Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  THIS AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE OF UNIFORMED PATROLS AND CAMERAS should definitely deter the people who don’t look like us from stealing our fake-jewel-encrusted siddur.

  As the evening settles over Deepdale Gardens, my father and I stroll through the courtyards—alive with pansies and hydrangeas and lilies and daisies—like two newly minted lords of the realm. Father is very nice to me on these walks, although sometimes as a joke he likes to sneak up to me and give me a podzhopnik, a little side kick in the ass. Ow, stop it! I say, but it’s okay because it’s a love kick and he’s not angry, just playful. When he is angry, he’ll shake his head and murmur, “Ne v soldaty, ne v matrosy, ne podmazivat’ kolyosa”—roughly, You won’t make it as a soldier nor a sailor nor a polisher of car tires—which is what Stepfather Ilya, Goebbels to his friends, used to say to him when Papa was growing up in a little village outside Leningrad. I guess I know that what my father means is that I am not good at physical activities such as carrying more than one grocery bag at a time from the Grand Union to his waiting Chevrolet Malibu Classic, but the Russian phrase is so archaic and convoluted that it easily misses its mark. Well of course I won’t be a soldier or a sailor or a gas station attendant. At the very least, I’ll be a corporate lawyer, Papa.

  But then there are the good times, when my father will open up the vast larder of his imagination and tell me a story from a long-running series he calls The Planet of the Yids (Planeta Zhidov). “Please, Papa!” I chant. “Planet of the Yids! Planet of the Yids! Tell me!”

  In Papa’s telling, the Planet of the Yids is a clever Hebraic corner of the Andromeda Galaxy, constantly besieged by gentile spacemen who attack it with space torpedoes filled with highly unkosher but oh-so-delicious Russian salo, which is salted raw pig fat, lard, a lumpy cousin of the French suet. The planet is run by Natan Sharansky, the famous Jewish dissident. But the KGB can’t leave him alone, even though he’s light-years away, and keeps trying to sabotage the planet. And always, just as it seems it’s curtains for the Yids—“the goys have burst through the Shputnik Shield and into the ionosphere!”—the circumcised ones, led by the fearless Captain Igor, manage to outsmart their enemies, à la the Bible, à la Leon Uris’s Exodus, à la us. For this is, of course, our story, and I crave it almost as much as I crave that forbidden salo, which you can’t really buy at the Grand Union anyway, almost as much as I crave my father’s love.

  We have walked the lengths and breadths of Deepdale Gardens, past the FAA Air Traffic Control Facility down the street with its five skyscraper-sized antennas, past the playground where Papa has let me sink in one basketball more than him to win yet another “close” game, past the hydrangeas of our cooperative Eden, and up the carpeted stairs of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue. Since we have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Publishers Clearing House, our mailbox is filled to overflowing with offers from around the country for one S. SHITGABT and his family, not to mention the latest issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. We won’t bite again, but those bright fat envelopes tell our story, too.

  We are living on the Planet of the Yids.

  We have already won.

  * * *

  * Technically, the roof belongs to the Deepdale Gardens Cooperative.

  The author in his favorite (and only) shirt pens the masterpiece “Bionic Friends” on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The chair is from Hungary, the couch from Manhattan.

  JUST BEFORE PUBERTY BEGINS in earnest, I come down with Dissociative Identity Disorder, evidenced by “The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states, [with] at least two of these identities or personality states recurrently [taking] control of the person’s behavior” (DSM-5).

  At least two? I’ve got four! To my parents and Grandma Polya I am Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart, disobedient son and beloved grandson, respectfully. Very respectfully. To the American teachers at SSSQ, I am Gary Shteyngart, strange salami-smelling boy with some aptitude at math. To the Hebrew teachers at SSSQ I am Yitzhak Ben Shimon or some shit like that. And to the children, to my fellow pupils in their Macy’s regalia, I am Gary Gnu the Third.

