It's Me, Eddie

Sonya

I rarely get invited anywhere, but I so love company. Once I went to a party given by the only person who still receives me – Sashka Zhigulin, photographer and troublemaker. I've already mentioned him, a real horse's ass, little kid and visionary, all his dreams and the dreams of his friends are focused on getting rich without especially working. There may be more to him, but this characterization also applies.

He lives in a big, semidark studio on East Fifty-eighth Street and goes to great lengths to pay his $300 a month and hold on to it, because he can invite guests here and pose as a grown-up.

In keeping with my silly habit, a habit very odd in a Russian, I arrived precisely at eight. No other guests were there yet, of course, and I stood around foolishly in my lace shirt, white slacks, lilac velvet blazer, and splendid white vest, while Sashka's friends worked. They were moving furniture, opening jars and bottles, putting up posters, and I didn't want to do anything. From boredom and apathy, I left – went for cigarettes, observed the sky growing dark over the streets, inhaled the scent of green leaves; it was May, Central Park was nearby and it reeked of spring weather and excitement. I came back, and the helpers had left to change their clothes. The only ones there were Sashka, who shortly disappeared too, into the bathroom, and this girl, Cod knows what she was doing there, a short girl with bushy, typically Jewish hair and a strangely affected way of speaking, drawling out her sentences or, vice versa, saying them too rapidly, like a bad actress taking pains to enunciate her lines clearly. As it later turned out, she had indeed attended a theatrical group in her native Odessa and was considered very talented. I have always been attracted to malformed specimens. Thus did Sonya enter my life.

We spent the whole evening together. One by one, as they showed up, I introduced her to my friends and acquaintances. Among the latter were both Jean-Pierre – an artist who lives in SoHo, my wife's first lover – and Susanna, also her lover. The fleet-winged Elena herself, with a wave of her hat, had flown off to Milan. All three of us had seen her off. She was still in Milan, flashing her brilliant plumage and driving the Italians out of their minds, I suppose, men and women alike. It doesn't take much to drive poor simple working folk – businessmen or artists – out of their minds.

I was still in a state of confusion, and Sonya was the first woman, if such she can be called, the term is hardly correct in respect to her, as you will see – more exactly, she was the first individual of feminine gender with whom I wanted, God knows why, to become intimate. The first after Elena.

Before this there had been lunatic encounters in an alcoholic haze, incomprehensible evening gatherings, infrequent parties. Women from Australia and women from Italy would come looming up, swivel their faces, say something about kangaroos or contemporary art, step back, disappear, and finally melt into the background, from which they had stepped forward for an instant with a swish of their skirts only to slip back again deep into chaos. I was almost always drunk, openly hostile toward them, and at the same time overflirtatious, lest I appear to be a homosexual. Body and soul together – unanimous for this once, having been cruelly insulted by Elena – I rejected the women, pushed them away, and I invariably woke up alone. I doubt I could have fucked a woman then or had any intimate relationship with her at all. Did I want to? Or did I feel I "had to"? I don't know. Sonya did not scare me. She was afraid of everything herself.

This first evening, the young lady from Odessa (she's very shy about that, of course) is shocked by the thoroughly proper introductions with which she is honored. "This is Jean-Pierre, my wife's ex-lover." "This is Susanna, her lover." The drunken but sweet-smelling Susanna kisses me almost with family feeling. I am not past caring, but I pity Susanna and scorn Jean; that gives me the strength to relate to them calmly. And besides, I know how to play my hand, add fuel to the fire. Introducing my "family" to this little Jewish philistine, I know that essentially they differ very little from her. Nevertheless, I am inflicting a blow, I'm giving her a lesson in depravity, Moscow-style, and eccentricity, also big-city-style. I'm giving her a lesson in relationships among people of far more exalted rank than the relationships she has known up to now. "This is how perverted we were in our native Moscow, and still are, here in New York," I am saying.

