Jenny went on to explain, but I wasn't listening anymore. I had in an instant managed to secure for myself the moral right to think whatever I wanted of her, had done so because I was serious about life and had asked her in all seriousness, even though I knew she wouldn't pass the test. I was weighing and planning my future, and I needed people who were real. She wasn't one of them.
Though the inner distance between us was becoming ever greater, on the surface we lived almost like husband and wife. I would arrive at the millionaire's house on Friday evening, and begin Saturday morning on the roof, sunning myself and drinking coffee, or pretending that I was sunning myself and drinking coffee, while in fact digging around in the rooms. When there weren't any guests around, Edward, the housekeeper's lover, became complete master of the house and liked to be left alone and undisturbed, and of all the rooms in the house he definitely preferred those that belonged to the children.
I was envious. I had never had my own room either as a child or as a youth, although in the best dreams of my boyhood, I had envisioned one in the form of a steamboat cabin — a white, happy childhood with white curtains stirring in the breeze and a gleaming river visible through all the windows, and a colored bed and my own dresser for my clothes, and booklined shelves, and a white washstand with a round mirror.
Our whole family — my father and mother and I — shared a single room. It was the fifties, in a country that had been utterly destroyed by war, and there was a housing crisis. All I had was my own little «corner» where I kept my things — my father's old knapsack, an old topography textbook of the same age, a few books on foreign lands and plants, and some maps. I was so hampered by the adults and wanted a private place of my own so badly, that, being an energetic boy, I resolved to excavate myself a room. With my characteristic practicality, I immediately set about it, digging a hole in the communal apartment house basement where we and our neighbors stored potatoes and coal. I dug in the evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp and carried the dirt outside in bags which I emptied under the huge elderberry bushes that surrounded the building. In the daytime I covered up the hole with boards on top of which I piled coal. I imagined submachine guns hanging on the walls of my dug-out (from hooks, I think) and bunks for the other "kids," although I had no clear idea who they might be. I might perhaps have finished my hole and finally enjoyed the privacy of my somewhat strange children's room (let's call it a children's room on the "Russian model"), but our family moved to another building, and I know nothing of the subsequent fate of that vacuum in the heavy Ukrainian clay. I hope nobody fell into it.
While looking over the room belonging to Henry, Steven Grey's oldest son, I started to feel terribly sorry for myself and my unfinished dug-out. Christ! I thought, you've reached the age of thirty-four and have never even once had a decent place to live. I looked in the drawers, stared at the amateur color photographs of happy children, sniffed the crab claw, felt the little Chinese figurine, turned the pages of a vacation book about a bunny rabbit, and jealously examined a cowboy hat from somebody else's childhood, a huge eraser, modeling clay, and some foil, all those little things that no child can possibly manage without. A piece of old wood stood on a chest and a stuffed owl scowled from a top shelf. The yellow floor, the blue shag rug, the cork wall on which was thumbtacked yet another sunny photograph — green and sky blue, with four children on the grass, one sticking his tongue out, and an azure sea visible through some rocks in the background. It's been many years now since Steven Grey and his family settled permanently in Connecticut, and the New York house has remained much as it was when they lived here. And the children's rooms have too. On one wall in an old frame hung a copy of the last issue of a newspaper published, as it turned out, on board the unfortunate Lusitania. The issue was dated May 7, 1915. The headlines were "The Dardanelles," "The Italian Crisis," "An Important Japanese Operation," and "Extensive Use of Gas against the British by the Enemy." There was also an announcement of an upcoming concert in the ship's saloon: "Concert in Saloon!" And there was a report by Sir J. French from the European front, written in the unvarying style shared by military communiqués the world over — the attempt to conceal and downplay a fucked-up situation: "The same morning three units carried out a concerted attack on a position in the Bois de Pally recently captured by us. This attack achieved die enemy's goal of gaining a foothold against our front line, but our counterattack permitted us to retake half of the hill almost immediately…" You're screwed, Sir J. French, I thought. They'll throw even more men at you at night, since the main thing is to gain a foothold, and in the morning your front line will become their rear.
