I met her in Queens, one evening in May. We had much in common – my father was a Communist, her parents were Protestant farmers. To her parents she was an enfant terrible, and to mine I was likewise a prodigal son and enfant terrible.
She was a pupil of an acquaintance of mine; he gave Russian lessons and Carol was his pupil. Once he told me, "I have a new pupil, a leftist, she's in the Workers Party." I said, "Please be so kind as to introduce me." He and I are quite formal.
I had long wanted to meet people in the leftist parties. From my rough calculations of the future I understood that I could not get by without the leftists; sooner or later I would go over to them. I was not suited for this world. Where else could I go? Before meeting Carol I did have one experience – I went to the Free Space Center, in a dilapidated building on Lafayette Street, where a lecture on anarchism was supposed to take place. This must have been in March. Having seen an ad in the Village Voice, I went over there and walked up to the second floor – the whole place was hung with posters and flyers. Posters and flyers lay around in stacks, they were all different sizes, from handbills to newspapers.
In the room – whose decor recalled a revolutionary committee somewhere in the Russian provinces during the civil war, the same tin mugs, cigarette ashes, and dirt, scarred walls screaming with slogans – there were three people. Turning to them, I asked if this was where the lecture on anarchism would be, said I was Russian and would like to hear the lecture, I was interested. They replied yes, the lecture would take place in this room, and they asked something in their turn. When I didn't understand the question, the man who had asked it repeated it in Russian. He turned out to be a Russian, he had left Russia in the twenties, and it was he who had been advertised in the paper as the lecturer who was supposed to speak.
He soon began. Only one more person came. I was touched by the size and composition of the audience. Five people, two of them Russian. The action took place on Lafayette Street in New York. As is evident, Americans are not much interested in anarchism.
They were taping the lecture, my countryman was spewing words into a hand-held mike, but I walked around and studied the posters on the walls. I understood colloquial speech poorly then – for that matter, my English isn't brilliant even now – but I had, and still have, an enormous curiosity about life. This curiosity has pulled me all over Manhattan, on foot, down the terrible avenues C and D, anywhere at all, any hour of the day and night. And it has forced me to go to poetry readings, where I understood nothing but meticulously paid my contribution and listened to the unfamiliar words more attentively than anyone else. I remember one such reading at the Noho Gallery, where I sat on the floor with everyone else, and in their indifference they didn't so much as ask who I was. I drank wine, smiled, applauded, and was a full-fledged member of the audience. There was a nice little humpbacked poet at the gallery with whom I exchanged a few words. In general the composition of the group recalled a Moscow audience. Roughly the same types of people. Except that the New Yorkers were a little less pretentious.
I used to go both to musical and theatrical performances, make the rounds of all the SoHo galleries twice a week. I went to a theatrical performance in the Village by a certain Susanna Russell, during a terrible rainstorm; I was wet to the skin despite my umbrella, but I didn't care. I was in such a state that nothing could make me get sick; that was ruled out.
After every such contact with life I returned satisfied and stimulated. I was with life after all, I was not alone. I came to know New York, the life of New York, and the nuances of its life rather rapidly, much more rapidly than I learned English.
Oh yes – so I walked around in this little room and studied the posters. I left before the end of the lecture, collecting as many posters as I could in the corridor. Some of them lie in my hotel room to this day, and one, in support of gay rights, I hung on the door. It's still there, in color, with underlining under the words in the text that I didn't know. Now I know them.
Several pictures on the poster show happy homosexuals embracing; others, people with slogans demanding civil rights for gays. I too feel that they – I mean we – should be given full civil rights, and without any fucking delay. Only I don't think this will change anything in a state as depraved as America. Well, isolated advances maybe, but insincerity and hypocrisy will not permit, for example, putting an open pederast in any important position.
All right then – Carol. We had been meaning to get together for a long time, my friend was in no hurry and very cautious. His caution he had brought from the USSR. At long last, one evening in May, I walked into my friend's place and saw a little blonde. Thin; she had a cigarette of course, she smoked all the time. She would smoke only half of a cigarette, the remainder she stubbed in an ashtray, and these remainders of hers gave off a lot of smoke. She spoke tolerable Russian, stubbornly called her cigarettes papirosy (which really means a Russian-style filter tip), and after a few introductory sentences plunged me immediately into the question of the need for Russians to acknowledge Ukrainian independence. Oof! At that moment I was much more interested in another problem: I needed people, lots of contacts, connections, people and more people. I dreamed about relationships with people in my sleep, I was languishing without people, but I had not turned to the Russians because they had nothing to give me. I was spoiling to get into this world, but I knew the Russians in minute detail and was repelled by their inadequacy here. I was strong in my weakness, I did not want to submit to the unjust system of this world, any more than I had submitted to the unjust system of the Soviet world. But the Russians almost all submitted, they accepted this world order.
