But right now there is no such solace. And both my father and I know that the fun we just had running among the spruces beneath the Lenin in Moscow Square will exact a price. Tonight I will be sick. In fact, I know even as we walk past the pharmacy with its bold, ugly APTEKA sign, I am already instructing my lungs to shut down. Another thing we do not realize in 1979: Asthma is, at least in part, what they call an “emotional disease,” triggered by stress and fear.
But fear of what?
Sweaty me is carried into the warm, cabbagy apartment and my mother is screaming at my father: “How could you stay out so late? How could you let him run in the cold? He’s overheated! Now he will be sick!”
And he starts screaming back at her, “Oy, yoi, yoi! She knows everything! A fucking doctor she is!”
“Don’t swear”—Ne rugaisya matom—“the child is here.”
To me: “Igor, ne povtoryai.” Don’t repeat our cursing.
“You’re the one who swears.”
“Me? You know what? Go to the dick!” Poshol na khui.
“Fuck your mother!” Yobtiki mat’. I record and mispronounce the bad words inside myself.
My mother loses her Russianness and retreats into the primordial Yiddish of her late grandmother from the Belorussian shtetl of Dubrovno: “Gurnisht! Abiter tsoris!” You’re a nothing! A bitter misfortune!
My breathing grows shallow. What language will they sink to next? Aramaic? I take off my pajamas and dutifully lie down on my stomach. My parents, still screaming at each other in two languages, prepare the cupping kit, getting the rubbing alcohol ready to feed the flames. A mere decade later I will find a new space to fill with alcohol.
And so I am cupped.
After cupping I cannot sleep. My back is covered in circular welts, and the asthma has only been exacerbated. I am on the living room couch that serves as my bed, wheezing. I pick up an illustrated children’s book about a young boy and girl who are (for reasons that now escape me) shrunk down to miniature size and then attacked by a swarm of gigantic mosquitoes. On one of the pages of the book, a spot of jam has coagulated to form what looks like the crushed remains of a particularly vile insect (in swampy Leningrad, the mosquitoes are the size of Lenins). A sleepless, suffering child exists in a kind of fourth dimension, where language runs unbidden through the tiny but growing mind and the external senses are primed to receive a flood of information. Hence: fictional mosquito, coagulated jam, vile insect, the heavy embrace of the sagging couch, patterns of the wall rug hanging above it forming real Arabic numbers and unreal Tibetan words (I have recently visited the Museum of Ethnography), Mama and Papa in the next room, sleeping after their latest fight, oblivious to all the action inside my head.
The northern sun clambers atop its perch with what can only be described as resignation, radiating pink across the tops of birches and the heavy architecture. A pink that, to the sleepless young eye, is filled with ribbons of life, amoeba shapes that float and twirl across the landscape and beyond it, a fifth dimension to the already busy fourth one I have described above. And to my old man’s wheezing is added amazement. I have been cupped, true, but I have lived through another night. The sagging couch, which I have long ago rechristened the Imperial Snotty, an eighteenth-century Russian frigate just like the one that lives in the nearby Museum of the Battle of Chesme, formerly the Chesme Church, where Papa and I like to launch our toy helicopters among the church spires, has made its way through the foggy night. The pressure of falling asleep has lifted, there is nothing to fear and nothing worth struggling for, and with that easing of expectations comes the unexpected. I fall asleep in the morning, the city bright and alive around me, Lenin with his outstretched hand greeting the schoolchildren in their uniforms, the workers and soldiers and sailors in theirs. Outside the window, two neon signs gently flicker on as I rumble into sleep. MEAT, one of them says. And then: PRODUCE.
Words. I hunger for them even more than the MEAT and PRODUCE they claim to advertise. The next day, if I am well, we will walk past my Lenin to the Moscow Square metro station, and there will be more words for me to eat.