Next to the relic from the Lusitania hung a portrait — an old gentleman in a pince-nez and green tie, probably a grandfather or great-grandfather. In another frame on the same wall was a group portrait of some gentlemen who had received the Edison Prize, with Edison himself in the center. The prime movers of progress, so to speak. To a significant degree, it is thanks to these fine-looking gentlemen and their boundless curiosity that the very existence of Homo sapiens is in jeopardy.
On the opposite wall was an art nouveau poster depicting an auburn-haired, bare-shouldered woman who was covered with flowers, who was bedecked with flowers. This lady, unlike the Fausts in their stand-up collars, was completely innocuous and didn't even have a name.
Hidden behind the door was a surprise — a yellow 1919 newspaper, framed like the other one of course, with a portrait of the same old gentleman in pince-nez and what were evidently his words printed in huge letters underneath: "People want us to be efficient and to provide service of the highest quality. That is impossible without capital investment. There must be an equitable interrelation here. If costs go up, then prices must too!" Golden words from the old gentleman, I thought to myself. He's right. Prices have been going up to this day and will continue to do so until the entire system collapses. And if it collapses, then everything else will too — both prices and costs, and the portrait of the gentleman in the green tie, and the millionaire's house, and maybe the whole world.
Then a white children's bed stood next to the doorway leading to the roof; now it has been replaced by a large adult bed Nancy brought from Connecticut. I have accustomed myself to fucking my women on the adult bed with the door open, so that the sunlight in all its vitality falls directly on the victim's cunt and on my own organ, which is tremendously stimulating, and heats both cunt and prick to incandescence. Then, however, a children's bed stood by the door, and next to it (and still there) a manned rocking horse from India embroidered in gold.
I sat on the horse and rocked and quietly thought, Why couldn't I live here? It would be a fine thing to remain living in this little house for the rest of one's life, and sleep in the children's bed, and throw children's books on the blue shag rug. Thank you, Jenny, I thought as I rocked on the horse, clasping it between my tanned legs. I have no right to be here, none at all. Thank you, Jenny. I'll have to give her a kiss when I get back downstairs. She doesn't feel well. Besides her vagina, her back hurts. She sleeps on the other bed, but next to me, obviously creating the illusion for herself of a normal life with a husband. Last night there were light blue sheets with butterflies on our beds. She does everything she thinks she's supposed to do so that sex will be pleasurable for Edward, and obediently sucks my organ. What can I do? she probably thinks. Edward must have an orgasm, and my vagina hurts me now. She makes an effort for my sake, but doesn't get any pleasure herself, the angel.
I've stopped dreaming about complete happiness, I thought, continuing to rock and watching through the open doorway a sudden gust of wind blow my Sunday New York Times from the roof to toss it in the river, no doubt. I've become calculating and don't worry about Jenny anymore, and always leave her in bed in the morning without regret, without even a glance in her direction; I leave her and the butterflies on the sheets and come up here to this children's stateroom. Downstairs sleeps a woman who is alien to me, a twenty-year-old woman who oppresses me with her plans. Down there lie her heavy bottom, her breasts, and the rest of her dubious charms, while I sit up here, a boy who has risen early and already contemplated an old geographical map. I have existed and I shall continue to do so, I thought, as usual full of boundless faith that morning in my own exceptional destiny. And when my hour comes, I shall leave this house for other women and other lands and return to my own destiny. Here in the children's room of the millionaire's house I've found an unexpected respite from my struggle, a place to hide out for a while. But enough of resting, I said to myself, and sliding off my Arabian courser, I went downstairs, where Eastern music and the voices of Jenny and somebody else could already be heard.
That somebody else turned out to be Jennifer, whom I had mistaken on my first visit to the millionaire's house for a Turk. She was in fact a Jew. I didn't care much for Jennifer; of all Jenny's friends, Bridget was my favorite, but Jenny liked Jennifer for some reason. I suppose it was because they were both cows and crazy about babies, and each eventually had one, Jennifer first, then Jenny a little later.
After I came downstairs that morning, Jennifer revealed to me and Jenny that she had "fallen in love" with the seventy-two-year-old Dr. Krishna.
"Congratulations," I said.
"I'm so happy!" she exclaimed, and jumping up from her chair, she embraced Jenny. Then she embraced me, giving off a strong odor of pot, and said that she and the doctor were planning to get married in the fall.