Face on, Carol was completely without flaws, even beautiful. But in profile there was something wrong with her face, some sort of mischance between her lips and nose. This is merely a cavil, after my beautiful wife. At the time, and that evening in particular, I was obsessed with Alexander's and my next article: we urgently needed it translated and no one wanted to do it because the few people capable of it, having done us the favor once and not having received any money for it, did not want to do it a second or third time.
Carol volunteered to translate it herself. This fact alone made me like her already. On the question of granting independence to the Ukraine, I supported her but expressed doubt as to the expediency of dividing up the bearskin before the bear was shot, especially right now, when the Soviet government was stronger than ever. I did not say that it was absurd. But that's what I thought. Besides, I added, right now the ties between the Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukraine were far stronger than they appeared to Ukrainian emigres; suffice it to say that there were nine million Russians living on Ukrainian territory…
Our host and his wife joined the conversation. Really a writer, not just a language tutor, our host was becoming day by day an ever greater admirer of Russia and patriot of his people, although he had been bursting to get out of Russia and had finally done it. This phenomenon is natural in a Russian. The writer felt that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were so closely related in both language and culture that there was no need to divide them artificially. Practically and realistically, independence might be necessary, for example, to the Baltic peoples – the Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, who had little in common with Russian language or Russian culture – but for the Ukrainians, White Russians, and Russians it was better and more natural to live together than to be split up and isolated.
I think the writer was nearer the truth than Carol, member of the Workers Party, daughter of Protestant farmers, for he was proceeding from the actual state of affairs, she from the party program and current opinion, according to which all peoples and ethnic groups – be they nothing at all, a man and a half – were deserving of independence and self-determination.
I didn't express my secret opinion that national groups should be not segregated but united, only not on the basis of a state in which a small group from a provincial ethnic intelligentsia would again make themselves into great rulers, propagating a new backwardness and barbarism in the world. No. All nationalities must be totally mixed, must renounce ethnic prejudices, "blood" and that sort of nonsense, in the name of world unity, even in the name of stopping nationalistic wars – even for that alone it would be worth being mixed. Mixed biologically, acknowledging the danger of ethnic groupings. Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks – enough of all that. It must stop, at long last.
Neither Carol nor the writer was ready for these ideas, I thought – too abrupt. I therefore held my peace and merely asked what would happen to me. My father was Ukrainian, my mother Russian, what was I supposed to do? Which state should I resettle in, Ukrainian or Russian? With whom should I sympathize, whose side should I be on? Besides, I knew both languages equally well, and had been raised on Russian culture.
They did not know what to say. "Independence is necessary!" said the confident Carol. Okay, let there be independence. But would it be any easier for a Ukrainian Limonov in a Ukrainian state? Here I had lived in the Russian state, a Russian writer, and what did I have to show? Not one published work in ten years. The real issue is not the attainment of independence for all nationalities, but something else – how to rebuild the foundations of human life so as to deliver the world at least from war, deliver it from inequality of property, deliver it from the universal killing of life by work, teach the world love, not anger and hatred, which are the inevitable result of national isolation.
I did not say all that. They would have thought I was crazy. What's this about "delivering the world from work"? Better to keep silent, or else first acquaintance would make this leftist young lady turn away, she would not want my company. And oh, how I needed company.
We ate fried eggs and cutlets, drank wine, and finished our vodka. The conversation moved on from Ukrainian self-determination to something Eddie-baby was fucking bored with, his article "Disillusionment." Eddie had written and published a shitload of articles in the sleazy emigre rag. But this was the one that got noticed, because here I wrote for the first time that the Western world had not justified the hopes placed in it by the Jews and non-Jews who had left Russia; in many ways it had turned out to be even worse than the Soviet world. After this wretched article little Eddie acquired a reputation as a KGB agent and leftist, but the article was what automatically enabled me, thank God, to break with the quagmire of the Russian emigration. Quickly and painlessly.
The Godfather of the Russian emigration, Moses Yakovlevich Borodatykh himself – editor and owner of the paper – had allowed the article to be printed. He acted rashly: the desire for a pointed article to stir up interest in the paper, the search for commercial advantage, his own business sense got Moses Yakovlevich into trouble. Later he kicked himself, but it was too late.
