“It’s amazing you could be so practical.”

“But each time the door opened and the third person entered the room, the whole thing fell apart.”

This all sounded to me like a play. The door opens, and someone comes in. That’s enough to make a drama. You don’t need a story. Without anyone being unfaithful, or in love with two people, or breaking up: all it takes is the door opening and the entrance of a third person for the drama to begin. A violent argument ensues—its content doesn’t matter much. One of the three leaves. Nobody really cares what happens to the two who are left behind. Perhaps they’ll get a pineapple out of the refrigerator, cut it in slices which they’ll line up neatly on a plate, and eat them with a silver fork as they sit on the sofa watching television. Pineapple is Ananas in German, and I believe it’s also called that in Russian. A while ago I went to a vegetable shop run by a Russian who was talking excitedly with a customer. Ananas, Ananas. The anarchist’s Ananas, Anna Karenina’s Ananas. Only the pineapple was labeled ананас, in the Cyrillic alphabet. If I forced her to read it, she might get it wrong and pronounce it “ahahak.” When she sees something written in Russian, she never bothers to ask how the letters are pronounced. She has no interest in reading Russian in the first place.

The bourgeois couple eating pineapple in their living room no longer need an audience. And when the audience goes home, they’ll find the same sort of pineapple and the same kind of sofa waiting for them—so why pay for tickets to see their own everyday lives on the stage? Their gaze shifts from the couple left alone in their living room to the third person who has left the room. From here on in it’s not a play but a movie. The camera follows the man outside. He hurries down a dark street barely lit by street lamps to board the trolley car, which he rides for two stops before getting off and going into a bar, where he gulps a glass of clear liquid, noisily slaps some coins down on the counter, and goes back out again to pound on the door of an artist friend’s atelier; then, finding that his friend is out, he slips around to the back entrance to the theater, where there’s a guard who won’t let him in. There’s nothing for him to do but lie down on a park bench.

“We live in terrible times,” Mayakovsky murmurs. “This is no time to sit at home eating pineapple. You have to go out.”

As he speaks, Mayakovsky wraps his broad, gray muffler around and around his neck. I meant to laugh and tell him jokingly that if he kept wrapping that muffler around his neck it would look like he wanted to hang himself, but suddenly I lost my voice. A moment ago he’d been talking about lost love and pineapples, and now he was going on about “terrible times” and politics. Conversations about fruit always lead into political topics. In the socialist bloc of Europe, there wasn’t ever enough coffee or bananas. Pineapples must have been in short supply, too. So whether or not this pineapple shortage indicates a low standard of living is naturally something we need to discuss. Then there’s the inevitable emergence of a social class with easy access to hard-to-get products—we need to consider why this privileged class always stands out most strikingly in societies where shortages are the gravest problem.