  If a psychiatrist had been present (and why the hell wasn’t she present?) to ask me who I was, undoubtedly I would have answered with my slightly manicured but still thick Russian accent, Doctor, I am Gary Gnu the Third, ruler of the Holy Gnuish Empire, author of the Holy Gnorah and commander of the Mighty Gnuish Imperial Army.

  How do things come to such a pass?

  In 1982, I decide that I can no longer be me. The name “Gary” is a fig leaf, and what I really am is a fucking Red Gerbil, a Commie. A year later the Soviets will shoot down Korean Air Lines flight 007, and the topical New York pop-radio station 95.5 WPLJ will play a parody of the hit song “Eye of the Tiger” by the important American rock band Survivor, only instead of “Eye of the Tiger” the song will be renamed “The Russians Are Liars.” (“As those Communist killers / try to sleep late at night …”)

  And as awful as those lyrics are, I can’t stop singing them. In the shower beneath our amazing frosted window opening out on the Deepdale Gardens parking garage, in my father’s car on the way to SSSQ, both of us morning-moody and unfriendly, even beneath the slurs and swipes of my classmates. The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars, The Russians are liars.

  The Soviet leadership are liars; that much I now understand. Latin Lenin in Moscow Square was not always on the up and up. Fine. But am I a liar? No, I am truthful most of the time. Except when one day after one Commie comment too many, I tell my fellow pupils that I wasn’t born in Russia at all. Yes, I just remembered it! It had all been a big misunderstanding! I was actually born in Berlin, right next to Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld, surely you’ve heard of it.

  So here I am, trying to convince Jewish children in a Hebrew school that I am actually a German.

  And can’t these little bastards see that I love America more than anyone loves America? I am a ten-year-old Republican. I believe that taxes should only be levied on the poor, and the rest of Americans should be left alone. But how do I bridge that gap between being a Russian and being loved?

  I start to write.

  Papa’s space opera, The Planet of the Yids, is high on my mind when I open up a Square Deal Composition Notebook, 120 pages, Wide Ruled with Margin, and begin my first unpublished novel in English. It is called The Chalenge [sic]. On the first page “I give aknowlegments [sic] to the book Manseed [probably sic] in this issue of Isac [sic] Isimov [sic] Siance [sic] Fiction magazine. I also give thanks to the makers of Start [sic] Treck [sic].”

  The book, much like this one, is dedicated “To Mom and Dad.”

  The novel—well, at fifty-nine pages let’s call it a novella—concerns a “mistirious* race” which “began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta.”

  Yes, Atlanta. We have recently heard from some fellow immigrants that the cost of living in Georgia’s largest city is much lower than New York’s, and one can even own a house and a swimming pool in the suburbs of that fast-growing metropolis for about the price of our garden apartment in Queens.

  Opposite the celestial body that is Atlanta with its conservative politics and strong retail base shimmers an alien planet named Lopes, sometimes more correctly spelled as Lopez. “Lopes was a hot world. It was a wonder it didn’t explode … It also contained many parrots.” Somehow I have restrained myself from giving the steamy proto-Latinos of Planet Lopez a set of transistor radios to play at full blast, but I did endow them with three legs each.

  There is also an evil, wisecracking scientist named, of course, Dr. Omar. “Hello,” Omar says, “I’m Dr. Omar it’s no pleasure meeting you, now if you mind zipping up that big whole in the middle of your face I can show you my discovery.”

  Dr. Omar’s discovery is the “Chalenge Machine” that “perhaps will prove which race is the right one”: the Atlantans with their corporate tax breaks or the Lopezians with their parrots and weak academic record
s?

  As I reread The Chalenge, I want to cry out to its ten-year-old author, Jesus Christ, why can’t you just doodle in the corner of your notebook, dream of Star Wars action figures, and play pick-up sticks with your friends? (Therein, I suppose, lies the answer: what friends?) Why at this young age does it have to already be a race war in outer space and one without the self-deprecating humor of Papa’s Planet of the Yids? What the hell are you talking about, you who have never met a Lopez or an Omar on the wild streets of Little Neck?

