It's Me, Eddie

I make money

One morning I was awakened by a call from John. "Come on down, Ed!" he said in English. Two minutes later I was downstairs and into the cab of the truck that stood by the entrance.

I was off to make myself some money. Anytime anyone offers me work, I don't turn it down. These times are few, and in practice my sole source of work is John. He is my boss and the only person I know at the renowned Beautiful Moving Company.

John – formerly Ivan – is a fascinating person. A seaman who defected from a Soviet fishing vessel in the straits of Japan. In an inflatable rubber boat, riding the current off the Japanese coast, he survived a gale and was picked up by Japanese fishermen. From Japan he applied to go to the States.

John is a manly-looking guy, tall and strong, slightly snubnosed, the same age as Eddie. A Jack London character. He speaks English exclusively. The words are horribly mispronounced, with a dreadful wooden accent, but it's English. He still condescends to speak Russian with me; he's more severe with others. This version of the "man of the people" is very familiar to me; the desire not to be Russian, the scorn for Russia, for its people and language, are also familiar. My friend Paul, though with certain deviations, was almost the same type. His story is less successful than John's but even more colorful.

God knows where Paul contracted his Francomania. Born Pavel Shemetov, the son of ordinary working parents, he lived in a small private house on the outskirts of Kharkov. During his four years in the navy, where he served as a seaman (John was navy too!), Pavel learned die French language down to the last detail. At the time I became acquainted with him his French was very sophisticated, he could speak with a Marseilles, Paris, or Breton accent at will. The French tourists who now and then passed through Kharkov on their way south – we picked them up, on Paul's initiative, in order to drink vodka with them by the fence of the Metropolitan's house, on a hill overlooking Kharkov, and barter goods with them – honestly took him for a repatriate, there had been many repatriates to the USSR from France.

Paul was madly in love with France. He knew all the French chansonniers, among whom he was especially fond of Aznavour and Brel. On the wall of his room, in oil, Paul had painted a huge portrait of Aznavour that covered the whole wall. I remember he once sang "Amsterdam!" for us, in a narrow, piss-puddled gateway on Sumskaya Street, the main street of our native Kharkov. When he imitated Jacques Brel, he puffed up and turned all purple. He had less ability and skill than Brel, but probably no less enthusiasm.

From photographs, drawings, and plans of Paris, Paul learned all of its streets, lanes, and culs-de-sac. He painted watercolors of them in great number. I think he could have walked through Paris with his eyes closed and not gotten lost. Names like Place Pigalle, Cafe Blanche, Etoile, and Montmartre had for him the ring of unearthly music. He was frenchified to the point of pathology. He refused to talk to people in Russian, he did not enter into conversations on buses or streetcars. "I don't understand," he would say curtly. He still made an exception for us, his friends, but only for us. Even at that, I think he inwardly scorned us for not knowing French.

He was working then at a tannery. I don't know exactly what he did there, but he did heavy, nasty work for almost two years – he wanted clothes. Somewhere in the labyrinth of Moskalevka, the Jewish quarter, he found an old Jewish shoemaker, and the man made him some high boots, with high heels too, "like the Beatles'." I forgot to mention that Paul loved the Beatles. With the help of the niece of the wife I had then, I made him a three-piece suit from a striped fabric, and a great many pairs of striped slacks. I remember that he liked his slacks very long, practically lying in folds at the bottom. It was an oddity of his.

Paul became frenchified to such a degree that even outwardly – I am thinking particularly of his face – he ceased to look Russian and really did recall a Frenchman, most probably a resident of a small town in Brittany. Many times, back in Russia, when studying Western illustrated magazines, I encountered faces surprisingly reminiscent of my poor friend Paul's.

His fate is tragic. He matured too early, while it was still impossible to emigrate from the USSR: they were not yet letting the Jews out; the practice of exposing undesirable elements and ejecting them abroad did not yet exist. It was too early, but Paul was already ripe. He so wanted to leave that hated country for his beloved France, the paradise that he had created for himself in his imagination. I don't know whether he would have been happy in that paradise. He might have been. I do know of three attempts he made to escape from the Soviet Union.

The first went unnoticed. On leaving the tannery, Paul, who had accumulated a little money, began to spend a lot of time downtown, visiting the cafes and the not very numerous vice dens of Kharkov. Somewhere down there he became acquainted with Bunny, a large and rather cute girl whom the whole city knew as a prostitute; he married her and moved in with her. Her mother was a tradeswoman. By paying off a few policemen she had succeeded in getting around Soviet law and was making money buying hard-to-get goods in one city and selling them in another. She converted her son-in-law Paul to this business. One time she sent him to Armenia. There he learned of a high official who was taking huge sums for illegally sending people to Turkey. Ostensibly they were hired for the job of building a highway. Part of the highway was being built on Turkish territory. Paul was unlucky. When he arrived at the border the chief was already in prison.