Things got especially awkward for the Godfather on February 29, when Nedelya, the Moscow Sunday supplement to Izvestia, the USSR's government newspaper, in an anniversary issue dedicated to the Twenty-fifth Party Congress, came out with a full-page article called "The Bitter Word 'Disillusionment'" – about my article, and about me in particular. There was even a montage by V.Metchenko, with skyscrapers in the background and against them the head of a young man in glasses, homologous with the head of Eddie Limonov.
They were using my article over there for their own purposes, naturally, but that's to be expected, they all use us for their own purposes. The only thing is, we the people do not use them, the government. God knows what we need them for, the governments, if they not only fail to serve the people but also go against the people.
We talked for a while about the ill-fated article. The writer was cautious and did not get involved in political issues; party comrade Carol agreed with me, of course, in my critical outlook on America and the whole Western world, but overestimated the dissident movement in the USSR, considering it far more powerful and numerous than it really was.
It was boring for me to explain Russia's misfortunes, I was sick to death of them, but I had to. I halfheartedly observed to Carol that dissidence was a phenomenon exclusively of the intelligentsia and had no ties with the people; the movement was very small – all the protests were signed by the same few, twenty to fifty people. "And by now," I said, "most of the movement's more distinguished members are abroad."
I went on to say that I considered the dissident movement very right-wing, and that if the single aim of their struggle was to replace the current leaders of the Soviet state with others, the Sakharovs and Solzhenitsyns, then they'd better not, for although the views of said persons were muddled and unrealistic, they had any amount of imagination and energy and would obviously pose a danger should they come to power. Their potential political and social experiments would be dangerous for the populace of the Soviet Union, and the more imagination and energy they had the more dangerous it would be. The USSR's current leaders, thank God, were too mediocre to conduct drastic experiments, but at the same time they had bureaucratic know-how in leadership, they were pretty good at their business; and that, at present, was far more necessary to Russia than all this unrealistic nonsense, these schemes for returning to the February Revolution or to capitalism.
That was roughly the scope of our conversation. Masha, the writer's wife, suggested we have some more vodka, tried to get us organized, but we were too carried away. We stayed until almost two, although the next morning Carol the revolutionary would have to go from Brooklyn to her office in Manhattan, where she worked as a secretary. We left together.
"This is the first time I've met a Russian with such leftist views," Carol said.
"I'm not alone, I have friends who share my views. Not many, but some. Besides, everyone who comes over from Russia moves to the left here, without fail, especially the young people," I said.
"If you're interested in the leftist movement," Carol said, "I can invite you when we have our Workers Party meetings."
"Unfortunately I have a lot of trouble with the language, Carol, I won't understand it all; but I'll be happy to come, I need this very much, my whole life is bound up with the Revolution."
Then we got on the subway and she told me about her party, trying to shout over the roar. After digging in two bulky tote bags filled with magazines, newspapers, reprints, copies, and other papers – the bags of a genuine agitator and propagandist – she pulled out a newspaper, their party paper, and their party magazine, and gave them to me. Both the paper and the magazine told about the struggles of the different ethnic and party groups, both here in America and all over the world – in South Africa and Latin America, the USSR and Asia. I rode as far as Grand Central and got off, after arranging for her to call me the next day and tell me how things were going with the translation of the article, which she would try to do at work if her boss wasn't there.
She had the translation done in a day. I met her at her office; she worked for some prominent lawyer, the office was on Fifth Avenue. Luxurious chairs upholstered in genuine leather betrayed the wealth of their owner. Carol sat in a little pen enclosed by a fence, as is customary, behind a desk with an IBM typewriter and a bank of telephones. She handed me the translation; I offered her money, which she refused. I thanked her.
"Do you want to go to a meeting in support of the rights of the Palestinian people?" Carol asked. "Admittedly, it's a very dangerous meeting. I don't even think many of our own comrades will come to it. It will be at Brooklyn College."
"Of course I want to," I said with genuine pleasure. A dangerous meeting was just what I needed. Admittedly, if she had said, Come tomorrow to such-and-such a place, you'll receive a submachine gun and cartridges, you'll participate in an action, an airplane hijacking, for example, I'd have been a lot happier. I mean it, only revolution would have fully suited my mood. But I could begin with a meeting.
"I'll bring a friend," I said, with Alexander in mind. "May I?"