Well, what of it. I am playing a primitive game, of course, but since she rather interests me, this provincial little Jewish girl, I utilize the second-rate resources of ordinary Moscow-style seduction.

Jean-Pierre and Susanna – I'm a depraved man, then, if I can be friends with them. Unobtrusively, as if by the way, I mention my publications, being translated in several countries around the world. I'm an important man, then. And third – I tell her about my liaisons with men. It's a shock, of course, a blow. But never mind, she will absorb it. I have yet to encounter the person who will give up what is interesting, even though it is "bad." Because so much has hit her tonight, Sonya leaves very early, at eleven o'clock (which will never happen with her again). She has to think; let her go and think. I see her to the bus, and I say that I like her very much, at the same time observing that her upper lip is very homely.

This evening I still have ahead of me a half-hearted attempt at intimacy – my first and last – with my "relative," Susanna. I make the attempt partly out of mischief and partly out of an awareness of a certain moral right to her. All evening, drunken Susanna is after blue-eyed Jannetta, who is also Russian. My chances are small, but I'll try. Miss Garcia cherishes a fondness for Russian girls. Garcia is as common a name as Ivanova is in Russia. And Susanna corresponds, in commonness, to Ludka. Ludka Ivanova.

Cherishes a fondness. She embraces Jannetta, gets a hand up under her skirt. Kirill and I – you remember, he's Jannetta's lover – clown around doing a homosexual dance, although neither of us has that kind of feeling for the other. I want to help Kirill and somehow dispel the awkwardness that has developed around the pair of "girls." Kirill is nothing but an overgrown kid. I see that he is distraught over Susanna's public attempts on his Jannetta and doesn't know what to do. He does not succeed in laughing it off. He may even cry. Jannetta is older than he; it seems to me she's experiencing pleasure at the touch of the drunken but adamant Miss Garcia – Ludka Ivanova.

Then comes a lapse of an hour, hour and a half. By now everyone is gone and I am in Susanna's apartment, sitting on the very bed where the photograph was taken: naked Susanna and Elena, lying in one another's arms making love, or just having finished. It was taken, I suspect, by the naked Jean. He and Susanna are forever slouching around with cameras. I sit on this bed, I wait, I think, and in the bathroom Miss Garcia pukes uncontrollably. Good Lord, what bad luck! Why did she get so stinking drunk! I had thought it would be symbolic to fuck Susanna on this ill-fated bed. Later she comes in, still pale and contorted with pain from the spasmodic heavings of her stomach. It is hard to look at her – aging face, make-up streaked and runny, lashes and eyelids all messed up. All is futility: the night is over, the fires have burned out, Jannetta has escaped her. I feel very sorry for her. I, at least, have art, the desire to make a monument of myself, but what does she have? Even if she is a lesbian, her brief summer of pleasure is passing by.

She points out to me a photograph – on the wall, framed under glass – of Elena, her lover. To her, Elena is a light in the window. Time and again she says lovingly that Elena's crazy, she's…

Had it not been for Elena's culture-shock, of course, had she not been so blind – she didn't know a fucking thing about the new life, about classes and groups of people – then Susanna, the honest working-girl who sins evenings and weekends, the exemplary good daughter who supports an old mother, would never have laid eyes on the rare little bird with the beautiful plumage… Elena.

But Susanna is convulsed with a fresh spasm of vomiting. I leave. What else can I do? But never again will she be my enemy. I recall with shame the March night when I tried to open the door of her building and set fire to it. "Den of filth!" I cursed. The door did not open. I broke the heel of my shoe that night. Henceforth Susanna will never be my enemy and will be of no interest.

Sonya… The second time we met was in accordance with a phone call. I had invited her to a birthday party for my friend Khachaturian – an artist and a modernist writer, a man with a formal mind, an inventor of procedures and techniques, who is now buried in uncontrollable formal research under the patronage and leadership of a wicked, sage little wife, who speaks English brilliantly and works at a company that makes scarves. We have come a long way together, they and I. They knew my previous wife, Anna, the one before Elena; they even spent their wedding night on the floor of Anna's and my apartment. We often fight, they understand me less and less, but that does not prevent us from preserving a semblance of friendship. We are friends.