The second attempt was the ruin of Paul's whole life. He was ready to burst, desperately seeking a way out. He would come to me in Moscow and say nothing, stare into space all day, distraught; in the evening he would disappear, starting out for suspicious addresses. Then he went away.

I later learned that he had gone south to Novorossisk, and there had managed to reach an agreement with some sailors from a French ship that they would hide him and take him out of the USSR. But Dame Fortune evidently did not favor Paul. One of the crew turned out to be a man who worked for Soviet customs. Such cases are said to be frequent – these are paid informers. On the basis of his denunciation, at the outer roadstead at Batum, the last Soviet port on the Black Sea – beyond it lay Turkey – the ship was detained, a search was made, and they pulled Paul from his hideaway. They found on him political caricatures of Soviet heads of state. There was a trial, and… here, at least he had a small piece of luck, if you can call it that: he was judged insane.

I don't know whether he really was. I suppose he was. I don't think he was born insane, but there was something pathological about him, and it must have developed gradually. He hated Russia too much, immoderately. "Tribe of goats," "imbeciles," "queerstabulary," "Communists" – these were his usual words, spoken many times a day. He addressed them not only to Communists, but also to ordinary innocent philistines.

They kept him in the mental hospital for a year, and before long he was sitting again on a bench near the Shevchenko monument in Kharkov, smoking a cigarette and glancing occasionally at his daughter Fabiana, who played by his Beatles boots. He talked to no one. Then he suddenly disappeared.

No one knew where he was or what had happened to him, until an inquiry arrived at the mental hospital in Kharkov from the western border of the USSR, from the Carpathians, requesting them to forward the medical record of a Pavel Shemetov, who had been arrested while illegally crossing the western border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the vicinity of city X.

A sad story, isn't it? I, little Eddie, remember yet another detail. Years ago, back before the navy, Paul got married. There was a wedding reception. All the guests got dead drunk, but even so there wasn't enough liquor. The bride, by now his wife, sent Paul for beer, she had an urge for beer. When Paul came back from the store with the case of beer, he discovered his bride in one of the rooms fucking his best friend… Nice… Perhaps it was then that he came to hate the filth and vileness of this world. The only thing he didn't know, poor guy, was that filth and vileness existed everywhere. And how could he know, poor guy, that it was not the Russian people who were at fault here, nor the Communist system.

Paul's further fate, after the letter from the Carpathians, is unknown to me.

But let us return to John. John had much less education than Paul. Paul was almost an intellectual. And he was straining toward France as the world of art, as an Eden. John was guided by far more practical considerations. He came to America to get rich, become a millionaire. And I'm sure he will. I do not have a very clear idea who owns Beautiful Moving. John takes care of all the business. He's the driver; he's also a helper and an administrator. He hires us, the helpers, at his own discretion. And the orders come to his, John's, telephone. Evidently the owner merely gives him the money, or gave it to him, the original capital.

We move people from apartment to apartment. Sometimes people move within the confines of one neighborhood, sometimes from state to state. From New Jersey to Pennsylvania, from New York to Massachusetts. The long moves are more interesting. By now I've seen a number of small towns, all similar to one another, in five or six eastern states, mainly in New England. If we ride together, then either we are silent, in which case I study the landscape along the road, or else the taciturn John suddenly begins to tell stories about his life on the trawler. The Jack London hero can't hold out, he cracks, talks about himself a little, insofar as his frugal, stern nature allows.

Usually this happens in the middle of the day. In the morning he is silent as a statue. When I jump into the cab with him, he utters only a short "Hi!" I may address him after that, but you can be damn sure I don't get much of an answer. I'm used to him and remain silent too. Basically I like him, I like his face, figure, character. Among the spineless bellyaching intellectuals who have come to America, he is a pleasant exception – a simple, ordinary man. A curiosity. He's a tough guy. He doesn't argue, he works very hard and is saving money in order to open his own business. He's a genuine Russian, although he once said he didn't give a fuck about his nationality. Despite what he says, he can't escape it – he's Russian, like me. Russian even in that he doesn't want to be Russian.

As I said, he's a very tough guy. Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, saves his money, lives in a bad neighborhood, and shares an apartment with someone else. He's very deft at handling his heavy truck. In some ways I envy him, my agemate, although little Eddie is a tough guy too, on the whole. I don't know whether he, John, associates with women. This question interests me to a certain degree; they say he fucks some woman from whom he supposedly rents the truck. Maybe she's his boss, too – one and the same person? I could easily find out about company affairs from John, but I don't want to appear curious. In the final analysis, I need my $4 an hour, which I earn by lugging other people's furniture up and down in elevators and stairways. Besides, I am interested to see Other people's apartments – things tell me much about their owners.

