Free The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov Page B

campfire.
    “Will you work?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    “Branch cutter or truck driver?”
    “Yes. Let’s go.”
    “Walk ahead.”
    He walked and held the branches. Stepping in the swamp, not looking.
    Under a watchtower, near a felled tree, prisoners sat smoking. I said to the zek foreman, “An axe.”

    The foreman grinned.
    “An axe!” I shouted.
    The foreman handed Kuptsov an axe.
    “Will you go to Letyaga’s brigade?”
    “Yes.”
    He grasped the axe handle clumsily. The dark shaft, shiny from use, set off his elegant wrist.
    How I wanted him to raise his axe against me! I would have shielded myself from the blow. I would have shaken off twenty centuries of civilization. I would have remembered everything they ever taught me at Ropcha. I would have snatched the axe out of his hands without giving him a second to collect himself…
    “Well,” I commanded, standing two steps away. Feeling every blade of grass under my boots. “Well!” I said.
    Kuptsov stepped to the side. Then he slowly got down on his knees beside a tree stump, set his left hand on the rough, gleaming yellow cut wood, then raised the axe and let it fall in one swift blow.
    “At last,” he said, the blood pouring profusely. “There now – good.”
    “What are you standing there for, you dickwad?” the foreman, who had run over, shouted at me. “You win – call the medic!”

April 4, 1982. Minneapolis
    Dear I.M.,
    I’ll make this short, since I’ll see you in three days.
    Minneapolis is an enormous, quiet city. There are almost no people to be seen. Few cars too.
    The most interesting thing here is the Mississippi River, the very one. Its breadth in these parts is about two hundred metres. In short, in full view of a crowd of American Slavists, I swam across this river.
    I swam across the Mississippi. And that’s just what I’ll write to Leningrad. In my opinion, it was worth leaving for this alone.
    Did you know that in March I was interviewed by Roy Stillman, and that he asked me, “What did you find most striking about America?” I answered, “The fact that it exists. That it is a reality.”
    For us, America was like Carthage or Troy. And suddenly it turned out that Broadway is a reality, Tiffany’s is a reality, the Flatiron Building is a reality, and the Mississippi is a reality.
    Once I was walking in lower Manhattan. I stopped by a bar called Johnny’s. I went inside, ordered an Irish coffee, and found a seat by the window.
    I sensed that there was someone under the table. I bent down – it was a bum, drunk. A black guy, completely drunk, wearing a red shirt. (Incidentally, I saw exactly the same shirt once on Yevtushenko.*)
    And suddenly I nearly cried with happiness. Could this really be me, drinking Irish coffee in a bar called Johnny’s, with a black bum under the table?
    Of course, there is no such thing as happiness, as Pushkin says. But there is also no peace, and beyond that, I’m weak of will, so I have to differ with him.
    And of course, all this is tinsel, paper streamers – the bar, the drunk black guy, the Irish coffee. But it means that, in the end, there is something to paper streamers. How many times in
the last decades have fashions in women’s hats changed? And paper streamers remain paper streamers for a thousand years.
    Let’s assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kinds of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?
    I’m staying in the Curtis Hotel, with a multitude of various amusements. There’s a bar. There’s a swimming pool. There’s a suspicious-looking Havana Room. There’s a souvenir shop, where I acquired swimming trunks for the Mississippi. (On the front, a design of a sausage and two hard-boiled eggs.)
    There are clean sheets, hot water, a television set, writing paper. There is a terrific neighbour, Ernst Neizvestny. (He just convincingly demonstrated to Harrison Salisbury:* “The