Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  We sign everywhere we need to, even places we probably don’t need to. We sign the fucking envelope. “Write neater!” Mama shouts at Papa. “No one can understand your signature!” “Calm yourself, calm yourself.” “Get the stamps!” “Wait with your stamps already, what does it say. No postadzh necessary.” The Publishers Clearing House has even taken care of that little detail. Classy.

  I walk solemnly to the mailbox and deposit our claim on the future. Adonai Eloheinu, I say to our new God, please help us get the ten million dollars so that Mama and Papa will not fight so much, and there will be no razvod between them, and let us live somewhere far away from Papa’s wolfish rodstvenniki who cause all the trouble and let them not yell at Mama when she sends the money Papa says we don’t have to her sisters and Grandma Galya in Leningrad who is dying still.

  That night for the first time in months the Lightman without the pupils and irises does not appear in my wood-paneled closet. In my first sleep in weeks, in my actual dreams, I walk into SSSQ a multimillionaire, and the pretty girl with the big teeth who’s always tanned from Florida vacation kisses me with those big teeth (I haven’t gotten the mechanics of kissing down yet). The kids make fun of Jerry Himmelstein, but I say, He’s my friend now. Here is two dollars. Buy us both the Carvel flying saucer cookie ice cream. And keep the change, you gurnisht! You nothing.

  We find out the truth quickly and brutally. At their respective workplaces, my parents are told that the Publishers Clearing House regularly sends out the YOU HAVE ALREADY WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS missive and that these are routinely thrown in the trash by the savvy native-born. Depression settles over our nonmillionaire shoulders. In Russia the government was constantly telling us lies—wheat harvest is up, Uzbek baby goats give milk at an all-time high, Soviet crickets learn to sing the “Internationale” in honor of Brezhnev visit to local hayfield—but we cannot imagine that they would lie to our faces like that here in America, the Land of the This and the Home of the That. And so we don’t give up hope entirely. The judges are probably reading our application right now. Maybe I should write them a letter in my burgeoning English. “Dear Publishers Clearing House, Spring is here. The weather is warm and rainy. Birds come From south and sing songs. My mothers pianist fingers hurt very much from the typing and she has only one suit for work. Please send the money soon. We love you, Family Shteyngart.”

  Meanwhile Car & Parking and the other Publishers Clearing House magazines are starting to pile up, taunting us with many hot naked centerfolds of the new Porsche 911, the official sports coupe of Reagan-era excess. We reluctantly begin to cancel our subscriptions to all of them, except for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a small, square little number with the drawing of an exciting molting space creature on the cover hugging a boy in its claws.

  Our dreams of being instantly rich are finished, but we are moving up nonetheless. We are saving every kopeck that comes our way via my father’s junior engineering job and my mother’s typing. I have my Eastern Air Lines plane, my pen, my broken Monkey, my Nazi stamp collection, my circumcised penis, the Mozart candy wrapper from the Vienna airport, the secret medal of Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca (will they throw me out of Hebrew school if they find out?), All Rome, Florence, and Venice, my Soviet atlas, and a bunch of donated T-shirts. My mother has the size 2 Harvé Benard business suit. My father has made a fishing rod out of a stick. Pounds of disgusting marked-down farmer’s cheese and kasha will feed us until we die of sadness, and if I don’t clear my plate of that warm soggy shit the thunderclap of Papa’s hand rings against my temple (Mama: “Just don’t hit the head!”) or Mama’s silence will make me consider taking my own life to everyone’s laughter.

  Who are we?

  Parents: My bedniye. We are poor folk.

  Why can’t I have the Monkey with both hands?

  Parents: We are not Americans.

  But you both have jobs.

  Parents: We have to buy a house.