I am John's chief helper now. Evidently he considers me a good one. He has had other helpers too. The dissident Yury Fein, a man of about forty-five, known mainly for being married to the sister of the first wife of our celebrity, our prophet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Then there's Shneerson, also a dissident, a man who arrived in Israel in Soviet prison garb, a professor's fat son. Shneerson quickly got out of Israel and is now on welfare. I have already mentioned that it was he who led me – half dead, my mind not functioning, my arm streaming pus – to the welfare center and got them to put me on welfare inside of a day. "Emergency situation!"

I remember how wide-eyed and astonished the Americans at the welfare center were when wheezing, fat, disheveled Shneerson pointed at me, a pale man with idiotically short-cropped hair, and explained to them that I had an emergency situation, I was in a terrible state, my wife had left me. They were astonished, perhaps even amused. Most of them, being aloof and self-involved, could hardly have loved another person so madly. But I must give them their due, they did not dispute my right to be the way I was. If the departure of a woman was an emergency situation for the Russians, so that they couldn't eat, drink, work, or keep an apartment – well, then that's the way they were, the Russians. What the hell, let's give the man welfare.

That may have been exactly how they thought. Or maybe, as many emigres claim, Welfare has a secret order from the American government to give welfare to all Russians who want it, in order to avoid exasperating people and appearing ridiculous in front of world society with their much-vaunted system, which is supposed to have room for everyone. A great many Russians are on welfare. I think Soviet emigres should be sent to the welfare center straight off the airplane. Having counted on mountains of gold here, they are utterly unable to assimilate the modest philosophy of the Western laborer. If they have to be like everyone else, then what was the point in coming? Here the ordinary man pronounces with pride: "I am like everyone else."

Yes, but John. I was talking about him. It's amusing that all of us – intellectuals, poets, and dissidents – are under an ordinary guy from a fishing trawler. He has proved to be much better adapted to this life than we are. He does his business seriously and punctiliously. You should see the way he walks into the apartment of someone who is moving, records the place on the contract form, and demands the client's signature. All this is done very importantly. His file folder looks important, the clamp on his clipboard sparkles, and we stand at his back – some, like Fein, very rightist; others, like me, very leftist; still others, like Shneerson, undecided – holding in readiness the dollies for moving furniture, the straps and the packing quilts. We wait for a signal from our businessman, John.

I find all this to be terrible foolishness, both my participation in moving other people's belongings from one place to another, and this Fein, who is forever praising America and its wise government. He even considers the Bowery and its dirty, piss-soaked inhabitants to be the result of a government plan to concentrate all beggars, alcoholics, and drug addicts in one place, the more easily to help them. My participation is terrible foolishness, but my $278 welfare is so inadequate for me that I participate in this foolishness anyway; I too am a man and need money. That is why the rightist Fein grabs the right side of the piano, and I, the extreme leftist, the left side – and here we go!

Admittedly, I need the money only for clothes, my single weakness. I have always found the acquisition of other things disgusting, and the experience of moving other people's belongings, the spectacle of the silly heavy sofas, the buffets, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of petty objects, has strengthened my aversion to the world of things. The owner will die, and all this shit will remain. "Never!" I whisper to myself, as I lug some Patrick's buffet up the stairs to the fourth floor, without an elevator. "I don't give a flying fuck for this old junk. No to things!" I say to myself. The only thing I cannot resist, alas, is beautiful clothes.

The signature is affixed. The missus has signed. From this moment on, an invisible meter counts out our pennies. We begin to move like automated dolls. Pick up, place on the dolly, turn, roll, lift at the threshold or the step, roll again… move, unscrew mirrors, wrap them in special quilts… monotonous, rhythmic operations, varying only in the size of the object and the turns on the staircase, the approach to the elevator, the steps down to the street, and the weather.

We're rather a cheap company; some of our customers are emigres, because we advertise in Russkoe Delo as well as the American papers. Emigres most often live in poor neighborhoods, they have precious little in the way of belongings. Sometimes we have to move crazy old ladies to the poorhouse and carry off their dirty odds and ends of trash.

Once we even moved iron beds with flat springs, beds for two girls of sixteen and twenty, beds they had brought from the USSR. But the girls were darling, with their neat little poopkas and high heels, Jewish girls bursting with their own juice; I feel like saying the banal, and I will: "girls with the eyes of little young lambs," bulging eyes, silly and trusting. I am not very fond of brunettes, but I feel a kind of gratitude toward Jewish girls. A Russian poet cannot help loving them – they are his main readers and admirers. "Ah, Tolya, who in Russia reads us but the Jewish girls?" the poet Yesenin once wrote from America to the poet Mariengof in Russia.

