The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  Mr. Rybakov raised his hand to cut him off. “Service the Fan as you will,” he said. “You’re a good young man and I trust you with him.”

  Vladimir felt the heaviness of the word “trust” in Russian, a favorite in the Girshkin household. He rose without ceremony and went over to the fan, pressing the button marked MEDIUM. The apartment was centrally air-conditioned but the new breeze, a fist of cool air punching through the general coldness, was welcome. He hit the button marked HIGH and the blades visibly doubled their effort, their buzz now punctuated by internal creaks and pops.

  “I ought to grease him again,” whispered Rybakov. “You can hardly hear him with all that creaking.”

  Vladimir stumbled for a response, but came out with a sort of mooing sound.

  “Shh, listen,” said his host. “Listen to the song. Do you know this song?” The Fan Man let out a series of raspy creaks himself, and then Vladimir realized that he was singing along:

  “Ta-pa-pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.

  “Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra-pa-ra-ra

  “I won’t forget you

  “Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.”

  “Yes, I know that song!” Vladimir said. “Ta-pa-pa-ra-ra Moscow nights . . .”

  They sang the verse several times, occasionally substituting remembered words for the “pa-ra-ra.” Perhaps it was his imagination, but Vladimir could hear the fan keeping tempo with them, if not actually prodding them into the bittersweet ditty.

  “Give me your hand,” said Mr. Rybakov, opening a creased, vein-ridden palm on the table. “Just put your hand there,” he said.

  Vladimir looked at his own hand carefully as if he was about to place it inside the fan’s grating. Such slender fingers . . . They said slender fingers would be good for piano, but you had to start early for that. Mozart was—

  He placed his hand into the warmth of the Fan Man’s palm and felt it close around him like a python over a rabbit. “The Fan is spinning,” said Mr. Rybakov and squeezed hard.

  Vladimir looked at the spinning fan and thought of his parents and their upcoming weekend barbecue. “Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.” They sang it in Brighton Beach and they sang it in Rego Park, and they sang it on WEVD, New York—“We Speak Your Language”—that the Girshkins had always left the radio tuned to, even when his first American friends from Hebrew school came over to play computer games and they heard the “Pa-ra-ra-ra . . .” and the two-dollar synthesizer orchestra in the background, and saw his parents at the kitchen table singing along while munching on the verboten pork cutlets, slurping down the mushroom-and-barley soup.

  Mr. Rybakov released Vladimir’s hand and patted it casually, as one pets a favored dog after it returns with the morning papers. He slumped over the side of his recliner. “Be so kind as to get the bedpan from my bedroom,” he said.

  4. WOMEN AND THE

  VLADIMIR QUESTION

  SEVERAL HERRINGS LATER , Vladimir bid his client farewell and returned to his humble Alphabet City lodgings. He was due to celebrate his birthday with “little Challah-bread,” his lover. But as fate had provided, on this particular day Challah was summoned to the Dungeon, the Chelsea whipping cavern. Four Swiss bankers, recent transplants to New York, had found that in addition to their jobs restructuring Third World debt, they had in common the need to be humiliated by a mother figure, someone a little more substantial than the Dungeon’s standard fare. And so Challah’s beeper had registered the code $$URGENT$$. Off she went with a little metal box full of dick rings and nipple clamps, to be back by nine, she promised, which left Vladimir with some time alone.

  First he took a long cold shower. It was ninety degrees outside that day; inside, a good hundred. Then, naked and washed, he happily roamed around the two-and-a-half rooms of their railroad flat, traversing the narrow path where his urbane belongings and Challah’s junk had once gone to war, and were now separated by an unofficial Green Line.

  This was already Vladimir’s third year of living apart from his parents but the exhilaration of having escaped their tender clutches simply would not cease. He was acquiring a homeowner’s mentality. He dreamed of someday cleaning house, of turning the gap between the kitchen and the bedroom, which was now referred to as the “living room” into a personal study.

