Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

  I think back to the Kiev-style cutlet she sold me when I had graduated from Oberlin. I see mother’s laughing face as she puts the twenty-dollar bill she’s inveigled out of me in the pocket of her pink pullover. She is happy. Haggling with her son is fun, especially since he always loses. At money matters he is also a failure. And she is laughing because she can feel that part of this must be a joke. She understands the absurdity of the moment. She will often begin an anecdote with the words “Guys, you want to laugh?” And then she will laugh herself as if to demonstrate what it’s all about.

  She is laughing. But is she sad? Is part of her sad? What is it like to be her at the moment she takes my money? What does it feel like to sell your broke son a horrible piece of chicken at retail? How many years must pass before I feel sad for her? Is this the moment? Is this why I brought them back here?

  The balalaika smashes against the wall. The five-year-old girl begins to cry. And then, here in the present, the sound of a violin fills the street. We are approaching the college where the post-smashed-balalaika phase of my mother’s musical education took place. My mother poses for the camera mock-solemnly and gives it a four-finger pioneer’s salute. In the lobby a plaque commemorates alumni lost in the Second World War. NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, it says. Next to the plaque are the usual bearded luminaries of the nineteenth century and next to the luminaries stands a new ATM machine. An incredibly Russian-looking boy with several layers of disheveled blond hair and a perfect potato nose is hitting the accordion pretty hard.

  I can see the immediate disappointment on my mother’s face, the sadness of return, the letdown of memory. “Everything used to shine around here,” she says. “Now everything looks so unkempt.”

  “There’s a fine stink here,” my father says, screwing up his Americanized nose at the produce of so many armpits.

  “The first time I came in here, I heard a girl playing the piano,” my mother says. “I nearly dropped. I said to my father, ‘I want to study here! I will study here.’ And I was accepted. No one expected that of me. Stalin spent a lot of money on this stuff. He loved music.”

  We trudge out of the music school and toward the distant Pryazhka River. “Why are all the windows boarded up?” my mother asks, as we approach the house where she grew up. SALE, a sign says in English. APARTMENTS, 228 METERS. “Look, they’ve set everything on fire!” Indeed, one of the windows has been blown out, the surrounding frame charred black.

  My mother looks around the building’s ruined courtyard uncertainly. “Petya Zabaklitski from our class, he lived in that entryway over there, every day he would run ahead and wait for me. And whenever I walked home he would shout, ‘Yasnitskaya [my mother’s maiden name] the Jewess is coming. Yasnitskaya the Jewess is coming!’ This was the first sorrow of my life.”

  My father grew up in the village of Olgino, northwest of the city center in the so-called resort area of Petersburg, which hugs the northern banks of the Gulf of Finland. Several redbrick mafioso-style estates, their boundary walls sprinkled with security cameras, have appeared along its rutted streets, but Olgino still feels like a half-wrecked semi-rural neighborhood moored in some failing periphery. We could be in Michigan or Sicily or North Africa or Pakistan. Only the weather betrays our latitude.

  Today is cold and rainy, but the village is swaddled in the unkempt greenery which my father is clearly delighted to see. We are approaching a ramshackle green house built in some indeterminate Soviet style of rural housing, New England barn meets Russian izba meets instant decay.

  “Here would pass a herd of cows,” he says. “In the morning I would have to push out our cow, Rosa, so that she would go into the forest with the other cows. There was a shepherd with a cattle prod. Oy, my heart is starting to jump!”

  There is laughter coming out from under his baseball cap. The snow-white goatee is mirthful. He speaks without pause. “Our house was one of the biggest houses, fifteen-twenty families lived in it. Here there were little garden plots.” We walk by a vast rotting woodpile. “Here was our veranda.” We walk by boarded-up windows. “Here we planted flowers.” A collapsing brick shack sheltering an old Suzuki four-by-four. “Here Aunt Sonya had a little barn, sheep, pigs, cows. We had a good warm barn, you could keep a cow or a piglet there in winter. Here was the outhouse. Always tons of shit there. Frozen shit in the winter. Here lived a girl named Gelya, when boys my age or older would see her we’d always shout ‘Gelya, opa! Gelya, opa!’ And she would laugh.” He makes a humping motion at the invisible Gelya.