  Yes, a house! The first step to Americanism. Who needs two-handed Monkey when we will soon have our own quasi-suburban home? And I don’t fully understand the importance of these “action” figures anyway, when my pen and my Eastern Air Lines jet can fly all over the world if I only close my eyes and let it be so. “Zhhhh … Mmmmmmm.” How much more action do you want? But at lunchtime the SSSQ boys do like to take out their Lukes and Obi-Wans and Yodels and set them on their desks to demonstrate just how much property falls within their purview. They talk in their already raspy Jewish voices: “I threw out my old Yodel because the paint on his ears was falling off and then I got two new ones and a Princess Lay-uh just so Ham Solo could do her.”

  Me: “Vow.”

  But before you can show off your Monkey and Yodel, indeed before you can have anyone “over,” you need to have a proper house, not some cheap refugee craphole with folding army cots and drunk Step-grandfather Ilya with a patched-up, oozing hole in his stomach from some insane surgery.

  Only it can’t be a whole house, because a whole house in the truly white sections of eastern Queens—Little Neck, Douglaston, Bayside—costs around $168,000 (roughly $430,000 in 2013 dollars), and that nut is too big to crack with our small Soviet rodent teeth. But kindly Zev, the young Kew Gardens Jew who acts as our unofficial adviser, tips us off to a development off the Long Island Expressway in Little Neck called Deepdale Gardens, sixty acres of affordable garden apartments built in the 1950s for returning servicemen. As me and Mama and Papa have been fighting in the Cold War since birth, we are entitled to one, too.

  The savings begin in earnest. What am I talking about? For our bloodline, the savings have been in earnest since two thousand years before Christ. A three-bedroom apartment in Deepdale Gardens will cost $48,000, and 20 percent of it—$9,600—has to be tendered in cash. Everyone is conscripted to help. Our local mailman, whom we know from Young Israel synagogue, will chip in $400 without interest. My parents’ Russian friends help out, $1,000 here, $500 there, usually at 15 percent interest per annum. This is how the system works, they lend to you, eventually you lend to them, until everyone has a home away from the minorities. On the back of an address book my parents keep the sums, and I follow along with them. March 12: $6,720. $6,720 divided by $9,600 = 70 percent. We’re more than two-thirds of the way there! When my parents come back from seeing their friends I await them with the address book and the question: “Odolzhili nam?” Have they lent us money?

  Sadly, our first address—252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue, Little Neck, Queens, 11362—is mostly numerical; there is no “Oak Harbour Lane” or “Pine Hill Promontory” or “Revolutionary Road.” But because each address contains just two apartments, a lower and an upper unit, there is no need to add “Apt. 2.” Which means that whenever we have to write our addresses out in SSSQ, I make sure the other children see it, hoping they will think this is an entirely private house, like the one belonging to the liberals’ son with the front and back yards.

  The beauty part is that the apartment does have a second level, an attic, which is accessed by a splintery, retractable wooden ladder that scares me to death, inciting memories of the special ladder my father had built me in Leningrad to help me conquer my fear of heights. Up in the musty, woodsy attic I close my eyes and pray over the intense Republicanism that is the birthright of every Soviet Jew in the time of Reagan. This attic that is above our living quarters, this dank storage space with its creaky floorboards, belongs to us and to no one else. I close my eyes and feel the power of ownership.

  Ours, ours, ours.

  We are climbing upward! Past the welfare queens, past the Spanishers with their transistor radios, up to the working-class white Catholics with the Yankees pennants who populate our courtyard. Adonai Eloheinu, one day let us climb up to the Solomon Schechter Jews in how much money we have, so that those Jews can be our friends, too, and we will all own station wagons together and talk about which foods are K(osher)-Pareve and which are not. We didn’t win the ten million from the Publishers
Clearing House. They lied to us and maybe we should even “sue” them. But we got even in our way. We bought our own cooperative garden apartment, and now even the peaked attic roof above my head is ours.*