  And what would Vladimir study in his study? Vladimir was partial to short fiction—brief, thoughtful stories where people suffered quickly and acutely. For instance, the Chekhov story where the horse-cab driver tells all his fares that his son has died the other day and nobody cares. Terrible. Vladimir had first read that one in Leningrad, lying as he always did in his sick bed, while Mother and Grandmother fussed in the next room, concocting bizarre Russian folk cures for his bronchial illnesses.

  The driver story (“Heartache” its simple name) was shorthand for the young Vladimir’s melancholy existence, the growing sense of the bed as his true home. A home away from the sepulchral Leningrad cold, where once he had played hide-and-seek with his father beneath the giant bronze feet of the Lenin statue, its sooty outstretched arm pointing ever upward to the brilliant future. Away from the primary school, where the few times he was deemed well enough to strap on his bright, creaseless uniform and make an appearance, children and teacher alike stared at him as if he was a cosmonaut stricken with the Andromeda Strain, erroneously released from quarantine. And away from Seryozha Klimov, the overfed hooligan—his parents had already given him a crash course in the social sciences—who would come up to him during recess, and gleefully yell, “Jew, Jew, Jew . . .”

  So, you see, young Vladimir had been more than willing to accept the loss of his freedom and formal education, if only he would be left alone with his warm feather bed and his Chekhov and his good friend Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe. But Mother and Grandmother and Father, when he returned from work at the hospital, would not leave him in peace. They fought his bronchial asthma without respite and with the entire Soviet Medical Encyclopedia and several less reliable tracts at their disposal. They would roll Vladimir’s pale body into hourly rubbing alcohol compresses, hold his face within centimeters of a boiling pot of potatoes, and practice the surreal ritual of “cupping”: A set of small glass cups was painfully attached (after a lit match was used to create a vacuum inside each vessel) across the length of Vladimir’s back in order to suck out the phlegm that rumbled through the invalid’s body. The Stegosaurus Effect, Dr. Girshkin called the wretched rows of glass assembled on his son’s back.

  NOW THE HEALTHY, older Vladimir paced the length of his imaginary study, in which his childhood volume of Chekhov would share pride of place with newer acquisitions: a martini shaker from the Salvation Army, a biography of William Burroughs, a tiny cigarette lighter cleverly embedded within a hollowed pebble. Yes, the inside of the apartment was becoming too cluttered for Chekhov—there were Challah’s batons and whips and jars of K-Y to consider, not to mention the cheap Fourteenth Street spice racks that kept falling off their hooks, and the numerous buckets of cold water Vladimir kept around the kitchen and bedroom so that he could dunk his head when he could no longer stand the temperate status quo. But still, what a pleasure to be alone. To talk to oneself as if to a best friend. His actual best friend, Baobab, was still down in Miami, being venal and unsavory.

  AND THEN IT was time. Challah was at the door fighting the locks. Vladimir closed his mind, worked himself up an erection, and went out to greet her. There she was. But even before he took in her workday face—the lipstick, mascara, and blush melting down in the heat, drawing a second ethereal face a notch below her all-too-real one—she was embracing him and whispering “happy birthday” in his ear, for unlike every other well-wisher of the day, Challah wanted to say it quietly.

  Dear Challah with the warm, flat nose, the enormous eyelashes tickling his cheeks, the heavy nasal breathing—queen of everything musky and mammal-like. Soon she noticed what Vladimir had been preparing for her below, the aardvark’s tubular snout poking out from within its wiry hedge, and said, “Goodnes
s,” in perfect mock surprise. She began unlatching the safety pins that kept together the swatches of black fabric she wore to the Dungeon but Vladimir said, “No, I must do it!”

  “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t rip anything.” She made sure he remained erect while he undressed her; the undressing went on for some time. When she was done, only the iron crucifixes remained against her heavy breasts, reminding Vladimir of artillery pieces scattered about a plain. Finally, with her crosses jangling, and his member in hand, Challah took Vladimir into the bedroom.

  On the futon, he recalled his mandate: be thorough. He kissed, rubbed his nose against, tugged with his teeth, pinched between thumb and middle finger, poked with what Challah had termed the Girshkin Gherkin, every part of her, even parts that he had grown weary of with the passage of time: the folds that collected on top of her hips, her arms, thick and pink, that pressed him to her not lustfully but the way he envisioned a mother would grasp her child at the approach of an avalanche.