In short, Sonya and I went. I took a bottle of champagne I had laid in ahead of time, a $10 Soviet champagne, the very bottle Mrs. Rogoff screamed about. There were about ten guests. There's no point in listing them all, though each of them figures in my life and is part of it to some extent. Sonya talked a lot of bullshit that night, provincial nonsense; I let it go by. I was in a good mood, nothing could spoil that sturdy, rugged good mood. I was pleased with myself, people were giving me compliments, there was lots to drink; company always brings me to life, I enjoy it. "I am a man of the town," as our Pushkin used to say. "Pushkin, Pushkin, the Pushkin who lived before me," as Alexander Vvedensky wrote – a modernist poet of the thirties, a brilliant person, like me a native of Kharkov; he was flung under the wheels of a train. So am I a man of the town.

Later, when the festivities were over and we left, I suggested – or she did, I no longer remember – but we decided to keep going and hit the bars. I had some money, and we set off. We drank vodka with a Pole in a bar on the East Side, she made an effort to talk to him in English. She needn't have bothered, you could tell by looking that he was an obvious type, an aging little man with no place to go; here he was, sitting in a bar at two in the morning. To provoke him I dropped some remark about Great Poland and Kiev. As expected, he got mad. It made me laugh. "Why do that to him?" Sonya asked. "I like to offend national sensibilities," I replied.

About three o'clock in the morning I effected a change of clothes. Back at my hotel I put on a white blazer instead of the lilac one, and we walked west to Eighth Avenue, which, thank God, I love and have studied thoroughly. I pointed out the prostitutes to her, and then I pulled her pants down, right on the street, and started masturbating her, shoving my finger into her cunt. She was wet and soft there, like all of them.

I convinced myself nothing had happened to them during these months. They still had their thing where it belonged, and if I shut my eyes it was just like Elena's to the touch – so I told myself, as I continued to run my finger over the genital lips of the young lady from Odessa. She arched foolishly and affectedly, and even when I penetrated her more deeply she was too frightened to come. How could she? She probably thought this was something unnatural. A Ukrainian woman in Kazakhstan killed her Latvian husband because in the second year of their marriage he finally forced her to take his cock in her mouth. She dropped him with an ax. And the artist Chicherin's wife, Marina, after many years of married life, simply would not let him fuck her from behind, on her knees. A woman who had read Teilhard de Chardin. The wife of an avant-garde Moscow artist.

I wanted very much for Sonya to come – in this ridiculous pose, with her slacks and underpants down around her ankles, a dark little clump of fuzz between her legs, her body contorted with inhibition and incomprehension – so I began to kiss her there. You know what she did? She managed to spoil it all – she began saying over and over in a rapid staccato whisper, "Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing?"

I can't stand it when people call me Edik. "What am I doing, nothing bad, I'm doing something good to you," I said, "doing something nice to you…"

She stood there dully, leaning back against the wall, with her slacks and underpants down as before. Suddenly angry, but hiding it, I pulled up her clothes and dragged her on.

By now it was getting light and I very much wanted to eat. But it was about four o'clock; all the places on Eighth Avenue had just closed. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, I knocked at a little corner restaurant and winked to a young black. Where I learned to wink like that I don't know, but the black opened the door immediately and let us in. I ordered us each a helping of meat and potatoes. For the two of us it came to about ten dollars…

"Do you have enough money, Edik?" Sonya asked.

"Plenty, plenty, but don't call me Edik. I don't like it."

I was slowly beginning to sober up – no, that's the wrong word, I hadn't been drunk all night. The fog around me had begun to lift, and I was seeing her – this homely little philistine with her face tired and old, if you like, at twenty-five – without the fog, which I had brought on myself. Eternal inhibition about sex, oh, there was a lot on that tired yellow morning face. It all began to irritate me. What the hell was I sitting here for? If I needed her as a woman, then why was I wasting time play-acting?

