I thought then that Richardson is Richardson and Dostoevsky is Dostoevsky, but out loud I merely said that a writer's possibilities are greater, since he deals with ideas, and since he does deal with ideas, he's a lot more powerful and even dangerous. But even my hint that a writer may be a villain couldn't dislodge Mr. Richardson from his firmly held conviction that the businessmen of the world constitute a special caste, a conviction that he well knew how to conceal behind demagogic assertions that everyone invests the same amount of labor in the world.

I remembered an idea of mine and decided to share it with Linda and Richardson. I was interested in what they would say. Linda sometimes listens to me. She pretty much regards me as a "crazy Russian," but sometimes I say intelligent things.

"Listen, comrade Americans!" (I always adopt a jocular tone whenever I want to speak to Linda about serious things.) "Listen," I said. "It seems to me that you, and please excuse the necessary generalization, always tend to take a mechanistic approach to the problems of life and mankind. That is, you approach man the same way you'd approach an automobile or a tractor. I'm not saying you don't admit the existence of the soul," I continued, laughing, "but you have the presumption to approach both the soul and its problems mechanistically. Even your methods of healing people, psychoanalysis, say, are at bottom predicated on repair, just like the repair of an automobile or a tractor…

"Even your drug revolution," I continued, "with all its so-called radicalism, with Timothy Leary and the other prophets of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and other garbage for the salvation of mankind, hasn't introduced anything essentially new. It's also a consequence of this mechanistic approach to man as a machine. You want to be happy? Swallow an LSD tablet or gobble up some mushroom spores, and you'll be instantly happy. And all mankind will be happy too. It's quick, of course…"

Here Mr. Richardson started protesting. I stopped him with my hand. "Sometimes it seems to me that you Americans — a generalization again; forgive me, but I can't help it — that you're much more steeped in primitive Marxism than the Russians are. The Russians are way behind you. You're always repeating the magic word economics. You explain everything in economic terms, and you persist in believing that every event in the world is attributable to economic causes. Both wars and revolutions — everything. I regard that as a naive point of view that's at least a century out of date. There's no question that bread is a motivation in the world, but it's not the only one, or even the main one. Overpopulated India has been starving for all the thousands of years of its history, and yet it's never had any revolutions to speak of. There's something higher than bread, namely human spiritual energy… Heroism…"

Suddenly realizing from Linda's and Richardson's faces that this new topic left them more indifferent than I had hoped, I leapt to another. "All right," I said, "forget heroism, and take the historical event that's closest to us, the Iranian revolution. How can you explain that in economic terms? The Shah improved the well-being of his country; there's no question about that. According to statistics, the population of Iran before the revolution enjoyed the highest standard of living in Iranian history. But the revolution still happened; it follows that it wasn't economics that caused the revolution, true? Perhaps it was something else then?"

Linda and Richardson started objecting… They agreed with me on some things, and not on others. It wasn't that we were divided into two camps — a Russian against the Americans, two Americans against a Russian. America and Americans had long since ceased to be foreign to me. I had been living in New York going on five years, and I didn't have much sense of myself as a Russian, though, yes, I did feel like a European sometimes.

As in all our other kitchen discussions, we didn't reach a common view. They suddenly got tired of "politics," and Mr. Richardson started praising my English. "I'll admit when you first came here to work, Edward, I got a headache every time I talked to you on the phone," he said, laughing. "Now you talk like anybody else. You still have an accent, of course, but it actually gives your English a certain interest. The girls obviously find it charming."

"Edward's biggest weakness is pronunciation," Linda said. "His vocabulary is extremely large — sometimes he even uses words I don't know very well — but he can't use his whole vocabulary because he doesn't know how to pronounce the words. Get yourself a grammar book, Edward, and learn the pronunciation rules," she concluded. "I've been telling you that for a year. If you like, I'll get one for you; I'm going to Barnes and Noble next week."

"Sure, get one for me," I happily agreed. "I'll pay you back immediately."

"If you don't, I'll deduct it from your salary," Linda laughed. "Edward once managed to get me in a snit with his pronunciation," she told Richardson. She laughed and continued. "You remember last summer when they broke into the house next door, of course, the one that belongs to Mrs. Five Hundred Million. The thieves came through the garden, cut out part of the door with a saw, and broke into the house and stole her paintings and other valuables. The special alarm system she had in every room didn't do any good; they just cut the wires."

Linda told her story and Mr. Richardson shook his head in horror. He and his family live in Massachusetts, and it scares him to hear about our New York crimes.

"So the day after the robbery," she continued, "Edward came upstairs to my office with a newspaper," and here Linda tried to reproduce my accent: "'Leesen, Leenda. Zat is zee edvartizingh in niuspepper… "

I yelled indignantly that that wasn't fair, that I'd never spoken with such a wooden accent, but Linda dismissed me with a wave and continued, though dropping the accent. "'Send $399 and in two weeks you'll get a new machine gun cheaper than any life insurance you can buy. Insure your lives with our machine gun, Americans! And the address," Linda concluded triumphantly, "was 'Kunoxville, Tennessee'!"

Mr. Richarson laughed long and sincerely. And after he stopped laughing, he repeated "Kunoxville, Tennessee!" and looked at me, smiling. I laughed too and looked at Linda; she loves to tell that story. I waited for the end, which contained my victory over Linda.

"I told him," Linda continued very seriously, "Edward! You don't say 'I kunow'; you say 'I know' with a silent 'k, so why do you pronounce it 'Kunoxville'? Memorize the rule, Edward; if there's a consonant after the 'k, the 'k' isn't pronounced in English. Or an even better rule is, if there's an 'n' after the 'k, the 'k' is always silent. Always. Don't forget it, Edward, it's 'Noxville.

"Do you know what he said to me?" Linda asked Richardson. This was the point of the whole story. Richardson didn't know. Of course not. "He said, 'Are you sure? What about those delicious little things made of dough? Knishes! "

Mr. Richardson howled with delight. "Knishes! Knishes!" he repeated, and Linda looked at him in triumph. "'Knish' isn't English, of course, but a word that's been taken from Yiddish," Linda said, "but it really is just about the only example where a 'k' standing before an 'n' is pronounced."

After he'd had a good laugh, Mr. Richardson asked me, "What did you want a machine gun from Kunoxville, Tennessee, for, Edward?"

"What for?" I said. "Before they broke into Mrs. Five Hundred Million's house, they robbed Mr. Carlson's house. They went through the garden the same way. And did you read in the papers about what happened in the Berkshires recently? An owner's twenty-year-old son and his housekeeper, a seventy-year-old woman, were killed by robbers. I want to live! I don't have the slightest desire to die for the sake of your step-brother's carpets and sterling. As you perfectly well know, our front door has only one lock. And your absent-minded brother leaves the doors open all night, both the front door and the door to the garden. Our alarm system has never worked, not even while Jenny was here. And the two watchmen who are supposed to guard our block sleep all night… I live alone in the house," I went on passionately, "and I'm scared!"