Velikii moguchii russkii yazik. The Great and Mighty Russian Tongue is how my first language bills itself. Throughout its seventy-year tenure, bureaucratic Sovietspeak had inadvertently stripped the language of Pushkin of much of its greatness and might. (Try casually saying the acronym OSOAVIAKhIM, which denotes the Association for Assistance of Defense, Aircraft, and Chemical Development.) But in the late 1970s the beleaguered Russian tongue can still put on quite a show for a five-year-old boy in a Leningrad metro station. The trick is to use giant copper block letters nailed to a granite wall, signifying both pomp and posterity, an uppercase paean to an increasingly lowercase Soviet state. The words, gracing the walls of the Technological Institute station, read as follows:
1959—SOVIET SPACE ROCKET REACHES THE SURFACE OF THE MOON
Take that, Neil Armstrong.
1934—SOVIET SCIENTISTS CREATE THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION THEORY
So that’s where it all began.
1974—THE BUILDING OF THE BAIKAL-AMUR MAIN RAILROAD TRUNK HAS BEEN INITIATED
Now, what the hell does that mean? Ah, but Baikal-Amur sounds so beautiful—Baikal, the famous (and now famously polluted) Siberian lake, a centerpiece of Russian myth; Amur (amour?) could almost be another word Russian has gleefully appropriated from the French. (It is, in fact, the name of a region in the Russian Far East.)
I’m five years old, felt boots tight around my feet and ankles, what might be half of a bear or several Soviet beavers draped around my shoulders, my mouth open so wide that, as my father keeps warning me, “a crow will fly in there.” I am in awe. The metro, with its wall-length murals of the broad-chested revolutionary working class that never was, with its hectares of marble vestibules, is a mouth opener to be sure. And the words! Those words whose power seems not only persuasive but, to a kid about to become obsessed with science fiction, they are indeed extraterrestrial. The wise aliens have landed and WE ARE THEM. And this is the language we use. The great and mighty Russian tongue.
Meanwhile, a metro train full of sweaty comrades pulls into the station, ready to take us north to the Hermitage or the Dostoyevsky Museum. But what use is there for the glum truth of Rembrandt’s returning Prodigal Son or a display of the great novelist’s piss pots, when the future of the human race, denuded of its mystery, is right here for all to see. SOVIET SCIENTISTS CREATE THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION THEORY. Forget the shabby polyester-clad human element around you, the unique Soviet metro smell of a million barely washed proletarians being sucked through an enormous marble tube. There it is, kid, in copper capital letters. What more do you want?
I decide to become a writer. Who wouldn’t, under the circumstances?
My living and sleeping space in the living room is divided into three broad categories. One part is the Technological Chest of Drawers, upon which rests a fancy new rotary phone that I am learning to pick up with great skill (“Mama, telefon!”) and a potbellied Signal television set. The television set is an object of great consternation among Soviet citizens because it regularly explodes. At one point, 60 percent of the house fires in Moscow are said to be caused by poorly assembled exploding television sets. As an infant I had already become aware of the perfidy of Uncle Electric Current and am now learning about the dangers of Cousin Television Set.
In an opposite part of the room is the Athletic Corner. Here my father has built me a simple wooden ladder that reaches to the ceiling and is designed both to give the housebound patient some exercise and to cure one of my greatest fears, the fear of heights. He has begged the workmen at his factory to carve out every sleek wooden bar, and the resulting ladder is possibly the most gorgeous thing in our apartment. It is also one of the scariest. Every month I try to scale one more of the dozen bars until, dizzy and dry mouthed, I am flying as high as four feet off the ground! Just a little more effort, just a little less asthma, and I will be what every Soviet boy ag
ed three to twenty-seven wants to become: a cosmonaut.
But I have other plans. The third part of the living room is the Culture Couch. This is where Culture happens and also where I sleep. (To this day, I work in bed, three pillows under my back, and have no use for desks, lecterns, and other distractions.) Culture is very important. My father dreamed of becoming an opera singer. Could one of my earliest memories involve him bellowing at me from The Queen of Spades, my head turned quizzically to the side, my mouth opened asthmatically, a smile growing on my lips? My mother plays the piano. Aunt Tanya, her sister, is a violinist. My beautiful cousin Victoria, daughter of my mother’s older sister, Lyusya, only five years older than me but already fully in control of her lithe and elegant body, can hop atop the Culture Couch and pirouette like the ballerina she is training to become. If I am to have anything to do with this family, I must become a kulturnyi chelovek, a cultured person.
