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

I'm a realist. Even in little things I sometimes catch myself in the most vulgar realism. Thus I remember altering some pants for a certain old lady and wanting to overstitch the seams — as you're supposed to do so they won't fray. I'd already put the right color thread in the machine when I suddenly thought, but why should I; she won't be using the pants that long. She's old, and she'll die before the seams have a chance to fray. And I didn't overstitch them.

I extend my awful realism to myself too. I'm constantly aware of death now. Before I wouldn't remember it for as much as a year and lived as if I were going to live forever, deeply absorbed in the problems of the day and never glancing around, and only occasionally stopping to muse with terror and bewilderment. And then I'd forget…

But now I think peacefully and tranquilly about death every day, and remember and count the time left. In essence, I've got twenty to twenty-five years of normal, active life before my body deteriorates to the point where it will be more a source of inconvenience than pleasure. Into those twenty to twenty-five years, I must squeeze all of myself — my thoughts, my books, my actions, and my sexual life, fucking the women I dream of fucking, and if (all of a sudden) I should want to kill men and women, I shall have to hurry if I'm going to do that too. If I should want to have children, then I'll have to conceive them in the middle of that period, and if I should have the lofty dream, say, of founding a party or a state or a religion, then, gentlemen, it must all be done by 2,001 to 2,005 years after the birth of Christ. I'm a corpse in the middle of his vacation. And that vacation is trickling away, gentlemen, and soon it will be back to chaos.

Faster, faster, while there's still time, and fan whatever delirium or fire there is in you; it's unimportant what it is, only that you do it while there's still time — I advise you too, reader. Before your meeting with chaos, before your sunny vacation is over and it's back to nothingness.

A couple of days after that I found myself sitting in the same place by the kitchen window repairing Steven's fur coat. He didn't ask me to. He merely threw the coat down on the chest in the hallway since winter was over and he didn't need it anymore, and I saw it there and realized the pocket was completely torn and the lining was coming undone at the seam, even though the coat was almost new. I could have sent it to Kaplan's for repair, or not have bothered about it and hung it up in the closet; yet I was sitting there and mending his fur coat, and taking great pains with it. I'm not moved by my own nobility; I'm just amazed at the different tendencies I find in myself — first wanting Steven's death, and then, like his mother, mending his coat. Probably that's as it should be. It may be that I'm capable of mending his fur coat, putting the mended coat on him, and then sending him off to his death. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of my fondness for order.

Send him off, send him off. It's what Steven deserves. After all, he's been terribly rude. Sometimes the instant he comes in the door. Yesterday when he arrived he announced he was going out even before he had a chance to shut the door. To which his servant replied in an ironically distraught voice, "Right away?"

"In fifteen minutes. Do you mind if I rest for a moment in my own house?" he answered, glaring malevolently at his servant.

I didn't mind. I had no objection. Rest, tired boss, rest, you neurotic old woman, I thought. I didn't expect him to blow up and start yelling at me. After Efimenkov's visit my stock has stood very high and solid with him, but I still cut out to my beloved basement where it was quiet, warm, and restful, and where nobody would come unless for wine, and sat down in the corner of the laundry room on a pile of dirty linen. A laundry room or basement is a good place to rest up after an escape from jail in damp and rotten weather, a place where after several weeks in the cold and wet you can cover your head with freshly laundered sheets and sleep and forget all about the rest of the world for a moment and about your own exploits and fame — where you can forget about everything except its slightly stuffy warmth and your own inhuman weariness…

Steven, I thought abstractedly… Nancy… Sometimes, in those moments when I stop looking at my day-to-day life as an inevitable stage in my destiny without which the future simply cannot occur, I think in dismay, Why am I a servant, why did I turn up here? It's all so ridiculous — Steven, Nancy… the silver, the dirty dishes, how to serve meat and how to make sauce for crab… It's all so ridiculous and stupid, so what are you doing here, Edward? Long ago in the Soviet school system you read about your present life in the books of pre-revolutionary writers, never thinking that one day that past would suddenly become your own life. It's as silly as…

Escape from servanthood? Where to? Wouldn't I end up wasting the minutes and hours I waste on Steven on some other, even more pointless work, on other things I don't have any fucking use for either?

Thus I sat on the pile of dirty linen thinking about what to do next. After spending about an hour in that state and weighing all the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that it made sense for me to go to work for Gatsby. What would I have been doing then in my apartment on Eighty-third Street, even supposing I had had the money to pay for it? I'd have been sitting there alone like an owl. At least here I'm surrounded by people, by conversation, language, books, and money, I thought, listing the advantages of the millionaire's house. Anyway, the whole family's going to Tunis for three weeks at the end of March, and then Steven's flying to Japan, I remembered happily, and got up from the pile of linen and went back upstairs.

After hanging around the house not fifteen minutes but an hour, Steven slammed the front door and walked past the kitchen window. But seeing me, he came back, smiled, and waved his hand, obviously ashamed of his rudeness. He's gone out dressed in nothing but his suit, I thought mechanically. He's not a bad person, I thought. Maybe someday he'll invest his money in the destruction of civilization…

For some reason during my first winter and spring at the house, it happened that Nancy had pressing business in New York a couple of times a month, and she came down either alone or with the children or even with her neighbors from the country, usually staying for a few days and only rarely longer. I calculated that during the first months of my employment in Mr. Grey's house, Nancy spent much more time there than she had during the whole time I'd been Jenny's boyfriend. Nancy was clearly checking up on my suitability for the duties of housekeeper, and unaccustomed as I was to being checked on, I got fucking tired of it.

Nancy loves to cook; she's no mere lady of leisure. She almost always made breakfast herself and for their whole crowd — for her own children and for her country neighbors and their children. My own responsibilities consisted of helping her — hanging around the kitchen with her, getting one thing and another for her, and running to the store. If it turned out, say, that the kind of butter I used wasn't the same one Nancy used, or if she suddenly decided to make pancakes, and there wasn't any flour in the house, I slid off my stool and ran out to the store for the butter or flour.

Thus I remember myself that winter standing in the brightly lit kitchen early in the morning like the sleepy servant boy Vanka Zhukov in Chekhov's story, and setting the table for a dozen people, and putting out the napkins, and pulling back the chairs, all before the sky had had a chance even to turn gray — Nancy and her friends are residents of the country and get up at the crack of dawn.