  Let me tell you what else is ours. There is a living room with a cottage-cheese ceiling and a small closet with a bookshelf built directly into the closet door! You can store Papa’s fishing stick inside the closet and put books on the outside of it. Here we display the trashier American novels we find on the street curb with the pictures of women and men kissing each other on horseback and a special hardcover copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus. The furniture will be the Romanian ensemble we brought from Russia: the already mentioned dining table, with an extra leaf for when kindly Zev and our other American supporters come over. There is a credenza, equally orange and glowing, upon which two Jewish menorahs are placed when visitors come, one in front of the other, one borrowed from a perch atop my mother’s Red October piano, as if to say that here Chanukah is a yearlong proposition. Beneath our feet there is a red shag carpet upon which I like to play with my pen. The problem is that the carpet is ragged, and there are many nails sticking out. Often, I will tear off a small piece of my arm during play, and I begin to mentally map the living room floor, careful to avoid major injury. What’s missing from this living room ensemble?

  The Television. Except for Leon Uris and his tales of Israeli derring-do, our house is Russian down to the last buckwheat kernel of kasha. English is the language of commerce and work, but Russian is the language of the soul, whatever that is. And television, it is clear—by the screaming, honking, spoiled American kids around us—is death. After we come to the States, many of my more adaptable fellow immigrants quickly part ways with their birth languages and begin singing the opening tune to a show about a black man with an aggressive haircut named Mr. T. The reason I still speak, think, dream, and quake in fear in Russian has to do with my parents’ dictum that only Russian be spoken in the home. It’s a trade-off. While I will retain my Russian, my parents will struggle with the new language, nothing being more instructive than having a child prattle on in English at the dinner table.

  Not to mention that after borrowing $9,600 for one floor of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue we cannot afford a television, so instead of The Dukes of Hazzard, I turn to the collected works of Anton Chekhov, eight battered volumes of which still sit on my bookshelves. Without television there is absolutely nothing to talk about with any of the children at school. It turns out these little porkers have very little interest in “Gooseberries” or “Lady with Lapdog,” and it is impossible in the early 1980s to hear a sentence spoken by a child without an allusion to something shown on TV.

  “NEEEEERD!” the children scream whenever I try to welcome them into my inner life.

  And so the Red Nerd finds itself doubly handicapped, living in a world where it speaks neither the actual language, English, nor the second and almost just as important language, television. For most of its American childhood it will have the wretched sensation that fin de siècle Yalta with its idle, beautiful women and conflicted, lecherous men lies somewhere behind the Toys“R”Us superstore and the multiplex.

  And now let me show you my private quarters. The garden apartment has three bedrooms, which is three bedrooms more than what we had when we got off the Alitalia jet at JFK just two years ago. USA! USA! I suppose. Most Russians do not breed well in captivity, and anyway my parents do not seem to like each other very much, so I have no siblings. This works out well by me. From a school essay entitled “I’m Worth Writing About”: “I like my position in the family. If I had a bigger brother he would boss me around call me names and punch me and kick me and beat me up.”

  My parents have taken the big bedroom, where we lie together in their giant shiny mahogany bed as one on weekends and they try to grab at my circumcised penis to see how it has turned out and if it has grown in accordance with the All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development. “Dai posmotret’!” they shout. Let us see it! What are you ashamed of? I’m twisting away from them, clutching at my goods, filled to the brim with that stupid new American word: privacy. But, also, I have to say, I am excited and happy that they take such an interest in me, even though I know from SSSQ that nobody should touch my zain. This much has been explained to us somewhere between Leviticus and Prophets.

  And so, privacy. Because there are three bedrooms, and my parents are very pleased with having even one, I am handed over the remaining two. This is also a statement on their part: They love me so much that everything that is in excess to their meager possessions is automatically mine. I would estimate their own entertainment budget during the fiscal years 1979–1985 at about twenty dollars a year, mostly hooks for my father’s fishing stick.

