It is 2010, a year before this current trip with my parents. I have returned to St. Petersburg to do a reading tour on behalf of the U.S. State Department. With some free time on my hands, I am taking the metro to the southern suburb to see my friend K. The Petersburg metro, built under Stalin, is the most reliable mode of transport in the city, but on that day, just as we are approaching Moscow Square, the train stalls.
I look up at a poster showing a pretty girl of about five holding a paintbrush with white paint smudged on her cheeks and forehead, smiling mischievously. The caption reads:
WHAT WOULD A RESPONSIBLE PARENT DO?
a) Put her in the corner
b) Enroll her in art school
c) Suggest that you paint together
—Russia Without Cruelty to Children!
The panic attack begins immediately. My breath is gone. I look up at the grimy ceiling of the metro car, trying to see right through it to my freedom, but all I can see through the deep tunnel and the Soviet wiring is Moscow Square and Lenin and the Chesme Church and something I cannot articulate.
An organization called Russia Without Cruelty to Children! is suggesting that the worst Russian parents are capable of is placing their playful, paint-splattered children in the corner. What I wouldn’t have given for that corner, that mythical, bloodless corner.
But right now, there is no place to sit on the crowded train. No corner for me to hide in. The train is not moving. Maybe it will never move! Maybe I will be stuck here with this paint-splattered, smiling girl forever. I turn to my fellow standing passengers, each of them rendered faceless by my panic attack, and begin to formulate what to say in Russian. “Gospozha,” I would start, to the most matronly and kindest of the faceless bunch. “Missis. I need to get off this train immediately. Please summon the conductor.”
But I know I can’t say it. I know this is no longer my city and these are not my people. But is it still my language? I close my eyes and begin to remember the words of my father’s letters.
Good day, dear little son.
A trickle of breath.
How are you doing? What are you doing? Are you going to climb the “Bear” Mountain and how many gloves have you found in the sea? Have you learned to swim yet and if so are you planning to swim away to Turkey?
More breathing, shallow, but familiar. I whisper the words to myself, the way I used to whisper to myself in Russian in the first grade of Hebrew school, the American children thinking me a lunatic.
One day in Gurzuf, a submarine named Arzum sailed in from Turkey. Two commandos wearing Aqua-Lungs departed the boat and swam for the shore. Unbeknownst to our border guards they headed for the mountain, for the forest. In the morning the Soviet border guards saw fresh trails on the beach of the “Pushkin” sanatorium and called on the border guard, who summoned their search dog. She quickly found the two hidden Aqua-Lungs under the rocks. It was clear—an enemy. “Search!” the border guards commanded the dog, and she immediately ran in the direction of the International Pioneers Camp. Story to be continued—at home.
The loud but happy turn of the wheels beneath us. We are moving again! We are coming into the station, we are coming into Moscow Square. I unclench my worried fists, open my eyes, and stare into the angelic face of the five-year-old girl with the paint smeared on her cheeks and forehead.
Little son, there are only a few days left until we meet again, do not be lonely, behave yourself, listen to your mother and your aunt Tanya. Kisses, Papa.
The doors swoosh open as if they’ve been pulled apart by giants. “Moskovskaya,” a recorded voice announces the station. Am I home?
“To Citizen Shteyngart P., NOTIFICATION, Your husband Sergeant Shteyngart Isaac Semyonovich, fighting for the Socialist Motherland, true to his military oath, evincing heroism and courage, was killed 18 February 1943.”
We are outside the tiny village of Feklistovo, where, in 1943, the German line extended southwest of Leningrad. The Red Army attempted to break through the German encirclement and end the siege of the city on several occasions. Here, in one such attempt, my grandfather Isaac, my father’s father, an artillerist, was killed in battle.
Twenty-six million died on the Russian side in World War II, nearly 15 percent of the population. It is not an exaggeration to say the ground trod by my sneakers was once steeped in blood. It is not an exaggeration to say that those of us who are Russian, or Russian American, or Russian anything, are the offspring of these battles.
Outside the unremarkable soldiers’ mass grave, squared away between some fields and huts, there’s a local gentleman in a straw hat selling flowers. “He’s going to rip him off,” my mother says of the straw-hatted man, as my father ventures out of the car with about four dollars’ worth of Russian currency. When my father returns with a modest bunch of red roses, she tells him: “Later, he’ll come and resell the flowers you put on the grave.”
We are facing a monument of the Soviet socialist realism school, a soldier with a rifle slung over his chest, a silver helmet lying by his feet, surrounded by overgrown weeds. TO THE SOVIET WARRIORS WHO DIED IN BATTLES FOR THEIR MOTHERLAND 1941–44.
It is a sunny day, the first beautiful day of our trip. There’s the smell of frying sausages from the nearby country houses. Two grandmothers are sitting on a bench by the mass grave. “I come from Leningrad,” one of the grandmothers says. She’s in full babushka regalia, black raincoat and green kerchief wrapped around her head. “I have a dacha here.”
“I live here,” says Babushka Two.
“In 1943, my father died here,” my father says.
The grannies are silent for a moment.
“Da,” they finally say.
“In February 1943,” my mother says. The fact that she has memorized the exact month of her husband’s father’s death is touching. I will memorize it, too.
“Maybe we’ll even find his name, son,” my father says as we begin to scour the overwhelming lists of the dead inscribed on the pink and white marble plates flanking the silver soldier statue on all sides. Somewhere amidst these green pastures, the hillocks covered with violets and daisies, my grandfather’s bones are buried.
“At least it’s a quiet place for a grave,” my father says.
“A good, quiet place,” my mother says, as if slotting herself into a Carver story. “The air is good.”