"Let's go to my place," I said.

"I can't," she said, "I love Andrey."

Andrey was one of the guys who had been helping Sashka. Maybe he was studying to be a bookkeeper. I don't remember. What do I care.

"What do I care who you love, Andrey or anybody else. I said I wouldn't infringe on your freedom – love Andrey, but let's go to my place now."

She said nothing and went on gobbling her meat and potatoes, although she had told me she wasn't hungry. Even here she lied and felt inhibited. This was getting disgusting.

The young black brought drinks. He was very attractive and he smiled at me – I obviously appealed to him, half drunk, with my black lace shirt and elegant white suit, vest, dark skin, high-heeled shoes. Their style. Marat Bagrov, the spiteful Jew, once said to me with characteristic familiarity, "Of course they relate to you, the blacks and coloreds. You're just like them. You dress the same and you're every bit as flighty."

The black put the glasses down and I slowly stroked his arm, glancing at silly uptight Sonya. He smiled and walked off. "Let's get out of here," she said. "Let's," I said, and we got up. She was afraid I'd go fuck him. Maybe there behind the counter, maybe in the kitchen, who knows. She was obviously afraid.

I gave the black his money and he saw me off with a knowing smile. And another.

We trudged along Eighth Avenue. They were already delivering newspapers. People with early jobs were walking to work, several coffee shops had opened, the prostitutes were no longer around. The night girls had gone to bed, and it was still too early for the day girls.

"Let's hurry," she said suddenly. "I have to go to the bathroom."

If you can help it, never see unloved women in moments like this. There is nothing more disgusting and pathetic, especially the inhibited, uptight ones. And all is flooded with pitiless morning light. It's like an execution scene, pursuit and murder on deserted streets. We could make a film like that, where a woman is running and she defecates as she runs, it streams out of her, we record with the movie camera the excrement falling from her body. Anguish and horror. Worse than murder.

We ran down Forty-second Street at a pretty good trot all the way from Eighth to Broadway. But then she tore along blundering into every doorway, her face distorted. There was suffering, too much to bear, written all over her short though well-proportioned figure. She can't do a fucking thing, even piss or shit, I thought spitefully. How would I know which she had to do? She wouldn't tell.

I could no longer guide or control her. She didn't want to squat in the dark empty subway corridor that I pushed her into, she became demoniacal, gnawed her lips, looked like a cornered animal, she all but turned and bit me.

Finally, and this was where my darling Elena had worked, her first American agency, 1457 Broadway – don't be surprised, do you think I could forget that address? Those addresses are etched in my mind – it was near there, two, maybe three doors away, that I spotted an open door. She struggled, but I went and dragged her in. It was a mess, they were making repairs.

"Go here," I said. "I'll stand and wait by the door." I went out.

Whew! Outside it seemed to be a fresh spring morning, the kind of morning when it's nice to think about the future, calculate your chances of success, you're young and healthy; or you look at your sleeping wife and children. There was a fountain nearby, the water was flowing. I wetted my hands, neck, and face…

I waited quite some time for her and still she didn't come. I began to think something had happened to her. I began to understand what sort of person she was, and it occurred to me that misfortunes always cling to people like her. By now I had made the march from the falling waters to this ill-fated door several times, but she hadn't shown herself. Lost in conjecture – a woman like that might do anything – I opened the door. She was standing on the stairs with her hands over her eyes. I walked over and said, though not spitefully, "Let's go. Why the hell are you standing here?"

"I'm ashamed!" she said, keeping her hands over her eyes.

"You fool, let's go," I said. "Hey, how can something natural be shameful? Only you didn't need to make a fuss, you could have gone in the subway."

She didn't move. I pulled her by the hand. She resisted. I began to swear. At this slight racket a man emerged from the depths of the repair equipment or from behind some door. An ordinary American man, perhaps fifty years old. In plaid pants, naturally.

