We lay still and I surveyed the field of battle. Strewn on the floor and bed were singles and ten-dollar bills belonging to her, my glasses, and various other feminine junk that had tumbled out of her purse, which also lay nearby. We both burst out laughing. On tiptoes, trying not to make any noise, we took turns going to the cold bathroom at the other end of the loft, and then we undressed completely and lay down, and I grabbed her luxuriant hair and pulled her head onto my prick…

I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a sweet odor of decay in the room, as if outside they were doing something with corpses under the window. Looking out the window, I saw the backyard of a butcher shop…

I had become a full-fledged member of American society with surprising speed. The French restaurant opened at last, and I started working there with Volodya and Kirill, a young guy from Leningrad and one of the characters in my first novel. Kirill and I were no longer friends, however. As you know, I had completely left Russians behind and set off on my own path.

I had left, but they still came. The two intellectuals, while making dough or shaping kulebiaki, pelmeni, or pirogi, the delicacies that were the basis of our menu, chattered nonstop, reciting Russian poetry together or suddenly breaking into Les fleurs du mal in French. Both of them, you see, had received Old World classical educations. Both were terribly, shamelessly cultivated, and their fastidious intellectuality at once created a distance between them and the rest of the kitchen. Otherwise they wouldn't have avoided sharp conflicts with the populace, even though the main kitchen was upstairs and we worked in the basement where the bouillon was made and the dishes were done in a special wing, and where the only other person besides us was the restaurant butcher.

I had listened to Russian poetry every day in fabulous quantities for a dozen years without a break, and the pompousness, vulgarity, and artificiality of Russian verse made me sick, and I therefore obstructed them by swearing, banging pots together, or reciting my own recent verse out loud, poetry which was frequently unbearable to them. Our little skirmishes had a rather benign, even friendly character, however, and neither they nor I took offense. But what really irritated me was their casual and misplaced disdain for our fellow workers. Neither Kirill nor Volodya called them anything but "cattle." I've never considered myself a model of altruism, but to hear insulting Russian names spoken every day right to the faces of our completely unsuspecting co-workers was for some reason offensive to me. As a result, I started swearing at them in earnest.

Taking advantage once of a convenient moment, I swiped several gallon bottles of cheap wine and a couple of bottles of whiskey from the bartenders upstairs — theft or expropriation? Expropriation without a doubt, I told myself, and just like Robin Hood I shared my booty from time to time with the people, including the puffed-up intellectuals, who of course called me a thief but who refused the wine and the whiskey neither the first time nor the last. On one occasion I also treated a black guy named Victor from the upstairs kitchen, who had come down to us to make a meat filling with the huge meat grinder located in our territory, and I'll admit he looked like a hoodlum — a broken nose and a raspy voice. I poured him a half a glass of whiskey — I knew how to make friends — and we jabbered awhile about his Antilles islands, where he was born. After Victor was gone, Volodya and Kirill started protesting:

"Don't start bringing your black friends down here, Limonov," Volodya said. "We know how much you like them, you wrote about it in your book, but we haven't got any use for them."

"Yes, Limonov," added Kirill, getting so angry he even turned red, "go upstairs if you want to hang around with them. We have a nice quiet place here, and we don't want them coming down. We don't need a crowd of blacks around here. This isn't Harlem."

"You disgusting intellectuals!" I said to them. "It's my business, and I'll make friends with anybody I want. You squeamish pansies!"

"If you don't stop bringing him down here, we'll tell the manager that he's been hanging around and that you've been drinking," the intellectual informers said maliciously.

I got my way. Victor came to visit me frequently after that, calling me «brother» and laughing very loud, and we had a good time. The intellectuals grumbled and muttered but in the end got used to Victor and even found him to be witty in his own way. Later on I heard something completely unprecedented — Kirill bragging in my presence to one of his girlfriends that he had a black friend at the restaurant named Victor!

Not unfortunately, but not fortunately either, life in the restaurant basement didn't last very long. Despite our grand beginnings — several parties organized by the owner Christine for publicity purposes during which well-dressed young whores with young men of the Playboy type toured the kitchen, and my two countrymen turned red and tried to keep their dignity though dressed in cooks' uniforms, and I imagined myself knocking one of the long-legged, sweet-smelling cunts over onto the potato sacks — despite those beginnings, the restaurant was poorly patronized. Despite all the ads in the big New York newspapers and magazines and the enthusiastic reviews in the restaurant sections of the New Yorker and Cue arranged by Madame Margarita, the restaurant declined, Christine lost money, and every night the dining room was three-quarters empty and the handsome waiters were spending more time combing their hair and bickering in the cloakroom than they were waiting on customers. There were rumors that we would soon be closed.

It wasn't so much that I liked working, no, but that with Jenny's help I had started looking for an apartment. I wanted to become a normal person, a member of their society, and then we'd see, maybe fate would toss something my way. Maybe a publisher would buy the book, since my agent, Liza, had finally received from my translator, Bill, the first chapter in English to go with the other two he had already finished and was now setting down to work with enthusiasm — and now this obstacle in my path.

Fucking unsuccessful businessmen! I needed their two hundred and ten dollars a week; I needed it badly. Believe it or not as you wish, but it was on the very same cold November day that Jenny found me an apartment on First Avenue and Eighty-third Street that the Russian section of the restaurant was closed. "We can't have such a large menu. It just isn't paying its way, unfortunately," Christine told us. I put on my leather coat bought used some time ago in Italy, picked up my old umbrella, said goodbye to Victor from the Antilles, and left behind yet another basement in my life. I went to Jenny's, of course.

She told me to take the apartment.

"Edward, how long can you go on living at the Diplomat; that's a very depressing situation. You'll feel a lot better as soon as you get out of there. I'll help you," she said. "I've already spoken to Linda about it. We're very tired of the Chinese couple, you know, the Chus, who vacuum and wax the whole house once a week. They go around the house the whole day without saying anything, and you can't communicate with them," Jenny went on. "If you want, we'll can let them go, and you can do the cleaning instead. Even though she pays the Chinese thirty dollars a week, Linda is willing to pay you forty, and that will be exactly enough for your rent — one hundred and sixty dollars a month! Do you want it?"

I said, "I want it," thereby depriving a Chinese family of rice. The struggle for existence. Neither the first mean thing I've done, nor the last.

You'll say something about how a hundred and sixty was too little, right? The fact is that Jenny found me two little rooms in a three-room apartment, the third and largest room of which was occupied by Joe Adler, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish-American boy who was trying to live independently of his mother and become a painter; he even had a beard. The apartment actually cost three hundred and twenty dollars. And so we made our decision. "If it ever happens you can't make your rent, Edward, I'll always be able to help you out," Jenny assured me encouragingly.