And so I put on my little sailor’s outfit, knot the collar in the front, and pick up a child’s violin. Aunt Tanya teaches me how to strike the stringy thing, the what-do-you-call-it, against the body of the instrument. The pad against my cheek feels velvety and nice, and the sailor’s outfit, with its white tights and little shorts, is equally pleasant, but honestly I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. The violin will give way to a less-esteemed instrument, the three-stringed Russian balalaika, which will eventually find its way into a dusty corner. In America, an elderly Russian gentlewoman, living next door to my grandmother, will try to inflict the piano upon me for five American dollars a lesson. None of it will leave an impression.
No, what I want to do is quite different. The violin’s dulcet wheezing is not for me (I have my own violin inside me, thank you), I cannot move my body like Cousin Victoria or holler from The Queen of Spades like my father: “Whaaaat is our life? A gaaaame!” If anything, I am more likely to explode like our Signal television set. I’m becoming a pathological reader. The first book, as I’ve mentioned above, concerns two children, a boy and a girl, who are shrunken down to the size of a kopeck and have to fend for themselves against giant mosquitoes and the like. The second book, the one responsible for everything else that has ever happened to me, is called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese. In the book, Nils, a bad boy prone to hitting the animals on his farm, is also magically shrunk down to a kopeck and then has to brave an adventurous life with the wild geese who carry him all over Sweden, to Lapland and back.
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf—incidentally, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—is a Swedish book, much loved in that country. It is no coincidence that the two books from which I learned how to read were both about small children shrunk to even smaller size and then forced into a hostile world. The lesson, at least to me, was clear: Bad boys don’t grow. And according to the All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development, which my mother studies religiously, with its diagrams of naked drawn boys of ever-ascending size with their ever-enlarging nutsacks, I am also not growing very well, in either corpus or sack. In every respect, I am a small thing full of limitations. When my aunt Tanya brings me my favorite ice cream, I get up and very seriously declare: “Thank you, but no. I am not allowed to eat it.”
In the Soviet Union The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a fine book for a five-year-old, although in the United States the dense one-hundred-sixty-page volume would likely be assigned in fifth grade and, in some states, in college. The biggest regret of my childhood is missing the television airing of the 1950s Soviet adaptation of the book, called The Enchanted Boy. It is the first time I take a pencil to paper and, with the help of my father, write a letter to the broadcaster, Channel One, on the devilishly tiny-squared, graph-paper tetradka that every Russian child knows well.
Respected Channel One,
I am a Leningrad boy, age 5. Last week you showed The Enchanted Boy. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese is my favorite book. I have read it so many times I have to use masking tape to hold it together. I cried when I found out you have already shown The Enchanted Boy. Please, please show it again. I really want to see it.
With respect,
Igor Shteyngart, City of Leningrad
My father and I walk past the pharmacy, past the Lenin, to drop the letter into a mailbox. I feel very close to my father at the moment. Holding his hand, I am jumping up and down with excitement, even though I might get sweaty and sick from all the jumping. When we get to the mailbox, my father folds the piece of paper bearing my childish scrawl in half and throws it in, without postage or address. At the time, I both know and don’t know that the letter will never reach Channel One in Moscow. I am both hopeful and I know better than to be hopeful. But what does my father know? That the paramount state broadcaster will not reair the story of Nils and the geese just because a five-year-old boy with an insufficient nutsack demands it? Or that soon we will leave the country for good, and there will be no Channel One in the free world; there will be, eventually, seven holy channels in the New York metro area—channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13—and even more if we purchase a UHF bowtie.