"Yes, of course," Carol said. "If your friend's not afraid. They usually watch us, we're all on their books. You've probably read in the papers that our party is suing the FBI because they've eavesdropped on us for years, smashed the locks on party premises, monitored our papers, planted agents provocateurs -"
"Yes, I've read about it in the papers."
"You know, when I became a member of the Workers Party, the FBI sent my parents a letter – they live in Illinois, my parents – informing them that I had become a member of the Workers Party. They always play mean tricks like that to sow dissension in families. My parents are Protestants, they're plain people, they don't like blacks, they don't like outsiders, they're racists, my brother is a rightist, this was a terrible blow to them. We were out of touch for a long time," Carol said.
"Your FBI has the same methods as the KGB," I said. "That's how the KGB behaves in Russia."
"And you know, the FBI has a list of twenty-eight thousand names all over America. These people will be arrested immediately, in one day, if any danger arises for the regime. They're the ones who are deemed to be personally dangerous, oh, for example, they have influence, can lead people. One of the names near the top is Norman Mailer's," Carol went on. "Do you know him?"
"I read him in Russia," I said, "he's been translated."
Carol's remarks did not surprise me. Back in the Soviet Union I had met and maintained close relationships with Austrian leftists; I had had several such acquaintances, and I knew better than other Russians how things stood in the West. They had told me a lot. Walking with me at the Novodevichy Convent, I remember, Lisa Ouivari had said, "You should leave the USSR only if there is an immediate threat to your life." My Elena had always drawn me to the right, now Elena was gone. And by now I knew this world well, I had no illusions.
The Soviet Union was left behind, and its problems too; I would have to live here and die here. The question arose, How to live and how to die? As shit, subject to the laws of this world, or as a proud man insisting on his right to life?
I had no choice, I didn't even need to make a choice. For me, with my temperament, there was nothing to choose. I automatically found myself among the protesters and the dissatisfied, among the insurgents, partisans, rebels, the Reds and the gays, the Arabs and Communists, the blacks and the Puerto Ricans.
The next day we met – she, Alexander, and I – and went to Brooklyn. There was still time before the meeting so we stopped at Blimpie's for something to eat. When she was eating, taking a sandwich in her hands, I noticed that Carol's fingernails were rough and broken. One mutilated nail turned down, almost under the finger. But there was nothing unpleasant about her hands, they were the plain hands of a thin little blonde. It was like looking at the mutilated fingers of a carpenter, steadily and calmly, knowing that this is clean, dry, and good, it's from work, it's as it should be.
Near the building where the meeting was supposed to take place, we saw a multitude of police and cars; young people stood here and there in separate little groups, animatedly conversing and discussing something. I sniffed the air with satisfaction. It smelled of alarm. It smelled good.
"Our comrades have been warned that the Jewish Defense League wants to start a riot, they're going to try and break up the meeting," Carol said with a grin, glancing searchingly at Alexander and me. What did I care, I was a rolling stone, a Russian Ukrainian; I had both Ossetian and Tatar blood in me, all I sought was adventure. But Alexander was a Jew; for him to participate in a meeting in support of the Palestinian people was very likely to be considered unnatural. So it seemed to me until we went up to the hall. Among those sitting in the hall were many Jews. I ceased to worry about Alexander.
But before going through the solid wall of police and guards up to the hall, we waited awhile longer, until a young man brought us the leaflets that served as passes to the meeting.
"He's in our party youth organization," Carol said. "He's been helping us since he was sixteen, his father is a member of our party."
We went upstairs and found ourselves in a large room, where, after paying a contribution of a dollar, we took our seats on either side of Carol, so that she could help us if necessary – translate whatever was unclear in the orators' speeches. Since this was the first time I had been to such an event, I looked around curiously.
There were several Arab youths in the hall who were selling leftist literature. There was also a stand with literature. They carried Revolution and other leftist journals as well. There weren't many people.
The meeting gradually got under way. There were six people on the podium, including two blacks, representatives of black organizations. The first to speak was a Lebanese student who talked about the civil war in Lebanon. I remember one place in his speech where he said that the goal of his comrades in the Lebanese leftist groups was not the acquisition of power in Lebanon, not the struggle with Israel, but world revolution! I liked that, I applauded him heartily. In those days I was just finishing "The New York Daily Radio Broadcast," a work in which I described some events of the future world revolution. I took a personal attitude toward the revolution. I did not seek refuge in lofty words. I deduced my love for world revolution naturally from my own personal tragedy – a tragedy in which both countries were involved, both the USSR and America, and in which civilization was to blame. This civilization did not acknowledge me, it ignored my labor, it denied me my legitimate place in the sun, it had destroyed my love, it would have killed me too, but for some reason I stood my ground. And I live on, reeling and taking risks. My craving for revolution, being built on the personal, is far more powerful and natural than any artificial revolutionary principle.
