, while the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, was beautiful. Whereas I said that the whole world was shit, the United States being no exception, and that our civilization deserved to be destroyed, since it had enslaved man and deprived him of himself, of his sense of freedom. "We, the whole world, have been living in Orwell's 1984 for a long time, only we don't realize it," I said.