  “Be careful, there are stray dogs here,” my mother says.

  We pass by an old Soviet radio jamming tower. “After I was released from the hospital,” my father says, “I was still half-crazy. My heart kept trembling. My mother and I rented a room here in the summer. I lived here from May to November, and I was mostly alone. Every day I’d go to the gulf,” the nearby Gulf of Finland, “swimming morning and night, even when there was ice. This saved me. This made me a human being again, as opposed to an invalid.”

  My father traces his weak nerves back to his life with Ilya, or Ilyusha in the diminutive, his cruel, erratic, alcoholic stepfather, whom my father eventually overpowered. “We lived in a room a hundred sixty square feet,” my father says. “Ilya was capable of anything.”

  “And you fought with him?” I ask.

  Proudly: “I beat him! Until he bled! Until he bled!”

  My mother laughs. “A good little son you were.”

  “My mother would come home and she would find out. We’d be silent, but there would be traces of blood on the curtains and elsewhere. My mother, of course, loved me more than him.”

  We are passing a line of birches, so clean and bright in the miserable weather. My father introduces a new subject. “Why am I so strong [krepkii], even to this day? Because from seven to five I worked hard. And I also played sports. Skis, skates, running, swimming. If you do farm work, you don’t even need to exercise.

  “I learned to love the peasant’s work. Jews weren’t supposed to do that. And in tsarist Russia Jews weren’t even given land, because they were supposed to be lazy and good for nothing.

  “I still have very good memories of Olgino. Because I am basically a country person. I like reading and music and all that. But I don’t like big cities. Not Manhattan, not Leningrad. To go to the opera, the museum, fine. But I like to be surrounded by trees, forest, grass, fresh air, fishing, and sunshine.”

  We walk toward the gulf which restored his sanity.

  We find ourselves back on Nevsky Prospekt, approaching the sienna-colored tower of the old city duma, or assembly. This is where first dates in Petersburg often begin, and my parents were no different. They met on the steps beneath the Italianate tower, where today, dozens of teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls are huffing away at cigarettes, tapping away on their phones. “When we first met I couldn’t understand what she was,” my father says. “It was as if some kind of orange had walked up to me.”

  “I painted my cheeks with orange powder,” my mother explains. “My friend had a boyfriend who knew how to get anything. And so for New Year’s he got everyone Polish powder, which was orange. But we were all very proud of it. All of Leningrad was orange. Anything Polish was a big deal. Such pretty packaging.”

  “So,” my father continues, “I was standing there and I saw this orange person. And I thought this is not one of ours! It must be a foreigner. She was more yellow than a Chinese.”

  “I’m telling you it was the Polish powder!”

  “I was wearing a hat that looked like—”

  “A pierogi.”

  “That looked like a pierogi. It was called a khrushchyovka. Gray and made of sheep. And I was also wearing a handsome French coat.”

  “Very handsome,” my mother
says, and I breathe in that sentence deeply. My parents still love each other.

  On our way back to the hotel, they mention that there is only eighteen thousand dollars left on the mortgage of their Little Neck home and that they will pay this sum off within months. “Now we will be free!” my father says.

  Now they will be free.

  We are crossing Moscow Square.

  They’ve put in gaudy fountains next to the pine trees where my father and I would play hide-and-seek. Beneath my Lenin there’s a temporary summer stage from which issues horrible thumping Russian pop, something about sun rays and “Get closer / closer to my heart.” There are Nike swooshes where the old gastronom used to be. Children who have no knowledge of the Great Leader scamper on and off Lenin’s podium, singing “la la la la la.” A lone boy in camouflage pants is texting with his mouth open. A man is holding a woman’s ass by the fountains, his bare shorts-clad legs wrapped around her. This is my sacred space, Moscow Square, June 2011.