The speaker after the Lebanese was a smallish man of indeterminate nationality. He might have been Mexican or Latin-American. This was a professional orator, his address was concise, polished, clever, and convincing.
"That's Peter, the leader of our regional organization," Carol whispered to me in Russian.
"He's a real pro, has a good rap," I said with envy, wondering when I would be able to speak like him. I very much wanted to get up and say, in the name of present-day Russians, that not all of us were shit for sale, not all of us would go to work for Radio Liberty and support their deceitful regime.
"What does 'rap' mean?" Carol asked.
"Talk," I said. I had forgotten that Carol couldn't know Russian slang.
Peter turned out to be not Latin-American but Jewish, a fact that he also made use of at the end of the meeting, in a very clever and deft reply to some questions from a lad in a yarmulke. The lad appeared to be a very good and honorable Jew, judging by how agitated and fidgety he was in speaking about the Palestinian question. Peter answered him patiently, and, at the end, inflicted the decisive blow lightly and abruptly, by saying suddenly that one should not confuse Zionism and Jews, and that he, Peter, was also a Jew, by the way. I appreciated the elegance of his speech, as did those present, who rewarded Peter with applause.
The speeches by the two blacks were simple, not so elegant and professional as Peter's but weighty and convincing. I liked the blacks very much. Militants. With lads like these I'd join in any venture.
All during the meeting there were suspicious characters hanging around outside the glass walls of the hall. The guards and police made their rounds every few minutes. A sort of whisper of alarm was audible in the air. At the door to the hall there was a constant small group of Jewish young people without identifying marks, of unknown political affiliation. But, finally, the meeting came to an end, apparently a happy one. People did not hurry to break up. A note of alarm echoed afresh in the words of a guard, who said we should use a certain exit because it was guarded by the police, they did not recommend that we use the other exits.
None of this mattered much to me, of course. I had my knife in my boot as usual, I felt like a fight. I had nothing against the members of the JDL, nationalists of all nations are alike. But I was closer to Alexander, and closer to Leib Davidovich Trotsky, than to doubtful nationalistic dogmas.
To my disappointment, however, nothing happened. Criminal Eddie got no chance. On the way back Carol introduced me to her comrades, among whom were several homely young Jewish women in rumpled slacks and an open-faced fellow in khaki work clothes. "He works at our press," Carol said. All of them, each in different degree, spoke Russian. The man was even a translator. Their press was putting out Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, in Russian. Subsequently, a month later, I was to receive this book and be the first Russian to read it. The first, not counting those who had read it in Trotsky's manuscript.
The book was to leave me with mixed emotions. Over certain pages, which described the great armed popular processions, I would sob, and whisper in my little room, "Can it be that I shall never have this!" I would weep in ecstasies of envy and hope over this thick, three-volume history, over our Russian Revolution. "Can it be that I shall never have this!"
Other pages stirred me to malice – especially those where Trotsky writes with indignation about how the Provisional Government, after the February Revolution, herded the workers back to work, demanded that they carry on as usual at the plants and factories. The workers were indignant: "We made the revolution, and they're herding us back to the factories!"
Trotsky the prostitute! I thought. What you forced the workers to do after your October Revolution was just the same: you demanded that the workers return to work. For you – the provincial journalists and half-educated students who, thanks to the revolution, rocketed to leadership in a huge state – the revolution really took place, but what about the workers? For the workers it didn't exist. In every regime the worker is forced to work. You had nothing else to offer them. The class that made the revolution made it not for itself but for you. To this day no one has offered anything else, no one knows how to abolish the very concept of work, make an attempt on the foundation. That will be the real revolution, when the concept of work – I mean work for money, for a living – disappears.
By a strange coincidence, party comrades were to bring me this book right in the middle of our demonstration against the New York Times. Several of them observed for quite a while, even helping us hand out leaflets.
After that meeting, Carol invited us to her place; she lives in Brooklyn, six or eight other members of her party live in the same building – it's like a party cell. We went by subway, then on foot. Alexander, suspicious Alexander, hooked on Freudianism, dropped behind the rest of the company and said to me in a whisper, "Listen, why are they all so flawed, don't you see it? Look at those girls – there's something wrong with them. Carol herself is normal, but even at that, she seems to me to have some sexual problem."