Back on the Culture Couch in 1977, I am rereading Nils asthmatically, letting enough air into my lungs so that I may hear the actual words spoken aloud by me, imagining that they are being spoken aloud on the television set. My grandmother Galya joins me. I have two grandmothers. Grandma Polya, on my father’s side, likes to sit with me on our favorite bench in Moscow Square and feed me various meats. She will come with us to America and be my best friend for a long time. Grandmother Galya, unbeknownst to me, is slowly descending into vascular dementia. She is the main reason my mother doesn’t want to emigrate, and she will die in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, barely sentient and in great pain. My aunt Tanya will stay behind and take care of her, a debt my mother will try to repay for the rest of her life.
Grandmother Galya used to work as a journalist and an editor at Evening Leningrad (Vechernii Leningrad). She knows of my love of Nils and the Wild Geese; she’s seen the lovingly applied masking tape holding together every volume of children’s literature I own. One day while babysitting me, she proposes: “Why don’t you write a novel?”
And so it begins. I am five years old with a thick, stubby pencil in my hand and a graph-paper tetradka waiting to be scribbled on. Grandmother Galya is smart. She raised herself up from the shtetl, took a gold medal in the local gymnasium, and schlepped her way to Leningrad to become a cultured person. She knows what every good editor knows well. You can’t just command “Write!” to your charges. There must be a reward system. Grandma Galya does not have access to the cold baked pork I love so well, but she does possess another important staple: cheese.
It is thick, hard, yellowish Soviet cheese, a poor relation of the megatons of orange lactose that the United States government will drop on my grandma Polya three years hence in Rego Park, Queens. But it establishes a pattern of exchange, goods for words, that has seen me through to the present day. Grandma Galya slices the cheese into dozens of pale yellowish squares. “For every page you write,” she says, “you will get a piece of cheese. And for every chapter you complete, I will make you a sandwich with bread, butter, and cheese.”
The resulting novel probably cost my grandmother a hundred pieces of cheese and at least a dozen cheese-and-butter sandwiches. No trace of it remains, but my childhood masterpiece likely began with these words:
Odin den’, utrom rano, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin prosnulsya.
One day, early in the morning, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin awoke.
Lenin is awake and alive in Leningrad! He has stepped off his pedestal in Moscow Square, and now it’s time for payback. At one point, before launching the October Revolution, he was hiding in a hunter’s cabin made of branches and straw (a proper Russian shalash) in Finland. And to this day, Finland, while officially neutral, stubbornly remains outside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In my sprawling novel, Lenin i ego volshebnyi gus’ (Lenin and His Magica
l Goose), this will be remedied forthwith.
After getting off his granite pedestal, Lenin meets a sympathetic talking goose, enormous in size, likely flying in from Georgia or Azerbaijan or Armenia or wherever else the dark men who sell flowers in the market come from. Lenin and the goose become best friends. Together, they make a pact: We will invade Finland!
Lenin gets on top of the goose, and they fly over the border into what will one day become the European Union, and Lenin begins bombarding the hapless Finns with our thick Soviet cheese from above. When not bombing the Finns, Lenin and the goose huddle together in their shalash and talk in capital letters, the goose saying things like “Have you heard, Vladimir Ilyich, that THE BUILDING OF THE BAIKAL-AMUR MAIN RAILROAD TRUNK HAS BEEN INITIATED?” Such a homey time Lenin and his fowl friend are having enclosed in those thick green branches, spruce branches from Moscow Square, naturally. But Vladimir Ilyich can bomb only so many Finns with cheese, because, you see, he has asthma!
It’s a little-known fact. He’s supposed to be so athletic, that Lenin, always swimming and ice-skating and so vibrant at chess, but, no, he is a fellow sufferer! All is proceeding according to the five-year plan, the Finns are almost ready to capitulate, when the talkative goose, probably a Menshevik, betrays Lenin to the Finnish secret police. The goose knows that Lenin is at his most vulnerable when he is having a raging asthma attack, so he lays Lenin down on his stomach, starts cupping him with banki, and then calls in the evil Finns. It’s almost curtains for the greatest genius of mankind, but Lenin manages to throw off the banki and break free of the Nordic swine. He captures the treacherous goose, cooks him in a big red pot, and enjoys a delicious goose feast with his newly converted socialist comrades.
Little Failure Page 6