  We are approaching the building where we lived; beyond it, the Chesme Church. I am breathing hard. I have to pee. My father is telling me how Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined America.

  We walk into the peeling entry way of our apartment house. The building is painted in the unappetizing colors of rose and dun, festooned with great loops of graffiti. Runty-looking kids are sitting by some ad hoc storage containers. The grass is overgrown with weeds and daisies.

  “Where was the rocket?” I ask, curious about the rusty spaceship where I used to play Cosmonaut.

  “The rocket was over there,” my father says, pointing at a standard-issue multicolored playground with swings and slides. A touch of sunlight, but no more, falls upon the courtyard where I used to spend my healthy days. The scraggly trees take what they can get.

  “I always had nightmares about a big black steam pipe,” I say.

  “That pipe, little son, was somewhere near here.”

  “What were you afraid of?” my mother asks. “What did you imagine? You were afraid of tree roots when you were three.”

  “Freud could have said a lot about all this,” I say, forgetting my audience. “He might have said it was about sexuality. The child growing up, afraid of becoming …” My mother grimaces. I stop talking.

  Our former lives hang above us. Beige brick, casement windows, the occasional wooden or iron balcony, exposed gray piping, black electrical wires.

  “It was big and dark,” my father says of the pipe.

  “Like a rocket,” I say. “I always thought there was going to be an explosion. And we’d all be flung into the cosmos.”

  “No kidding,” my mother says. “How could you even have imagined that?”

  We return to the street, the facades of our megablock forming a pinkish wave flanked by a column of oaks.

  “And over there, to the left, there was a church,” my father says.

  The sidewalks have piled against each other like so many adolescent teeth. An unreformed ancient tram passes with a nineteenth-century European clatter. My mother is limping on the way to the church. My father jokes that she’s drunk too much beer at Little Jap (Yaponchik), the Moscow Square sushi joint with the casually racist name where we just ate lunch.

  “I didn’t drink too much,” my mother protests, “I didn’t eat too much. I have a corn on my foot.”

  “Can’t bring the old lady with us,” my father says. “We should have left her home.” I laugh, a braying sound. This is how they talk. This is how I never learned to talk. Not in Russian. Not in English. The supposedly funny banter with a twist of the knife. That’s what I have my novels for.

  My father squeezes her with love. “Starukha [old lady],” he says, “let’s take her by the arms and legs and throw her in the garbage dump.”

  “I’m not drunk. I drank half what you drank.”

  “You drank all the beer.”

  All of this is said in good humor and could go on for the rest of the afternoon. But it stops.

  We are standing in front of it. The sky is the same dour gray as every other day, while it is the same pastry pink they serve at my mother’s favorite Café North on Nevsky. “What a pretty church,” I say. “This used to be the museum of … the naval fleet, something like that?”

  “Yes, because it was the battle of Chesme,” my father says.

  “I don’t remember anything!” says my mother.

  Its three spires are poking into the northern murk, there’s a sandy lot in front of it. A drunk is sitting on a bench with his arms around one leg. My mother sits down on another bench to treat her corn. “Just go in the church by yourselves,” she says. “If there’s a toilet, tell me.”

  “Do you remember we used to launch your helicopter here?” my father says.

  “The helicopter, yes.”

  “Many, many times we launched the helicopter. You liked it so much. And I did, too. I actually liked it, too.”

  “Where did we find the helicopter?”

  “We bought it! Where did we find it? It flew so high, almost to the windows.”

  “I remember it got stuck one time.”

  “No, I don’t remember that. I don’t think so. Many, many times we would launch it. You were so happy.”

  We come upon a heavy wooden door. My father takes off his cap. Inside the church, a floodlit study in pink and gold. People are crossing themselves with a quiet vengeance. “They sure knew how to build churches in Russia,” my father says, impressed. “The most well known of the post-Byzantine style is the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod. I was there.”

