Diary of a Loser

Pastoral

to M.N.Izergina

From Brandenburg runs a beautiful summer road, lined along both sides luxurious beeches and plane trees. The road leads to Oranienburg, which is only a stone's throw from sleepy Winnenburg.

Beyond the big sleepy lakes on the outskirts of Winnenburg, there's a valley with remarkable grapes unique to the area, grapes like the Blue Velvet and Rosaly. Nearby the southwestern exit from the valley – the only one accessible by an automobile – there's a hotel, «Eccentrics' Shelter,» whose owner, Frau Maria, remarkably resembles Madam Recamier. «Our entire life is a joke,» she likes to say in rainy weather, and then she inevitably performs with great gusto a well-known old love song «Burn Bright My Star.»

Who would have expected this? Nonetheless, last Friday, a student, Savitsky, and a Jewish miss, Klinestock, committed suicide simultaneously. Singing, they crossed the valley and drowned in the ponds, I mean those by the lake.

To be a passer-by on every beach. To be a foreigner, a fly-by-night from another country. To manage without books or apartments. To throw a dozen finished volumes into a hotel's dumpster and then – in accordance with the secret instructions of the Extraordinary Annihilation League conveyed through an agent – a girl in a purple hat, named Madeleine. Moving on and on, setting up conspiracies and at times unloading your own gun into the pink faces and stomachs of men sentenced by the League – usually they're between forty and sixty years-old.

Early morning. A tempting thirteen-year-old babysitter arrives. Sunburned nose, blonde, long legs. I want to get up from the table, get rid of these tiresome adults and their conversations, take the girl by the hand and go with her into the new morning. She still believes in something. She still loves for no particular reason – for shaggy hair, for unconventional ideas, for her first sex.

«Cocksucker!» you say bitterly into nowhere, being one on one with yourself. You smoke another cigarette, and yet another. Or you walk from corner to corner. Or you stare out the window. «Cocksucker!» And this exclamation has more meaning than most books, including the famous old Bible.

It doesn't interest me anymore. Okay, a woman: a head, hair, two arms, two legs, that opening in between her legs covered with furry growth. So what? I did use to love women, loved to get to know them, loved to study them, loved their orgasms, loved to watch their faces distorted at that moment. But now I've left that to ordinary folk, and I only find pleasure in the struggle against this society and societies in general. Nonetheless, yesterday I was disturbed by a five-year-old girl. An unashamed little creature was rolling on a low toy bicycle – her legs wide apart, showing off her pubis. And there it was, a pink opening like a hole from a bullet. A bullet hole.

I'm not an impotent, dirty old man. Women on the streets look at me with definite interest, but that bullet hole was so indecent that I turned my head in terror. It was much more indecent than the fat prostitute who showed a mangled cunt which I once saw early in my youth.

An evil child.

And old man sticks his prick into a virgin and sways voluptuously over her. A virgin has a certain burning sensation and receives great pleasure from his gray hair and creased skin. She feels like a child, a little girl, and it's very bad that an old man is fucking her. And because it's bad, the virgin enjoys it. She claws the old man's chest.

A youth weeping stupidly is outside the frames of the picture. God forbid, he may even kill himself. «Chili out, buddy. The virgin is just a senseless, twenty-one-year-old flower.» Sometimes the guy calms down, sometimes he doesn't.

Who's that knocking at the door? Oh, it's nobody, it's that good-for-nothing writer, Eddie Limonov, a thirty-four-year-old fucker, God's creation, a creature.

«Oh, it's yet another Russian!» said a great lover of cherries Misha Baryshnikov when someone asked him, «Who's this?»

I liked that. That's just who I am: yet another Russian.

Suddenly, it turns out that for the past two months he's been having sex with a girl who has hereditary syphilis – can you imagine? It's that millionaire's housekeeper. She announced it to him. «And if I'm already infected with it?» thought he – a question worth pondering. But being a reckless adventurer in the extreme, it occurred to him, not without some consternation, that even this is interesting to him; he perceives it as a fascinating fact in his biography. Isn't that something!

Later it turned out that it's not syphilis but some kind of benign plague.

Well, yes, I would want some kind of terrifically exciting relationships amid a group of people, and women of course, all on a moving ship. It's just a pleasure trip with no particular destination.

A ship is convenient – no chance to escape. Besides, a crowded space breeds perverse relationships.

And the quickly changing backdrop of shores, landscapes, and ports is necessary for an impatient person. It is a very tense situation which is resolved only with a murder. Blood makes everyone huddle together as though they were a family.