  The hero of The Chalenge is a space fighter pilot named Flyboy, modeled after a kid who has just transferred into SSSQ, a kid so blond and handsome and retroussé-nosed it’s hard for some of us to believe he’s fully Jewish. Flyboy’s best friend is fellow pilot Saturn, and the love of his life is a fly girl named Iarda. Even at this early stage of my writing career, I realize the importance of a love triangle: “Flyboy smiled his best smile which the other two were jelous off. It of course was clear [Iarda] liked him best.”

  “Oh no,” Iarda says. “Fourteen more ships from the other side.”

  “Look,” says Saturn. “Twenty more ships in Atlanta battle formachions. Our kind.”

  “It hit the electronic scanner shaft and all the scanners and other equipment apart.”

  “Well how stupit can people get?” Flyboy wonders.

  And then, once the space battle is complete, and our kind has won: “The fourth ship was bound to come. On Atlanta things were going wild.”

  I write dutifully, excitedly, asthmatically. I get up every weekend morning even if the Lightman has kept me awake all night, the little pinpricks of light that form his hand spilling out of the cracks between closet door and jamb, reaching out for me, scared breathless on my foldout couch. Five years earlier I had written the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose for my grandmother Galya, who is now six years away from a horrible death back in Leningrad. But now I know to avoid anything even remotely Russian. My Flyboy is as Atlantan as apple pie. And his Iarda, while vaguely Israeli sounding (a reference to the Yordan, the River Jordan?), is also a hot, principled taxpayer who can blow a Lopez or a Rodriguez out of the sky as surely as Ronald Reagan will soon joke, “We begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes.” Bombing Grandma Galya back in Leningrad, he means, and the rest of us Russian liars.

  I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal. Lenin didn’t work out; joining the Komsomol youth league didn’t work out; my family—Papa hits me; my religion—children hit me; but America/Atlanta is still full of power and force and rage, a power and force and rage I can fuel myself with until I feel myself zooming for the stars with Flyboy and Saturn and Iarda and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

  There is a teacher at school, a Ms. S, who has just transferred in to substitute for some Mrs. A–Z, and who herself won’t last long within the unique educational environment of SSSQ. Ms. S is as nice to me as the liberals’ son. She has, like almost all the women at the school, an enormous weight of spectacular Jewish hair and a small pretty mouth. On one of her first days on the job, Ms. S asks us all to bring in our favorite items in the world and to explain why they make us who we are. I bring in my latest toy, a dysfunctional Apollo rocket whose capsule pops off with the press of a lever (but only under certain atmospheric conditions, humidity must be below 54 percent), and explain that who I am is a combination of my father’s Planet of the Yids tales and the complicated stories in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dr. Asimov himself, and that I have even written my own novel. This passes largely unremarked as the latest batch of Star Wars X-Wing fighters and My Little Ponies are paraded around.

  Finally, Ms. S holds up a sneaker and explains that her favorite activity is jogging.

  “Pee-yooh!” a boy cries out, pointing at the sneaker and holding his nose, and everyone except me laughs a wicked child laugh. Jerry Himmelstein agoofs.

  I am shocked. Here is a young, kind, pretty teacher, and the children are intimating that her feet smell. Only me and my two-hundred-pound Leningrad fur are allowed to smell around here! I look to Ms. S, so worried that she will cry, but instead she laughs and then goes on about how running makes her feel good.

  She has laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!

  After we have all finished explaining who we are, Ms. S calls me over to her desk. “You really wrote a novel?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “It is called The Chalenge.”

  “May I read it?”

  “You may read it. I will brink it.”

  And brink it I do, with the worried admonition “Please don’t lose, Meez S.”

  And then it happens.

  At the end of the English period, when a book about a mouse who has learned to fly in an airplane has been thoroughly dissected, Ms. S announces, “And now Gary will read from his novel.”

  His what? Oh, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m standing there holding my composition notebook straight from the Square Deal Notebook people of Dayton, OH, Zip Code 45463, and looking out at me are the boys beneath their little flying-saucer yarmulkes, and the girls with their sweet aromatic bangs, their blouses studded with stars. And there’s Ms. S, whom I’m already terribly in love with but who I’ve recently learned has a fiancé (not sure what that means, can’t be good), but whose bright American face is not just encouraging me but priding me on.