  My first bedroom, formerly the apartment’s dining room, covered entirely in cheap wood paneling, is given over to my folding couch, which is itself draped in velvety green-and-yellow stripes, oh-so-soft to the touch. When erect, the couch feels like it could belong in a corporate office of the famous International Business Machines, and when folded open, it feels luxurious beyond belief. Only now do I realize that, minus the polka dots, the couch has the same striped color scheme as the singular shirt I brought with me from Leningrad. Next to the couch is a typewriter stand, and on the stand is an IBM Selectric typewriter that my mother has liberated from her place of work. At first I am not sure what to do with it, but I know that holding the font ball labeled COURIER 72 is somehow important, and I hold it in both of my hands for quite a while. Between my Courier ball and the All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development there is a terrible chasm that will take half a lifetime to fill.

  On the other side of the couch is the glass-and-mahogany bookcase that is the focal point of every Russian household. This kind of unit usually goes in the living room where visitors can appraise their hosts and take notes on their intellectual deficiencies. My parents aren’t telling me to become a writer—everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as “computer”—but placing the bookcase in my room sends the unmistakable message that I am our family’s future and that I have to be the best of the best. Which I will be, Mama and Papa, I swear.

  The bookcase contains the collected works of Anton Chekhov in eight dark blue volumes with the author’s seagull-like signature across every volume’s cover, and most of the collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. In front of the Russian greats stands a siddur (the Jewish daily prayer book), enclosed in a plastic case and coated with fake silver and fake emeralds. It is written in a language none of us understands, but it is so holy that it blocks out the Pushkin that my parents have all but committed to memory. Beneath the siddur, on the inferior shelves, is the small but growing collection of American children’s books that I am now capable of reading. There is the book on how Harriet “Moses” Tubman freed the black people from Maryland, there is a short history of George Washington (how handsome he looks astride his white mare, a real amerikanets!), and a book called The Boy from the UFO. An unhappy white boy, Barney, who lives with his foster parents meets an alien boy in his backyard and agrees to go back to his home planet. When he finds out he’ll never see his foster parents again, he learns to love them. On the cover is Barney, also very handsome and American in his pretty pajamas on a rooftop that is the personal property of his foster parents (just like we own our roof now!), and a spherical metal container, the UFO, floats promisingly in front of him. I don’t know why, but reading this book makes me cry at night.

  Opposite the bed is the closet in which the Lightman with only the white sclera for eyes shares his quarters with my shirt, a V-neck sweater, and a pair of yellowish corduroy pants, part of my Stinky Russian Bear ensemble at SSSQ, wide waled in a style that will make a confusing comeback when I enroll at Oberlin College less than a decade later.

  Lest the reader get the wrong impression, let me say now that I am agog with Bedroom Number 1. There is so much happines
s here. This is my first stab at keeping and maintaining my own space, even if my father will saunter in without knocking to pick up Dostoyevsky’s The Insulted and Humiliated from the bookshelves, and my mother will come over regularly to pet me and make sure I am still alive.

  And then, as if that’s not enough, my kingdom extends to Bedroom Number 2. We do not have enough money to furnish this bedroom, but this is when the amazing American curb—the land of miracles—will provide us with another couch, of coarse plaid, upon which we will stick an even coarser red carpet, the kind that used to hang on the wall above my Culture Couch in Leningrad. Eventually we will find a little black-and-white Zenith television in the trash can outside our building, and that will find its pride of place, and when I will grow even older and have access to a Sanyo AM/FM Stereo Cassette Player with Headphones and Anti-Rolling Mechanism I will sit on the coarse Russian carpet covering the coarse American couch and, while listening to Annie Lennox lamenting the weather in “Here Comes the Rain Again,” brood in the singular odorous way of a boy sinking into his teenage years.

  Outside our storm windows there is also a new world. Deepdale Gardens must have once been a pretty redbrick maze of two-story buildings and interlocking parking garages, but by 1981 it has all faded to a brownish color. This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition. But at the time all I know is that there are pathways and roundabouts on which I can ride my shitty used bike, and all of this territory belongs to the cooperative and, hence, partly, to me. In fact, there are signs everywhere attesting to the private-property nature of Deepdale Gardens—meaning It is our complex, so you keep out, mister.