Natasha covered her face with her hands and then uncovered it and said I was empty and cynical and would never write anything interesting and would only repeat myself. She was angry and wanted to hurt me. I wasn't fucking her as much and was getting tired of her. I didn't object: probably I was empty and bad, and maybe I didn't have any future, either literary or human.
I went to the toilet. Its door was crudely fashioned from boards. Over the urinal somebody had written the words "Fuck you!" in bold letters. But a little below them somebody else's kind hand had written, "That's not nice." Exactly, it wasn't nice to write "Fuck you." When I came out, an affectionate ginger-haired dog was running around the bar.
My companion was already behaving a little better and started telling me very insistently that I should get myself roller skates and/or a car. There wasn't, she thought, enough speed in my life. While listening to her I drank another J & B, but I didn't get any drunker. But at least sitting with Natasha was better than drinking alone. After that we left, I first with my hands in my pockets, and she a little behind with her purse. For some reason I'd gotten interested in the purse phenomenon, and I thought to myself, a woman without a purse is always defenseless. That's why they all carry them. They have everything they need in them to make themselves up in the morning. Girls in jeans, however, have only their keys and a couple of dollars but no purse. As soon as they become women, the purse appears. Natasha has become a woman, since she's carrying a purse now.
She had become one, and with a vengeance. We went back to my place. Stanislaw was still there, I think, but I didn't want to see him, and so we went quietly up to my room and added to what we'd already had — we smoked a joint and had some more to drink. Then I think we flicked, although I don't remember. The next morning Natasha wasn't in bed with me. Well if she wasn't there, then she wasn't — she'd obviously left while I was still asleep. I shrugged and went into the bathroom to wash under the skylight. I opened the door, and…
The whole bathroom was spattered with blood. Lying on the floor were my knife and two pairs of manicure scissors covered with blood, and there was blood on some pieces of a razor blade that had come from who knows where. There was also blood on the floor and on the fluffy yellow rug and the tiled walls. My sandy-haired little girl, my little pianist, had obviously tried to kill herself or, more likely, had wanted to show me how serious our relationship was.
I sat down on the bathtub and thought. The little fool, I thought, why get mixed up with me, an angry thirty-six-year-old cynic? I certainly never had any desire to hurt her, but I live my life according to my own separate rules and, I think, separate from other people. I had told her at the start, "Watch out, Natasha, don't fall in love with me!"
"No, I'm the same way you are, Limonov; I've had a lot of men, as many as you like!" she had answered.
I called her at home and then at the school where she taught music. She was at school. I didn't get angry but only said, "Well, are you still alive?"
"Still alive," Natashka said self-consciously. "Forgive me, Limonov. I got so drunk last night and I shouldn't drink at all. I left a letter for you on the desk, but please don't read it, all right?"
Of course I read the letter; I am a writer. It was a long one; I think she spent the whole night writing it while I slept, bastard that I am.
Limonov [the letter began], since you usually don't pay any attention to what I say and don't let me speak and make bored expressions, here's a letter for you.
The fact that I made a pest of myself recently after drinking, saying you're not such and such and you don't do such and such, etc., whereas I'm "good," doesn't mean I'm in love or that I love you. No, it was because I was deeply offended by the way you treat me. And it isn't that I need you to love me or sleep with me. You don't really suit me as a lover at all — you're monotonous, unattentive, brutal, and ungrateful… I'd very much enjoy coming over to talk with you and then sleep in one of the children's rooms, which is where my place is with you! But no, one has to pay for your attention by making a certain part of one's body available. Even though your attention is in fact directed at yourself, and I'm a spectator, a silent participant, which is very valuable to me, especially now, when I happen to be surrounded by so many worthless men and women.
I admire you, Limonov, but no more than that — I'm not a girl who's in love with you. I believe and feel myself to be someone who has excellent talents, and I like very much what you write, and I know why. Despite my age, I understand a lot more in general and have more taste and sensitivity than most of the people around you. For me you're not just a talented writer — otherwise there wouldn't have been anything to attract me to your person; I could have read your books at home — but I repeat, you're an exceptionally talented person, infectious, lively, and stand out to advantage from the feeble, silly, dreary people your own age.