"Do you know him?" he said to Sonya, in English, of course.

"Everything's okay," I told him. "Sorry."

I told her in Russian, "Don't raise a ruckus, you fool, half of Broadway will come running. Let's go to my place."

We left, thank God. We walked down the street and turned abruptly east, down Forty-second again. We could perfectly well have passed for a pimp and a Spanish prostitute who had had a little row and then made peace. We walked, and from time to time I hugged her around the waist and thought how unfortunate we all were in this world, how stupidly and disgustingly the world was arranged, how much excess there was in it. I thought that I ought not to get angry, it wasn't good, I ought to be kind to people, though I forgot all the time. You ought to pity them all, you ought to bring them your love, bring repose, and not think of Sonya as a homely Jewish woman playing at being a girl; there's no reason to scorn her… You disgusting squeamish aesthete! I cursed myself. To top it all off, I extravagantly called myself a horse's ass and a punk, then stopped Sonya and kissed her as tenderly as I could on the forehead – nonetheless noticing the wrinkles on it. Well, I can't help myself. Meanwhile, we had turned on Madison and were rapidly nearing the hotel.

Nothing special happened, except that I fucked her, of course. This was not my most gigantic sexual feat. An easy triumph over a person beneath me, nothing to be proud of. Besides, even considering my current aversion to women, I was still dissatisfied with myself, I didn't get a good hard-on with her. And I was dissatisfied with her in particular – nothing about her suited me.

It irritated me that she washed and did laundry for a long time in my shower – after all that, she evidently hadn't gotten her excrement to its destination because she laundered both her slacks and her pantyhose and her underpants.

Everything happening was kind of pathetic, which I can't stand. For the first time in my life I felt sorry for myself. She puttered in the bath, or rather the shower; I lay on my bed and felt irritated through my drowsiness. Fuck you, ordinary people! I thought. You do everything assbackwards. My Elena would have squatted easily and simply where she had to, she would have laughed till she dropped, and many's the time she would have aroused me by flashing her poopka and peepka, and maybe, out of mischief, I'd have amused myself by holding my hands under her stream. Next I recalled with pleasure how in springtime, when I was a kid, I used to exhibit my red member to my future wife Anna from the bushes in the cemetery, and how she would go off to one side and piss, and then we'd fuck on a warm gravestone, and the light would slowly fade in the sky.

Whereas this woman… But I recalled again that I must love, even Sonya, and forgive. I forgave her everything, even her fussing with her clothes, but when she came to bed I was even more disenchanted, more and more disenchanted. She had too much hair on her. It was appropriate on her head – beautiful Jewish hair. But it was the same in her armpits, and the same barbed wire on her pubis, and several coarse hairs had found their way to her very large breasts, to her nipples. That's nothing, I thought, as I tried to get myself and her warmed up. On top of everything else, Eddie-baby, you seem to be anti-Semitic.

I penetrated rather quickly, although it was not the moist and burning place I had expected. Not to the degree I wanted. When I rolled over and lay between her legs in the usual position, she promptly hoisted her legs up on me, which hindered me no matter how I moved. Moreover, she acted the way she thought a woman burning with passion was supposed to act – she tried to clasp me to her as tight as possible, which did not send me into raptures, because it kept me from making love. It was the first time I had come up against such a clumsy person…

"Sonya, open up, don't clench, I'll hit you!" I hissed at her.

She didn't smell of perfume or even soap. Her natural smell was not unpleasant, but I so love perfume, and her smell for some reason reminded me of the smell of Jewish rooms hung with rugs, in the summertime in Kharkov, rooms I had happened to visit. All that was lacking was the dusty ray of light and the crawling flies. Anyway, I somehow got her unclinched from me and began to fuck her more freely. But when my cock stood up properly erect, and I began to thrust my tool into her vigorously, she suddenly writhed in pain. I'm no bawdy Russian epic hero, no Luka Mudishchev, I worship love, but I also know a lot about love – she was not writhing from the size of my member, it's average. The little idiot had some sort of disease inside.