My working minutes tick by, bathed in sweat, amid self-abasement and the countless jostling memories awakened now by a ray of sun, now by a book that has fallen from a badly tied box… "I was reading it, then she came in – Elena – and we…" Hauling and carrying extensive Russian libraries is an especially strange pastime. Here in America, Russian books produce an unexpected effect. Carrying the dull green spines, the collected works of the Chekhovs, Leskovs, and other eulogizers and denizens of sleepy Russian noondays, I think vicious thoughts about the whole of my loathsome native Russian literature, which has been largely responsible for my life. Dull green bastards, Chekhov languishing in boredom, his eternal students, people who don't know how to get themselves going, who vegetate through this life, they lurk in these pages like diaphanous sunflower husks. Even the print, small and crowded, is repulsive to me. And I am repulsive to myself. It's much pleasanter to move the bright American books, not all of which, moreover, are intelligible to me, thank Cod.

We have moved a set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and are now moving boxes of loose papers stamped "Radio Liberty." Dirty dipshit operation… so that's where he works! The owner of the papers is an intellectual from Kiev, with a graying beard. For some reason they all unthinkingly begin to collaborate with the CIA. I, who received not a ruble from the Soviet regime, would seem to have more grounds for being embittered at my former homeland and going to work for an organization financed by the American intelligence service and aimed at the destruction of Russia. But I don't work for anyone. I did not collaborate with the KGB there and am not about to collaborate with the CIA here – to me, they are two identical operations.

The owner of the library, with the little gray beard, enthusiastically tells Fein that an article of his has been accepted for the anniversary issue of Posev. Bonehead, he's found something to be proud of. In the USSR the graybeard was a screenwriter – worked for the Soviet regime. I did not encounter any free screenwriters in the USSR; naturally, he wrote what the authorities needed. Here he also writes exactly what the authorities need – such people work for the authorities under all regimes. They were born to serve, to carry out functions. They change masters without any special pangs of conscience. And why not?

Prostitute! I think, meaning the graybeard. The prostitute is also dragging chests around, breathing heavily; he is saving time and money. Evidently they don't pay him any too much at Radio Liberty. Or else it's greed. "How much is your Homeland today?" I feel like asking him… He keeps dragging. His son, a tanned athlete of about sixteen, is also carrying things. Mama, who looks younger than she is, does not carry furniture. "Mama can be fucked," says the ubiquitous Kirill, who is present with me as always. I brought him to earn a little money. It is probably the first time in his life he has worked as a mover. The big aristocrat finds it disgusting to carry furniture, he has little knowledge of the correct way to pick things up, he just barely holds on. But he does, although the job is hard for him to take and probably humiliating. Since I am actually from the lower classes and have seen all kinds of situations in this life, sweat is no novelty to me, though I haven't done any moving for ten years. But Kirill's face shows depression, loathing for the work, and boredom. His expression will change, giving place to a certain satisfaction, only after he gets his money, but as it turns out, John has had time to notice it. He will not invite the aristocrat to move furniture again, young men like this don't appeal to him. He does not understand the conventions of this world.

What the fuck does this prostitute want with the Great Soviet Encyclopedia? I am still wondering about our client. It is clear that the only reason he needs the encyclopedia and his huge Russian Orthographic Dictionary is so that he can be more literate in selling out his Homeland. He has even brought over some paperbacks on patriotic heroes of World War II. Why? As possible material for his scripts. For some sort of expose. There was another writer like that, but from the Second Emigration; I think he's still writing. He reads a Soviet book, supposedly finds anti-Soviet tendencies in the author, and there's his article. That's how he lives, article after article. And there's another one, a former Soviet officer, who contrives to publish one and the same thing in two places, sends it to Radio Liberty and Russkoe Delo – changes the title, revises two paragraphs, and sends it off. Two fees. That's how he's lived his thirty years abroad. A good cook. Likes to eat. It's not their fault, poor fellows. They want to eat. But if you're going to work in your own way and measure this world – whether the USSR or America – by your own standards, then what will you eat? You can't feed on the Holy Spirit, can you?

When we move Americans – at present our customers are mostly all Americans – then my reflections are different. Recently we moved a couple from a house in Queens; they had been living together but were then separated, because we moved them to two different apartments. "What do you think, are they divorced?" I asked John.

"What do I care?" he said. "Do they pay money? They do. I make my money, I don't care about the rest."

