From My Friend s Diary

From My Friend’s Diary
In the crotches of a New York block
there is no tenderness.
In the crotches of a New York block —
nothing but hard metal,
and I am tired of it.
Dear Dr. Rudolf von Hanstein, I would like to inform you that I received your letter of 12/3/2015. I would just like to note that my current address is:108-15 63 Rd, Forest Hills, New York 11375.
With best wishes, Marina Kuzhman
That was how I lived: somewhere between an official letter that had to be written politely and correctly, and a life in which there was no politeness left — and hardly any strength.
One Sunday, while I was selling things on the street, some American man came up to me and started saying nasty things about Hillary.I didn’t argue with him — I was busy talking to a costume designer. But if I’m honest, deep down I partly shared his indignation.
As he was leaving, he said:
“Poor Chelsea.”
Yes, poor Chelsea.I had read somewhere that a charitable foundation was paying her only $65,000 an hour.
That week I had eleven dollars set aside for food.And I thought: perhaps I should send one dollar to Chelsea after all.Let her make not just sixty-five thousand an hour, but sixty-five thousand and one more dollar.
And maybe there are many people like me.The whole world knows who she is. So let everyone send her a dollar.
And I had already spent twenty-three years in this blessed country —;without legal papers, without the right to work, without the right to a normal life.
No one knew me. And those who did know me wouldn’t send me even one dollar out of their weekly expenses.
It is a sad thing to realize.
And yet I was being persecuted —for what? For my views, my opinions, my doubts.
From late 1998 until 2005, they tormented me with the sounds of airplanes. That overused classical music of engines, pushing you toward panic attacks. A terrible pain in my chest, around the heart. You walk all day as if someone had stuck a knife into you.
Then other experiments began.
The Nazis were put on trial in Nuremberg for experiments on living people  those who cover up similar things today — or modestly pretend not to see them — receive applause and prizes.
Then, in 2015, I moved to Queens, and the airplanes started again.But by then I reacted less sharply.A person gets used to everything, apparently. Even to what one should never get used to.
And yet once, long ago, I thought it had been love and happiness.
It turns out happiness really does come from happen — from something that happens. As Pushkin wrote: “happiness is chance, a mighty instant.”
Only for me it had been real, while for him — as I was later told —
“It was not about P.M. It was an official matter.”
As one of our professors of historical materialism used to say:
“All men are the same — they just earn different salaries. And all women are the same — they just behave differently in bed.”
Judging by later remarks, I did remain in his memory.
As he later wrote:
“This was not separate from the election campaign.;It was the main event of the election campaign.”
What was it about me that drew so much attention?
At the time I hardly watched television. There was some old box in my studio, barely working, and I had no particular interest anyway. They spoke too fast; I didn’t understand everything. The only thing I really loved was advertising.
Not because I was crazy about products.I hardly bought myself anything. I didn’t enjoy dragging myself through stores. And I certainly didn’t have what one might call cash flow.
What I loved was listening to the music made by the man I loved.
He was a musician and worked in television advertising. Even if he hadn’t written that particular commercial, his influence — his soul — could be felt everywhere. Because he was a genius. Exceptionally gifted. That was what other musicians said about him.
Perhaps that was precisely why he never became a truly huge star.The greater the talent, the harder it is to fit in. As Lermontov wrote: the clever climbers rise to the top.
Yes, Stephen belonged — unofficially — to the American elite.
Robert Redford kept copying him. They even looked alike. But the original is always more powerful, more expressive. That is why an original painting costs far more than a copy.
And there was such an energy between us that it was impossible not to notice it.
And that gift — gift, present — was not clothes, not apartments, not papers.It was not a transaction: if you give me this, I’ll give you that.It was simply it.
And what a voice he had.
I used to call when I knew for certain he was away and not at home, just to listen to his answering-machine message a hundred times. There were no cell phones yet.
“Hi, this is Steve. I cannot take your call right now, but I’ll call you soon.”
I called a hundred times because I thought about him every minute, every second. I lived through him.
He recorded that message right after our meeting —at the very moment when, in my soul, I had already decided not to call him and not to seek him out again, because I understood that I had been overtaken by feelings I could not control, feelings I could not master.
I felt I was being drawn into some powerful current.That it might be stronger than my sense of responsibility.That I had a daughter in Russia whom I had not seen for more than two years.That I was planning to leave.That none of this was timely, appropriate, or according to plan.
And yet in that message I could hear all his impatience and fear —the fear that we might never see each other again.
I remember the force with which he pursued a second meeting.
And I understood that I could not part from him.
That only with him did I become whole. With him, I was.
That was when I understood that love is not a romance, not a relationship, not an event. It is when, standing next to another person, you suddenly exist for the first time.
I am — I am.