  We leave the church. And I think: That was it? That was the entire visit? That was the sum of fifteen years’ worth of panic attacks?

  My mother is still sitting next to a dirty flowerpot outside the church, carefully applying Dr. Scholl’s to her feet. “You’re a comical old lady,” my father says to her. She gets up and begins to waddle, penguin-like, away from the church and back toward Moscow Square and the metro that will take us back to our hotel. We pass by a graffito that addresses the three of us Jews specifically: “The Slavic Realm is for Slavs only!”

  “His posture has improved so much,” my mother says of me. “He’s unrecognizable. His walk. It’s like he’s not my son!”

  “He’s been going to the gym,” my father says. “Feel his arms. How I fought with him to get him to play sports, but he didn’t do dick.”

  “You didn’t want to,” my mother says to me. “He tried playing ball with you. He built you a little ladder.” As I write this, I hold a photo of myself climbing my father’s makeshift wooden ladder in our Leningrad apartment, wearing a sailor’s outfit and a shit-eating grin. The photo is dated 11/1978, and my mother’s handwriting on the back announces: “The famous athlete training at home.”

  “He was trying to stop you from being afraid of heights,” my mother says. “And it worked, you climbed it.”

  “Yes, you climbed to the top,” my father says. “Gradually. At first you climbed two or three steps, and then you got to the top. It’s all about training yourself.”

  “On the one hand, your father taught you well,” my mother says. “On the other hand, he always pushed you.”

  “Pushed me?”

  “He wanted you to overcome your fear of heights but then when you got to the top he tried to push you off. And I read in Freud that you should never do such a thing.” She read in Freud? “It just creates more fear. But your father didn’t understand that. He was young himself. Thirty-three years old, what did he understand? Come to think of it, he was maybe about thirty-six when he pushed you off the ladder.*

  “He pushed you from the heights, like this!” my mother says, as she makes a pushing motion. She laughs. “He scared you, and you became even more fearful of heights.”

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” my father says. “I have something to show you!”

  We’re walking by Lensovet (Leningrad Soviet) Street. There are cheap lace curtains in the windows of the apartment blocks. The hotel
Mir, which I’ve once unfairly described as “the worst hotel in the world,” sits on one side of the street. We step over crooked tram lines and unkempt vegetation. A soot-covered truck passes by. My father begins to speak rapidly, as if he has been building up the courage to do so.

  “As I was telling you, little son, one day when we were walking down this street after launching our helicopter by the church, we were going back to our house and you started to behave rascally [ty nachal shalit’]. You were still trying to launch the helicopter on the street and there were so many people around. I told you once, twice, you didn’t listen, then I swung my fist and you got it in the nose. And the blood began to flow.”

  My mother laughs. “Oy, how could you do that? I gave my son into your hands, and you would do that!”

  “When I came back to Russia as an adult and walked by here I began to feel very scared,” I say. “And I had dreams about helicopters.”

  “Really?” my father says. A sad-looking child peeks out from behind his lace curtains as we walk by a first-floor apartment. We pass a sign for a cell phone company: SIGN UP AND COMMUNICATE FOR FREE.

  “And then I bought a book about Petersburg. I was looking at it in the store, and I saw the Chesme Church, and I had a panic attack.”

  “Oh, Igor, you are so sensitive,” my mother says. “And that is why you are a writer.”

  “In Russia you could do things like that,” I say, meaning punch a five-year-old child in the nose until he bled. “But in America …”

  “You couldn’t do that in America?” my mother asks.

  “I didn’t want to beat you,” my father says. He looks thoughtful. “It was by accident. I waved my hand and hit you in the nose.”

  “I only really beat you up once,” my mother says, “and I was so sad afterward.

  “I guess even from the start I was an American mama,” she says.

  It is time for me to be silent. It is time for me to listen, not to talk. But it is also time for me to go underground.