Well, John doesn't, but Eddie does. I observed them carefully, and their belongings too. They were both small. He was like all Americans and so was she. Very typical. He had on a T-shirt and so did she. He had on denim shorts, his legs were hairy and just a bit crooked; she had denim jeans, her ass was a little droopy. He could have been anything, I think he was Jewish. A mustache, of course, how could he not have a mustache, and she smoked one cigarette after another. Their names, of course, were Susan and Peter, how could they be anything else. Two bicycles. One box labeled "Peter's Kitchen," another box "Susan's Kitchen." One box "Peter's Shoes," another "Susan's Shoes." All their things had been thrown into the boxes, not properly packed, and as we lugged all these boxes down a narrow green stairway, and then down a gray stairway, and then down three brick steps, the things kept trying to pop out and fall. They had a lot of things, but it was all somehow petty. Tiny little boxes, more little boxes, small little things, and only a few big ones – an old wooden armchair and a chest of drawers, a pair of small dressers, and that was all.

We moved Susan to an apartment on East Eighty-sixth, where there was an elevator. She got the two bicycles and her share of the boxes with the bottle necks sticking out of them.

Peter got the television, the old wooden armchair, and the bricks, which evidently served as spacers for bookshelves. I observed this couple like a stern high judge, hoping to see something in them other than typicality, other than his shock of curly hair and his mustache – in New York, every other man has a mustache and a shock of hair. I saw nothing.

By the time we moved him it was dark, and he threatened not to pay us any money due after six hours. He had, he said, only six hours' worth of work, and we were doing everything slowly, he said – after we had worked like hell lugging his little boxes and chests to the fourth floor. I broke a slight hole in the bottom of one of them with my head. Nevertheless, he paid us.

His apartment was on West 106th Street, not a particularly good neighborhood. I had worked fourteen hours that day, we had had another job in the morning, we had moved a Greek, I was very tired, my legs were buckling, and when John and I were carrying the last thing, an air conditioner, my strength gave out and the air conditioner landed right on top of me, though without injuring me.

"What the fuck are you doing, you mother?" John said softly.

"I'll just rest a minute," I said. "I got very drunk yesterday;" I added, which was true.

At the sound of our voices a curious denizen of the third floor stuck her head out into the stairwell. "What's happening?" she said.

"Nothing," John replied lazily. "It's just that this guy has worked over fourteen hours today. He's tired," and he started to laugh.

I was very ashamed that I hadn't been able to hold out and had collapsed on the stairs. Ashamed before the seaman from the trawler.

"Never mind," he said. "You're not used to it yet. Weak hands."

It was the first time God had made me aware there was a limit to my physical strength. If it hadn't been for those stairs! This didn't happen to me again, however; eventually I would become strong as a horse.

Ten minutes later, having received all the money – be would have tried to get out of paying John, but John wouldn't have given him his fucking TV and lamp, which were still on the truck, boxed separately in quilts – we were on our way downtown in the truck, trying to pass some other shithead in a truck, like us…

John… I like him. The lousy thing is that he's a racist, he doesn't like blacks. "Black trash," he calls them. His racism, that of an ordinary peasant lad from Russia, has a rather primitive character. Driving through different provincial towns with me, he determines first of all whether they have many blacks. The highest praise he can give a town is the assessment, "There's no black trash here at all." John is delighted by the state of Maine, where there are no blacks, where the air and water are clean, unpolluted. John associates blacks with pollution. "Ordinary people" are full of shit too. It was the workers that beat up the students who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. And the racial clashes in Boston – the capitalists are not to blame for them at all, it's the ordinary working gents who don't want their children to study with black children. Ordinary people too are full of shit in our time.

"I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike once," John recounts, "and the blacks in the car ahead of me turned over. They yelled from the car, but I drove around them and calmly rolled on. I looked back and a bunch of Americans had already come running, they were pulling die black trash out of the car."

"What a racist you are!" I tell him.

He's not angry, he laughs. "Racist" is a swear word to a liberal American professor; to a man from the fields of Byelorussia, a seaman from a trawler, "racist" is not a swear word.

We often return from our trips via Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Calmly driving the heavy truck, he looks at the crowd and grits through his teeth, "Monkeys, monkeys!" With no special malice, however. He points out to me a guy who is totally drunk or stoned, staggering along waving his arms. John laughs contentedly.

I do not try to dissuade him, I do not suggest that he take thought and reject his racism. It's futile. And although we calmly ride in the same truck, although I approve of him in some ways, value his simple strength and vitality, and although it seems to me that he approves of me in some ways too, the possibility cannot be excluded that coming years will place us on different sides of the barricades. He will be defending this system and this regime, along with lads just like him from the fields of Texas, Iowa, or Missouri, and I will be with the hated black trash.