"You came! I forgot to tell you, I don't take anything. Everyone says that if you take those pills you can't have children," she whispered bleakly.

What made her think I had come? "If only I could come," I told her, "that would be happiness for me."

"So you didn't come!" she said, and began kissing me gratefully.

God! Again I noticed her upper lip. "Don't you dare scorn her!" someone said in my ear. "You ought to love everyone who's in trouble, everyone who's unhappy and has complexes, everyone…" But what could I do – I looked at her and saw a lip exactly like my neighbor Tolik's, a boy I used to go to school with. Poor kid, he was hunchbacked and stunted, his father was an alcoholic. "Quit it, you swine!" said the voice. "You should be ashamed – you're the filthy one, she's kind and good!"

She really was kind and good. Subsequently she often bought me wine and vodka, took me to the cinema and the theater; she would have given me all her money if I had asked her to, I think. That was fine, but she wasn't much good in bed.

I worked over her for a long time. Finally, by means of all kinds of manipulations I succeeded – having pulled out of her – in dirtying the hotel sheet with my semen. Squalid pleasure, I noted with ennui. She wanted desperately to sleep, but I wouldn't let her. I wanted to see how she would come. With a foolish grimace, obviously. By now it had turned into a sport. I worked over her until I asked venomously, "Sonya, tell me, have you ever come in your life?"

"Once," replied honest Sonya.

"I'm going to buy you an artificial member, and I'm going to fuck you with it until you fall off the bed, until you start to come over and over – until brute stimulation makes orgasm run into orgasm. I'll do it. And you have to understand that you need it. You need to fuck a lot. With any man, all men, not just me. Otherwise you'll never be a woman…"

I did not keep my promise, although I am confident that if I had, I would have made a person of her. I did not buy her an artificial member, I very quickly lost all interest in her. The reasons had to do with class, which may be surprising, but it's so. She proved to be an incorrigible plebeian, and that I could not forgive. What she liked to be in life was shit, dung. She had no illusions or hopes. She hated all the higher manifestations of man – hated the great men of history, hated history itself, hated with the hatred of an ant. Perhaps this was a self-defense against me, I could easily have crushed her, but why would I?

She fell asleep, but I slept barely half an hour. I wanted to fuck, even with her. Later on she did not arouse me at all. One time I wanted so much not to fuck her that I began complaining of a pain in my prick and said I thought I had some sort of venereal disease. This was a couple of days after the night I spent with Johnny, a black guy from Eighth Avenue – to this day I remember his round poopka and beautiful figure under the baggy clothing of a street bum, a habitue of dark alleys. There was a grain of truth in the ailing prick. I think Johnny had overdone it, sucking off my cock; he may have been a little too zealous with his teeth. More about Johnny elsewhere. I told Sonya that I could not take the responsibility of making love to her without going to a doctor first. She left, thank God, and I spent the evening masturbating dreamily on some flowery celestial theme.

Whenever I made love with her it was like the first time, I couldn't fuck her deep. She demanded – imagine, demanded – that I kiss her on the neck, it was supposed to stimulate her. I couldn't see that it did. The whole thing was really lousy – she was like an old log, she didn't get soft. "Be soft," I demanded. I finally had it, and once when I stayed the night with her at Alexander's I didn't listen to any of her claims of pain or anything else. I finger-fucked her rudely and grimly, spreading her cunt open to incredible size – I almost got my hand inside – and she came. And how!

Having started down this road, I might have made her into a convenient object, but as I say, her plebeianism killed me outright. I finished with her on her birthday. Toward the end she turned out to be pregnant by Andrey, she had fucked with him before me – poor guy. She was elated at being pregnant, even though she planned to have an abortion. "It means I can," she said proudly, "I can have a baby!" "Not after the abortion, you can't," I told her cynically.