"Listen, Alya, what do you want?" I said. "Revolutionaries have always been like this, in my observation. You can find flaws in Lenin or anyone you please. Does that matter to you and me? What we need is a clique; you know you have to belong to some clique in this world. Who else accepts you, who's interested in you? But they accept you and me, they need us, they invited us. We have one way out: go to them. Aren't we flawed, you and I? You must agree we are, to some extent."
I was right. We seemed to have every reason to be drifting, not necessarily toward the Workers Party, but toward the dissatisfied of this world. The satisfied had no fucking need of us. Why we would not go to them, to the satisfied, was another question.
We arrived at Carol's roomy apartment, which she shared with a girl friend. Her roommate was asleep somewhere in back. We settled in the living room, Carol made some sandwiches, we drank the beer we had bought, and talked. Later the orator came, Peter. They asked us a lot of questions, we asked a lot of questions, the evening dragged on till after two in the morning. I had some sexual hopes for Carol, as for every person at that time. Despite her sex, I found her agreeable for some reason. Roughly speaking, I wanted to make love with her, but people kept coming and going, all the neighbors were at Carol's, and I couldn't even get a word with her – except that she sat on her heels by the couch where I had found room, and sometimes translated what I didn't understand, without letting me yield my place on the couch to her. That was as intimate as we got.
Finally everyone left. Alexander and I were the last to leave. Why the last? She would not let us go with everyone else. "Don't all leave at once," she said. In company, with other people, she was gay and evidently very witty, since people laughed at her words from time to time – unfortunately, I understood almost none of her jokes. She crawled around on the floor, there weren't many chairs, all the guests preferred to sit on the floor, Carol preferred it too.
She came put and saw us to the subway. Outdoors it proved to be very chilly, ft had suddenly turned much colder. We got to the subway entrance; she was about to take leave of us, but I said to her, "Carol, excuse me, I need a word with you in private.
"Excuse me," I said to Alexander, "one moment."
"No problem," Alexander said.
We walked away. I took her by the arms and said, "Do you want me to stay with you, Carol?"
She put her arms around me and said, "You're so nice, but perhaps your friend wants to talk with you?"
I didn't quite understand her, we stood in the cold, I was practically shaking with cold, we kissed and stood with our arms around each other. She was thin all over, nothing to her, and yet she had a daughter thirteen years old. The daughter lived with her parents in Illinois.
"You're very nice," Carol said softly. "Tomorrow, on Sunday, I'll be in Manhattan, I have to stop by the office. I forgot my new hat there, I bought it yesterday. I'm leaving for three days to see my parents in Illinois, and I wanted to show them my hat. I'll call you tomorrow and we'll get together."
I was very cold and tired, and I didn't insist. Perhaps I should have. But I was freezing. We hugged again and kissed, and she left. "Go along," I told her, "you'll freeze."
While Alexander and I rode the subway we had a lively discussion of our new party comrades. Alexander said it was all clear to him. I called on him to abstain from conclusions for the time being; it was too early to decide, on the basis of one meeting, how we should view them. We got off at Broadway. Its sidewalks and pavements, as usual in the cold, were belching clouds of steam. Alexander turned left toward his Forty-fifth Street, I went up and to the right. In the all-night eateries people sat and chewed.
She did not call the next day; I waited for her call till two. This upset me greatly, I was already thinking of her as my beloved; such is my nature. I had much more in common with her than with any of the rest. In addition to being a revolutionary she was also a journalist, and quite recently the Worker – the organ of the American Communist Party – had come down hard on her for her article on Leonid Plyushch, a Ukrainian dissident.
She did not call, but that morning and the night before, I had accustomed myself to the thought that she would be my beloved, I had even thought how I would dress her – and now this. I don't like it when things fall through. I was very upset and did not immediately regain my composure that day.
She turned up several days later. She apologized. She hadn't come in for the hat on Sunday; first thing in the morning, she had headed straight to the airport and flown to Illinois; she hadn't had time to come in for the hat, the flight was very early, and she hadn't wanted to wake me. "After all, you went to bed very late the night before," she said. We arranged to go to lunch together. We met.
We sat across from each other and talked about what we were doing. Alexander and I were plotting our demonstration at the time, and I told her about our plans. Suddenly she said, "You know, I want to tell you that I have a friend. I feel very awkward, I like you, you're nice, but I've had this friend now for several years. He's not a member of our party, but he's a leftist and works in a leftist publishing house."