This is so clear to me that I smile calmly in the truck. Ah, John, little Eddie's a tough guy too, you'd better forgive him in advance, just in case. Life is too serious, I think.

He pays me my money and steps on the gas with his canvas shoe. As he disappears around the corner I catch a fleeting glimpse of his head, his short American-style haircut. I walk to my hotel.

Lately John has warmed up to me. For one thing, he now works almost exclusively with me. For another, he occasionally calls me outside of working hours and invites me to do something with him. He begins in English but then, on my account, descends to Russian after all. Once he came over with Lenya, the former inmate of the Gulag Archipelago, in Lenya's car; it was late afternoon, but they were going to the beach. Lenya is a poor driver, but we finally reached the deserted beach on distant Coney Island. As always, in keeping with my childish, soldierly habit, I had brought nothing with me, but John of course proved to be well equipped. He had with him a mat, which he spread neatly on the sand; he had a transistor radio, which he turned on immediately; he had a first-rate volleyball, which as he put it had cost him twenty-five bucks; he had an expensive textbook of English. After a swim Mr. Businessman lay down on the mat, took his pen, opened the book, and began working the exercises.

Lenya Kosogor, thin and stooped, also had no things with him, like me. It's a prison-camp habit not to burden oneself with things – they will only be taken away. Lenya and I lay right on the sand. At first I laid my head, which was wet after my swim, on John's volleyball; then, thinking he would bawl me out for ruining the surface of the leather, I moved my head away and rested it on my own sandal.

We lay there for quite a long time in the sunshine – it was an evening sun, not hot. Lately I have grown accustomed to silence, and talkativeness irritates me at times. In this respect John is almost ideal. I kept my eyes closed. Lenya asked me a couple of questions and also fell silent. We lay there a long time.

"Let's go, Ed!" John said suddenly. He closed his notebook, took the ball, and went off a little distance from where we lay. A game of volleyball – it was possible, I thought, but I had on these fucking lenses; if I moved abruptly they might fly out. But I didn't want to appear ridiculous in front of my boss. I said only that I hadn't played volleyball in at least ten years. The game began.

At first I was cautious because of the lenses and because my hands weren't obeying me. Finally I remembered how to play, and things started to go better. John wasn't much of a player either, but gradually, as I say, things got going, and later Kosogor joined in. We played quite a long time, then Kosogor lay down again on the sand and started singing Russian songs, while we kept chasing our ball around, with our eyes narrowed against the flying sand – the ball did get away from us fairly often and fall in the sand.

You know, it was like returning to my childhood. The Kharkov beach. My tireless sun-blackened friends, at once athletes and hoodlums. The endlessly flying ball. The svelte girls, who usually played very badly, but their presence inspired the young males of the species to incredible tricks and pirouettes. Admittedly, all the participants in this scene were much younger then, there were a great many of them; that scene also had a background filled with people we knew or half knew, and most importantly, it didn't have the feeling of aching sadness. Sadness surrounded both energetic John, and Lenya Kosogor, and me. Why? I asked myself. It wasn't nostalgia, was it? I don't know whether they sensed the sadness, but to me the gray ocean was sad, and the dirty sand, and the gulls, and the remote group of people on the sand – everything was filmed with sadness. The kind of sadness, you know, that makes a man take a machine gun and start shooting into the crowd, I wouldn't do it, but as an example, that's a good way to dispel sadness.

Actually I was feeling the lack of a lifework, solidly begun and just as steadfastly pursued. What this country offered me could not be my lifework. It could be John's, he made money; or Lenya Kosogor's, he wanted something definite and material; but with my thirst for love, you know, I had it tougher than anyone. Only a Great Idea could lend purpose to my life. Riding in a car, embracing a loved friend, walking on the grass, sitting on the steps of a city church – it all feels good when every hour of your life is subordinate to a great idea and a movement. But for now, there was never anything but sadness.

I cut short the volleyball session, went for a swim, swam thinking ceaselessly about how I might find love again in this world, so that it would bloom, take on color, blaze up, become the vibrant and happy world I used to live in. I swam way far out and then turned over in the water, lay there and thought about this, while over my head, scrawling across the water, glimmered the last ray of the setting sun.

I climbed out and strolled along the beach. The others, my simple, ordinary, generally good friends, were still lying there on the sand, but I didn't feel like going over to them. I strolled in the opposite direction, where there were alien bodies and alien people, and an old man with a beard was doing calisthenic bows that smacked of prayer, directly toward the setting sun.