All the same, on several occasions she did give me pleasure indirectly, in a purely human way. One occasion came at a time when I was worn out at last from my nocturnal rambles on the West Side. The day before I had smoked too much grass and had lain all day in the pond in Central Park, up to my waist in the water. The police came by several times to make sure I was alive. Seeing that I was, they walked on. It was only toward dark that I found the strength to get up and go to the hotel. So I was lying in my room the next morning like a prisoner, dreaming about eating, when she called up and invited me to her parents' place. She was living there at the time, and she went there every evening, and went back in the night from my place, all the way across town, even though she had to get up at seven o'clock. She was working at some company, I wasn't very interested which one. In the end she got mugged, a black guy snatched her purse. From that time on she had a bad attitude toward all blacks.

I remember once we were riding on a bus, a stretch of the route lay through Harlem. There were several fire hydrants open – water was pouring noisily over the sidewalks, happy half-naked children were jumping around.

"Just look what your precious blacks are doing," she said. "Savages! They don't give a damn that water purification costs a lot of money. They don't give a damn about anything. They just consume what whites have created, they don't want to work!"

"You're a racist," I said.

"But you're not, you're a leftist. I'd like to see what you'd say if you got mugged. My knee still hurts to this day -"

"But why did you hang on to the purse? You should have handed it over, that's all. Besides, he could have been white. So far as that goes, if fifty percent of all muggers really are black, then fifty-five percent of the mugged are also black. You know I hang out wherever I want to at night, Sonya, I don't carry a thing, not even a dollar, I go on foot so I don't even carry a subway token. But even if I did get mugged by blacks, I wouldn't start howling and projecting my hatred for a bunch of muggers onto the whole race. Idiocy!"

"That's all theory," she said furiously. "When they take away money that you've earned, you won't talk like that."

"When the preelection meeting of the Workers Party was over, I got on a bus with a group of comrades. The meeting was in Brooklyn, in a dark and remote district populated mainly by blacks. While we were boarding the bus, threats and curses rang out from the benches in the shadow of the trees, where the local hooligans were sitting, black hooligans. Then they started throwing bottles at us. I got on last. A bottle hit the bus right by my head. What would you have me do, Sonya? Bear within me hatred toward all blacks? Those guys sitting there on their benches don't know a fucking thing about the world. I've been in their shoes, I was a hooligan and a bandit myself – I know the psychology of these people. It's not their fault they're like that -"

"At work they get away with anything," she went on hotly. "Just try being late if you're white – once, twice, and you're out. But it doesn't affect a black, they're afraid to touch him, he can accuse them of racial discrimination. They make life impossible -"

"You were indignant at anti-Semitism in Russia, how can you say such revolting things?" I said. "And it's not just you, that's what's so terrible. But you know that America was built mainly by the hands of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. They have just as much right to everything here as the whites. It's only been the last fifteen years that they've gotten anything. Do you think they're happy here in their Harlem? Many of them would rather live on the East Side, but they don't have the money. Anyway, quit bitching – you don't know a fucking thing, you talk like a philistine. You should be ashamed…"

This was only one of our skirmishes, and one of the facets of her world view.

Oh yes, I meant to tell about the pleasure she gave me. I arrived very late, had trouble finding their out-of-the-way neighborhood, green and quiet. I was ushered into an apartment that did not even remotely resemble an American one. The door closed behind me and I found myself in Odessa. She served me fried chicken, cucumber and tomato salad, bouillon – a typical south Ukrainian dinner. We ate the same sort of thing in Kharkov, too.

Her mama was like Yura Komissarov's mama, or the mother of any of my provincial friends. Her pajama-clad father occasionally popped out into the corridor – he was installing a newly purchased air conditioner. Her father was like a provincial Jewish father, all my friends had fathers like him. It's a safe bet he wore his big underpants around the apartment; his wife and daughter made him put on pajamas because daughter had a guest coming. Maybe he was a bookkeeper like Andrey. Mama solicitously served fruit – pears one minute, watermelon the next. Courteously and respectably, I refused vodka and wine.