I even started to respect her for her «originality» and daring and her craziness. A difference of fifty-two years isn't exactly trifling, I thought. What a people these Indians are. He's never been married until now. He's just starting out. His first wife.
It was very hot, around a hundred degrees. After taking her bra off very nearly in front of me and something else besides that looked like panties — New York girls have an extraordinary simplicity about these things that is on occasion even offensive — the idiotic Jennifer ran out into the garden and started twirling about in nothing but her Indian blouse and her skirt. She leapt up and down, holding her arms high, and pointlessly waved her hands, performing something in between a belly dance and a gymnastics exercise. A Jewish chicken, I thought derisively. Pimply, happy, and satisfied with her Krishna, who was an "excellent man," as she had told Jenny. I could see that she really was happy, only it all looked so silly.
While this was going on, the other fortunate, Jenny, was jabbering on the telephone in the kitchen. I had just given her a gift, the Virgin Mary on birch bark, the work of my friend Borka Churilov and the only Russian thing I had left.
"Thanks for Jenny," said the sweaty Jennifer, who had just come in from the garden, distracting me from my thoughts. She kissed me.
Jenny was going out with Jennifer; they had things to tell each in private. Both were contented with life. One had "fallen in love" with a seventy-two-year-old Indian doctor, and the other with an ambitious Russian guy who was a writer, only the sort of writer of which there are so many around, since who the fuck had read his books? For my part, I immersed myself in a book by Virginia Woolf I'd just discovered on the dining room bookshelf.
At the end of August Jenny and I visited her parents in Virginia. I remember her striding energetically ahead through the crowd at the Port Authority bus terminal dressed in a long skirt like the mother of a family, and myself dressed in white pants and a black cap trudging along after her with a vacant expression on my face and loaded down with bags. Among other things, the bags contained loaves of Jenny's own freshly baked bread. Hot as it was without that, the bread gave off an additional steamy warmth.
Once underway on the bus, Jenny happily dozed on my shoulder, while I read a book on anarchism, from time to time gazing at two attractively jaded teenage girls sitting on my right, both of them blondes, both drinking cans of Budweiser, and both chewing gum with their beer.
I had just started a chapter on anarchism in Spain, when the bus came to a halt. We were, as it turned out, already in Washington, D.C. I reluctantly took leave of the Spanish anarchists, sturdy fellows all, smiled in farewell to the insolent teenagers, with whom I would very gladly have gone, and picked up our bags. The bread, thank God, had finally cooled.
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.
Our jaunt was not without its minor incidents. From a house with a cement swimming pool painted a dark blue and hidden deep in a gully among the trees some shaggy dogs rushed out at us, barking furiously. Robert and Debby put their legs up on the handlebars and I put mine on the frame, and we quickly coasted downhill to a green bridge crossing a little brook, and left the disappointed dogs behind. Eventually we reached the place where all the Jackson children had gone to school. Robert and Debby laughingly showed me, as if it were one of the sights, the special building where the defective children studied. I laughed at the defective children too, and regretted that it was Saturday, since they had probably all been taken back home to their families and it would therefore be impossible to see their defects.
It was very hot, and so we decided not to ride any farther but to remain in the school yard and spend some time there. Each of us taking quiet pleasure in the fact that he wasn't defective, we rode on the swings, and then when he saw somebody he knew throwing a ball in the basketball hoop all by himself, Robert asked me if I wanted to play. We played with the other guy for a little while, and then switched from basketball to soccer, which I'm a lot more partial to. Debby played soccer no worse than Robert did. After we had exhausted ourselves and the ball, we rode back home. I was already getting tired of the American hinterland, even though I was also making an effort to «study» it. Since you're here, Limonov, ask about everything; stick your nose in all the details…
And stick my nose in all the details I did. On a shelf in the living room I found The People's Almanac, went out into the garden, sat down in the sunshine, and began to study it. It contained more than a thousand pages of different kinds of information from every domain of human endeavor. I of course was most interested in the lists of criminals "most wanted" by the FBI, lists going back many years. After 1969 the "most wanted" were political criminals, especially those belonging to certain organizations — the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and still earlier, the Students for a Democratic Society. Obviously, the two giants, America and the Soviet Union, had undergone a process that was still not quite clear to me but that was the same in both countries, since at the end of the sixties in the Soviet Union too the most important criminals for the KGB had been the dissidents. The mosquitoes were biting me, and the sun was roasting me unmercifully, but I read on and on, reading until lunchtime, unable to tear myself away. Papa Henry even came out and said he would give me the The People's Almanac, and I could read it in New York. Papa Henry was obviously hinting that I was being "unsociable."