With him, I was present in this world.
Something undeniable had happened — something that changes everything, like birth or death.
Love does not merely enter your life.It rearranges it.Everything begins to move differently, as if you had suddenly landed on another planet and all your plans, obligations, and learned formulas no longer mattered.
I listened to his voice a hundred times because I thought about him every minute.Because sometimes a single voice can hold you in the world better than a passport, a job, or a place to live.
Without him, it felt as if I were constantly being erased.
But life does not ask what matters most to you.It simply places you where you will have to survive.
A poet I knew, Urin, once wrote:
“Love is not passion.”
Probably because he was a man.
Because for a woman, as Marina Tsvetaeva wrote:
“Love is always passion.”
And perhaps that is why  Piaf was possible.;That kind of passion, joined to simplicity, to something popular and almost religious in its intensity.;She enchanted people and ennobled them.
And then I looked at all of it and could not understand:;if they were all so fixated on me, why, when I asked for a green card, did I hear through intermediaries:
“A green card? You are a living legend.”
It is very convenient to be a living legend when you have no papers, no money, and no future.
And then they began destroying me in front of everyone. They turned it into a show. Especially on television. My virtual image was everywhere.
But no one came up to me and said:
“Do you need help?”
Perhaps most people thought: well, if you are having an affair with the chief gendarme of America, let him help you.
Logical.
I have always liked to excuse everyone.It makes life easier.
But life kept placing me exactly where I simply had to survive.
I sold things on the street. I cleaned apartments.I moved from room to room.I lived among other people’s children, other people’s smells, other people’s rules, other people’s exhaustion.
After 2006 I was so ill that only in the last few months did I begin to feel somewhat better. For the previous two years, it had been difficult even to speak.
I worked for religious Jewish families. There was very little conversation there.They had so many children that they themselves were living at the edge of their strength. They did not notice your condition — not because they were cruel, but because they simply had no time to notice. They were carrying such a burden themselves that they had no space left to think about the state of your soul or your body.
And then one day I found myself pulled toward Brighton Beach.
There I met Tatyana, and with her an artist from Rostov, who had also been living there without documents for fifteen years.Her friends had done well in Spain, and everyone dreamed of fleeing to Europe.
As one acquaintance of mine said — and she, by the way, had an American passport:
“I’d leave New York for the devil’s horns if I could.”
And what was there to say about people like us — without legal papers, stuck there for decades?
I wanted to leave too. But Vika kept me there.
On Sunday I saw another Tatyana — a model who had worked with the best designers in the world.She wanted to buy my apartment in St. Petersburg and leave with her child, for whom she had been fighting in court for a long time against a former lover.
Everyone, even the most outwardly successful, had their own abyss.
We drank well together, had something to eat,and then she stopped answering my calls.
But I didn’t call right away either.All that endless instability cools the warmth of friendship.
They sold us and betrayed us, then they jingled, then they started cooing,then they sighed —ah, what a Lee,we could never do that, we fell behind back there, and so far away too. That is why we never published, that is why we betrayed, that is why we sold. Don’t burden us —we are already in the mud.
The internet worked badly.The mouse wouldn’t cooperate. And already I wanted to move out of there, before I had even had time to get used to it.
It is hard for me to listen to music on the internet. I love live music.
Especially there, where every evening one could go hear the music of great composers performed by very talented musicians.
I do not want to speak badly of anyone, but all of it reminded me of fragments of a shattered mirror.
Sometimes the reflection was beautiful.But still it was somehow sad and awkward.
Twenty-three years there.
It was as if the whole world revolved around me. Many famous people knew me.
And yet without papers I had not seen my mother for more than twenty-three years.
Complete erasure.
On one side, I had apparently remained a living legend.;On the other, as a human being with ordinary human needs, I was of no use to anyone.
And even the fact that I had been mocked, harassed, pushed under that pressure —that too somehow remained off to the side.
As if it were nothing special. As if that were simply the norm of life.
And all those politicians,all those speeches about human rights, all those little musicians and little actors howling along with politicians —so often it all turned out not to be about a human being at all,but about the scenery built around one.
November 27.Sold things.Rain.Saturday.Tired. Woke up early.The mouse on the internet isn’t working.
I began rereading material about Zoshchenko.
Zoshchenko was convinced that the language which, according to Korney Chukovsky, was capable only of expressing confusion and spiritual deformity could in fact capture the full complexity of life, its most contradictory and varied manifestations.
Not only stupidity, pettiness, and cheating,;but also genuine tragedy, unusual intelligence, naive good nature… enthusiasm.
In the poor, helpless, awkward, semi-literate speech of his героя, Zoshchenko discovered a true gold mine of new artistic expressiveness.
Perhaps that is why I wrote all this down.