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

It's my own fault too. I gave in to Linda a little, not in everything, but enough for her to get the upper hand. I myself volunteered in the beginning to run whatever errands she wanted — I said I liked walking around New York and preferred to be active. And it really is pleasant sometimes to hang around in the area of Fifth Avenue for a couple of hours instead of sitting at home with Linda and Steven and his gaggle of arrogant businessmen who think they're the saviors of mankind, the key people in the world and the most important. The businessmen are firmly convinced that they're the ones who give us poor mortals our work, our jobs, and that if it weren't for them, the human race would soon be extinct. They've been taught their insolence by the American press, by books, movies, and television, but it's a delusion, an American myth. They're as proud of themselves as poets, these business gents. I used to think poets were the most arrogant and proud creatures on earth, but now I see that I was wrong; poets don't even come close.

I've also spoiled Linda by making lunch for her. Even when Steven isn't home I still make something, and around one o'clock Linda and I sit across the kitchen table from each other and feed our faces. It frequently happens that I don't feel like eating, and even more often that I don't feel like cooking, but I have to. I started that routine myself, hoping to predispose Linda to me, and I succeeded, and now she gets very offended if I refuse to make lunch for her. She's even picky about what she eats, gentlemen — can you imagine that? If I make tuna fish with onion, which is easy to do — the whole operation only takes me ten minutes — Linda complains about the lack of variety in our diet: "Not tuna again, Edward!" Several months ago we discovered grilled Polish sausage and ate that with enthusiasm. But now Linda doesn't want Polish sausage anymore; she's sick of it, you see, and it might be fattening.

I don't think it's the Polish sausage that's making Linda fat, but the fact that she's been working for Gatsby for eight years, and getting nervous, and losing her temper, and putting up with Steven's various moods, the moods of someone who's closer to her than her own relatives, and taking pride in him, and hating him. I even have a suspicion that she's in love with him — I mean it. Linda's been sitting in one place too long; she needs some fresh new air and new people. I can see it, and even Jenny could. Linda needs to tell the millionaire's house to shove it, and jump into life, and then she'll stop gaining weight. And leave David, her fifty-year-old Jewish boyfriend of habit who's always complaining he doesn't feel well, and get herself a younger lover and start a new life.

Sometimes after one of her periodic arguments with Gatsby, Linda mutters about looking for another job, that she's had it, that eight years of slavery is enough, but it's still a long way, gentlemen, from fancy speeches to actually attempting to break out of a well-paying cage. She'll never do it, although I hope to God I'm wrong.

I can picture the old Steven Grey inevitably cut down by a stroke during one of his rages and stuck in a wheelchair (a wheelchair of the most modern construction, of course, with computer controls) and bickering in the millionaire's house with the old woman Linda. It's all perfectly clear: they'll never change. Gatsby will never stop, and he'll never give up "this fucking business," to use his expression, and take up teaching and become a professor, as he once threatened to do in my presence during a forty-five-minute access of sincerity. No, it's all perfectly clear as far as Steven and Linda are concerned, and the only person for whom nothing is clear is the butler Edward — what will happen to him, and where and how and in what capacity he'll meet his end. So that it's possible I'm wrong to complain. I'm unquestionably freer than they are, although less happy. But you have to pay for freedom, butler Edward, so shut up and stop complaining about slavery.

But let's get back to the lunches. Another reason why Linda insists on them is that she doesn't want to spend her own money. She's a bit stingy, as Jenny told me. Not that she's pathologically greedy — she asked Jenny and me out to restaurants more than once, and she and David paid their share without any fuss, and Linda gives parties at her home, but she's frugal. With Jenny she didn't have it as good as she does with me — a free lunch, just like the kids in school. Jenny baked bread and cooked, but not every day.

But I continue to feed Linda; I don't resist. Anyway, she sometimes does things for me too, things I either can't do by myself or that are a nuisance for me to do. For example, she checks my business letters written in English from time to time and corrects my mistakes or even retypes the letters, which is very important to me. At the beginning of my career in Gatsby's house, she helped me make lunch; I didn't even know how to steam vegetables — all that asparagus and broccoli and those artichokes and Brussels sprouts — she helped me, and though she did introduce more fucking nervousness and fuss into the process than was necessary, her help was of great value, and I admit it. Moreover, when Steven wasn't around, she even tried to teach me correct English pronunciation. I quickly tired of that activity, it's true, but for a while I read her articles out of The New York Times I'd found interesting, and she corrected my pronunciation and explained the rules.

But Linda's principal merit is that she talks to me. Several times a day I go up to her office, sit down on the couch next to her desk, and if she isn't busy, gossip with her or talk about politics. But our main discussion club is in the kitchen, where during lunch we talk about the news of the day. I read all the international news in The New York Times without exception, and I regularly read Newsweek and Time, and for that reason am better acquainted with what's going on than Linda is; I'm a newspaper freak and Linda respects my knowledge.

After my private eighteen-month propaganda campaign for an equal and unified humanity, Jenny departed for Los Angeles a very different Jenny than she'd been when I first met her. She hadn't become pro-Russian or a great lover of communists, but after associating with me for a while, she realized that the human beings living on the other side of the globe are people too and not monsters. Weak, poor, intelligent, and stupid — people of all kinds, but people… The realization that Russians aren't a 260-million-strong band of evil-doers and criminals was, gentlemen, no small thing for the mind of a girl raised in a country where the word «communist» had not long before been used to frighten children. An achievement, you might say.

Linda is a very skeptical person. She is, moreover, strongly influenced by David, who really dislikes Russians. He's a cultivated person, a stage designer, and it would be difficult to suppose that he's a racist, especially since Russians aren't the most appropriate object for racism. Most likely he's just a failure who has found himself a sufficiently remote target on which to vent his anger, since in my opinion he's a coward — hence his karate.

David, although he's friendly enough with me personally, half-seriously considers me a Russian spy. Linda certainly doesn't share that opinion — she's seen me scrubbing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees too many times, an image of me that has obviously displaced from her mind the image of Edward in a KGB cap being photographed with his fellow spy school graduates with the Kremlin in the background. But Linda is by nature a skeptic; she doesn't trust the world. She cautiously peers out from behind her skeptical armor, and at any little thing withdraws again.

We discuss international problems until we're hoarse, especially relations between America and Russia, although we always reach the same conclusion every time, namely that our peoples are decent and hard-working, and that it's the fucking politicians who are trying to make us quarrel.