  Am I scared? No. I am eager. Eager to begin my life. “Introduction,” I say. “The Mistirious Race. Before the age of dinousaurs There was Human life on Earth. They looked just like the man of today. But they were a lot more inteligent than the men of today.”

  “Slowly,” Ms. S says. “Read slowly, Gary. Let us enjoy the words.”

  I breathe that in. Ms. S wants to enjoy the words. And then slower: “They built all kinds of spaceships and other wonders. But at that time the Earth circuled the moon because the moon was bigger than the Earth. One day a gigantic comet came and blew up the moon to the size it is today. The pieces of the moon began to Fall on Earth. The race of people got on their spaceships and took off. They began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta. But there was another planet named Lopez with a race of three legged Humanoids. War started soon.” Big breath. “Book One: Before the First Chalenge.”

  As I’m reading it, I am hearing a different language come out of my mouth. I do full justice to the many misspellings (“the Earth cir-culed the moon”), and the Russian accent is still thick, but I am speaking in what is more or less comprehensible English. And as I am speaking, along with my strange new English voice, I am also hearing something entirely foreign to the squealing and shouting and sheket bevakasha! that constitute the background noise of SSSQ: silence. The children are silent. They are listening to my every word, following the battles of the Atlantans and Lopezians as far as the ten minutes of allotted time will go. And they will listen to the story for the next five weeks as well, because Ms. S will designate the end of every English period as Chalenge Time, and they will shout out throughout the English period, “When will Gary read already?” and I will sit there in my chair, oblivious to all but Ms. S’s smile, excused from following the discussion of the mouse who learned how to fly, so that I may go over the words I will soon read to my adoring audience.

  And God bless these kids for giving me a chance. May their G-d bless them, every one.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a hated freak. But here’s what I’m doing: I am redefining the terms under which I am a hated freak. I am moving the children away from my Russianness and toward storytelling. And toward the ideology of strength and Republicanism, which is life around the Shteyngart dinner table. “Did you write anything new?” shouts a kid in the morning, a merchant’s son, renowned for his lack of basic literacy. “Wil
l the Lopezians attack? What’s Dr. Omar gonna do next?”

  What indeed? I am now so far beyond Jerry Himmelstein that I don’t even bother studying him and trying to avoid his social miscues. With my newfound lesser brand of hate comes the responsibility that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The responsibility of writing something every day, lest I fall out of favor again and be restored to Red Gerbil status.

  What I need is to expand my repertoire. And that means more access to popular culture. When I’ve run out of The Chalenge to read I follow up with another fifty-pager called Invasion from Outer Space, featuring the evildoings of the Academy of Moors (Yasser Arafat has been back in the news), and that one goes over reasonably well. But what I really need is access to a television set.

  Enter Grandmother Polya.

  Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who acts as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent. You can see her in action in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens, running after her thick-limbed grandson with a dish of buckwheat, fruit, or farmer’s cheese—“Sasha, come back, my treasure! I have plums for you!”—or flipping through rows of slacks at the Alexander’s (now Marshalls) on Queens Boulevard, getting Sasha ready for the new school year.

  Rego Park, Queens. This is where I go after school while my parents work. Close enough to Little Neck for my father to strike with his Chevy Malibu Classic, but far enough away that I may develop my own personality. The homey, low-rise redbrick neighborhood is overshadowed by the three modernist Birchwood Towers, each nearly thirty stories in height and featuring the tackiest themed lobbies on the Eastern Seaboard—the Bel Air, the Toledo, and the Kyoto, with its marble Japanese statuette and hanging scrolls. I spot my first limousine parked in the Bel Air’s circular driveway and promise to myself that one day I will own one. Other less gargantuan co-op buildings have pretty gardens and names like the Lexington and New Hampshire House. In one of these, my grandmother, over sixty but still full of country strength, cleans toilets for an American woman.