  Finally, when he felt a full gathering of steam between his legs, he went between hers, and for the first time, looked into her face. Dear Challah, dear American friend, with that crimson look of arousal, but also with the restraint to keep Vladimir from biting into her neck or plunging into her mouth, just so she could look into his eyes when they were this close.

  So Vladimir closed his eyes. And had a vision.

  DRESSED IN LIGHTWEIGHT cotton chinos and tunic, a brown Nat Sherman’s cigarette implanted in his mouth, his hair fashionably cut short and continuously waved over to one side by a playful summer wind, Vladimir Borisovich Girshkin issued directives into a cellular phone as he walked along an airstrip. Granted, it was a lousy airstrip. There was not even a plane. But a series of properly spaced white lines etched into the cracked concrete could only mean an airstrip (or else a provincial highway, but, no, that couldn’t be).

  While in bed, the blind, naked Vladimir was keeping up his hump hump with Challah in a desperate bid to orgasm, his fashionable doppelganger in the vision was making progress against the substantial length of the airstrip, beyond which a half-circle of the setting sun, bloated and patchy like rotting fruit, peeked out from the confluence of two gray mountains. Vladimir could clearly see the new Vladimir, his purposeful gait, his agitated face spanning the range of ill humor, but he could not understand precisely what he was saying into the cellular, why the airstrip was isolated by scrub fields on all sides save for the mountains, why he could not daydream himself a plane, fabulous companions, and a set of filled champagne flutes . . .

  And then, just as the coital Vladimir was to reach his elusive target with Challah, the imaginary Vladimir heard a rumble, a boom, a sonic displacement directly above him. A hawk-nosed turbo prop was skirting the runway, headed directly for our hero, flying low enough for him to see the lone figure in the cockpit, or at least the lunatic glimmer in the pilot’s eye that could only have belonged to one man. “I’m coming for you, boy!” Mr. Rybakov was shouting into Vladimir’s cellular. “Away we go!”

  HE OPENED HIS eyes. His face was sandwiched in between Challah’s shoulder blades where a constellation of beauty marks formed a soup ladle. The ladle lifted and lowered with her breathing, a lock of her orange hair fell into it.

  Vladimir propped himself up on one elbow. In her free time Challah had repainted their bedroom a dentist’s-office mauve. She had arranged overlapping retro posters (condensed-milk advertisements and the like) across the ceiling. She had gone out and bought a squash, which now rotted in the corner. “Why did you close your eyes?” she asked.

  “What?” He knew what.

  “You know what.”

  “Most people close their eyes. I was overcome.”

  She burrowed her head into the middle of a pillow, swelling up the sides. “You were not overcome.”

  “Are you saying I don’t love you?”

  “You’re saying you don’t love me.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  She turned around but covered herself with her arms and drew in her legs. “How can you say ‘this is ridiculous’? People don’t say things like that unless they just don’t give a shit. How can you be so flippant? ‘This is ridiculous.’ How can you be so detached?”

  “I’m a foreigner. I speak slowly and choose my words with care, lest I embarrass myself.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Well, what the hell am I allowed to say?”

  “I’m fat!” she shouted. She glanced around as if looking for something to throw, then grabbed a roll of her own flesh, the one that collected beneath her breasts before her stomach began. “Say the truth!”

  The truth?

  “You hate me!”

  No, that wasn’t the truth exactly. Vladimir didn’t hate her. He hated the idea of her, but that was different. Still, it was Vladimir who had invited this big woman into his life, and now there was no recourse but to sift through his meager vocabulary of comforting words, to put together the proper blandishments. You’re not fat, he thought, you’re fully realized. But before he could voice those tenuous thoughts, he noticed a large, complicated insect, a sort of roach with wings, hovering directly beneath the canopy of posters. Vladimir moved to defend his crotch.

  In the meantime, Challah had let go of her roll of flesh, which fell in luxuriously with its grander compatriot, the stomach. She turned back into her pillow and breathed in so deeply that Vladimir was sure she was going to exhale in tears.