My father speaks: “Goodbye, goodbye, Father. I probably won’t come back again until my death. Forgive me. For everything.”
I laugh nervously. “You’re not guilty,” I say.
“I have a sense of guilt,” my father says. “That he didn’t live enough. In ’43 he was twenty-nine, maybe thirty. He didn’t see anything. What was it for? He left a little son, a wife.” He shakes his head.
“Oh, son,” he says to me, “why didn’t me and my mother come here earlier? I don’t know why she didn’t care about these things. We could have been here a hundred times. Of course, she was upset.”
What I notice is that he has stopped calling me “Little Son.” Now I am just his son. Now I stand at exactly the same height as him and our relationship is clear.
“Son, please read the prayer for me.” From his Velcro money pouch, my father pulls out a pamphlet with Jewish prayers to be said at a grave site. “Where’s the main prayer?” he asks. “Baruch …?”
As I write this, I’m looking at a photograph of my father in his early seventies holding an umbrella in the forecourt of Versailles, his right foot raised off the ground as if he is Gene Kelly, one of my Stuyvesant sweaters billowing out above his khaki pants. He is smiling at my mother and her camera, smiling fully, with teeth, in the American manner. “Singer in the rain,” my mother has written on a Post-it note in her careful English script. She has stuck the note above my father’s dancing figure.
The day after we visit my grandfather’s grave, we will go to the Great Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. I will ask my father if he ever visited the temple during his Soviet days. “Yes, five or
six times,” he will say. “The first time I came, my aunt who later killed herself, Aunt Sima, she had her wedding here. I was about seventeen years old. And while that ceremony was taking place a girl entered. I remembered her my whole life. She wasn’t a beauty. She was dark, dark. A good Jewish face. And some kind of strange, almost glowing dark eyes. My whole life I have felt those eyes looking at me.”
“Lord, who should sojourn in thy tabernacle?” I read from Psalms 15:1 in English. “Who shall dwell upon thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly and walketh righteously and speaks with truth in his heart … He that does those things shall never be moved.”
I begin the mourner’s Kaddish. “Yitgaddal veyitqaddash shmeh rabba,” I say in Aramaic. My father bows slightly to God’s will with each cadence.
I say.
I chant.
I can read the prayer, but I cannot understand it. The words coming out of my mouth are gibberish to me. And they can only be gibberish to my father’s ear as well.
I chant the words and he says “Amen” after each stanza.
I chant the gibberish backwards and forwards, tripping over the words, mangling them, making them sound more Russian, more American, more holy. We haven’t found my grandfather’s name, Isaac, amidst the acres of marble covered with Ivans and Nikolais and Alexanders. But the sun shines generously. Cows are mooing and grass is being mowed. A small airplane, surely our heraldic symbol, is landing nearby. This part I know well.
Ve’imru, Amen.
Let us say, Amen.
: AMEH!
* * *
* He was forty.
To my parents—the journey never ends.
To Richard C. Lacy, M.D., Ph.D.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND I THOUGHT writing novels was hard.
The task of sailing into the past was made that much easier by David Ebershoff, my editor, who knew exactly when to furl and unfurl the sails, if that’s the right metaphor. (Is it? Or is it trim the sails? I wish I were Waspier.) I also want to thank everyone at Random House for their continued belief that I’m an okay guy and writer, including Gina Centrello, Susan Kamil, Barbara Fillon, Maria Braeckel, Sally Marvin, Denise Cronin, Joelle Dieu, Rachel Kind, and Toby Ernst. My agent, Denise Shannon, continues to keep me solvent and is a terrific reader to boot. My thanks to Dmitry Dolinsky for his expert help with what they call a “flash drive.” Patricia Kim took many photos of me wearing a toga.
So many people volunteered their time to remind me of what had happened during the 1980s and early 1990s, a time period many of us are trying to forget. They include Jonathan, J.Z., Ben, Brian, Leo, Maris, and Jessica.
Finally, my parents provided enough stories to fill several volumes and were kind and patient enough not only to answer all my nagging questions but to accompany me to Russia for a week of fish pie and remembrance. I would also like to thank all my “first responders,” people who took the time out to read early drafts of this book and offer advice: Doug Choi, Andrew Lewis Conn, Rebecca Godfrey, Lisa Hahn, Cathy Park Hong, Gabe Hudson, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Paul La Farge, Christine Suewon Lee, Kelly Malloy, Jynne Dilling Martin, Caitlin McKenna, Suketu Mehta, John Saffron, and John “Rosencranz” Wray.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of this work appeared in the following publications in different form:
Chapter 1: Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, The New Yorker
Chapter 2: New York
Chapter 4: Travel + Leisure; Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design, edited by Michael Idov (Rizzoli); The Threepenny Review
Chapter 6: The New Yorker
Chapter 7: an essay first published privately and then in New York magazine’s My First New York (Ecco); The Threepenny Review
Chapter 8: The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker
Chapter 9: The Threepenny Review
Chapter 10: The Threepenny Review, Granta
Chapter 11: Gourmet, The New York Times Magazine, The Threepenny Review
Chapter 12: The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review
Chapter 13: The New Yorker
Chapter 14: The Threepenny Review
Chapter 15: The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker
Chapter 16: The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker
Chapter 17: The New York Times Magazine
Chapter 18: The New York Times Magazine
Chapter 21: GQ
Chapter 23: GQ, Granta, The New Yorker
Chapter 24: GQ, The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure
BY GARY SHTEYNGART
Little Failure
Super Sad True Love Story
Absurdistan
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GARY SHTEYNGART was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He is the author of the novels Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Absurdistan (2006), and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), and the memoir Little Failure. Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, GQ, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages.
Gary Shteyngart is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at 212-572-2013 or [email protected].
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