At that time I was still going to Madame Margarita's to make piroshki and pelmeni, although less and less often. Unfortunately, die very good cook and gay man of letters Volodya and the enthusiast Madame Margarita turned out to be poor businessmen, or rather, not poor businessmen, but unable to devote all their time to piroshki and pelmeni. Volodya was writing a book about ballet and seeking and rejecting new lovers and in the evenings going either to gay baths or to the parties of the rich. Madame Margarita was busy with Lodyzhnikov's business… You need to be a harassed little person who knows that if he doesn't sell a certain number of piroshki and pelmeni each day, his family won't have anything to eat. Then the business will succeed. After shuffling through their papers, and counting and recounting, and adding, multiplying, and dividing, but mainly subtracting, they decided to quit.
But as so often happens, another way of making money suddenly appeared on the horizon, this time in the form of one of Madame Margarita's friends, the French woman Christine, who already owned one restaurant that gave her an appreciable income, and who had decided to open another on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Third Avenue with a Russian evening bar serving appetizers. Volodya, who had already squandered the advance on his ballet book, planned to go to work there as the head chef, taking me on as a cook, to which I agreed, although not without reservations, to be honest, but I still agreed, having decided at the same time to get off welfare. The fact is, I really wanted some sign of visible progress in my life, and I wanted it soon. What made up my mind was the fact that we would be expected to work evenings, from five until one in the morning, so I would have my days free and could still write. But the restaurant still wasn't open, and on my way to and from Jenny's, I would peer into its chalked-over windows at the workmen rushing urgently about.
On one of the last days of my pelmeni-making I got involved in spite of myself in a heated political argument with Madame Margarita and Volodya. I didn't really want to argue, but I lost my head. Somehow they egged me on imperceptibly, to the point where their placid philistinism irritated me so much that I jumped in. Basically our positions were these: Madame Margarita and Volodya believed that only Russia was shit, while the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, was beautiful. Whereas I said that the whole world was shit, the United States being no exception, and that our civilization deserved to be destroyed, since it had enslaved man and deprived him of himself, of his sense of freedom. "We, the whole world, have been living in Orwell's 1984 for a long time, only we don't realize it," I said.
Volodya smirked, which only made me madder.
"Thanks to the training and education the Soviet government gave you, and gave you for nothing, by the way," I said to Volodya, "you occupy a privileged position here. Just as you did there, in fact. You wrote and published books on ballet there, and you write and publish them here."
"And who stops you from publishing your books?" Volodya said maliciously. "Haven't found a publisher for your pornography yet?"
"No, I haven't," I said. "You know perfectly well how hard it is for me to find a publisher, and you know why… Maybe I'll never find one."
"Limonchik," said Madame Margarita with inimitable calmness, "what can you do; it was your bad luck to be born in the Soviet Union and come to America too late. All the places are taken now. If you had come here in the thirties, it would all have been different. Maybe your children will be happier. Certainly they'll be happier," she concluded sympathetically.
"Can you imagine that?" I answered. "What am I supposed to do now, lie down and die?"
Madame Margarita shrugged.
"Maybe I should wait for rebirth?" I asked sarcastically. "It's my 'bad luck. But I don't believe in rebirth. I know everything is happening now. There's nothing ahead but a dark pit. And there isn't anything in it. It's just a pit!" I was silent for a moment. "To nobly make piroshki, and haul somebody else's furniture and paint somebody else's walls, and live in the Diplomat, and drink and grow old and merely accept it," I continued, "while all around you is the odor of money, and expensive cars are speeding by, and morsels of young female flesh are displayed in the picture magazines. No thank you. I'm much too passionate and ambitious for that. I don't know how, but I'll be successful here. Me, and not my children, whom I don't intend to have anyway," I said angrily to Madame Margarita. "If I have to kill, then that's what I'll do!" I added in a facetiously calm voice.
"You're a typical Soviet, Limonchik," Madame Margarita said, "a typical Soviet…"
Madame Margarita is very smart, and in her youth was very, pretty; I've seen photographs. She had once been married to a wealthy businessman — had engaged, in short, in the usual business of females and sold her cunt for a profit. And not very long ago she had a millionaire among her lovers, a publisher. She still lives alone in a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue and doesn't have to go to work, having already earned everything with her cunt. Her only work now is going down to the bank, and whatever she does for Lodyzhnikov, or the pelmeni and piroshki, she does for her own pleasure and not for money. I'd make the same bargain with the world too. And of course it wasn't unpleasant for her cunt either. Pleasurable and practical.
I walked from Madame Margarita's up the broad expanse of Park Avenue, past the doormen in full dress uniform, and swore in two languages. "Limonchik, what can you do, it was your bad luck," I bleated, parodying the sympathetic voice of Madame Margarita. Ah, you whores, I thought. You're all members of the same gang — Gatsby and Efimenkov and Stella Makhmudova, and Volodya and Solzhenitsyn, and Madame Margarita and Lodyzhnikov and the poet Khomsky, and Rockefeller and Andy Warhol, and Norman Mailer and Jackie Onassis, and all the designers and hairdressers and blue bloods and party secretaries, whether they live in a country pompously calling itself the "leader of the free world" or in another that no less vulgarly pretends to have a monopoly on the "bright future of mankind." You all make up a cruel international mafia, a union of strength and capital with learning, art, and intellect. And the millions and billions of us simple people are required to submit to your cruel whims, to your games of the mind and imagination, to your caprices which cost us so much, since from time to time you push us into war. Fucking Big Brothers!
I reached the millionaire's house and complained about the Big Brothers to Jenny.
"Edward," she said, "don't pay any attention to the fucking politicians. They're the same everywhere, in all countries, and no doubt they'll push us all over the edge someday!" And then she started making soup, the most peaceful activity imaginable.
Life is an indistinct affair, utterly diffuse and formless, and it is only those principles that you yourself introduce (or that are introduced for you by others) that give life whatever order it has and a kind of purpose and coherence. Jenny was of course a very important stage in the process of "my struggle," as I envisioned it, the struggle of Edward Limonov against the world and everybody in it. Yes, that's the way I conceived it — as one against all, and it was a struggle in which I had no allies. I just recently happened to overhear my employer Gatsby shouting in his office during one of his regular fits of hysteria, "You're all against me! The whole world's against me!" I was astonished to find that he perceives the world exactly the same way I do.