The time I've spent with you has always given me the maximum pleasure, unless you start sulking and get depressed. What I'm trying to say is that I love you, or not even that I love you, but that I'm terribly curious about you, although you're not a man to me, Limonov, oh no! My attitude toward you is enthusiastically rational, I would say, and the pleasure I've gotten from you is of a purely intellectual quality. And I don't consider myself undeserving of your attention. I deserve it a lot more than those idiots around you who don't even have the sense to understand or appreciate you. It's incomprehensible to me the way they permit themselves to carry on around Limonov. You think the fact that they're older requires them to understand, although my age says just the opposite, but there are exceptions to every rule.
I'm a big fan of yours, Limonov, and of your books, both present and future, and I'd be happy to be of use to you, only not in bed; I'm not up to it anymore, unfortunately. I don't even want to get into bed with you anymore. You are really insulting in bed — unsatisfied and with absolutely no reason to be. If you don't want a woman, then don't fuck. Who do you think you're doing a favor? I get the feeling in bed that you're using one woman to revenge yourself on the whole female race. What I'd really like is for your Elena to finally come back to you so you could "live happily ever after and die the same day," and then Limonov would stop taking revenge on women as a group, and wouldn't be in such a hurry to take personal revenge on as many as he could, and would be kinder and more attentive and would write different kinds of books.
Excuse me for my hysterics, they're just temporary, and don't think they're because of you, Limonov! It's just that I shouldn't drink at all, and it's happened to me before that after I've got drunk I have for no reason started cutting my legs and arms, not to commit suicide but to hurt myself.
You're far from being the main thing in my life, in fact. I have my own life as a musician. You say I'm not a woman; I'm glad to hear it, since that would only interfere with my creative life. Because the music I play and care about doesn't include the lower part of the body, the sexual equipment, but the head and some organ of feeling in the chest. And it's a great thing if you can keep your sexual characteristics from interfering with your music. That's the reason you don't like classical music, in fact — there isn't any place in it for your prick — and why you like rock 'n' roll, where there isn't room for anything but your prick. It would be good for you, in fact, not to fuck for about two years; then you'd learn to like music and something else useful. Wouldn't that be nice!
I like to fuck, I like it a lot, but it's not all the same to me who I do it with, Limonov. And in bed it's not enough for me to have "cruel," dry orgasms. I also need lots of things I don't get from you, tenderness, for example, and I also need to have a desire for a particular man, and I don't feel that kind of attraction for you — I don't desire you and I never have.
I feel insulted by you. You've never even once asked me about anything and you don't know anything about me. You haven't even once looked in my direction with interest. But you're so sure that at twenty-one I don't understand anything, don't know anything, and am just a weak little infatuated idiot. My answer is that you're a conceited fool. It's just a lot more pleasant for you to have a girl like that around so you can surround your self with a picture of complete incomprehension and women who aren't worthy of you. I know I'm an independent and strong person. I have enough problems of my own. I'm alone, and I don't ask anybody for help, and I make all my own decisions by myself and suffer all my misfortunes by myself, and so I make some mistakes and have my disappointments, but I can say that I do understand something about life. I am, you could say, a kind of hero for my age and sex. It doesn't bother me that you don't have time for that — I'm interested in you and I don't care whether you're interested in me. It's just that it's unpleasant for me to have to listen to such baseless garbage about myself. You've found a little idiot who's also young.
I'm a musician, Limonov, a mature, thinking musician, and it isn't my profession to be a woman. My life is not for men, and I don't exist for them. And you've never been just a man with sexual equipment for me either. This is all true, which I think would have been apparent to you if you had paid a little more attention to me instead of just classifying me as a "twenty-one-year-old girl with a big ass."
Natasha