  “There’s a strange insect coming down on you,” Vladimir preempted her.

  Challah looked up. “A-a—”

  They scampered off the futon as the beast landed between them. “Give me my T-shirt,” Challah demanded, once again covering herself with her arms as best she could.

  The intruder crawled along the crests and ridges of their bed sheets the way a big-rig truck weaves along a mountain highway, then executed a great leap forward into Vladimir’s pillow. It was really something! In Leningrad the roaches were small and lacked initiative.

  Challah leaned over and blew at the monster hopefully, but its wings began to stir and she drew back. “God, I just want to go to sleep,” she said, putting on her long T-shirt with a childhood character Vladimir was not familiar with, a comical blue imp. “I’ve been up since six. An assistant DA wanted an entire tea service set up on his back.”

  “You’re not submitting?”

  She shook her head.

  “If some lawyer touches you—”

  “No one’s touching me. They know.”

  He came around the bed and put his arm around her. She pulled away a little. He kissed her shoulder and before he could do otherwise, he started to cry—it happened very easily sometimes, now that his father was not around to object. She held him and he felt himself a very small man in her arms. On the futon, the insect remained in charge, so they went out to the fire escape and smoked cigarettes. She was crying too now with the cigarette in her hand, wiping her nose into her palm so that Vladimir worried her hair would catch fire from the cigarette, and he moved to clean her nose for her.

  They drank a cheap Hungarian riesling that spelled “headache” after the third glass. They held hands. The lights were going out at the Garibaldi nursing home across the street, a five-story residence built in the sixties to prove how closely a building could resemble Formica. The Jamaican record store on the first floor, three Bob Marley records and a lot of dope for sale, was gearing up for the night’s business, the volume of the reggae constrained by the whims of the sleepy Garibaldi denizens across the street. Along with the cops, they had reached a sort of negotiated settlement, Alphabet City style, with the profitable Rastafarians. Everyone left everyone alone, the music stayed low.

  “Hey, in three months I’ll be twenty-five,” she said.

  “It’s no big deal, turning twenty-five,” Vladimir said. Immediately he felt bad. Maybe it was a big deal to her. “I just got a thousand dollars from a client,” Vladimir said. “Maybe we can go to
a nice French restaurant for your birthday. The one with that famous plat de mer. I read about it in the paper. Four kinds of oysters, a very special crawfish—”

  “A client gave you a thousand dollars,” Challah said. “What did you have to do to him?”

  “Nothing!” Vladimir said. He shuddered at the implication. “It was just a tip. I’m helping him get his citizenship. Anyway, this plat de mer . . .”

  “You know I hate those slimy things,” Challah said. “Let’s just go out for a really good hamburger. Like at that fancy diner. The one we went to for Baobab’s birthday.”

  Hamburger? She wanted to eat a hamburger on her twenty-fifth birthday? Vladimir remembered his parents upcoming barbecue, an event replete with many hamburgers. Could he invite Challah? Could she wear something decent? Could she pretend she was attending medical school where Vladimir had discreetly placed her in the Girshkin family imagination?

  “That fancy diner sounds perfect,” Vladimir said, kissing Challah’s peeling lips. “We’ll get Caesar’s salads for everyone, gourmet relish, pitchers of sangria, the works . . .” And the next time they had sex he would keep his eyes open. He would look into her eyes directly. This is what one did to keep a relationship going. These were the desperate measures. Vladimir knew the drill. Preserving his fief, no matter how meager, this is what it meant to be an older, wiser Vladimir.

  5. THE HOME FRONT

  THE WEEKEND FOUND Dr. Girshkin sweating beneath the midday sun, his bald spot browning like a flapjack on the griddle, as he gestured about with a giant beefsteak tomato. “It is the biggest tomato in New York State,” he told Vladimir as he showed it off from every angle possible. “I must write to the Ministry of Agriculture. Maybe they have a prize for someone like me.”

  “You’re a masterful gardener,” whispered Vladimir, trying to hustle some encouragement into his faltering voice.