My face showed nothing. I was already so used to blows of fate that this wasn't even a blow. Never mind, I'll survive, I thought, although it's no fun when your dreams crumble to dust. In my imagination we had been living together and working jointly for the party.
"Okay," I said simply. That was the end of my romance with her, but our political relationship continues to this day, although I am disillusioned with the Workers Party as an effective party.
After lunch that day we walked along Fifth Avenue, heading for Madison; she had to buy coffee for the office. Across from St. Patrick's I asked her, "What do you think, Carol, will there be revolution in America in our lifetime?"
"Definitely," Carol said without a moment's thought. "Otherwise why would I work for the party?"
"I want to do some shooting, Carol," I told her. And I meant it.
"You will, Edward," she said, grinning.
You're thinking we were two bloodthirsty villains who dreamed of seeing America and the whole world bleed. Nothing of the kind: I was the son of a Communist officer – my father had served his whole life in the ranks of the NKVD; that's right, the secret police – and she was the daughter of a puritan Protestant from Illinois.
I repeat – what had I seen of this life? Eternal semistarvation, vodka, abominable little rooms. Why does a man who sells vodka, who has a liquor store, gain the acceptance of society, real acceptance, while a man who writes poetry comes all the way around the world simply to gain nothing, find nothing? And what's more they take away the last thing he clings to – love. Eddie has fantastic strength, how else would I hold on, with my constitution, how else?
Carol told me a lot about America and its system. She told me about the Boston racial conflicts – her party newspaper was writing about them at the time – about how the newspapers conceal information when whites attack blacks, or, vice versa, inflate it if blacks attack whites. She told me that it was mainly Latin-Americans and blacks who had fought in Vietnam. And there was lots more she told me.
I went to many meetings of the Workers Party, and although their methods of struggle struck me, and still do, as undynamic – they were mainly busy "supporting" everybody, they supported the rights of the Crimean Tatars in the USSR, demanded political independence for Puerto Rico, supported Brazilian political prisoners and the right of the Ukrainians to be separated from Russia, et cetera – still, I learned a lot at their meetings. They were a party of the old type, of course, there was much in their structure that was dogmatic and obsolete. They called themselves the "Workers" Party, for example, although I don't think their membership included any workers at all. Peter himself, the regional leader, spoke of the workers as a reactionary force.
"You're an extremist," Carol said to me. "If I ever get to know any extremists, I'll introduce you. You're better suited to them."
The Workers Party took a very suspicious stance vis-a-vis Alexander and me. Alexander, a very suspicious man himself, said to me, "They think we're KGB agents. Some Russian dissident has planted this idea in them. Carol doesn't think so, of course, she has very high regard for you. But the leadership – those guys certainly do. If not, why didn't their press carry any report on our demonstration against the New York Times - why not? After all, they made a point of being there for two hours!"
Alexander was right in this instance, I think. They never reported that we existed, although they should have found us tempting material. In counterpoise to the usually very rightist Russians, suddenly here's a leftist cell, here's an "Open Letter to Sakharov," criticizing him for idealizing the West. Even the Times of London printed an account of the letter – the leftists proved more rightist, or more suspicious, than the official bourgeois newspaper.
I do not believe this party has any future. They are very isolated, they fear the streets, they fear the suburbs, in my view they have no common language with those whom they support and in whose name they speak.
A typical incident: I was accompanying Carol to the Port Authority after work; her daughter was supposed to be arriving. We walked along Fifth Avenue – at first she had wanted to go by bus or subway, but I foisted my pedestrian habit on her and we walked. It was still early, we sat awhile at the Public Library and then went over to Eighth Avenue, where the Port Authority is, via Forty-second Street. My girl-revolutionary was somewhat wary of Forty-second Street and huddled close to me in fright.
"Our comrades are afraid to walk here. There are lots of druggies and crazies here," Carol said warily.
I started to laugh. I wasn't afraid of Forty-second, I felt at home there any hour of the day or night. I didn't say so at the time, but it crossed my mind that her party was nothing but a petit-bourgeois study group. If I were making a revolution I would lean first of all on the people among whom we were walking, people like me – the classless, the criminal, and the vicious. I would locate my headquarters in the toughest neighborhood, associate only with the have-nots – that is what I was thinking.
Carol said, laughing, "This is ridiculous, to have someone from Moscow take me around New York and know the way much better than I do."