After lunch I decided to be more sociable for Jenny's sake. And so, when they invited me to go to a baseball game between two school teams, one of which the eleven-year-old Kevin played for, I said it had always been my dream to see a real baseball game and I was dying to go.
We piled into two cars, the big car belonging to Jenny's father and a small blue one belonging to Robert, and set off. On the front seat next to his father sat the grave little Kevin, chewing gum. He was nervous, but he chewed his gum like a grown-up, pretending he was a tough guy.
There were already quite a few cars parked at the site of the upcoming event, and many of the seats on the wooden benches had already been taken. All of us — the more than ten members of the entire Virginia-based Jackson clan and I — took our seats higher up where it was more comfortable, in the center, so to speak, of the bleachers that partly surrounded the main part of the baseball field and that were separated from it by a high fence, and got ready to cheer Kevin on. And then it started…
I thought it would be insufferably boring and had already begun to steel myself for the ordeal. How wrong I was! There was nothing boring about it. In just a few minutes, the solitary figure Limonov found himself caught up in a vortex of local hysteria. "Our team" — that is, Kevin's — was called the Yellow Socks and was playing the Tigers, and, gentlemen, it was the championship! And so all the relatives of the Yellow Socks and all the relatives of the Tigers were there, plus all their friends and acquaintances, and everybody else who cared about the reputation of the town and the school, as well as all those who were merely curious, and all those locals who had come simply because there was nothing else to do in town, and all the local hooligans and local intellectuals, and… All of them had clambered up onto the benches with cans of beer and Coca-Cola and other soft drinks and with cigarettes between their lips, and were waiting for the action to begin. Underneath the bleachers wandered very young children ready to pick up balls coming over the fence, if there were any.
Children of eleven, twelve, and thirteen are exceptionally different in size and form. On the same team were giants and dwarves, men and babies. All of them took their turn at bat and struck at the ball thrown by the opposing team's best pitcher, and when they swung and missed, the crowd roared and whistled indignantly, but when a lucky batter swung and hit it and threw down his bat and took off round the bases, the crowd roared and whistled in delight. I was afraid for the catcher the whole time, since I was sure one of the kids would hit him between the eyes with the bat or knock his brains out — the bat was a serious weapon — and spoil the whole game, but the kids were up to it and didn't hurt him.
A fat blonde, her tanned shoulders bared and the straps of her bra and pink undershirt cutting into her ample flesh, shouted to her son, a small blond boy with his hair cut in bangs just like Prince Valiant's, "Bobby, be aggressive! Be aggressive!" And Bobby was, insofar as his size and strength permitted, and he hit the ball well, and took off around the field, while his mama grabbed hold of the fence in raptures and screamed, "Bobby-y-y-y!"
I looked at the Jackson clan. Papa Henry at the far end of the bench was yelling something and slapping his hands on his knees, Debby had stuck two fingers in her mouth and was whistling, and even the usually morose Betsy was yelling too, although in the general uproar it was impossible to tell what she was saying. But when Kevin came up to bat, we all started wildly applauding and yelling, "Kev-in!" as if shouting encouragement to our own champion in single combat — me too, as I suddenly realized to my own astonishment. Our man did no worse than Bobby had — he was even better, thanks to the fact that Robert had coached him for several hours before lunch by throwing a ball to him. He was in good form, our champion, and he hit the ball brilliantly, and we all started shouting again, I don't remember what, and whistling, and in my enthusiasm I struck Jenny on the shoulder with my hand and screamed something else along with all the others, and then we applauded our Kevin while he circled the bases.
When I finally recovered from that collective paroxysm, I heard Jenny choking with laughter and pointing at me and shouting, "Look at Edward! Look at how Edward's screaming and waving his hands! Ha, ha, ha!"