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

Volodya smirked, which only made me madder.

"Thanks to the training and education the Soviet government gave you, and gave you for nothing, by the way," I said to Volodya, "you occupy a privileged position here. Just as you did there, in fact. You wrote and published books on ballet there, and you write and publish them here."

"And who stops you from publishing your books?" Volodya said maliciously. "Haven't found a publisher for your pornography yet?"

"No, I haven't," I said. "You know perfectly well how hard it is for me to find a publisher, and you know why… Maybe I'll never find one."

"Limonchik," said Madame Margarita with inimitable calmness, "what can you do; it was your bad luck to be born in the Soviet Union and come to America too late. All the places are taken now. If you had come here in the thirties, it would all have been different. Maybe your children will be happier. Certainly they'll be happier," she concluded sympathetically.

"Can you imagine that?" I answered. "What am I supposed to do now, lie down and die?"

Madame Margarita shrugged.

"Maybe I should wait for rebirth?" I asked sarcastically. "It's my 'bad luck. But I don't believe in rebirth. I know everything is happening now. There's nothing ahead but a dark pit. And there isn't anything in it. It's just a pit!" I was silent for a moment. "To nobly make piroshki, and haul somebody else's furniture and paint somebody else's walls, and live in the Diplomat, and drink and grow old and merely accept it," I continued, "while all around you is the odor of money, and expensive cars are speeding by, and morsels of young female flesh are displayed in the picture magazines. No thank you. I'm much too passionate and ambitious for that. I don't know how, but I'll be successful here. Me, and not my children, whom I don't intend to have anyway," I said angrily to Madame Margarita. "If I have to kill, then that's what I'll do!" I added in a facetiously calm voice.

"You're a typical Soviet, Limonchik," Madame Margarita said, "a typical Soviet…"

Madame Margarita is very smart, and in her youth was very, pretty; I've seen photographs. She had once been married to a wealthy businessman — had engaged, in short, in the usual business of females and sold her cunt for a profit. And not very long ago she had a millionaire among her lovers, a publisher. She still lives alone in a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue and doesn't have to go to work, having already earned everything with her cunt. Her only work now is going down to the bank, and whatever she does for Lodyzhnikov, or the pelmeni and piroshki, she does for her own pleasure and not for money. I'd make the same bargain with the world too. And of course it wasn't unpleasant for her cunt either. Pleasurable and practical.

I walked from Madame Margarita's up the broad expanse of Park Avenue, past the doormen in full dress uniform, and swore in two languages. "Limonchik, what can you do, it was your bad luck," I bleated, parodying the sympathetic voice of Madame Margarita. Ah, you whores, I thought. You're all members of the same gang — Gatsby and Efimenkov and Stella Makhmudova, and Volodya and Solzhenitsyn, and Madame Margarita and Lodyzhnikov and the poet Khomsky, and Rockefeller and Andy Warhol, and Norman Mailer and Jackie Onassis, and all the designers and hairdressers and blue bloods and party secretaries, whether they live in a country pompously calling itself the "leader of the free world" or in another that no less vulgarly pretends to have a monopoly on the "bright future of mankind." You all make up a cruel international mafia, a union of strength and capital with learning, art, and intellect. And the millions and billions of us simple people are required to submit to your cruel whims, to your games of the mind and imagination, to your caprices which cost us so much, since from time to time you push us into war. Fucking Big Brothers!

I reached the millionaire's house and complained about the Big Brothers to Jenny.

"Edward," she said, "don't pay any attention to the fucking politicians. They're the same everywhere, in all countries, and no doubt they'll push us all over the edge someday!" And then she started making soup, the most peaceful activity imaginable.

Life is an indistinct affair, utterly diffuse and formless, and it is only those principles that you yourself introduce (or that are introduced for you by others) that give life whatever order it has and a kind of purpose and coherence. Jenny was of course a very important stage in the process of "my struggle," as I envisioned it, the struggle of Edward Limonov against the world and everybody in it. Yes, that's the way I conceived it — as one against all, and it was a struggle in which I had no allies. I just recently happened to overhear my employer Gatsby shouting in his office during one of his regular fits of hysteria, "You're all against me! The whole world's against me!" I was astonished to find that he perceives the world exactly the same way I do.

I lived invisible to everyone but Jenny. And I lived intensely; I was in a hurry. Unfortunately, nobody else was. I badly wanted to get ahead. Onward! I shouted to myself in an agonized voice. But the world held me back with a firm grip, not wishing to let me leap with such sudden ease into the next category of life, or, if you like, to climb up onto the next rung of the social ladder. Up, I'm sorry to say, from the very bottom. There weren't any rungs below me. Unless it was jail.

I wanted to get out of the hotel and move somewhere else. I sensed from everything that I needed to get the fuck out of the Diplomat, that the time had come to move. If for no other reason than just to move.

My first attempt proved a false start. After one of my arguments with Jenny, I decided to strike out on my own, and tried to find myself an apartment. The ballet writer Volodya rummaged through his vast circle of acquaintances and introduced me one day to a little twat named Mary Ellen. This dwarfish little bag of bones lived in a two-room apartment near Lincoln Center and was studying ballet for the fun of it. Mary Ellen had a rich homosexual dad who lived in Washington, D.C., and who paid for both her apartment and her two two-hour classes a day. "Mary Ellen's apartment is too expensive for her and she's looking for a roommate," Volodya told me. "Talk to her. If she likes you, she'll take you and you'll pay her something. Or you won't have to pay her anything," added the cynical Volodya, "if you start fucking her; then you can live there for nothing. In my opinion, she doesn't so much need a roommate as a prick," and he laughed in distaste.

Mary Ellen did in fact need a prick. The first time we met, she looked very intently and significantly at me, and passionately informed me of her desire to learn Russian. Her apartment was spacious, in a huge modern building with mirrors in the lobby and several doormen who used special televisions to watch what was happening on every floor. The lobby even had its own newspaper stand.

I liked the building and I liked the apartment, but I didn't much care for the circumstance that I'd have to sleep on a little couch in the living room. And write there too, for when I asked Mary Ellen where I would work, it turned out I'd have to do that in the living room too on the only table in the apartment. The upshot was that I would be renting a «corner» of her apartment, as they say in my native land, and not a room. Naturally, if I start fucking her, I thought, then I'll sleep in the bedroom with her and work wherever I see fit. But after looking at her gray, sunburned, bony little arms with their skin strangely cracked like crude leather, I had no desire whatever to fuck her. That is, I wasn't excluding the possibility of occasional copulations with her, once a month say, after I'd had something to drink or smoked a couple of joints, but to become dependent on her wasn't something I wanted to do.