She had doubted that I would take her the right way. I did. Granted, I was afraid – I might encounter one of my boyfriends, Chris, for example, or other, lesser, acquaintances, but it turned out all right, thank God.
Carol is very sweet and very obliging, and very businesslike. In one way I am even content that we never became lovers. At least, I don't know what kind of problem she has, I don't believe she's altogether healthy. She can't be; but she doesn't need to be. In this world healthy people are needed for something else. The world hangs by the struggle between the healthy and the unhealthy. Fair Carol and I are in the same camp. If I wanted to, I could become a member of her party. But I'm sick of intellectual organizations, in my view the old parties are anemic. I am still seeking, I want something alive – not red tape, or money being collected in a little basket and the total announced, who gave more. I do not want to sit in meetings and then have people all scatter to their homes and calmly go to the office in the morning. I want people not to scatter. My interests lie somewhere in the sphere of semireligious Communist communes and sects, armed families and agricultural groups. As yet this is none too clear, the outlines are just beginning to take shape, but never mind, all in good time. What I want is to live with Chris and have Carol there too, and others as well, all together. And I want the free and equal people living with me to love me and caress me; I wouldn't be so terribly lonely, a lonely animal. If I don't perish somehow firsts – anything can happen in this world – I am determined to be happy.
The meetings with Carol are useful to me – I learn a lot about America from her and she learns a lot from me. We are friends, although, for example, she concealed the date of her trip to the USSR from me, apparently afraid that I really was a KGB agent. She told me only after she was back, when she gave me some Soviet chocolate and a twenty-kopeck coin as souvenirs. You fool! I thought. I could have given you addresses, and you'd have met people you can never meet, even if you go to the USSR a hundred times. But I'm not hurt.
Carol is an unfinished chapter, we constantly discover new ideas in common, she often waits for me near her office – fair, smiling, with or without her dark glasses, always burdened by party literature and two or three tote bags.
"Carol, all you need is a leather jacket and a red kerchief," I tease. "A real commissar."
The Workers Party, and in particular my friend Carol, organized a meeting in support of Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was in a Soviet prison camp. The meeting was very diverse. They had representatives of the Irish separatists there; they had the Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, a former political prisoner; they had Pyotr Livanov (God knows how he had decided on what for him was a very bold step, speaking at a meeting arranged by leftists – I think he and his friends have something to do with the fact that Alexander and I are considered KGB agents); they had Martin Sostre, a black who had spent eight years in an American prison for a political crime. I nearly howled with delight when Martin Sostre came right out and said, "I join, of course, in supporting Mustafa Dzhemilev, and in general I support the right of nations to self-determination, including of course the Crimean Tatars, but I protest the fact that when Sakharov sends an article to the New York Times, in which he writes about injustices and oppression, infringements of individual freedom in the USSR, the Times prints his article practically on the front page, whereas similar articles about injustices and infringements of human rights here in America the Times refuses to print."
That was what he said, Martin Sostre. A strong man. He didn't hurry, he spoke calmly, slowly, swaying slightly, and even I understood every last word he said.
I observed Livanov, he was all contorted with horror. He was in for it, poor guy, probably hadn't expected this. What would his hosts say to him, who had given him work, who had given him food and drink here, who had paid his "English teachers; what would the American rightists say, who had given and were still giving him money? If you survive a prison or a mental hospital over there, you get money here. But what would they say to Livanov, the American rightists, when they learned he had taken part in such a meeting?
Carol had expended enormous effort in persuading Livanov to come and speak. It had taken her a long time. Now, as chair of the meeting, my friend was full of herself, exuberantly announcing and introducing the speakers. She was satisfied.
Alexander and I were sitting in the second row. We were serene because we knew that at the crucial moment all these girls, old men and women, philosophizes and orators, Oriental poets, and playboys from Amnesty International would scatter in all directions, and people like Martin Sostre, Carol, and ourselves would remain. So we thought, and we were hardly mistaken.
Carol calls me often now.
"Hello, Edward," Carol says on the phone. "It's me – Carol."
"Hi, Carol! Glad to hear from you," I reply.
"We're having a meeting today," Carol says. "Do you want to come?"
"Of course, Carol," I reply. "You know how I'm interested in everything."
"Then let's meet at six o'clock by the subway at Lexington and Fifty-first Street," she says.
"Yes, Carol – six o'clock," I say.
We meet at six, we kiss, I take one bag from her, that's all she allows, and we go down into the subway.
Once in a while, at lunchtime, you may find us on Fifty-third Street between Madison Avenue and Fifth, sitting by the waterfall.