I walked quite a way along the tide-smoothed sand, gazing at the ocean, hoping for something, but did not encounter anything or anyone necessary for my purposes; only a few children and teenage girls arrested my attention. But between them and me there lay by now my insurmountable age, my head full of the past, my scarred arms, and always that sadness. I returned to my own people – to choose an arbitrary term, of course, an arbitrary term.

They greeted me with a piece of news. "Your friend is dead," Lenya said. "Which one?" I asked indifferently. "The Great Helmsman," Lenya said. "Get out the black paint, you'll be putting a black border on the portrait in your room."

So he's dead, I thought. He was all muddled in recent years, he scuttled Trotskyism to ape the ancient Chinese emperors, founders of dynasties, he kept on living and now he's dead. A man of the people, and muddled like the people. Why can't I live without arrogance, why am I tormented by arrogance and love?

We played some more volleyball. A towheaded nurse from a nursing home came along, John invited her to play with us, and it developed that her parents were from Poltava. I jumped for the ball, everyone laughed; even in childhood I had excelled at the risky Brazilian game, as Sanya the Red called it.

The nurse from the nursing home, as Lenya observed, wanted John to fuck her, but when it comes to sex John has affairs of his own; I don't know what kind We left.

At a seedy roadside joint we ordered ourselves some roast beef; on the sly, Lenya and I each drank half a tumbler of brandy, bought at the liquor store next door. John turned it down. He took the wheel, and we started off to New York. The tipsy inmate of the Archipelago was expressing his opinions on something from the back seat, genially and loudly. I stared intently into the surrounding cars and said nothing…

Another time John took me to inspect an American submarine for some reason. God knows why I should want to see some fucking boat, but he invited me, came for me in the truck, and I couldn't refuse John. I went along.

The boat lay in a little enclosure. It was huge. Everything on it was real, except that two good-sized holes had been cut in the sheathing and staircases soldered into them for the tourists. We clambered around in the boat's compartments for a good hour, listening to explanations from an old submariner, a clever guide who called the little girls "missy" and patiently answered both their questions and the naval questions of my friend John.

"The hell he says they had good air here, fuck it, you better not try the air here. There's no rolling in a sub, you don't feel it, that's true. But the air is shit," was John's commentary on the old submariner's stories.

John was interested in everything. He peered below, where there were batteries for power, peered into the holes of the diesels, turned a wheel and closed the hatches on our whole group so that we wouldn't hear the noise from another tour group following behind us.

I didn't give a fucking shit about that boat. I looked politely, but I would have had more interest in going to see an autopsy room, where I had also been invited recently, to watch them dissect the dead. But the boat – fuck it. Well, at least I wasn't at home, thanks to John.

After the boat he took me someplace else, without saying where. This was his usual trick. Like him, I don't crack under pressure; I kept silent, didn't ask where I was being taken, merely watched the road, trying to guess. Aha, now it was clear – this was the Tolstoy Farm. He took a right at the farm. Weaving among secondhand cars, we drove up to a single-story barracks for two families. Walked in.

"This is Ed." He presented me to a guy with gray temples. "His name is John, like mine," John said, rudely pointing at the man.

"Yes, some people call me John," the man said gently, "and some Vanya."

The apartment was wretchedly small, the host's small daughter was asleep in the small neighboring bedroom, and I was horribly bored and even depressed, until she woke up and came in. You will shortly understand why.

John had brought a Magnetophon with him, a crude popular model with a tinny sound; he switched it on, some American girl sang. This Vanya – mentally I called him "Vanechka," sweet Vanya, because he was suffused with gentleness, both what he said and his whole figure, I definitely liked this fellow who worked at a plastics factory – this Vanya laughed at John's Magnetophon. John explained that he had bought the Magnetophon to practice his English. But they called the magnetophon a tape recorder, I forgot.

The girl on the tape sang words to the effect that what had been yesterday would never return and that this was terrible, and many other sad words besides. After the girl, John had recorded an old Russian man, a Kuzmich or Petrovich. "Whatever you want, Kuzmich. Talk or sing," said John on the tape recorder. John in the chair flinched. And when Kuzmich, getting the words wrong, started to sing the Russian folk song "When I Was a Coachman," I am sorry to say I got up and quietly went outdoors.

I had no fucking use for these tear-jerking Russian songs about loved ones found dead under the snow. They were too close to home. At that time even an English-Russian dictionary filled me with terror. The words "lover," "passionate," "intercourse," and others like them tormented me with the torments of hell. I writhed when I read them. Russian songs were all I needed.