Later her parents left to visit a sick aunt in the hospital, and I went and lay down on the couch – if you're going to rest, then really rest. The provinces… You have to do that, tie on some weight, as they said in the Ukraine. You can show off a bit once without being quite in your element. Sonya played me a record of some Odessa comedians, pupils of the great Raykin; their names were not familiar to me, which genuinely amazed Sonya. "No," I said, "I don't know them, alas." The comedians were boring and were meant for people working in Soviet scientific research institutes. But I listened to them and did not get irritated. A day in Odessa. Never mind, we'll be patient. Only here in America did I see for myself the huge distance that separated Moscow from the Russian provinces.

"We might go for a walk in the park," she said. "There's a castle there. They brought it over from Europe by boat – took it apart brick by brick and reassembled it here."

"Let's go," I said. "Everything here was brought over from Europe."

We set off, and I felt quiet and calm. It was getting dark, for some reason we had to take an elevator up to the park. We took it. We walked along the deserted lanes, almost without speaking. I was grateful to her for being silent. Still in silence, we arrived at the castle and sat down on a bench.

The castle was not what mattered – it was far less interesting than, for example, Fra Diavolo's castle, which I had seen in Itri, in Italy. Nothing much, a boring American castle. I could not believe they had brought it over from Europe. Probably a fake.

But from every quarter came the smell of fresh forest and ocean; it was very nice. A quiet, spacious moment. Had I been even a tiny bit in love with her, I would have been completely happy. But even so, this was my first quiet evening mood. I had been running without looking, I'd been running, I was tired, I stopped, I reflected, and the world appeared soft, caressing, an all-forgiving, all-cleansing eternal world.

"Thank you, Sonya," I told her, softly and sincerely.

Then we rode into the city to my place. The wind was blowing through the bus, a little old black man who had had a drop too much changed a dollar for me, and Sonya didn't irritate me… I fucked her that night with gratitude, I even tried.

Another time she and I were hanging out in the Village – she fed me octopus on Sullivan Street. It was an Italian holiday, a bride and groom were riding to church, which gave me a little pang. I remembered my own wedding, the crowds of friends, and I hurried to get away from the church. Little Sonya was clicking away with her camera, taking pictures of me from all angles. I could very likely have made her a slave; all I had to do was hint that I hated slacks on women and loved dresses, and the next day she came in a new, specially bought dress. Very likely I could have made her a slave, but I myself was seeking slavery, slave-girls were not what I needed.

Once she took me to a cinema on Bleecker Street to see some new French films. I was wildly pleased with one of them, about a killer who is commissioned to murder an ex-model, but he falls in love with her even though he's a homosexual. Sonya kept sighing; it was apparently of no interest to her, but I took it hard. I was enthralled with the man, who trusted the woman at first, but the woman wanted to be uncommitted, alone. I saw in this film a similarity to my own fate: I too loved and wanted to be loved, I did not want to live alone, just for myself, and what did I get – life cast me aside, the woman did not want me.

After that film I changed my hairstyle – I have bangs covering my forehead now. But she was bored in the movie theater; I don't know what sort of film she would have enjoyed. Perhaps art in general roused her indignation? She was a philistine, only her sexual inadequacy distinguished her from a philistine.

I say "was," because after her birthday party in a little restaurant in the Village – which continued with a smaller group in Chinatown and ended on the subway with an argument and cursing on political and ethnic themes, including Che Guevara and the Jewish question – after that I did not encounter her again. Toward the end I couldn't even keep my promise to let her lie down awhile in my room at the Winslow after the abortion. Bastard, I was at Roseanne's that day.

Roseanne had just appeared in my life – the next stage, the first American woman I fucked. I did not encounter Sonya again. Oh yes, once, coming out of my ex-wife's – Elena had moved in with Zhigulin by then, and I was bringing her something she had asked for – I caught a glimpse of my little Yid; she must have been eavesdropping. She quickly slunk away. It didn't even occur to me to follow her, and I turned in the opposite direction.