I went outdoors; the trees were rustling, the grass showed green, night was falling, a Bulgarian youth from the family next door was sitting on the porch tapping his high heel on the threshold. I went over to the van in which we had arrived, leaned my forehead against its high yellow chassis, and quieted down. From the house I could hear the doleful song. Why all this? I thought. Was it really impossible to live our whole lives in love and happiness? Life' is so short, so small. What is she seeking, Elena, what force drives her forward or back? Why must I suffer terrible moments like these, and much worse? We could have spent our whole lives together – as adventurers, whores, prostitutes, but together. The last phrase is my favorite: sex is sex, fuck whom you wish, but why betray my heart?

This passed quickly. After all, by now it was the end of summer, not March or April. I didn't settle down into a wonderful mood, but when I went into the house the old man had finished singing "The Peddlers" and little Katenka had appeared, a small sleepy creature about two years old, or even a little younger. The Bulgarian father dressed the creature, and she began moving around among us, mostly in my vicinity, uttering sounds and smiling at me. I caught myself watching only Katenka; the conversation between John and sweet Vanya held no interest for me. They were saying something about the secondhand cars that stood along the road to the barracks. The cars were for sale, it seemed, and cheap. A white Pontiac cost only $260. At the price of the Pontiac I turned off, because I had made up my mind: I picked up this Katenka and set her on my lap.

Good Lord, what did I know about children, poor unhappy frightened creature that I was? Not a fucking thing. The little plant had to be entertained. On my head was an old straw hat of John's; I kept taking it off and putting it on, trying to summon up a smile on the baby's face. Although at her age the little girl was closer to nature, to leaves and grass, than to people, she understood me. She didn't cry, she didn't want to frighten me in any way, she put her little wee hand on my chest – my shirt was unbuttoned – and stroked me. Her hand was hot, and from it there spread into my body a sense of animal comfort such as I had not felt since I slept with my arms around Elena.

Suddenly it occurred to me that once upon a time I had greatly disliked children, and how happy I was now with this creature on my lap. She would grow up, she'd be beautiful – sweet Vanya wasn't bad; I hadn't seen his wife. God grant you happiness, little animal, I thought. But if He does, let it be for your whole life. God forbid you should know happiness and then live all the rest of your life in unhappiness. The most terrible torment.

The little wild animal sat on my lap, and fool that I was, I didn't know what to do with it. All I did was carefully support its little back and make funny faces at it. I was awkward. I have never had children. How strong I would be now if I had such a Katenka, I would have an incentive to live. I wouldn't send the child to school, the hell with your schools. I would dress her in wonderful clothes, the most expensive; I'd buy her a big wise dog…

Such were my futile dreams as I gazed on someone else's child. Why futile, you say? Of course they were futile. I could no longer have a child by the woman I loved; I would not have loved a child by an unloved woman. I did not need an unloved child.

I shouldn't hold her so long on my lap. They might notice, I wouldn't want that. To John I was unprincipled, desperate Ed, a pretty good helper, for whom he intended a future as manager of his business. He's that way, John is, he'll have everything. Not for nothing does he live like a Spartan: doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and perhaps doesn't sleep with women, considers them to be too ruinous a pastime for him at present. He'll have everything he wants, John will. Only not for long, because this whole era is coming to an end.

John made a tape of sweet Vanya singing a few excerpts from some Bulgarian songs and the famous "Moscow Nights." He sang them gently and touchingly. I let baby Katenka go, set her carefully on the floor, and thought with bitterness that I had no right to relax, I must keep a tight hold oh myself. If you don't, you die, and I had learned from a conversation among Roseanne's guests – they were discussing the book Life after Life – that suicide changes nothing, the suffering remains, a dead man experiences the same feelings as the living. I wouldn't want to plunge into eternity in the state I'm in now. They had convinced me. That meant I must overcome. Therefore I took leave of my host with exaggerated distinctness, then gave Katenka, who sat in her papa's arms, a light touch on the shoulder and said, "Good-bye, baby!" I jumped up to my seat, and we drove off in the darkness, from time to time conversing, from time to time falling silent. Traffic was heavy, it was Sunday, people were driving from vacation areas, and therefore it took us a while to get to Manhattan.

"Look at that car ahead of us," John said as we crawled along the George Washington Bridge. "It costs eighteen thousand. My vehicle is for making money, his is for wasting money. I bet the guy driving it's a cheat, he got rich off fraud and drugs. How are you worse than him? But here you sit in my van, and you've got nothing."

John said it viciously, and I thought that he was far from being as simple as he seemed. And not very contented. He worked like a horse and got tired, his face was lined. Maybe I was wrong about the barricades. Maybe, God willing, we'd be on the same side? Something resembling class hatred had glinted in his words.

"What's the name of that car?" I asked.

"Mercedes-Benz!" he replied. Staring at the car, he added, "Fuckin' shit!"